Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American

software engineer Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software applications. It involves applying engineering principles and computer programming expertise to develop ...

who is best known for creating the Node.js

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

runtime as well as the Deno

TypeScript TypeScript (abbreviated as TS) is a high-level programming language that adds static typing with optional type annotations to JavaScript. It is designed for developing large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. It is developed by Micr ...

runtime.

Biography

Dahl grew up in

San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. His mother bought him an

Apple IIc The Apple IIc is a personal computer introduced by Apple Inc. shortly after the launch of the Macintosh 128K, original Macintosh in 1984. It is essentially a compact and portable version of the Apple IIe. The IIc has a built-in floppy disk driv ...

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 undergraduate higher education institution, generally leading to an associate degree, certificate, or diploma. The term can have different meanings in different countries: many community colleges have an open enr ...

in San Diego and later transferred into

UC San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Sc ...

where he studied

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

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

University of Rochester The University of Rochester is a private university, private research university in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded in 1850 and moved into its current campus, next to the Genesee River in 1930. With approximately 30,000 full ...

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 invariant (mathematics), invariants that classification theorem, classify topological spaces up t ...

, 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 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 sapph ...

Node.js

On May 27, 2009, Dahl released his project, the Node.js runtime. 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. is a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it markets infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics. Services Triton, Joyen ...

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