A troll is someone who's just trying to get a reaction, but hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile.

Zed has obviously contributed a lot, and was being trolled by the Ruby community (know what 'fuzed' stands for?) before he started ZSFA.

When you write long-form blog posts that are about little more than the list of Ruby people that have offended you --- often writing about them for the Nth time --- I stop caring what your contributions are, and start being annoyed. Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more, but don't demand that I attend to their neuroses.

> Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more

No, really, there aren't. Go read about Zed.

You're joking, right? Name 2 developers each for the Rubinius, JRuby, MRI/YARV, and IronRuby projects, 2 developers from Passenger, anyone working on the Nimble Methods blog, anyone working on EventMachine, any 2 developers working on Merb, any non-37s developer working on ActiveRecord, anyone working on Ruby-AST projects, anyone working on GitHub and anyone working on Ruby git bindings --- there, I'm at 20, and I haven't even gotten to _why yet.

Don't bullshit me. The fact that Zed talks the talk doesn't automatically mean he's walking the walk. He wrote a webserver. There are 100 Ruby developers who have written more --- and more important --- code than Zed, and I haven't heard about any of the crank calls they've gotten.

Let me know when you get to one hundred. In the meantime, writing the Ruby webserver is a larger contribution than say, git bindings.

What's even more of importance about that web server(mongrel) was that there was no good web server that could reliably run Ruby/Rails apps at that time.

mod_fcgid (note the 'd' at the end) actually worked, and works pretty well. I only just now migrated away from it in favor of Passenger, which is easier to configure and has most of the same advantages, as well as being more actively developed.

You mean besides lighttpd and FastCGI?

Yeah, and that's an important distinction, especially in cases like this.

You can be pissed off and rude and not be a troll. If you do, the people calling you out as a troll are often trolling themselves, albeit more benignly.

I've stopped clicking the links to his posts because they're always things I can't determine why I should care about. Most of his posts that I find from here could have been written by a non-programmer, and if they were the people here would complain they were off-topic.

It's very Valleywagish actually.

I follow HN in NetNewsWire and can't always tell that a link goes to Zed; if I could tell, I'd ignore them.