David Heinemeier Hansson
Creator of Ruby on Rails and Parter at 37Signals
It all started back in 2001 when Jason Fried of 37signals was trying to learn PHP. He blogged a few questions on Signal vs. Noise, I emailed him a lengthy response, and he decided it was easier to hire me than learn programming.
The seven time zones between Copenhagen and Chicago actually meant that we got a lot done with few interruptions. In 2003, we started work on Basecamp and I decided that it was time to drop Java and PHP in favor of programming in Ruby. My first project in Ruby was Basecamp and out of that came Ruby on Rails.
I left Denmark for Chicago in 2005 after finishing my bachelor's degree from Copenhagen Business School. Later that year, I won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly for the work on Rails.
My work with Ruby on Rails also led to a LinuxJournal cover and mentions in the pages of Wired (again), Business 2.0, Chicago Tribune, and other publications.
I'm the co-author of Getting Real (over 40,000 copies sold) and Agile Web Development with Rails (over 100,000 copies sold). My latest book called Rework will be published on March 9, 2010.
For years now, I've been a frequent public speaker. My most famous talk was probably my Startup School '08 appearance The secret to making money online. I've also been doing RailsConf for a long time. There are video recordings of my talks from '06 US, '07 US, '07 EU, '08 US, and '08 EU.
I was born in 1979 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
