Especially wrong litanies. He likes to imply that the only people who call him on his attitude are biz people, as a kind of dismissive jedi mind trick. That's complete hogwash, a lot of engineering types and rubyists don't like Zed and have been fairly vocal about their disapproval for some time now.
Zed loves to be a complete jerk and then when people use the same strong language back at him suddenly write a blog post about how mean people are. At first I thought he was being deliciously ironic, but now I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
It's weird how so many people are so paranoid. Why is he coming up with these elaborate explanations of why they dislike him so much?
Is his reasoning really something like this? Biz dudes needs rails to be popular so that they can pitch ideas while being clueless, but Zed has made rails less magic, so now the Biz dudes hate Zed because now they have to have real ideas instead of buzzwords.
Really an elaborate explanation for simple name-calling. Perhaps the rude guys are just that - rude guys. To over-think it is nothing but paranoia.
I can see why someone, maybe a "MBA biz dude", might a tad upset about someone who goes out of his way to piss all over the reputation of Rails. There actually isn't anything wrong about Rails having a cool reputation if it is going be to accepted in an ordinary. working business.
Without ever having him, I am pissed at Zed because he has good ideas and he makes himself so hated that his good ideas will not get a hearing in an organization.
I mean, if he wanted to storm the Bastille and launch the Ruby-powered communist dictatorship of the proletariat, then his screw-the-biz-people rhetoric would make sense. But he clearly wants to conduct business himself while somehow not getting a clue that reputation is a part of business.
I don't know, but every time he writes something like this, it becomes a little bit harder to buy his "it's all an act" spiel. But he's not at all unhinged! I mean, who are you going to believe, Zed Shaw or your lying eyes?
I've hung out with him in person. He is a nice guy in real life, though very opinionated and with an overdeveloped sense of justice. He believes strongly in being nice to people who are nice to him and the converse.
Character is how you deal with people who aren't nice.
It's amazing to me how many people have still not come to terms with that truth. It's written in the oldest books in the world. I think it's particularly apt for the Internet age when conversations with strangers happen regularly.
The last time I saw Zed in person was a bit tense, because he had threatened to hunt down my friend Kevin Clark and start a physical fight with him.
He came into a lightning-talk session at railsconf, cut in line to talk about his next project (Utu), and then left without listening to any other talks.
It exists, it works, it's probably stable for things on the less-complex side of github (they had some SSL issues we've worked on addressing).
It's also about to get a big kickback from the Powerset/MS development on 0-point-of-failure deployments. That code is basically working at Powerset, and I can start to migrate it. I even have hours allotted on company time for it!
I just realized that Zed could be _why's evil twin. They're both talented, well-known rubyists, and they're both fascinating to read, even if you don't really have any idea what they're talking about, but they seem diametrically opposed in personality.
thank you. Can people please stop up-voting zed posts. I don't know the guy and am not offended by his obvious attempts at sensationalist blogging, but I have yet to read a post of his in the last year that had any meaningful hacker content.
Its funny I like Zed. I think its healthy to have someone with his technical insight standing on the outside screaming "You're fucking DOING IT WRONG!".
Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)
I'm disturbed by the thought that screaming profanities is the only way to get a hearing for your ideas, and would like to discourage anything that takes us in that direction.
That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.
I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.
Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.
I have been in enough meetings over the years where you hear all kinds of profanities, and you're right, the key to successful meetings is when people call it like it is. However, antagonism is not necessarily productive. Remember, you need to work with these teams, and even good teams roll our products that may not be good. I don't know the history here in its entirety so speaking generally, while it's good being a naysayer, there is a way to do it constructively. Reading what I have, I don't really see anything constructive here.
While I agree with you that the corporate world is full of doublespeak, the idea that politeness is inherently hypocritical and that swear words are necessary for straight talking is, well, stupid.
Yes, but if your point is that something's hypocritical and bad, it's much easier to say it rudely than it is so say it politely. Zed rants. I think if he were to write more civil-yet-critical posts, it would make for longer, less focused posts. Rudeness applies well in some situations.
I think it's quite possible to keep discourse civilized, and at the same time honest.
> Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap"
... are indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination. Yeah, once in a while they're useful for effect, but if you use them all the time, they lose their power to shock, and you just sound crude and uneducated.
Your riposte would be witty were you to use words not merely for their syllable count, but that actually convey some semblance of coherent meaning. As it is, your attempt at language play is one that brings to mind a concentrated effort to put round pegs into square holes.
As much as I appreciate your sentiment, I would beg to disagree. It is possible to imply scatological sentiment without resorting to 'swear words' and is occasionally appropriate. Although it requires effort, constructing a sentence or phrase that is more precise on whatever topic is vastly more effective than either "good job" or "god damn fucking shit". The use of either is both lazy and frequently just plain ineffective.
Absolutely, I love it that Zed is putting himself out there and dishing the dirt, but I'm also glad not everyone is doing that. It reminds me a bit of the Howard Stern phenomenon.
That's a superb analogy :) Zed's a great hacker, but he seems to thrive on bitchy rants. He also seems to relish personal grudges, etc. I think it's entertaining and usually read his rants with a smile, though this seems to be his most immature yet.
It's somewhat distressing to see that the parent comment has 8 karma points. It suggests that there is a lot of groupthink going on here. What was the purpose of the parent comment, other than to be a "kick in the groin"? Are you seriously suggesting that Zed isn't in the top 1% of humanity in intelligence? And before you point out how many millions of people are still smarter than that, consider how many people are dumber than that. 99% of humanity is a lot of people!
