Author
David Heinemeier Hansson
The creator of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp's co-owner, who argues for small teams, calm work and doing less.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
David Heinemeier Hansson grew up in Copenhagen and joined 37signals in the early 2000s as a contract programmer. While building Basecamp in 2004 he extracted the web framework underneath it and released it as open source: Ruby on Rails, which went on to power a generation of web companies and made him one of the best-known programmers of his era.
He became a partner in the company alongside Jason Fried and co-wrote its books, Rework, Remote and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, which turned the way they ran a small, profitable, independent software company into an argument against the venture-funded model. He remains the framework's lead and a prolific writer on software and work.
Outside software he races cars, competing at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and winning his class there in 2014.
The signature
Heinemeier Hansson writes to provoke and then to explain. His signature is the strong opening line that half the audience will disagree with, followed by the reasoning that makes it hard to dismiss; in Rework the chapters on constraints, planning and launching carry that shape.