I think Zed Shaw is quite the opposite of _why. I can see _why playing with kittens and making chalk drawings on the asphalt in a torrid calm summer day and Zed driving through in a camo Hummer, smoking a big cigar and listening to industrial metal. All the kittens run scared and _why goes hiding behind a bush where he meets a new imaginary friend.

I much prefer _why.

Except _why and Zed got along fine. Zed is a perfectly cool dude in person. And regardless of what you think of Zed he builds good tech, shares it with others, takes contributions from other people.

Of course I haven't met either one of them and I can't really talk about the kind of person they are, just about their personas and the way that I perceive them.

30 inch of snow fell where I live yesterday, I'd take zed and the hummer ;p

In all seriousness, they both were(are) awesome ruby developers and I wish they would come back and code more. We still use mongrel for our Rails app where I work and I've used shoes to develop a desktop client for our application.

For some reason your description of Zed Shaw reminds me of maddox. Which has given me the idea to go see what he's written lately.

I don't know Zed but I got my start on the infamous rant. I read it and assumed he was just a guy that was tired of being shit on. In reading what he says and does in the following months and years, I don't get the sense he's an asshole, just that he doesn't really put up with crap unless there's a good reason.

> I don't get the sense he's an asshole, just that he doesn't really put up with crap unless there's a good reason.

Which for some, make him an asshole.