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Zed Shaw has Left Dropbox
- SlyShy 16y agoNice of him to make that clear, unnecessary as that was.
- zedshaw 16y agoActually, there was an entire thread just right now about it, and if you don't deal with the rumors right away they spread like herpes.
- SlyShy 16y agoI read the thread. What I wrote was unclear though, sorry. What I meant was, it's stupid that you'd have to do that, because people shouldn't be starting rumor mills in the first place.
- zedshaw 16y agoWell, it's stupid but I learned the hard way if you don't shut down people who slander in the tech world then the rumor mongers take it to mean you're weak and the slanderers are right. Sucks, but the alternative is to give folks with no integrity a way to tear you down. In other words, there really is no higher ground in tech unless you're already rich.
- pkaler 16y agoWe live in a world where PageRank is truth. Whatever shows up higher in Google is assumed to be true.
- jrockway 16y agoMy dream of having Zed come to an interview where the interviewers all have their feet up on the conference table is this much closer to coming true!
- zedshaw 16y agoOh that'd be funny as shit. Actually, I've gotten used to it. Seems to be just a damn stupid signifier that you're a start up guy.
- jey 16y agoCongrats on creating a new cultural tradition.
- techiferous 16y agoOr that you've got knee problems, like me. ;)
- stuaxo 16y agoOh, BTW... meant to ask ages ago; the Trie thing looked awesome and I immediately started to think of wrong uses for it (e.g. XPath parsing)... if you get time then python bindings would be nice :)
- bonsaitree 16y agoThe aforementioned to be read in the voice of Bender.
- alnayyir 16y ago>If you got something interesting that doesn't involve me being a system administrator Is it me, or is this a running meme/problem for him?
- zedshaw 16y agoNo it's not you, I do get asked to be a sysadmin quite often. I have no idea why. It's not something I'm good at. I did for a short time in college to pay tuition a decade ago. I don't enjoy it. I never apply for it. For some bizarre reason, people ask if I want to be a sysadmin out of the blue. Drives me crazy.
- starkfist 16y agoIt's not that bizarre, you write software mainly used by systems administrators. I used to work with one of the guys who wrote apache, and now work with a guy who wrote most of one of the popular NOSQL engines. And they both work as systems administrators. Not "useradd" systems administrators (although they are technically in that part of the org chart) but more like what Google calls "SREs." Rather than explaining what it is, this guy's google groups post does a better job: http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg02937.html http://www.sage.org/lists/sage-members-archive/2005/msg02937... If they just want you to add user accounts, that's weird. But SRE style jobs are where a lot of guys who write famous open source systems software end up. from the google groups post: "Yes, sysadmin skills are essential here, however we also require a very strong skillset in development, automation, high-level systems architecture, networking, statistics and general problem-solving." sounds like a description of zed!
- mistermann 16y agoUhhhhh....oh, why bother.
- mistermann 16y agoAh, nice downvotes, I guess a good lesson to not comment on smartass one liners who can later edit out the entire theme and content of their original post. The original post I commented on: "Maybe because you write software used by sysadmins?"
- milesf 16y agoSure hope Zed finishes http://learnpythonthehardway.com/ http://learnpythonthehardway.com/ Such a great primer for pre-programmers.
- nalbyuites 16y agoAgree. Just starting to learn pre-programming - unlearning bad habits from school where every year we wrote the same bunch of programs, once in BASIC, Pascal, C etc. The only thing I had liked then was Logo. :)
- n8agrin 16y agoWould love to see him do something similar for c as well.
- mkramlich 16y agoZed, you totally have to write some great new rants now. (Not related to Dropbox, not what I'm implying. Just that you should have more free time to write for a while, so we'd love to see the fruits of it.)
- jrockway 16y agoI wish I could exchange Zed-rants for Yegge-rants.
- stcredzero 16y agoThis sounds like the start of another Magic the Gathering type game, only with startups.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- heresy 16y agoWhen are we getting a ZedCam? I think the world deserves to know when Zed is taking a crap.
- stcredzero 16y ago1st 6 words: could be considered witty. Words 7 to 19: complete turnaround! Lesson: know when to stop.
- mml 16y agoThey tried to give him a pager
- erlanger 16y agoI definitely read bass as bass. I fish too much (blasphemy).
