David Heinemeier Hansson

Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE. Won at Le Mans as a racing driver. Invested in Danish startups.
August 26, 2025

Omarchy 2.0

Omarchy 2.0 was released on Linux's 34th birthday as a gift to perhaps the greatest open-source project the world has ever known. Not only does Linux run 95% of all servers on the web, billions of devices as an embedded OS, but it also turns out to be an incredible desktop environment! It's crazy that it took me more than thirty years ...
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August 26, 2025

National pride

The Danish flag is everywhere in Denmark. It's at the airport when parents greet their kids coming back from holiday. It's on the birthday cake when you invite people over. It's swinging from the flagpoles in house after house, especially in the countryside. It's on the buses on the monarch's birthday. It's everywhere and all the time....
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August 14, 2025

Omarchy micro-forks Chromium

You can just change things! That's the power of open source. But for a lot of people, it might seem like a theoretical power. Can you really change, say, Chrome? Well, yes! We've made a micro fork of Chromium for Omarchy (our new 37signals Linux distribution). Just to add one feature needed for live theming. And now it's released as a ...
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August 11, 2025

What do you do with a chance?

“One day, I got a chance. It just seemed to show up. It acted like it knew me, as if it wanted something.” This is how Kobi Yamada's book What do you do with a chance? starts. I've been reading that beautiful book to the boys at bedtime since it came out in 2018. It continues: “It fluttered around me. It brushed up against me. It circl...
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August 9, 2025

All-in on Omarchy at 37signals

We're going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals. Over the next three years, as the regular churn of hardware invites it, we're switching everyone on our Ops and Ruby programming teams to our own Arch-derived Linux distribution (and of course sharing all the improvements we make along the way with everyone else on Omarchy!). It's funny how n...
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August 8, 2025

It's beginning to feel like the 80s in America again

Have I told you how much I've come to dislike the 90s? The depressive music, the ironic distance to everything, the deconstructive narratives, the moral relativism, and the total cultural takeover of postmodern ideology. Oh, I did that just last week? Well, allow me another go. But rather than railing against the 90s, let me tell you a...
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August 7, 2025

The Framework Desktop is a beast

I've been running the Framework Desktop for a few months here in Copenhagen now. It's an incredible machine. It's completely quiet, even under heavy, stress-all-cores load. It's tiny too, at just 4.5L of volume, especially compared to my old beautiful but bulky North tower running the 7950X — yet it's faster! And finally, it's simply f...
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August 7, 2025

YouTube has earned its crown

I often give Google a lot of shit for shutting down services whenever they're bored, hire a new executive, or face a three-day weekend. The company seems institutionally incapable of standing behind the majority of the products they launch for longer than a KPI cycle. But when the company does decide that something is pivotal to the bu...
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August 5, 2025

Omarchy is on the move

Omarchy has been improving at a furious pace. Since it was first released on June 26, I've pushed out 18(!) new releases together with a rapidly growing community of collaborators, users, and new-to-Linux enthusiasts. We have about 3,500 early adopters on the Omarchy Discord, 250 pull requests processed, and one heck of an awesome Arch...
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July 31, 2025

Executives should be the least busy people

If your executive calendar is packed back to back, you have no room for fires, customers, or serendipities. You've traded all your availability for efficiency. That's a bad deal. Executives of old used to know this! That's what the long lunches, early escapes to the golf course, and reading the paper at work were all about. A great fic...
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July 28, 2025

The beauty of ideals

Ideals are supposed to be unattainable for the great many. If everyone could be the smartest, strongest, prettiest, or best, there would be no need for ideals — we'd all just be perfect. But we're not, so ideals exist to show us the peak of humanity and to point our ambition and appreciation toward it. This is what I always hated about...
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July 25, 2025

Building competency is better than therapy

The world is waking to the fact that talk therapy is neither the only nor the best way to cure a garden-variety petite depression. Something many people will encounter at some point in their lives. Studies have shown that exercise, for example, is a more effective treatment than talk therapy (and pharmaceuticals!) when dealing with suc...
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July 24, 2025

You expect principles but should wish for none

People seem to be continuously disappointed by the fact that public companies are run by professional managers who don't operate from deep principles. But they shouldn't be. It's in everyone's interest that corporations set their sails to the wind and whims of the prevailing culture. It's the essence of capitalism: Give people what the...
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July 23, 2025

It's a Beelink, baby

It's only been two months since I discovered the power and joy of this new generation of mini PCs. My journey started out with a Minisforum UM870, which is a lovely machine, but since then, I've come to really appreciate the work of Beelink. In a crowded market for mini PCs, Beelink stands out with their superior build quality, their c...
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July 17, 2025

