This is an editorial pick, not a submission — Talmyn’s own research into a builder with a genuinely long track record, published as part of our ongoing Talmyn Builder of the Year coverage.
David Heinemeier Hansson, widely known as DHH, created Ruby on Rails — one of the most influential web application frameworks of the last two decades — as a byproduct of building Basecamp, the project management tool he co-founded with Jason Fried. He remains CTO of the company, now called 37signals, and has continued creating new open-source projects well past the point most successful builders would have stopped: Hotwire, Kamal, and most recently Omarchy, a Linux operating system project.
Why he made this list
The specific thing worth noting in 2026 is that Omarchy — a genuinely new project, not a legacy maintenance effort — reached a $10 million funding milestone for its associated foundation this year, decades into a career where Hansson could reasonably have stopped starting new things. That’s a real, current data point about sustained building, not a retrospective on old work.
The other detail worth including: 37signals has operated without outside venture funding for its core products, and Hansson has been vocal about that as a deliberate choice rather than a limitation — a specific, statable philosophy about ownership and independence that’s shaped both his products and how openly he’s built and given away the tools behind them.
Talmyn’s Builder of the Year coverage looks for someone still actively building, not just a legacy reputation. A new project reaching a real funding milestone in the same year is exactly the kind of current evidence this category asks for.
