David Heinemeier Hansson could be mistaken for a Gap model. The Danish 26-year-old's blog is filled with glam photos of himself, his friends at parties, and his hot girlfriend. But Hansson is actually the first Google-O'Reilly hacker of the year (2005), an-ber-geeky nod for producing Ruby on Rails.
RoR establishes a simple, open source framework for using the equally simple programming language Ruby. In RoR, commands look like sentences, and limited choices make it tough for Web developers to get lost or tangled up in code. As a partner at 37signals in Chicago, Hansson uses RoR to write software for the popular project-management tools Basecamp and Backpack.
RoR also makes it easy for developers to work with AJAX (short for Asynchronous JavaéScript and XML), the technology that lets them do cool stuff like move folders and scroll through maps on a Web page. "It's like a color-by-numbers system," says Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, who's rebuilding his entire site with RoR. And that's been Hansson's goal all along - to fundamentally remake the way Web sites are built. As he puts it, "We've already slaughtered a whole herd of holy cows."
- Nicholas Thompson
David Heinemeier Hansson
credit Anna Knott
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