Ryan Dahl


Ryan Dahl is an American software engineer and the original developer of the Node.js JavaScript runtime and the Deno JavaScript and TypeScript runtime.

Early life and education

Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. His mother got him an Apple IIc when he was six years old, one of his first experiences with technology. Ryan attended a community college in San Diego and later transferred into UC San Diego where he studied mathematics. He went on to attend grad school for Mathematics at the University of Rochester where he studied algebraic topology, 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."

Career

After working on the Node project since 2009, Dahl announced in January, 2012 that he would step away from the project and turn over the reins to NPM creator and then Joyent employee Isaac Z. Schlueter.
Ryan Dahl gave the following reason for moving on from the project:
In 2018 he announced Deno, a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime built with V8.