David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH, is a Danish programmer, entrepreneur, race car driver, and multi-millionaire. He is the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web framework, the Chief Technology Officer of 37signals, the company responsible for productivity software such as Basecamp, HEY, and ONCE, and a member of the Shopify board of directors since November 2024. David has published a number of white supremacist and anti-immigration articles, publicly supports anti-Islam agitator Tommy Robinson and the violent British anti-immigration protests of 2025, and has worked to dismantle progressive politics within the companies and communities he is responsible for.

"As I remember London"

In September 2025, David published an article titled "As I Remember London" on his personal blog which uses numerous fascist and racist dog-whistles to argue against immigration in Great Britain. This article generated controversy particularly within the Ruby on Rails community, leading to several calls for his removal from positions of leadership. As of April 2026, David remains the chair of The Rails Foundation board of directors and 37signals remains a "core member" of the foundation.

David's article relies on allusions to indirectly support racist views. For example, the second paragraph reads:

London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

The paragraph cites the Wikipedia article "Ethnic groups in London", which explains that 59% of London residents were born in the UK, but only 36% are white. David's article can be shown to exclude the non-white people who make up the difference between these figures. The article uses classic fascist argumentation tactics, relying on an emotional appeal to the discomfort of white readers with racist perceptions of the everyday makeup of people one may encounter in London. The article evokes nostalgia for a past where non-white people were less visible, and plays up British nationalist myth-making by relating symbols such as Big Ben and The Tube to British (white) identity. David addresses "native Britons" in heroic, galvanizing terms, and calls for organizing states along ethnic lines:

You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.

David's arguments rely primarily on emotions and manipulating facts to stoke those emotions, for example disingenuously citing immigration as the cause of changing demographics in London, though a majority of London residents were born in the UK. The article's coverage of the "Grooming gangs scandal" appeals to racist fears over the rape of innocent white women by racialized and de-humanized caricatures of the out-group:

I really feel for the Brits because it's not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle. They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls. I don't know. But I'm glad that there clearly are many Brits who are determined to find out. Unwilling to just let their society wither away while their bobbies chase bad tweets instead of the rampant street thefts or those barbaric rape gangs. Unwilling to resign the rest of the country to the kind of demographic replacement that befell London over the last two decades.

"Demographic replacement" is a dog-whistle alluding to the debunked white supremacist Great Replacement Theory.

Defense of right-wing figures

"As I remember London" defends several right-wing agitators over the course of its narrative, including:

• Tommy Robinson, a prominent far-right British activist, Islamophobe, and leader of the violent far-right protests that inspired Hansson's article. Robinson has been criminally convicted of harassment, assault, and fraud, and has served five prison terms for his criminal convictions.
• Graham Linehan, a British comedian and anti-transgender activist who was arrested and questioned on suspicion of incitement to violence regarding his transphobic posts on X.
• Prime Minster Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, a left-conservative politician whose anti-immigration rhetoric is quoted in Hansson's article.

Response from the Ruby on Rails community

Numerous members of the Ruby on Rails community stepped forward to respond to this article, and to Hansson's rhetoric generally, calling for Hansson's removal from positions of authority within the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities.

“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this framework we all love.

David Celis, Rails Needs New Governance

Many members of the community took the opportunity to reject Hansson's broader political views, looking beyond the inciting article itself:

Unfortunately it isn’t just migrants and non-white people that have come under fire in DHH’s recent writing and social media posts. There have been multiple examples of anti-trans rhetoric. There was the post where he described an ad featuring a plus-sized Black women as “grotesque” and celebrated the ads being replaced with ones featuring “blond babies” (what is it about the baby’s blondness that is relevant I wonder?). There have been the posts veering into puritanical Pronatalism, another favourite subject of the nationalist right. Whether it’s his direct intention or not, there has been a consistent theme of othering and stigmatising in his recent writing. The message is clear: if you are trans, a migrant, black, overweight, childless, have ADHD, then in DHH’s view you are somehow inferior. Instead of raising up and supporting the marginalised and vulnerable, DHH choses to exclude and punch down. This is not something the Ruby community can continue to simply ignore.

Tekin Süleyman, The Ruby community has a DHH problem

Basecamp's "Best Names Ever"

Basecamp is a productivity tool developed by 37signals. In 2021, Basecamp disbanded their DEI committee and banned "societal and political" conversations in the workplace, changes jointly announced by Hansson and Basecamp CEO Jason Fried. The changes appear to have been motivated by internal controversies within Basecamp. The Verge reports that a list of "Best Names Ever" was maintained by customer service representatives as an in-joke to nickname their customers, which is reported to have included numerous inappropriate or racist nicknames for Asian and African customers. The discussion of what to do about this list is said to have led to the change in policy.

Interviews with a half-dozen Basecamp employees over the past day paint a portrait of a company where workers sought to advance Basecamp’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by having sensitive discussions about the company’s own failures. After months of fraught conversations, Fried and his co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson moved to shut those conversations down.

At the time, Hansson acknowledged that the list of names was wrong, but objected to employees who framed the list as a step in the "pyramid of hate", a tool used by the Anti-Defamation League to understand how hate develops in society, and stopped discussions which aimed for broader reforms to address the underlying issues at Basecamp.

Omarchy

Omarchy is a pre-configured Arch Linux-based Linux distribution "by DHH" using the Hyprland desktop environment, founded by David Heinemeier Hansson. Hyprland is controversial, in particular for its project leader, Vaxry, who expresses trans- and homophobic rhetoric and portrays himself and Hyprland as victims of the RedHat DEI conspiracy theory.

Omarchy is financially supported by Cloudflare, who provides hosting for the website. It is unclear if Cloudflare provides direct financial support to Hansson, but the Ladybird project sponsorship, announced simultaneously with Omarchy, included a $100,000 cash donation. Framework, a laptop manufacturer, has sent test hardware to Omarchy, promotes Omarchy on its social media profiles, and sponsors Hyprland at $7,200/year.