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cover art for DHH: Building Basecamp and Ruby on Rails as side projects, with David Heinemeier Hansson

3/19/2021

DHH: Building Basecamp and Ruby on Rails as side projects, with David Heinemeier Hansson

Season 2, Ep. 7

Brought to you by Out of Hours- the community of people with side projects.

If you enjoy this episode, consider buying me a coffee to show your support! ☕️ We currently make a loss on the show and your support means the world!

Today on the podcast is David Heinemeier Hansson: the co-founder and CTO of Basecamp, a NYT best selling author, and creator of Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on rails is a free open source web application framework. and some of the biggest companies in the world were built with it: Airbnb, Shopify, Twitch and Square to name a few.

He’s also built hugely successful businesses: Basecamp - which started as a side project for him and his cofounder Jason. It has since made him a millionaire, and served millions of users.

Alongside all of this, he is also an author. He’s written three books, including New York Times Bestseller Rework. He’s also a Le Mans class-winning racing driver.

Even though he started all his biggest projects as side projects, this is not a traditional podcast episode - we talk much more about the other meaning of ‘out of hours’ - the fact we are running out of hours and life should be meaningful. We talk about everything from:

open source
why intrinsic motivation matters
why he was a terrible employee
how to build your internal sense of control
why he doesn’t set goals
how he found out money doesn’t make him happy
whether he’ll ever go into politics
climate change

P.S. If you enjoy this episode, consider buying me a coffee to show your support! ☕️ We currently make a loss on the show and your support means the world!

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