Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

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Zed had a satirical site called "Zed's so fucking awesome" mocking the whole 'Ruby rockstar' thing in the late 2000s. A bunch of people didn't get the joke and got really angry at Zed. [1]

Zed also pointed out some genuinely bad stuff that was happening in the rails community in: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto which made them more angry.

Edit: a user points out below that post came before the ZSFA site. I'm not sure that matters.

He also claimed Ryan Dahl ripped off Mongrel's HTTP parser. The flip side of this (which I've heard from someone else involved in node) is that Ryan Dahl is super talented and just read the damn HTTP spec like Zed did. I honestly don't know enough about HTTP parsers to say either way.

Zed's talented: Mongrel and Lamson are in the top of their categories. Learn C The Hard Way is a modern, but still fundamental C book. Any interaction with Zed I've ever had has been brilliant.

[1] The people who got angry at ZSFA in the late 2000s are probably the same people who write Jenn Schiffer angry tweets for writing tech satire these days.

That Rails is a Ghetto piece is filled with personal insults, gripes, anger, accusations that people are slighting him or intending to slight him. There seems to be one critique of Rails buried in all that, that DHH may have been running a Rails app that required many restarts a day. I only had the patience to get through the anger and the personal stuff because I really wanted to actually read the piece before I replied to your post.

When you spew that much anger into the world you're going to rub people the wrong way and concern others that if things start to go slightly south you're next to go on the shit list.

I already feel like I'm posting too much in this thread about a particular individual that I've only had a few interactions with on Twitter, but as a programmer it's extremely important to me that discourse between programmers is considerate. If you can't or won't express yourself without endless anger and personal insults, why is it the responsibility of other people to be patient with your tantrums?

> There seems to be one critique of Rails buried in all that

Yep, it was more a criticism of people's behaviour than rails itself.

No, the relevant fact in RiaG is that DHH had been lying to people for years claiming that "rails scales" when he had to handle 400 restarts a day of his process.

And then I was trying to be funny and shit.

That site existed way before Ruby rockstars. I remember reading it in high school. It was priceless.

re [1]: This is not an accurate reflection of the events and circumstances at the time.

The "Zed's so fucking awesome" follows the Rails is a Ghetto post, and the start of acrimony between Zed and other members of the Rails community, and so was more of a consequence of the aforementioned acrimony than it was the cause.

Sure. Amended, though I don't think it makes that much of a difference.

It does make a difference because Jenn's rise to general attention has been through her satirical and artistic work (as well as the fact that she's an awesome developer who worked at the NBA and now works for Bocoup).

The context in which everyone was relating to Zed was the dude who wrote mongrel who did an about face and not only left the ruby community but decried it all the way out.

Remember this was in the heyday of Ruby on Rails's rise, twitter was still using mongrel as their primary web serving mechanism.

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