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.
February 21, 2025

Stick with the customer

One of the biggest mistakes that new startup founders make is trying to get away from the customer-facing roles too early. Whether it's customer support or it's sales, it's an incredible advantage to have the founders doing that work directly, and for much longer than they find comfortable. The absolute worst thing you can do is hire a...
Read more
February 20, 2025

When to give up

Most of our cultural virtues, celebrated heroes, and catchy slogans align with the idea of "never give up". That's a good default! Most people are inclined to give up too easily, as soon as the going gets hard. But it's also worth remembering that sometimes you really should fold, admit defeat, and accept that your plan didn't work out...
Read more
February 19, 2025

Europe must become dangerous again

Trump is doing Europe a favor by revealing the true cost of its impotency. Because, in many ways, he has the manners and the honesty of a child. A kid will just blurt out in the supermarket "why is that lady so fat, mommy?". That's not a polite thing to ask within earshot of said lady, but it might well be a fair question and a true ob...
Read more
February 17, 2025

Europe's impotent rage

Europe has become a third-rate power economically, politically, and militarily, and the price for this slowly building predicament is now due all at once. First, America is seeking to negotiate peace in Ukraine directly with Russia, without even inviting Europe to the table. Decades of underfunding the European military has lead us her...
Read more
February 17, 2025

Leave it to the Germans

Just a day after JD Vance's remarkable speech in Munich, 60 Minutes validates his worst accusations in a chilling segment on the totalitarian German crackdown on free speech. You couldn't have scripted this development for more irony or drama! This isn't 60 Minutes finding a smoking gun in some secret government archive, detailing a pl...
Read more
February 15, 2025

Europeans don't have or understand free speech

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest t...
Read more
February 8, 2025

Serving the country

In 1940, President Roosevelt tapped William S. Knudsen to run the government's production of military equipment. Knudsen had spent a pivotal decade at Ford during the mass-production revolution, and was president of General Motors, when he was drafted as a civilian into service as a three-star general. Not bad for a Dane, born just ten...
Read more
February 7, 2025

Servers can last a long time

We bought sixty-one servers for the launch of Basecamp 3 back in 2015. Dell R430s and R630s, packing thousands of cores and terabytes of RAM. Enough to fill all the app, job, cache, and database duties we needed. The entire outlay for this fleet was about half a million dollars, and it's only now, almost a decade later, that we're fina...
Read more
January 31, 2025

It burns

The first time we had to evacuate Malibu this season was during the Franklin fire in early December. We went to bed with our bags packed, thinking they'd probably get it under control. But by 2am, the roaring blades of fire choppers shaking the house got us up. As we sped down the canyon towards Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), the fire ha...
Read more
January 21, 2025

Waiting on red

Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like...
Read more
January 20, 2025

MEGA

Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect. Especially the young. In a poll by CBS News, it's the 18-29 demographic that's most excited, with a whopping two-thirds answering in the affirmative to being optimistic about the next four years under Trump. And I'm right th...
Read more
January 20, 2025

Failed integration and the fall of multiculturalism

For decades, the debate in Denmark around problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully...
Read more
January 7, 2025

The social media censorship era is over (for now)

Mark Zuckerberg just announced a stunning pivot for Meta's approach to social media censorship. Here's what he's going to do: 1. Replace third-party fact checkers with community notes ala X. 2. Allow free discussion on immigration, gender, and other topics that were heavily censored in the past, as well as let these discussions freely ...
Read more
January 6, 2025

Delusional dreams of excess freedom

Jim Carrey once said that he hoped everyone could "...get rich and famous and do everything they dreamed of so they can see that it is not the answer". And while I sorta agree, I think the opposite position also has its appeal: That believing in a material fix to the problem of existence dangles a carrot of hope that's depressing to go...
Read more
December 16, 2024

The premise trap

The hardest part for me about collaborating with junior programmers, whether it's in open source or at work, is avoiding the premise trap. That's where the fundamental assumptions baked into the first draft of the code aren't questioned until you've already spent far too long improving the implementation. It's the same with AI. Because...
Read more
November 21, 2024

Jaguar is lost but Volvo knows the way

Jaguar's new rebrand is getting murdered online, and for good reason. The clichés are as thick as the diversity pandering is dated. CREATE EXUBERANT. LIVE VIVID. DELETE ORDINARY. You'd think these were slogans from a Will Ferrel bit about insufferable marketing trons, but nope, that's the 2024 campaign for a car maker that won't be sel...
Read more
November 20, 2024

