I tweet from @dhh and email from david@heinemeierhansson.com.
I write essays on this site and on the Signal vs Noise blog.
Creator of Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and beautiful code. I created Rails in 2003 by extracting it from Basecamp and continue to lead the development.
Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have built amazing applications using Rails. Some of the more famous include Twitter, Shopify, 500px, and Github.
Founder & CTO at Basecamp
Basecamp is the world's #1 project management tool and has been used by more than 15 million people. It's the best way to make progress on projects together, and it's famously easy to use. We've been around for more than a decade. I run the company together with my business partner, Jason Fried, and our lovely team of 40 programmers, designers, supporters, and sysops.
(We were formerly known as 37signals, but changed the name of the business in 2014.)
Best-selling author
REWORK is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Sunday Times best seller with more than 300,000 copies sold around the world. It's a book about starting and running businesses a better way.
REMOTE: Office Not Required is the new book, and it encapsulates all I've learned about working remotely for the past decade. It includes all the arguments for why the time is right for remote work to blossom, and for how you can navigate the pitfalls. It's in the same style as REWORK: Short, wonderfully illustrated, and to the point.
I also co-wrote Getting Real, the predecessor to REWORK, and Agile Web Development with Rails.
Le Mans class-winning racing driver
I'm competing in the World Endurance Championship for 2014 in the GTE-AM class with Aston Martin Racing (Young Driver). We just won at the 24 hours of Le Mans in a very emotional finish for the #95 car after the tragic loss of Allan Simonsen in the prior year.
Together with a win at Silverstone and a second place finish at Spa-Francorchamps, we're leading the championship by almost 30 points. The next race will be in Austin, Texas on September 20th.
Last year I also raced in the WEC, in the LMP2 class with OAK Racing. We finished 2nd at Le Mans, 2nd in the championship, and took 5 podium finishes in 8 races.
I started racing sportscars in the Cayman Interseries in 2009, moved to 911 GT3 Cup Cars at the end of 2010 (winning the gold class in my first race!), and then went all out in 2011 with races in GT3 Challenge, Radical Masters, ALMS GTC, Grand-Am ST, and ILMC (in Lotus below).
That was all warm up for my break-out season in 2012. Together with Conquest Endurance, I competed in the American Le Mans Series with LMP2 class-wins at Mosport and Road America to finish second in the championship. That performance earned me SPEED's Rookie of the Year.
I tweet racing from @dhhracing.
Public speaker
I occasionally give talks on business and technology. My most popular talk is The Secret To Making Money Online, delivered at Startup School in 2008. It's about how you don't need to aim to be a billionaire or take lots of venture capital to have a successful startup (and life):
Along the same lines, I debated Jason Calcanis from This Week in Startups on business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics (fast-forward 47 minutes):
See also the follow-up debate with Calcanis from this year where we revisit some of the same topics as well as new ones.
Finally, I told Stanford Business School how to Unlearn Your MBA.
Hobbyist photographer
I share pictures on Flickr and 500px. Here are a few of my favorites:
Family man
I'm married to Jamie:
This is our son Colt:
This is me in my Sunday race-day finest:
We split our time between Chicago, Malibu, and Marbella.