I suspect a lot of HN folks don't know who Dean Allen is (was), which is a little unfortunate. He was an early and strong advocate of, well, making the web readable and beautiful -- and of keeping in mind that those two things aren't mutually exclusive, something we've occasionally lost sight of in the years since.
He created Textile, a Markdown-like "lightweight markup" language that actually predates Markdown (and is, by some measures, more powerful). He went on to create Textpattern, a blogging system that, like WordPress, bloomed into a lightweight CMS -- but unlike WordPress, TXP (as its fans call it) has a much better template and extension system. And, Allen created TextDrive, an early shared hosting service that, at least until its unfortunate-in-retrospect merger with Joyent, was a power user dream. (No offense to the folks at Joyent -- well, not much -- but TextDrive became their transparently unloved "low end" brand surprisingly quickly.)
The Joyent/TextDrive situation was more difficult than most people dream of. [I worked at Joyent from early 2010 till 2014 or so... post merger, and on into several attempted revivals of TextDrive...]
Dean was much loved by his fans and seen as intractable and 'difficult' by others.
Still - one deserves to rest in peace and not be spoken ill of. Good bye, Dean, and thanks for what you did, and what the space you helped build, has done for several internet communities (textile, textpattern, early Rails, early javascript-on-the-server...) that will yet live on.
He created Textile, a Markdown-like "lightweight markup" language that actually predates Markdown (and is, by some measures, more powerful). He went on to create Textpattern, a blogging system that, like WordPress, bloomed into a lightweight CMS -- but unlike WordPress, TXP (as its fans call it) has a much better template and extension system. And, Allen created TextDrive, an early shared hosting service that, at least until its unfortunate-in-retrospect merger with Joyent, was a power user dream. (No offense to the folks at Joyent -- well, not much -- but TextDrive became their transparently unloved "low end" brand surprisingly quickly.)