Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 74 posts

Re: Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

#31

Post by mikepence »

What do you say about a man who embodied everything that is good and precious about the culture of sharing in software? When we all got that Rails was the next big thing in '05 and '06, Ezra was there in IRC and freely gave of his time and expertise and all but tutored me in Rails and Ruby. I was so deeply moved by his generosity, that on meeting him at the first Rails conference, I just had to hug him.

Goodbye, friend. The kindness you showed to me and to so many others lives on. Thank you.

Re: Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

#32

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

In the early days of both Engine Yard and Kongregate Ezra and I worked closely on solving some problems during high pressure moments. He was smart, dedicated, and genuine. He worked hard to not just solve problems, but to communicate and teach everyone around him.

We lost touch over the years, chatting occasionally and always saying "hey, we should meet up sometime." I'm sorry now we didn't.

Re: Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

#33

Post by tomfakes »

If you were building Rails apps in 2005/6, more than likely you were reading Ezra's blog post on how deploy to your VPS. It was tricky to get right, but Ezra made it so that it was no longer impossible. He was always there to help people with their own tricky configurations too.

Re: Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

#34

Post by hcatlin »

When I was first releasing Haml, I remember that Ezra piped up and encouraged me. Actually, thanks to the Internets, it's still there https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rubyonrails-talk/UqYlo_N59zo...

Seeing someone as brilliant as Ezra saying he liked my project (Haml was the first thing I ever released) really encouraged me to continue on in OSS development. And, of course, we added iterators to Haml shortly after Ezra suggested it.

Also, Ezra was super helpful when we built m.wikipedia.org using Merb... helping me get everything set up so that we could scale that project to 2 billion pages a month through the three dinky machines I had!

I'm totally surprised and gutted to hear that he's passed. :(

Re: Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

#36

Post by Sthorpe »

mikepence wrote: post #31

What do you say about a man who embodied everything that is good and precious about the culture of sharing in software? When we all got that Rails was the next big thing in '05 and '06, Ezra was there in IRC and freely gave of his time and expertise and all but tutored me in Rails and Ruby. I was so deeply moved by his generosity, that on meeting him at the first Rails conference, I just had to hug him. Goodbye, frie…

Right there with you. I can't count the number of times he helped me on IRC.
Post reply on HN