If the main people who control the direction of the framework which you use to make your living were acting in a shady way wouldn't YOU be interested? It's not just "personal dirty laundry" in that what the people he's talking about do, how they work, affects a lot of people.

Also, it's not just "some guy." Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel, which virtually every Ruby on Rails project uses. Without him, Rails development would likely still be a huge pain in the ass.

BTW, you should read his essay on statistics; it provides a good starting point for figuring out how to analyze the performance of your sites.

Yeah, that statistics essay is awesome. My favorite essay of his, though, is how he uses finite state machines to implement protocols. It's pretty badass.

You mean, like every intrusion detection system ever built?

Your point?

Parsing protocols with parser generators is not an original idea, despite the fact that it's one of the top 3 value propositions Zed Shaw has for Mongrel.

"Why is this interesting?"

I think you just answered your own question. ;)

Zed (and his code) is very well-known, intelligent, and important to the Rails community. Whatever you may think of his perspective or how it's been presented, he has some ostensibly valid criticism and it will certainly be interesting to see how people will react to it.

Agreed. I checked out Zed Shaw after reading the article (I did not know anything of him except that he wrote Mongrel) and was very impressed [http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5455-zed-shaw]. He obviously is a very important, and known member of the Rails (and Ruby) community, and I am anxious to see the response the community has to his throwing in the hat.

I personally have not interacted with the rails community (but have with ruby's) so I don't have an opinion as to whether he makes any good points, but taking him at face value, I have to admit I am a little disappointed.

Again, it will be interesting to see how this turns out...

Did you see at the bottom where he says Dave Thomas' Pickaxe book killed Ruby? I gotta see that.

Sure did... That piqued my curiosity too...

(for the record I use rails) once you sift through his rants some of it is both interesting and disturbing at some points:

"(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day

(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10

(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice

(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?"

Thank God JRuby is here...

This is perhaps the most interesting part of this entire article.

DHH was referring to individual unix webserver process restarts, not server reboots.

Sure, but either way, it's your app server process going down. Not useful.

No that's not useful, but the information coming out of Zed is also not very useful. We don't even know whether the number 400 was meant to be accurate or rethorical. We don't know whether this was going on for a day, a week or a year. His rant was basically an insider thing and there's no way for anyone to judge anything from the outside, which is why I probably shouldn't even be writing these words about it...

Even if it was over a period of a year that seems like a lot.

It was a stunner for me, I must admit.

Put it in context:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=91814

I'm surprised the business even survived that long with that many restarts per day.

forgot to mention this - in defense of 37 Signals and their flagship Rails app... I've been a heavy user of Basecamp/WriteBoard for about 8 months now (we're talkin 6+ hours a day), and I've only experienced an unexpected meltdown once.

what exactly constitutes a meltdown, and are there ever expected ones?

"what exactly constitutes a meltdown"

when all you get is a 503 page

when nothing responds and it has nothing to do with your connection

"and are there ever expected ones?"

well, not expected meltdowns; more like advanced notice for maintenance - probably a deployment of a newer version of the web app

It's interesting to see the "inner-agenda" of Rails community especially for those who aren't involved. For some time many Rails bloggers are defending Rails very hard and often they poke (obsessively) other technologies.

I've always knew these people were defending Rails for consulting money.