You know, if he'd actually done that, that would be fine. But in the past month he's flamed the music industry after doing a piss poor job of researching his claims then retaliated with a giant rant and personal attacks when folk disagreed with him.
WTF are we still paying attention to him, and why is he still getting to the top of the HN front page when he's done nothing of any real worth for the past year, apart from the opinionated rants he himself has decried?
That's not true: he was able to write the right software at the right time[1], when nobody else had will/time/whatever to scratch their own itch. The Mongrel HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails applications, and on it companies like Engine Yard based their business.
Like was previously said in this thread, he's a passionate hacker, and puts his passion on his sleeve. While I don't particularly appreciate the excess of harsh in his posts, I consider it no different than Torvalds writing "You're full of shit" on LKML.
The main problem here is about the "people" perception about whate they find "written on the internet", and their constant need of finding an hero to follow: in this scenario, if you're a respected and known developer, you simply cannot ignore your influence on the "crowd" and you have to measure the harshness of your writeups.
Although you're probably right about Apache + Passenger becoming the de-facto for running Rails applications, I personally think that Mongrel is still ahead by a bit.
The Rails Hosting 2009 survey shows that the test group uses Passenger more, but the people in this group are not a random sampling. I would argue that people ahead of the curve are also the people who find it inviting to fill out such a survey.
I've spoken to him over email before. He comes across as a pretty good guy, unlike the perception I had of him from his writings. His article about understanding statistics should be required reading for any good programmer. It's a pity that he decided to focus his efforts elsewhere (e.g., not Ruby/Rails) about a year ago.
I've worked with people before that have his "blog" personality (for lack of a better description) but in real life. Most of the time these are really smart people, and they are difficult on others because there are a lot of stupid ideas out there. One way of ensuring you filter out the crap is to shut the door on everything. The good stuff will knock again. I had a boss that called a lot of things I suggested stupid. So when I had to fight to implement an idea, and I was adamant about it, he knew that it probably wasn't stupid, and let me go ahead. Think of it as being skeptical, assertive, and intimidating. In the end, about half of my ideas got implemented. The other half I ended up being glad were not implemented, usually about a year after the decision. He'd been correct, and made me look better by keeping me from making a mistake.
It's a lot like picking up girls at a bar. The good ones are hit on so many times that their gut instinct is to shut you down immediately if you approach them. You need to be persistent and stand your ground in order to win them over. Most guys will cower and retreat at the first sign of rejection. The ones that get a girl's number are the ones that know how to stay and do battle, so to speak.
Zed shows that he's willing to think about issues long term. Most people would simply live with and forget about what they wrote in that rant. Zed goes and makes an update to it saying that he wants to retract what he said. I think that's an admirable trait.
Up until he pulled his trollier-than-thou speech i'd have agreed. The utu documentation is very well written and enlightening and so too are plenty of his trolly articles. What annoys me is that he claimed he was better than that, that it was all a show.
Perhaps he's just gotten used to the rant format. Hopefully he'll improve with time as when he's sensible he's awesome. But like he's said he should be judged not on his personality, bad or good, but by his works and ideas. Frankly they haven't been very impressive lately.
Then if you don't want to watch the rest, that's fine. But give it at least 10 minutes. It was a fantastic presentation, and your perceptions of Zed might even be changed by the end of it, like mine were.
OK, I'm guilty of some hyperbole there. From what I can tell, Zed is perfectly
capable of being civil when he wants to be, very driven and a good engineer.
However he has an impulsive trollish side as well and it hasn't been laid to
rest despite claims that it has. So folk just need to ignore him when he's being
a dick and learned not to blindly upmod anything that comes from zedshaw.com.
Meh, I suspect one of the reasons I'm most riled up about this is that I'd have
also defended him a few months back. I doesn't seem like he needs it now though.
WTF are we still paying attention to him, and why is he still getting to the top of the HN front page when he's done nothing of any real worth for the past year, apart from the opinionated rants he himself has decried?