Wow, you don’t see rants like this every day. Zed Shaw, who created Mongrel, a library and web server that just about everyone uses to serve rails applications, is basically a God in the Rails community. In a post today called “Rails Is A Ghetto” he tears into a number of leading Rails developers, the community in general, and a number of startups (and Google).
The post is long but highly entertaining, even to those of us outside of the core community. Basically, Zed just started a shitstorm that is going to reverberate through that community for months.
Most entertaining quote: “This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college.”
And: “After Mongrel I couldn’t get a gang of monkeys to rape me, so forget any jobs. Sure people would contact me for their tiny little start-ups, but I’d eventually catch on that they just want to use me to implement their ideas. Their ideas were horrendously lame. I swear if someone says they’re starting a social network I’m gonna beat them with the heal of my shoe.”
And: “Then there’s the social network idiots. They all have a social network plus something fucking stupid to sell, but of course no MBA can actually code so they come running to me. However, there’s a slight problem. You see, I have a business degree you cock suckers. If you tell me that your social network will take on facebook because it includes baby pictures then I’m going to laugh in your face. They are an established player with CIA backing. You won’t wipe them out.
Google was a total riot. They offered me a job twice. I went with it, and they never responded. Probably because the job they were offering me—someone who’s been coding for 21 years, 15 professionally—was as a junior system administrator. What the hell does a junior sysadmin do at google? That’s probably like mopping the floor at a glory hole in Queens. I told them to review my resume and offer me a real position.”
And (last one): “With Rails I get scrawny cock suckers with carpal tunnel syndrome talking to me like they’re gonna eat my young. Their feeble PHP infected minds can’t grasp advanced shit like objects or closures. When you combine stupid businesses with stupid people using a stupid framework based on a big fat fucking lie on a shitty platform you get the perfect storm of dumbfuck where a man like me can’t find work.”
Photo credit: James Cox.
he will regret this one day, rants like this are best typed in and then never sent (posted)
you made me re-read this, and there are some great one liners “perfect storm of dumbfuck”
I dunno. this is the kind of guy a lot of people would want on their team. And Mongrel is, from what I hear, a pretty kick ass piece of software.
damon – yes. and he enjoys the word “cocksucker.”
yes, mongrel is great, but reading this, one would think ruby and rails both suck, which is certainly not the case
Mike, I liked your quote “Zed just started a shitstorm” lol
@Damon,
He won’t regret this. I applaud him for being truly honest. Some people might think that he won’t get any job offers in the future due to this article. I’d have to agree with that opinion. But if you look closely, he’s fed-up with stupid job offers anyway.
The smart companies (let’s count Google out ONE TIME only) would want him on their teams because they know he’s onto something. I’m sure there are many smart managers (that have MSc/PhD in Comp Sci) who are tired dealing with cowboy-type developers (those who don’t have formal education in CS) would want to hire him (if he chooses to stay in the IT industry). And I’m sure he would be glad to work with them.
His rant could swing either way, we don’t know yet. He might have more job offers by dissing Rails. Rails community had burned their bridges too with PHP/Python/Java/.NET communities.
From Wikipedia:
“Mongrel” is a derogatory epithet in Australia. It is generally used to refer to an ill-bred man, a man of poor manners or morals.
I have no clue what ruby (on rails) is but this post was entertaining !
He makes good points, and assuming what he says is true, I absolutely agree with him. He has every right to be angry. He has contributed so much to the community and has gotten very little back.
Obviously Zed has a lot vested in Rails….and what I thought was interesting was that he was abandoning Rails for Python and some other functional languages.
I also find it amusing that an obviously smart guy interviews at Google and only gets a Jr. Admin position. WTF?
History tells us that this rant will go mostly into the vacuum. People have been railing against PHP for years and years, but still places like EA use it for nearly all of their online code. Zed may be desperate for RoR not to go down the PHP road, instead becoming (possibly?) something between java and perl, but while he will probably retain serious acolyte love there’s really not a whole lot he can do about the direction Rails nerds take the language.
I bet the Jr Admin thing at Google was just Google testing his humility.
Whoa…
I surely wouldn’t hire him… not even to code for my shitty startup.
Zed has been a great contributor to the Ruby on Rails community. He will be missed by many of us.
You can be truly honest without acting like a baby. Everyone knows the smartest people are the most difficult to manage, they tend to be aggressive, opinionated, impatient, etc. But this is just an example of being a whining baby with little constructive content. Actually no constructive content unless someone can point it out.
