Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American

software engineer Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term ''p ...

who is best known for creating the

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

runtime as well as the Deno

TypeScript TypeScript is a free and open source programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are ...

runtime.

Biography

Dahl grew up in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. His mother bought him an Apple IIc when he was six years old, one of his first experiences with technology. Dahl attended a

community college A community college is a type of educational institution. The term can have different meanings in different countries: many community colleges have an "open enrollment" for students who have graduated from high school (also known as senior sec ...

in San Diego and later transferred into

UC San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is t ...

where he studied

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

. He went on to attend grad school for Mathematics at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants Undergraduate education, undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Doctorate, do ...

where he studied

algebraic topology Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify ...

, which he found "very abstract and beautiful" for a couple of years but later got bored of it because "it was not so applicable to real life".

Ruby work

After graduating, Dahl entered a Ph.D. program, but eventually dropped out, since he did not want to devote the rest of his life to mathematics. Instead, he left for South America, where he started developing web applications in

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sa ...

Node.js

On May 27, 2009, Dahl released his project, the

framework. In January 2012, after having worked on the Node.js project since 2009, Dahl announced that he would step away from the project and turn operational management over to NPM creator and former

Joyent Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, Joye ...

employee Isaac Z. Schlueter. Dahl gave the following reason for moving on from the project:

Deno

In 2018, Dahl announced Deno, a JavaScript/

runtime built with V8.

References

External links