Before I begin, I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! May 2008 bring happiness, peace and prosperity to all.
I’ve been keeping myself very busy lately with RSpec and Behavior-Driven Development, basically learning the ropes and how all the pieces fit together. For now, I’m totally enjoying it. But more on that in a future post.
Now, I know that everyone who read Zed Shaw’s rant towards most of the Ruby and Rails communities will have an opinion on this. But I’ll give my own thoughts on it. All I hope is that someone doesn’t read this and think “Who the hell is this guy to give an opinion?” I might not be a ’somebody’ in the Ruby or Rails communities at the moment, but I would really like to be part of those communities sometimes in the near future.
Upon first glance, Zed’s rant seems like a completely immature piece, just looking to damage the reputations of certainl people and companies. But if you read closely, ignoring the unprofessional language scattered throughout the text, there’s a whole lot of valid thoughts and reasoning to this entire rant.
Most of his attacks are aimed at two people: Kevin Clark and Dave Thomas. Kevin Clark has been a pretty big part of the Rails community, regularly contributing code and such, and Dave Thomas of course is the author of possibly the most well-known Ruby and Rails books in the market. His story on Kevin is that they possibly never got along and clashed multiple times, while the story on Dave is that supposedly Zed had a fix for a pretty serious bug in Ruby, yet Dave and others ‘threatened’ Zed to not release it. For what reason, it’s not clear in the rant. Now, about these allegations, I don’t know whether they’re true or not (there’s always two sides to a story). But from my own views, I think any environment has these types of problems all the time. My own workplace can be used as personal experience on these manners. There’s always someone who wants to be smarter and better than you, and for some unknown reason they go out of their way to make sure they come out looking better than you can. It’s stupid, but it’s just human nature, I guess. I bet almost any other open-source community is the same.
He also goes on to write about Thoughtworks, a software consulting company that jumped on the Rails bandwagon a while back. Zed’s beef with them is the fact that they charge a shitload of cash while providing not-so-great work in return. Isn’t this is the case with almost all software consultancy places? I can name a few off the top of my head here in Puerto Rico. In fact, all you need to do is go to a website one of these ‘expert software consultants’ made, look at how the site is built, and anyone with an eye for software development standard practices can name a dozen things they would change immediately. This is no surprise here.
I do commend Zed for not making this a 100% negative jab towards Ruby and Rails. He included some people who he knows and have helped him out or were unlike those who he vilified before. Like I said, all communities have their share of bad apples, mostly people who want to be most widely known at your own expense. So the fact that he names some people who were cool to him shows that.
I’ve read a lot of other blogs where people are dismissing Zed for the way he expressed his views, that he burned his bridges and what not. But that’s what he apparently wanted. He said he’s not happy being part of the Rails community, so he wants out. This is his way of getting out. Now, I may not agree with the way he did this at all. You never know when you need to cross a bridge you burned in the past, after all. But being in the position he was, seeing and knowing a lot of things that went down, he has a valid opinion, and he’s simply entitled to it.
I think Zed partly wrote this rant not to bash everyone associated to Ruby or Rails, but to try and help out, in his own way. He knows a lot more about the community than most of us will probably ever know. So hopefully some good comes out of him exposing some dirty details on how the Ruby and Rails world is run. In the end, it simply boils down to this: It’s one man’s opinion. No matter how important he is (or rather, was) to the Rails world, one man isn’t enough to kill it, in my opinion.
Zed, if you miraculously read this, best of luck to you in the future, buddy. Hope the rant was worth it!
14 comments ↓
For what it’s worth, my memory of the incident was that Zed popped up in rails-core Campfire at the time of a known security hole (I think it was in CGI.rb). Koz and I suggested delaying announcing it until Matz had a chance to fix it. There was some discussion on how long Matz had already known about it. Then Zed left the chat.
It would be instructive to consider just how either Koz or myself could possibly threaten Zed–he doesn’t seem like someone who would be threatened by anything
Either way, I’m sorry he’s leaving the comminity: his energy and style added to it.
Dave
Hi Dave,
Thanks for leaving your comments on this matter. I was curious about this, since Zed vaguely mentioned this without a solid explanation as to why his fix wasn’t immediately used. This makes it much more clearer. As I said, there’s always two sides to any story, so I appreciate you leaving yours.
You being such an integral part of the Rails community, I’m sure you were taken a bit by surprise, much more than anyone of us, by that rant. I hope you’re able to speak with Zed and air out these differences. Of course, he doesn’t seem willing, but to each his own
Again, thanks for dropping by and leaving your comments.
Dave, is that really you?
I am a Rails developer from Brazil and I also published my take on the subject.
As Dennis I can’t judge this as I was not present in those episodes. Though as Zed targeted mainly you, it would be nice to have an statement about this.
Of course, it could possibly just be like throwing fuel to the flame, but a professional and explanatory (not apologetic) closure from you would be great for all of us that was just left with the Zed rant.
Read it. Notice nobody from rails-core is putting up the transcript? It is pretty nasty how that went down, and I stopped hanging out there because of that. And when you’re an unemployed serf in the rails community, pissing off DT, MK, and other Illuminati doesn’t help. So, nobody needs to actually threaten to really threaten.
Wow, this little obscure blog is sure getting a lot of attention from some folks!
Zed, as I mentioned in my write-up, there are always two (and in some cases, even more) sides to any story. Dave gave his recollection above. I thank you for dropping by and giving yours too. I have no idea what really happened, as I obviously wasn’t there. But whatever happened… well, it just happened, I guess. I certainly wouldn’t want any type of “war of words” over this anywhere.
