A Conversation With David Heinemeier Hansson

This week’s show explores the importance of having a clear vision and crafting your code. David Hansson, co-owner and CTO of 37signals, shares the story of his rise to the C-suite and the challenges he faced when starting the company. He joins Etienne de Bruin to discuss how his company has grown over time.

Some ideas you’ll hear them explore are:

• David considers himself a programmer, not an engineer. Engineer, he says, should be a protected title for people who actually have engineering degrees.
• Most programming languages are not designed for the programmer but to contain and relegate the programmer as the “problematic character that’s driving it from behind the keyboard.”
• David and his business partner were both students of bad businesses, getting a close-up view of what not to do, which later informed their decisions in building Basecamp. This valuable insight, along with their combined skill sets in programming, design, and business operations, allowed them to approach entrepreneurship from a unique lens. “We had a healthy degree of utter arrogance and exuberant ignorance, and through those things, a commitment to doing things from first principles,” he shares.
• Once you've made enough money that no one can threaten your livelihood, you achieve a distinct degree of inner freedom that allows you to stand up for your principles. 
• There are aspects of hardship that are good for you, and they will only make you stronger.
• A lot of productivity is about realizing the value of doing nothing, and the value of not creating more. The inherent creation value in destruction and inaction is huge and should not be overlooked.

Resources

David Hansson on the Web | LinkedIn | Twitter

Email Etienne: etienne@7ctos.com

Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck

Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans

Refactoring by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler