Advisor Profile
David Heinemeier Hansson
37signals
- Specialties -
- Ruby, Ruby on Rails
- Projects -
- Basecamp, Ta-da List, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard
- Location -
- Chicago, Illinois
A product of Danish Design from the Winter of '79. Grew up, graduated, and still live in the city of Copenhagen. David has been writing about it all since the Reboot conference in 2001 inspired him to start Loud Thinking.
Since '96, he's been working with the net with varying levels of success in the fields of game journalism, marketing, project management, design, and development. These days its mostly about development, though.
As a partner in 37signals, he helped transform the venerable design shop into a product company. Basecamp, Backpack, and Ta-da List are all applications launched since the shift came into effect in February 2004. He did the programming for all of them.
In July 2004, he released the framework Rails (also known as Ruby on Rails) from the work on these applications. He's been managing that as an open-source movement ever since. And lately, quite a few people has been taking notice. That means a bunch of speaking engagements including RubyConf, FISL, Reboot, OSCON, JAOO, and more.
In August 2005, he won the Best Hacker of the Year award at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly.
In addition to Rails, he's also created the most downloaded Ruby end-user application. It's a small, light wiki called Instiki. He's no longer actively developing on it, but still proud of how far he made it go. He even used it to write his final project towards his bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Computer Science at the Copenhagen Business School.