Welcome to Michael Hartl’s home on the Web! I’m a theoretical physicist with a background as a technology entrepreneur. You might know me as founder of Tau Day and author of The Tau Manifesto , as cofounder and principal author at Learn Enough , or as the creator of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial . I’m the author of over a dozen books, including Learn Enough Python to Be Dangerous and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial , published jointly by Learn Enough and Pearson Education. Since the acquisition of Learn Enough in 2
I’m an alumnus of Harvard (A.B. in Physics), Caltech (Ph.D. in Physics), and Y Combinator (with a company that is long, long defunct). As a graduate student and postdoc at Caltech, I studied black hole dynamics and was an instructor in theoretical and computational physics, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching . At the request of Kip Thorne , I also served as Caltech’s editor for an update to The Feynman Lectures on Physics . (You can read more about this remarkable project he
Other interests include old books, languages, nutrition, physical fitness, singing , and martial arts (including Krav Maga Level 5 , a “black belt in self-defense”).