David Heinemeier Hansson

In 1999, Hansson founded and built a Danish online gaming news website and community called Daily Rush, which he ran until 2001.^[3] After attracting the attention of Jason Fried by offering him help with PHP coding, Hansson was hired by Fried to build a web-based project management tool, which ultimately became 37signals' Basecamp software as a service product.^[4] To aid the development process, Hansson used the then-relatively obscure Ruby programming language to develop a custom web framework. He released the framework separately from the project management tool in 2004 as the open source project Ruby on Rails. In 2005, Hansson was recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the "Hacker of the Year" award for his creation of Ruby on Rails.^[5] After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School and receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005.^[6]

David Heinemeier Hansson lists photography and race car driving amongst his many hobbies.^[7] He took part in the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans driving for OAK Racing.^[8] He also drove a Morgan-Nissan P2 car for Conquest Racing in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), winning two races in the season. Heinemeier Hansson joined OAK Racing full-time in 2013, taking five 2nd-place finishes to finish 2nd in the Trophy for LMP2 Drivers. During the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans post-race technical checks, certain irregularities were detected on the Vaillante Rebellion team's #13 Oreca 07-Gibson, resulting in the car's disqualification.

In July 2010 it was revealed that Heinemeier Hansson was the person that had commissioned the one-off Pagani Zonda HH supercar.^[9] He also commissioned the Koenigsegg Agera HH, which was sold in 2022 to Houston Crosta, a YouTube video creator in Las Vegas. It has now been sold to car spotting YouTuber, "TheStradman".^[10] Heinemeier Hansson also purchased an Aston Martin Valkyrie.

24 Hours of Le Mans results

More information Year, Team ...

Year	Team	Co-Drivers	Car	Class	Laps	Pos.	Class Pos.
2012	OAK Racing	Bas Leinders Maxime Martin	Morgan LMP2-Nissan	LMP2	341	14th	7th
2013	OAK Racing	Olivier Pla Alex Brundle	Morgan LMP2-Nissan	LMP2	328	8th	2nd
2014	Aston Martin Racing	Kristian Poulsen Nicki Thiim	Aston Martin Vantage GTE	GTE Am	334	17th	1st
2015	Extreme Speed Motorsports	Scott Sharp Ryan Dalziel	Ligier JS P2-Honda	LMP2	329	28th	10th
2016	Abu Dhabi-Proton Racing	Khaled Al Qubaisi Patrick Long	Porsche 911 RSR	GTE Am	330	28th	3rd
2017	Vaillante Rebellion	Nelson Piquet Jr. Mathias Beche	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	364	DSQ	DSQ
2018	Jackie Chan DC Racing	Ricky Taylor Côme Ledogar	Ligier JS P217-Gibson	LMP2	195	DNF	DNF
2019	Jackie Chan DC Racing	Ricky Taylor Jordan King	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	199	DNF	DNF
2022	Inter Europol Competition	Pietro Fittipaldi Fabio Scherer	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	364	18th	14th
2023	Jota	Pietro Fittipaldi Oliver Rasmussen	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	316	24th	13th
2024	Nielsen Racing	Fabio Scherer Kyffin Simpson	Oreca 07-Gibson	LMP2	291	25th	11th

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• 2005: Won Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at OSCON from Google and O'Reilly for the work on Rails.^[11]
• 2006: Accepted the Jolt Award of product excellence for Rails 1.0.^[11]
• 2012: Named ALMS Rookie of the year.^[12]