- blasdel 16y agoSo that's why you never got banned from news.yc — you had immunity :)
- iamwil 16y agoAnd here I was wondering where he had all this time to be doing Mongrel2, play guitar, work at dropbox, blog about shedding bikes, etc.
- joshu 16y agoWant to do a startup? I'm available
- grandalf 16y agoI think heroku would be a good fit for Zed. Or maybe Railsmachine (if they want to step up the competition)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- shin_lao 16y agoIf you truly believe in Mongrel2, start your own company. Don't wait for the company that's going to truly open source it, it won't be the way you want it if it's not your company.
- jshen 16y agoyeah, stop working on Mongrel2 and get a business off the ground. Then maybe possibly one day when it's making money you can work on Mongrel2 again, your way.
- dagw 16y agoThe problem with starting your own company is that you end up owning a company. That means you have to run a company which means you have less time to hack Mongrel2. I totally understand and respect wanting to get hired by a bigger company like the guy who developed Redis did. Basically being able to completely focus on your code without having to hunt for funding or worrying about where your next paycheck is coming from is a much better proposition for most people.
- dnsworks 16y agoHow would you make a company around a webserver?
- blasdel 16y agoPhusion is doing pretty OK. There are still some companies left idling along from a group 10 years ago that sold commercial event-driven webservers / reverse-proxies / caches / load-balancers that were much better than Apache, but are heaps of shit compared to the nginx ecosystem.
- bdr 16y agoI heard they tried to make him be a sysadmin.
- jeb 16y agoAnd that's the problem with Rockstar Programmers. They know they are rockstars, they know that they can get funding for their own product at a moments notice, they know that they can always go on a speaking tour. You need them, but they don't need you, and they know it. So they walk in and want to do what they want to do, they have no intention of doing the shitty stuff. But work in a company has a lot of shitty stuff to be done. The problem with Zed is that though he is a good developer, he's also a good writer and probably a good talker. Those last two are important to him, and when people work at companies, they should not be having two big side projects (writing and talking). It distracts from the work. All the rockstar programmers of the last few years all seemed to have entered CTO roles, have started their own companies, or are important people in very big companies. Very few are still just slugging away at code at small startups. This story is basically why you should not hire rockstar programmers. Hire normal people who depend on you for their income.
- cracki 16y agoCompanies should hire drones. Companies shouldn't hire people with a life. Is that your conclusion?
- seigenblues 16y ago"Hire normal people who depend on you for their income." yes! that's it! Be sure you're the one in control, ensuring your ability to treat them as less than human! Sorry for the snark, but that last line may be pretty unintentionally revealing. employer/employee relations are a complex relationship which requires a delicate balance of power. Having the employee be entirely dependent on the employer is just as damaging (to both parties!) as having a keystone employee who knows he can't be replaced. I'd replace your last line with "Hire equals who you can treat as equals." "Authority is solvent to humanity."
- zedshaw 16y agoFirst off, you don't know me, so don't presume to know how I am to work with, or what kind of employee I am. In fact, what you wrote here is borderline slander, as you're basically telling people to not hire me. You and everyone else needs to quit that shit because I don't do it to you, and it does have a major impact on my life. Second, who the hell are you to say I shouldn't have a life outside of your company? This is not a damn salt mine, or a factory. Programmers are hired based on their visible experience. The projects they do and the things they write are now a major deciding factor on whether they get jobs. To then tell someone that all of that stops because you're paying them a piddly little 100k/year compared to your massive ownership in the company is down right abusive. Third, in the valley the trend of firing people at the drop of a hat because they aren't a "good fit" cuts both ways. If you show no loyalty to your employees then they owe you nothing. Expecting them to stick around and be loyal, but then fire their peers for having a bad day with no warning is completely unfair. Basically, I think your entire comment smacks of business douchebag who has no concept of worker's rights, fairness, or even basic capitalism.
- j_baker 16y agoDumb question time: what does it mean for Mongrel to not be truly open source? And why is it not already?
- Avshalom 16y agoAs a guess I'd say getting it out there in front of enough people that Zed is no longer writing 99% of the code. Getting real community effort on improving it. Although he might just mean in context of the company not keeping any aspect of it proprietary.
- zedshaw 16y agoRight now I'm the only guy working on it. I like starting my projects that way since I can lay down the playground for other people and avoid the bikeshedding. Once it gets stable I then write up documentation and start letting interested folks at the code to help me.
- jacktang 16y agoZed is hate to be system admin?