#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with David Heinemeier Hanssen, also known as DHH. He is a legend in the programming and tech world, brilliant and insightful, sometimes controversial, and always fun to talk to. He's the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is an influential web development framework behind many websites used by millions of people, including Shopify, GitHub, and Airbnb. He is the co owner and CTO of Thirty Seven Signals that created Basecamp, Hey, and Once. He is a New York Times best selling author together with his co author, Jason Fried, of four books, Rework, Remote, Getting Real
Commodore 64 was the inspiration. I really wanted a Commodore 64. That was the first computer I ever sat down in front. And the way I sat down in front of it was I was five years old, and there was this one kid on my street who had a Commodore 64. No one else had a computer, so we were all the kids just getting over there, and we were all playing Yer Kung Fu. I don't know if you've ever seen that game. It was one of the original fighting games. It's really a great game, and I was playing that for the first time at five years old. And we were, like, seven kids sitting up in this one kid's bedro
disappointment.
This is not a Commodore 64. But it was a computer. So I got my first computer at essentially six years old, that Amstrad four six four. And, of course, the first thing I wanted to do, I just wanted to play video games. And I think the computer, which he, by the way, had traded for a TV and a stereo recorder or something like that, came with, like, two games. One was this Frogger game where you had to escape from underground. It was actually kind of dark. Like, this frog trying to get it out from underground. I was just I was pretty bad at it. And I only had those two games, and then I wanted m
at this sexy thing. That is a sexy machine right there. This
is from an age, by the way, where computing wasn't global in the same sense. The different territories had different computers that were popular. The Amiga was really popular in Europe, but it wasn't very popular at all in The US as far as I understand it. It wasn't popular in Japan. There were just different machines. The Apple two was a big thing in The US. I'd never even heard of Apple in the eighties in Copenhagen. But the Amiga 500 was the machine that brought me to wanna try it again. And you know what's funny? The reason I wanted to try it again was I remembered the first time time to l
on YouTube.
On on this thing, they would make these little, almost like music videos, combining some MIDI music, combining some cool graphics, and they would do all of it in, like, four k. Four kilobytes, that is. Not four k's of revolution. Four kilobytes of of memory. And I just thought that was such a cool scene. This was obviously pre Internet. It was even pre VBS, bulletin board systems, to some extent. It was you swap your demo software with someone else by sending them a disc in the mail Mhmm. Like the three point fives. And I just I was enamored with that whole scene. I was enamored with what they
your parents know?
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