David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson
Hansson at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Born	(1979-10-15) 15 October 1979 (age 37) Copenhagen, Denmark
Residence	Benahavís, Spain
Other names	DHH
Occupation	Programmer
Employer	Basecamp
Known for	Ruby on Rails
Website	david.heinemeierhansson.com

David Heinemeier Hansson (born 15 October 1979; known to the Ruby and car racing communities as DHH) is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the . He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp (formerly 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, and Remote with Jason Fried.

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-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.