Cold reading an ADHD affliction

I'm sure there are truly pathological cases of ADHD out there, and maybe taking amphetamines really is a magic pill for some folks. But there clearly is also an entire cottage industry cropping up around convincing perfectly normal people that they suffer from ADHD, and that this explains many unwanted aspects of the human condition. T...
Read more
November 19, 2024

Joining the Shopify board of directors

I've known Tobi for over twenty years now. Right from the earliest days of Ruby on Rails, when he was building Snowdevil, which eventually became Shopify, to sell snowboards online. Here's his first commit to Rails from 2004, which improved the ergonomics of controller testing. Just one out of the 131 commits he made to the framework f...
Read more
November 13, 2024

Obsessive problem solving followed by aimless wandering

I haven't felt any urge to tinker with my Linux setup in months. This after spending much of the spring and into summer furiously and obsessively trying every PC out there to find the perfect replacement for the Mac, diving deep with Ubuntu, and codifying my findings in the Omakub project. But now it's done, and I'm left enjoying the A...
Read more
November 12, 2024

House rules in Fortnite

We play a lot of Fortnite at our house. It's a great game for teaching kids cooperative discipline, and in a remarkably wholesome setting to boot (no blood, cartoon styling). I've had no qualms involving all three of our boys from an early age in the family squad, including our two youngest from around age four. Since we started playin...
Read more
November 11, 2024

Too much therapy at work

Many years ago, Jason and I hired a COO at 37signals, but ended up letting them go after just a year (many reasons, another story). This happened not long before one of our company meet-ups, so we thought it fitting to discuss the matter in-person. What a mistake. The session turned into a group therapy session lasting hours, with a fr...
Read more
November 6, 2024

The spells are spent

They just don't work any more, those baseless accusations that anyone we disagree with is a racist, misogynist, fascist. After being invoked en masse and in vain for the better part of the past decade, their power to shock and awe is finally gone. All that's left is a weak whimper. Good fucking riddance. The problem with accusations li...
Read more
November 5, 2024

What you know that just ain't so

The fun bit about business is in all the answers you don't have. Should we be priced higher or lower or leave it alone? Should we chase these customers over here or those customers over there? Should we add more features or polish the ones we have? There's endless variation in every one of those questions, and you can't reason your way...
Read more
October 17, 2024

Our cloud-exit savings will now top ten million over five years

We finished pulling seven cloud apps, including HEY, out of AWS and onto our own hardware last summer. But it took until the end of that year for all the long-term contract commitments to end, so 2024 has been the first clean year of savings, and we've been pleasantly surprised that they've been even better than originally estimated. F...
Read more
October 14, 2024

Capture less than you create

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It's beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I've spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize...
Read more
October 13, 2024

To the crazy ones

In an earlier era, we'd all have been glued to the television to cheer SpaceX successfully catching Starship's returning booster rocket on the first try. I remember my father talking about seeing Apollo 11 make it to the moon. That was a lifelong memory for him. And I remember, as a six-year old boy, watching the fatal Challenger explo...
Read more
October 13, 2024

Open source royalty and mad kings

I'm solidly in favor of the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) model of open source stewardship. This is how projects from Linux to Python, from Laravel to Ruby, and yes, Rails, have kept their cohesion, decisiveness, and forward motion. It's a model with decades worth of achievements to its name. But it's not a mandate from heaven. I...
Read more
October 8, 2024

Automattic is doing open source dirty

Automattic demanding 8% of WP Engine's revenues because they're not "giving back enough" to WordPress is a wanton violation of general open source ideals and the specifics of the GPL license. Automattic is completely out of line, and the potential damage to the open source world extends far beyond the WordPress. Don't let the drama or ...
Read more
October 3, 2024

Kamal 2: Thou need not PaaS

Kamal was our ticket out of the cloud. A simple tool for deploying containerized applications onto our own hardware, without the need for the complexity of something like Kubernetes. Kamal 2 is a huge leap forward for that tool, and it has just shipped. Now you can deploy multiple applications to the same server, and you can have SSL c...
Read more
September 30, 2024

Wonderful Rails World Vibes

I totally understand how programming conferences end up being held in a drab Sheraton hotel somewhere to save money. It's expensive to outfit a cool venue with the gear and operations needed to pull off a great experience for speakers, sponsors, and attendees. And while the cost of doing something more inspiring than a carpet-clad conf...
Read more

See more posts »