So I don't see why Zed should be called dumb, and I don't see why the parent comment was upvoted. Actually, I think it's perfectly obvious why it was upvoted -- I'm just hoping Hacker News doesn't turn into that.
I am sure Zed is smart. His rants don't sound very enlightening to me, though. I am certainly not made smarter by hearing him opine on how many guys subconsciously want to be filled with his cock.
It's his blog though, I guess he can do what he wants.
This might not be entirely spot-on, but: I think that it's useful to have somebody who's ranting that much about the Ruby team, even if it's not entirely relevant. I mean, he's spent a lot of time actually talking about Ruby (see: his legendary rant), so it's not like he doesn't occasionally to get technical, but at the same time Ruby has a reputation for being very kind and friendly and wonderful, and while some Ruby people are truly wonderful (_why is incredible), it's not some mystical haven for coders, and a lot of the developers whose blogs I read seem to really make it out to be one, and that means that certain large chunks of people conform to each others' thought processes, and that's harmful. Active venting, even when it's not spot-on, encourages people not to entirely conform.
If you haven't read his lengthy rant on Ruby and the community, do it immediately, because I think that having context on Zed makes his writing a bit more worth reading.
I like Zed. He writes some seriously good code, he answers technical emails (mine, at least) and seems to really care about his fellow humans (read up on past threads if you're missing this).
However, I don't think that every item he posts on his blog is worthy of news linkage. Comments on stuff that someone said on IRC at some point? Ehhhh, colour me 42 kinds of uninterested.
I saw Zed Shaw in QCon 2007 before I had learned that he was an internet rockstar. Frankly speaking, he seemed like one of the least douchebaggy speakers of the whole conference.
Sadly, he wasn't invited (or didn't wanna come) to QCon 2008. Our loss.
It's a metaphor. It means that in the Internet world, a lot of attention is paid to him not just because of product but because of personality. Don't mock metaphors when they're used correctly, like in this case ("I saw him speak before I knew he had a reputation"). Mock them when they're ridiculous ("I want to make my website more 2.0").
Zed did poke a hole in the Rails hype with his "Rails Ghetto" rant, and I think it did Rails nothing but good in the long run - this merger, for example, would probably never happened otherwise.
Funny how Rails' actual value grew in contrast to the hype around it (a lot of it by the type he calls biz people - but also a lot by non-coding writers, bloggers, publishers etc) subsided.
no, merb did the community good in the long run. ezra and team wrote good code instead of complaining. Demonstrating how a community can work well without ego was what merb brought to the game in a way that Zed had nothing to do with.
There are many great hackers in the world. Some have written code that turned out to be critical to our everyday hacking lives. Zed seems to think that because he wrote one piece of software that has been used a lot (its really just a small blip on the "used a lot" scale) that he has the right to constantly remind everyone of this. Seriously, do the authors of VIM, openssh, firebug, etc... constantly remind us that we owe a debt to them by listening to their rants?
The bottom line is if Zed had not have written mongrel, someone else would. No hacker is irreplaceable.
Personally I'm not sure, overall, Mongrel was a good thing. The Ruby web community should have focused on working well with existing web servers (mainly Apache) instead of building their own. Phusion Passenger is, in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened to Ruby in the web space, since Merb & Rails.
I don't know if the Merb/Rails merger would have happened if the ego-inflating hype around Rails was still on. In that sense, maybe Mongrel's main benefit (IMHO) was that it gave Zed credibility which made his "Rail Ghetto" rant significant.
I agree everyone is replaceable, and yet - surprisingly small number of people out of those who have the skills to build such projects actually bother to do it. It's easy to know how to build something, hard to actually do it, from start to finish.
Why do people see strength where there is only reactionary weakness? What is it about returning hate for hate that is so refreshing and liberating? There is nothing but waste on both sides.
Look... there will always be people spewing hatred at you. If you spew back, you have accomplished nothing other than to inspire more hatred. Maybe we think that's cool? Maybe if someone does it with style it makes it cool? Why is it that any other reaction that doesn't involve spewing hatred back get labeled as hypocritical counterfeit? Why must "saying what's really on your mind" involve some form of malevolence? Is that the only response that humans can have when insulted? Is it because it's funny?
If we are to keep HN a decent community, this kind of reactionary behavior should not be encouraged.
I got intrigued how come I don't know about pooswa in french... Then looking at urban dictionary seems like they got it from the sentence 'voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir', which got transcribed to 'voule vu coche avec moi POOSWA!', so that's why the guy thought it meant pussy (never mind that the ce soir means this evening...)
Well, that's why one shouldn't always rely on user generated content :-)
There is lot's of drama in it. But actually - those IRC quotes (if they are authentic) are really not nice. I think it is time that Open Source learned about culture - because the Wild West version does not really work for something that has cooperation at it's core.
I was puzzled by his claim that pooswa is french for pussy. It sounds more like good evening with a very strong german accent.
I guess the slang meaning implies that you're a pussy when you say good evening in french, and what I took for a german accent is in fact american.
By the way, I don't think this is hacker news. I hope this comment doesn't help the post stay on the front page. I don't know how hacker news works. I voted up the comment that says 'not hacker news'. I hope this doesn't increase the score of the topic.
Zed Shaw is the archetypal Rails proponent, and explains in full why Rails has such an uphill struggle to be accepted. It's as if being a Rubyist requires being a dick.