Hey Zed, If you’re reading this, would you be interested in co-founding my startup ‘YouBaby.com’? Its a revolutionary twist of social network for pregnant chics! It’s just me right now, but I have the BIGGEST bag of ideas around! I’ll give you 3% of the company and 5% if you build the thing in under a month. You in?
best read of the year so far. One of the best people to trash rails because hes got great cred. Could this be the start of the end of the rails cult…
“The post is long but highly entertaining, even to those of us outside of the core community. ”
Does this translate into “none of us TechCrunch writers know how to program?”
aaronontheweb – no, it means our rails guys are all on vacation. We’re actually building a rails app right now and have two full time guys doing it. And the Crunchies and Tech President sites linked in the nav bar are simple rails apps. We have some in house knowledge, they just aren’t sober and awake this New Year’s morning.
This is a sophomoric, arrogant tantrum. Why is this news and why do some of you enjoy reading this?
He’s complaining about the technical stuff in Rails, which doesn’t really matter to rails peeps, as Rails is all about pretty code, not all that other stuff. Zed’s post is mostly just FUD. It sucks that he doesn’t get cred for his amazing work, but imo that’s just because the rails flock isn’t technical enough to understand how awesome mongrel is.
Although I don’t have any knowledge concerning “rails” … and therefore I have no opinion either good or bad … I do admire Zed’s honesty and bluntness!
Whether right or wrong, I’d rather know exactly where someone stands … rather then having to deal with a chameleon.
@Jaffer: lol, you might want to see Mongrel (disambiguation)
Zed gets plenty of credit for Mongrel, everyone knows he wrote it and everyone loves it, that’s credit in the open source world.
Why does every think that calling strangers butt buddies is being “brutally honest”.
Zed is a great coder, but he can be abrasive to work with and unfortunately rubs people the wrong way sometimes. In any community this can make it very hard for you to get your ideas across, even when they are right – nobody wants to work with a dick. It sucks that he has run into sketchy companies that don’t pay, or community members that he doesn’t get along with, but eh, no shit, he will find these companies and these type of people everywhere.
Probably the only piece of interesting information in that rant is the 400 restarts a day quote from DHH, which has so little context as to be completely useless. Is this a particular issue with that app? I’ve run several high volume Rails apps and have yet to see issues like that.
I feel bad for Zed with this rant, he airs out his personal issues here in a pretty immature way.
Hilarious
We had a guy working for us once. Was literally a networking genius. Then he was let go. It turned out his mouth was bigger than his brain.
I got tipped to this rant on twitter and had already read it when I saw your post here. As I said earlier (on twitter), “…Bitterness of the tone aside, are his points valid / verifiable? Dunno… yet”.
The point he makes about performance & stability is probably the most important. Again, gotta read around the angry style, but R (and RoR) is pretty damn flaky WRT performance & stability. I wrote a little about this back in November, and will simply quote myself here in reference to all the downtime at Twitter (p.s. I like Twitter):
“I think Ruby’s edges (or core maybe) are showing here. This has been discussed at length at Laughing Meme, but I haven’t seen much about this subject on Twitter’s blog. Lots of folks are using Ruby daily, with many of them adopting Rails, and all of them have a stake in its future.
Performance is a tough characteristic to engineer into a language (or even a project) after the fact. Is Ruby/Rails going to be able to pull this off, or will it remain “…dead slow” to the point of no longer being considered for scalable web development?”
Again, dunno.
Backpeddling has begun, Zed mentions on his blog that he will also write a “rant” praising good (in his opinion) ruby contributers. We know from his other rant that he is an excellent person to be passing judgement.
“I’ll be finishing off the Rant tomorrow for anyone that’s interested, and will also do a few follow-ups. Most importantly I want to do another rant that points out the heroes of the Ruby community so that they get credit. There are some incredibly good creative programmers in the Ruby world but the mass of mundane idiots and blow hards drowns them out like wet rats.”
From the “about me” page:
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell me if you use my projects. Don’t take it too seriously though, it’s all an act.”
Nothing to admire in this, regardless of his ‘cred’. If he’s so brilliant, and he’s got his business degree, and the job offers he gets aren’t what he thinks he deserves, he might try looking in the mirror. Maybe, just maybe, he’s the dumbass, and he wasted a ton of time on a piece of software in a community that got him jack squat in terms of continuing opportunity. Totally, 100%, completely his own fault and lack of foresight or knowledge or ability.
In addition, he’s totally imprisoned to the idea of someone giving him a job, but he thinks their ideas are crap. The guy doesn’t have the stones to start a commercial project himself, but everyone else is an idiot– yeah, gotcha Zed. You’re a misunderstood genius and the world owes you a collective blow.
One part of this I did like is that it puts the lie to the idea that the joy of open-source is the work. This guy is seriously bitter that the endless hours he spent have so far not brought him the rich rewards he obviously expects and believes he deserves.