American hype

There's no country on earth that does hype better than America. It's one of the most appealing aspects about being here. People are genuinely excited about the future and never stop searching for better ways to work, live, entertain, and profit. There's a unique critical mass in the US accelerating and celebrating tomorrow. The contras...
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July 16, 2025

Linux crosses magic market share threshold in US

According to Statcounter, Linux has claimed 5% market share of desktop computing in the US. That's double of where it was just three years ago! Really impressive. Windows is still dominant at 63%, and Apple sit at 26%. But for the latter, it's quite a drop from their peak of 33% in June 2023. These are just browser stats, though (even ...
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July 14, 2025

The 6 Hours of Lex

When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance t...
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July 3, 2025

Get in losers, we're moving to Linux!

I've never seen so many developers curious about leaving the Mac and giving Linux a go. Something has really changed in the last few years. Maybe Linux just got better? Maybe powerful mini PCs made it easier? Maybe Apple just fumbled their relationship with developers one too many times? Maybe it's all of it. But whatever the reason, t...
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June 29, 2025

The parental dead end of consent morality

Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot. This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movie...
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June 27, 2025

Self-driving is finally happening

I still remember how the car industry got all excited back in 2017 about how steering wheels would soon be obsolete. Every concept car then was a living room on wheels, seats facing inwards. The self-driving revolution was imminent, they said. Well, it wasn't... but now it actually is! Humans have a hard time with scenarios like this. ...
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June 26, 2025

Omarchy is out

My latest love letter to Linux has been published. It's called Omarchy, and it's an opinionated setup of the Arch Linux distribution and the Hyprland tiling window manager. With everything configured out-of-the-box to give you exactly the same setup that I now run every day. My Platonic ideal of what a developer environment should look...
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June 3, 2025

Gender and Sexuality Alliances in primary school at CIS?!

The Copenhagen International School is a wonderful private school located in the North Harbor of the city. It's home to over 900 students from around the world. This is where ambassadors, international executives, and other expats send their kids to get a great education in English while stationed in Denmark. As a result, it's perhaps ...
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June 3, 2025

Denmark gets more serious about digital sovereignty

The recent disconnection of the ICC's chief prosecutor, at the behest of the American administration, could not have come at a worse time for Microsoft. Just a month prior, the folks from Redmond tried to assure Europe that all was well. That any speculation Europeans could get cut off from critical digital infrastructure was just fear...
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June 2, 2025

Omarchy: Bottling that inspiration before it spoils

Over the years, I've learned not to question inspiration. To simply let it drive when it shows up with a full tank. Quite often, I don't exactly know where we're going or even why we're going, but it's repeatedly taken me to just the right place at just the right time, so now I just hop in and say: Let's go! Case in point: Arch + Hyprl...
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May 20, 2025

HEY is finally for sale on the iPhone!

Our battle with Apple over their gangster attempt to extort 30% of our HEY revenues was one of the defining moments of my career. It was the kind of test that calls you to account for what you believe and asks what you're willing to risk to see it through. Well, we risked everything, but also secured a four-year truce, and now near-tot...
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May 19, 2025

Have you tried the exact opposite?

Have you thought about doing the opposite of whatever you're doing or considering? It's a really helpful way to test your assumptions and your values. What does the opposite look like, how would it work? It's so easy to get stuck in a groove of what works, what you believe to be right. But helpful assumptions have a half-life, just lik...
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May 18, 2025

Cheap mini PCs have gotten really good

For the past week, I've been working off the Minisforum UM870. A tiny mini PC with an 8-core/16-thread AMD 8745H CPU, which retails for $343 (or €379) as a bare-bone unit, and stays below $550, even after adding 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. I'm shocked to report that I really don't need more than this! I mean, I knew that Apple's Ma...
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May 13, 2025

Coding should be a vibe!

The appeal of "vibe coding" — where programmers lean back and prompt their way through an entire project with AI — appears partly to be based on the fact that so many development environments are deeply unpleasant to work with. So it's no wonder that all these programmers stuck working with cumbersome languages and frameworks can't wai...
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April 28, 2025

Don't make Google sell Chrome

The web will be far worse off if Google is forced to sell Chrome, even if it's to atone for legitimate ad-market monopoly abuses. Which mean we'll all be worse off as the web would lose ground to actual monopoly platforms, like the iOS App Store and Google's own Play Store. First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building ...
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April 24, 2025

We'll always need junior programmers

We received over 2,200 applications for our just-closed junior programmer opening, and now we're going through all of them by hand and by human. No AI screening here. It's a lot of work, but we have a great team who take the work seriously, so in a few weeks, we'll be able to invite a group of finalists to the next phase. This highligh...
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