David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and racing driver. As a programmer, he is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a software framework for web development. He is also a partner and chief technology officer at the web-based software development firm 37signals.

Hansson co-wrote Agile Web Development with Rails with Dave Thomas in 2005 as part of The Facets of Ruby Series. He also co-wrote Getting Real, Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work with Jason Fried.

Programming career
In 1999, Hansson founded and built a Danish online gaming news website and community called Daily Rush, which he ran until 2001. After attracting the attention of Jason Fried by offering him help with PHP coding, Hansson was hired by Fried to build a web-based project management tool, which ultimately became 37signals' Basecamp software as a service product. To aid the development process, Hansson used the then-relatively obscure Ruby programming language to develop a custom web framework. He released the framework separately from the project management tool in 2004 as the open source project Ruby on Rails. In 2005, Hansson was recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the "Hacker of the Year" award for his creation of Ruby on Rails. After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School and receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005.

Racing career
David Heinemeier Hansson lists photography and race car driving amongst his many hobbies. He took part in the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans driving for OAK Racing. He also drove a Morgan-Nissan P2 car for Conquest Racing in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), winning two races in the season. Heinemeier Hansson joined OAK Racing full-time in 2013, taking five 2nd-place finishes to finish 2nd in the Trophy for LMP2 Drivers. During the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans post-race technical checks, certain irregularities were detected on the Vaillante Rebellion team's #13 Oreca 07-Gibson, resulting in the car's disqualification.

In July 2010 it was revealed that Heinemeier Hansson was the person that had commissioned the one-off Pagani Zonda HH supercar. He also commissioned the Koenigsegg Agera HH, which was sold in 2022 to Houston Crosta, a YouTube video creator in Las Vegas. It has now been sold to car spotting YouTuber, "TheStradman". Heinemeier Hansson also purchased an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

Complete FIA World Endurance Championship results
† As Heinemeier Hansson was a guest driver, he was ineligible for points.

Complete European Le Mans Series results
(Races in bold indicate pole position; results in italics indicate fastest lap)


 * Season still in progress.

WeatherTech SportsCar Championship results
(Races in bold indicate pole position, Results are overall/class) † Points only counted towards the Michelin Endurance Cup, and not the overall LMP2 Championship.

Recognition

 * 2005: Won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly for the work on Rails.
 * 2006: Accepted the Jolt Award of product excellence for Rails 1.0.
 * 2012: Named ALMS Rookie of the year.