David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

That's who I am and that's what I do.

I thought of PHP as a tool I needed to smack the computer with until it produced web applications I wanted.

It was very much a means to an end.

I didn't fall in love with PHP.

I'm very grateful that it taught me the basics of programming, and I'm very grateful that it set the bar for the economics, but it really wasn't until Ruby that I started thinking of myself as a programmer.

And the way that came about was...

That the first time I ever got hired as a professional programmer to write code was actually by Jason Freed, my business partner still.

All the way back in 2001, I had been working on these gaming websites in PHP for essentially 18 months at that point.

No one had been paying me to do code in that regard.

And I connect with Jason Freed.

Over an email sent from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Chicago, Illinois, to a person who didn't know who I was, I was just offering solicited advice.

Jason had asked a question on the internet, and I had sent in the answer, and he was asking in PHP.

And I'd send them the answer to that question.

And we started talking and then we started working, which, by the way, is a miracle of what the Internet can allow.

How can a kid in Copenhagen who's never met this guy in Chicago connect just over email and start working together?

And by the way, we're still working together now, 24 years later.

That's incredible.

But we started working together and we started working together on some client projects.

Jason would do the design.

37signals would do design.