David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
Created Rails, which is how most people meet Ruby, and a lightning rod for strong opinions.
David Heinemeier Hansson, known as DHH, created Ruby on Rails by extracting it from the code of Basecamp at the company 37signals, and released it in 2004. It is hard to overstate the effect: Rails brought an enormous wave of newcomers to Ruby, and its ideas (Convention over Configuration, "Rails is omakase") reshaped how the whole industry builds web apps. For a great many people, Ruby is the language you learn because of Rails. (rubyonrails.org, The Rails Doctrine)
Opinions on him run strong in both directions. Many admire his opinionated design sense and his two decades of championing Ruby and Rails; others have taken sharp issue with his stances over the years, on matters from technical direction to workplace and political controversy. Ruby Lore does not try to settle that: where a disagreement is genuinely part of Ruby’s history, it gets its own page where the people involved speak for themselves. What is beyond dispute is the reach of his influence. For a great many developers, Ruby and Rails are inseparable from his name.
Related: Rails was pulled out of Basecamp · "How to build a blog in 15 minutes with Rails" (DHH, 2005) · "Rails is omakase"
Sources
Sources
- Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/
- The Rails Doctrine: https://rubyonrails.org/doctrine