Zed Shaw Puts The Smack Down On The Rails Community

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.