Zed Shaw didn’t put any smack on anyone but himself, dead-center on his loaded diaper.
With mongrel, Zed contributed a huge amount to the Rails community, and from the sounds of it, more that I am even aware of. It is sad to see that people, in more than a few instance, attempted to take advantage of him. Those types of people are definitely out there and we have to watch out for them. As a (long ago) previous practitioner of both vb.net and php, I don’t see Rails going in that direction. Having said that, with any programming language, especially those with a low barrier to entry like Rails, there will always be people touting that they are highly skilled professionals with nothing to back it up. Hopefully there will be less of those types so that those of us that understand that Rails will only get you 80% (or less) of the way to a serious application, and that you *really need* to know Ruby and good OO software design, won’t be spoiled due to the bad apples.
Good luck to Zed in the new year.
Hahaha… that was awesome. Thanks Zed !
There’s something I don’t understand… Why are you people enjoying this post ????? Since Zed is so good at programming… Why doesn’t he just start his own thing ????? Second, if Google says No… that means no… The facts are, Ruby on Rails is well established and just released it’s last version : rails 2.0.2.
We all know the reputation of Google concerning its hires.
Anyways… Good luck with Perl Zed….
PS: will we see you at RubyConf2008 ???lol
Holy shit, that is smoken’
I love PHP. Why does everyone (including Zed) think PHP is so bad?
Mike,
No, what I mean is do any of you WRITERS, i.e. the content-producing wing of TC, produce any code?
Zed has nailed it. One applauds the enthusiasm of those discovering the limits of their talents in coding. Usually, that means they are coding up a shit storm. Rarely does it mean they are ‘coding up’ a successful company. Jumping to the successful business isn’t always what one does. You can code without design, you can design with a plan, and you can plan without business concept, you can conceptualize a business without experience. If you want to succeed ($$) do some that is based on the public’s general laziness (and not yours). The wider the def of ‘public’ is, the more money you make. Facebook makes it easy (lazy) to meet people. What is ‘ease of use’? Its *hard* to make it easy. Nice Zed! Nice pick Techcrunch!
Haha…great way to start off the year. Fresh start…all getting along! …or not. hahahahaha
but we don’t want to hire PHDs to academic, all that computer science, don’t bring me resumes with PHDs
then there is, I am a PHD everyone will want t work for me
Aaronontheweb the writers spout claptrap not code…
Zed. You should see a doctor about BPD, seriously. So let me get this you have a business degree, almost a CS degree, and you could probably kick Chuck Norris’s arse but yet you haven’t created your own startup and you still can’t find work?
I might as well throw in the towel now.
One word….. “Mirror”
Zed. Kudos on speaking it like it is (from your viewpoint). My first reaction to reading this however was to say tongue in cheek “what’s a rail?” because I KNOW that something like 80% of the people reading the rant will do just that. Instead I’ll say this.
Don’t rip off your arm to slap someone with the soggy end, we need that arm to keep on coding and to bring down that 80%… it’s just too high. Good luck.
What a great start on the new year! Whats really going to bake your noodles is that the very same Zed Shaw is in the top, even before DHH, in the popularity list on working with rails: http://www.work.../popular/people
Whats also interesting is this interview with Adrian H (creator of django) from a rails developer: http://www.akit...drian-holovaty/
They talk a little about flaming and trolling…..
“At the end of the day, what really matters is the sites people create with these tools, not the tools themselves. If you’re going to judge someone, judge the sites that person makes, instead of the tools that person uses.”
More of that please!
since he is so smart and all, how is he so unsuccessful… and why is this on Techcrunch?
“Here’s a bit of background on me: My education is in business. I have a BS in MIS and almost finished my MS but ran out of money. I’ve got more business education than most of the MBAs out there, and I have a nearly formal education in software development, modeling, statistical analysis, and sociology. I’ve done it all, but what does the slick talking shit head car sales MBA loser think I am?”
Zed hit a home-run with Mongrel — anyone can get lucky. Beyond that, what has he done? Can’t manage his life well enough to finish his degree (”ran out of money” == poor planning, poor execution, poor follow-through). Can’t manage his business affairs well enough to make a living (please pay me quick I have to pay rent…). So much for his expertise in business.
As with any community of people, the Rails community has it’s share of idiots on both extremes — thanks, Zed, for illustrating.
He’s a people person, then?
I love the smell of napalmed bridges in the morning ….
he sounds bitter.
I think he hits home a point that frustrates me to no end. The only people companies are looking for are people that are so grossly overqualified that taking the job would be an insult or an indication that they are lying on their resume.
It helps!
QOTD – “I’ll never be afraid of some pilsner fresh fat fuck who eats donut hamburgers and only gets exercise when he plays World of Warcraft on a DDR pad.”