David Heinemeier Hansson discusses the guiding principles behind the development of Ruby On Rails, the open source web applications framework. Throughout the presentation, he restates such phrases as "don't repeat yourself", “convention over configuration", and "constraint is good", almost as sacred verbal formulas. But these are the guiding principles upon which he is building a professional foundation, and also the guiding principles he relied upon to develop Ruby On Rails, and other projects such as the project management application Basecamp, the personal information manager Backpack, and to do list application Ta-Da-List. He aspires to something better for himself and his professional colleagues - to avoid the underlying drudgery, complexity and repetition inherent in the programming profession.

According to Heinemeier Hansson, the goal of Ruby On Rails was to develop a toolset that would make web developers happy and allow them to have confidence in their code. Programmers do not enter the profession to engage in a continuous, repetitive, mindless generation of code. Ruby On Rails aims to eliminate a great deal of duplicative effort. The goal is to allow developers to build quickly, confidently and effectively, and free them from those aspects that typically bog down the application development process, such as the need to focus time on maintaining awareness of the in and outs of supplementary programming languages, or coding variables for multiple configuration points. Ruby On Rails allows programmers to focus on developing the business logic to meet the specific task at hand - no compilation, no deployment, no server restarts, no code generation. The job of the programmer is to build solutions, and Ruby On Rails provides a composite framework to make that undertaking more efficient, and quite possibly a more professionally satisfying experience as well.