EP #279 - David Heinemeier Hansson: Ruby On Rails, And What Came After It

David Heinemeier Hansson, originally from Denmark, studied Business Administration at the Copenhagen Business School in the late 1990s. He is the founder of the open-source web framework, Ruby On Rails, and co-founder of 37Signals and HEY along with his business partner, Jason Fried.

In 2001, he got his first official commercial job, after programming for only 2 years. At the time he envisioned programming not just as a tool, but as something he saw himself doing for the long term, which encouraged him to excel at programming, and later resulted in the creation of Ruby on Rails. David founded Ruby on Rails in 2003, a software used for creating high-performance web platforms. It has been very successful since its inception, with popular applications such as Airbnb, Square and Spotify being built on the platform.

A year later, in 2004, David launched Basecamp, one of the first software-as-a-service applications, with his co-founder, Jason Fried. Basecamp is now a gold standard for easier and superior project management. It has been used by over 75,000 organizations across 166 countries and 5 continents. Some well-known organizations that have used basecamp include Shopify, and Accenture, among others. In 2020, HEY was created by David and his team as an alternative to Gmail and Outlook. It shifts the paradigm of the traditional email structure and allows users to better deal with spam and unread messages, helping customers to better track and filter incoming emails. Since launch, HEY has already attracted tens of thousands of users.

During the episode, David explained his views on quiet quitting: he believes that quiet quitting is a lose-lose situation for both the employer and the employee, and that business owners should be more aware of the emotional and mental state of their employees. He advises that companies should be satisfied with having employees who do good work in a reasonable time, rather than desiring employees who share the same intense devotion to the company that a founder would have. He also urges against "deferred living" and encourages everyone to make the most of the time they have now by diligently doing gratifying work together with people they enjoy. David has employed this structure to create his own work-life balance, as he juggles many hats: being a founder of several companies, a father, a bestselling author, an investor and a Le Mans & WEC class-winning racing driver.

Memorable Quotes:

"Ruby really changed my trajectory as a programmer. Programming stopped being just a tool, but something I could really see myself doing in the long term."

"I don’t consider myself a computer engineer. I consider myself a software writer. That’s a completely different paradigm, and self-perception."

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