DHH has spent twenty years proving the software industry wrong, with a Le Mans class win on the side

In 2004, a 24-year-old Dane working on a small project management app pulled the framework out from underneath it and released it for free. Ruby on Rails made building a web application feel like writing a sentence instead of assembling a carburetor, and the industry reorganized around it. GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, early Twitter: all of them stood on the thing he gave away. Two decades later Rails is still running an unreasonable share of the internet's actual revenue, which is not something most twenty-year-old software can claim.

That would be a career. For David Heinemeier Hansson it was the opening argument. What followed has been a twenty-year campaign against the software industry's received wisdom, conducted in public, at volume, with an unnerving habit of being proven right later.

The calm company, and then the receipts

With Jason Fried he wrote Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, the books that gave a generation of founders permission to not destroy themselves. No venture capital, no growth-at-all-costs, no 80-hour weeks, no open-plan hellscape. 37signals stayed small, stayed profitable, and stayed private, which is the only version of that advice that carries any weight: he was living in the house he was selling.

Then came the trilogy of heresies. HEY, an email service launched into Google's teeth, which turned into a public brawl with Apple over App Store rules that DHH mostly won. ONCE, software you buy one time and own forever, in the middle of the subscription era. And the big one: leaving the cloud. While every CTO on earth was migrating to AWS, 37signals migrated off it, bought their own hardware, and published the invoices. About $2 million saved per year, a projected $10 million-plus over five years, and eventually the satisfying finality of deleting the AWS account.

The pattern is always the same. Notice the thing everyone accepts without checking. Check it. Do the opposite in public. Publish the numbers.

The 2026 model

The current heresy is an operating system. Omarchy is his opinionated bundle of Arch Linux and the Hyprland tiling compositor, essentially his personal desktop bottled and made reproducible, and it escaped containment: 37signals is moving its entire Ops and Ruby teams onto it as hardware comes due, and the project has gathered a $10 million war chest as of this August. A Linux distro as a company-wide bet, in 2026, is exactly the sort of move nobody else would make and he would not consider unusual.

The other twist is how he writes software now. The man synonymous with hand-crafted, beautiful Ruby has gone agent-first, running two models side by side in tmux with neovim in the middle, and barely typing code by hand anymore. The most opinionated craftsman in the business changing his craft this completely, this publicly, is worth more than a hundred AI thinkpieces.

He is, to be clear, a lightning rod. He picks fights, he means them, and the fights are frequently louder than the code. But the through-line for anyone building anything is the useful part: check the received wisdom yourself, then publish what you find. Start with the cloud exit posts on his site, then go watch the Le Mans footage, because the man does in fact drive race cars for real.

We're going all-in on Omarchy at 37signals.

David, 2026, announcing that his side project is now the company's operating system