By the way, thanks for replying to the E-Mail I sent you. I appreciate it.
Zed is a dick, but that’s why I love him. I saw him at Defcon 15 when he did his Utu speech, and it really had overtones of the same fed-up pissed-off zed in the rant. Honestly I’ve met some of the ruby big-wigs up here in portland and sometimes I get the same vibe. I think it’s just a comment on how pretentious the tech community can be (maybe ESPECIALLY the fledgeling rails community)… One thing that’s stuck in my mind since the day I saw z were the last words at his speech in the DC conf - he threw it at us really hard, really solid that we were living in a real police state, and that no silver “Tor” bullet is gonna change that. That shit stuck with me because Zed sticks. I’m bummed he’s leaving too.
I can’t believe Zed and DT are both on you blog dude! stirring up the feathers, clearly!
I don’t understand Zed’s reply. No one needs to actually threaten to really threaten? WTF does that mean? In my experience people need to threaten if they’re going to, you know, threaten. So was Zed threatened, as he said he was, or not?
As far as pissing off DT and anyone else in the Rails community, honestly, who can possibly give a rat’s ass? I’ve made quite a bit of money from Rails, all of it from clients who wouldn’t be able to pull Dave Thomas from a Ronald McDonald lineup, much less use his name in a coherent sentence. I’m not sure how pissing off anyone in the Rails community translates to losing money directly. Such an idea seems to be giving Rails community higher-ups a power that they don’t really possess.
That said, I would like to read the aforementioned transcript. Zed has leveled some accusations which, due to his (previous) standing in the community, bear some examination. It certainly seems to me that he’s given enough to the community so that his accusations should be examined for justifiability in order to avoid potentially losing other developers who are talented and who are willing to give of that talented.
Finally, for the record, I did agree with Zed’s point about the Pickaxe book, that it is the most overrated stack of bound paper in any programming community. When Zed made that comment in his rant, I shouted a “Yes! Thank you!” and thought that, perhaps, there might be other points he’s making which are worth listening to …
i thought Dave Thomas started Wendy’s, not McDonalds…
@Sikanrong - I’ve encountered so many pretentious people, probably since I started studying Computer Science in college, that I’ve grown to accept the fact that these sort of people exist in this world. I don’t agree with these people, obviously, but I either tend to ignore their claims of ‘greatness’ or just avoid them altogether. And of all the blogs that exist in the blogosphere, it’s pretty freaky that both Dave Thomas and Zed Shaw landed and commented on my post. I’m not trying to ruffle feathers, just trying to be objective and hear both sides of the story. Now if only Kevin Clark or Michael Koziarski popped in to leave some comments…
@Juan: I guess Zed was saying that he actually wasn’t threatened directly, but rather indirectly by the actions of others involved. Of course, that’s his side of the story. I don’t think the issue here was to destroy people’s reputations or whatever. I don’t think the guys Zed directly mentioned will suddenly lose their position inside the Rails community. If you make money off of Rails, that’s cool. I’m doing the same too. That doesn’t make us evil or anything. I guess my point of this post was that while Zed was pretty straight-forward with his rant, his words do need to carry some weight, due to his previous work with Rails. About the Pickaxe book, I wonder why no one had mentioned these points before. I bought this book because it was the de-facto Ruby book, with rave reviews all over the Internet. His points are valid, but I think it’s a bit hypocritical that people are not ripping this book. Hopefully Dave will fix some of these issues in the future.
@dRÉc: Very funny… Although when I first bought the Pickaxe book a couple of years ago I immediately thought the same thing… Sorry Dave!
Just reinforces my opinion of the noisy web development community - a bunch of squabbling school children arguing over things no-one else cares about like “Red marbles are way better than blue marbles cause, cause jimmy’s red marble hit sams blue marble really really hard and I think it cracked it, truely ruelly”.
Like anyone gives a shit.
@womble: Well, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. I’m guessing you’re not part of the ‘noisy’ web development community
However, just because the web development community isn’t important to you, it doesn’t mean it’s not important to anyone at all. Let’s take your example: we might find the ‘marble community’ stupid. But guess what? It isn’t stupid to Jimmy. He loves his red marbles, he most likely celebrated when he his marble cracked Sam’s marble. Hell, Sam probably went home with his cracked marble all bummed out. In other words: They give a shit. People like myself and the others who responded above (well, maybe except for Zed) give a shit about this community.
I respect all communities, even if I don’t agree with what they do. I’m not too partial to Microsoft’s development languages and tools. But I don’t go to ASP.Net blogs and bash them for caring about that. So before you pass any judgment to anything that doesn’t share your sentiments, try to be in someone else’s shoes for a second.
Hi Dennis,
There is a difference in caring about the product, its professionalism and it’s ability to do the job and behaving like a bunch of school children - the point I was trying to illustrate.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who’s looking to use their hard earned cash to build a web site, they hear about rails/ruby/whatever, come accross what appears to be ramblings on a web site from the community and run like hell.
It’s the difference between weekend custom car enthusiasts who espouse the best shine on their car using product X and engineers who design cars in large production plants
Unfortuantely the ruby community isn’t the only one with its share of nutbags, all of which brings the nascent profession of software engineering (of which I’m a member) into disrepute and makes it a little more difficult for each of us who wishes to be a professional.
Dave Thomas wears his balls on his chin.
Really, Dave has balls on his chin? Strange, the last time I saw a picture of him he had none. It was probably an old picture, or it was Photoshopped.
Leave a Comment