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Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

429 points by milesf ↗ HN
Ezra Zygmuntowicz, a founder of the rails hosting company Engine Yard and original developer of the web framework Merb, passed away Wednesday, November 26th. No details yet, but what was a rumor on twitter has been confirmed by Stuffstr.com's VP Steve Gutmann, the last company Ezra work at as their CTO.

Will update as more information is known.

73 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] thread
milesf
I met Ezra back at RailsConf (2007) after a talk he gave. Scary smart, yet friendly and humble. The man left us way too soon.
brumir
I meet Ezra at RailsConf 2007, this was pre Engine yard if I am not mistaken. At this point he was all merb. He was fun to be around, very positive attitude and extremely smart.

Sad day…

tmornini_ey
Ezra agreed to co-found Engine Yard in January 2006, and was full-time in August or September I believe.

Merb was built to handle a high-traffic endpoint for one of our customers. :-)

milesf
So Merb's genesis was in response to a customer's need? I remember Rails, Ruby, and the hosting stack being mighty slow back in the early days.
piyushpr134
Merb started as essentially a wrapper on top of mongrel handler. Merb = Mongrel + erb. Mongrel had concurrency and it was super lightweight. However, it did not have goodies like routing or templating engine. Ezra write Merb as modular framework which did not care if you used datamapper or active record. Haml or ERB.
tmornini_ey
Yes, it was 100% in response to our customers' needs.
Nutella4
When I was very new to Rails, I heard a talk Ezra gave at a RailsConf about the work he had done setting up and configuring servers for EY when they were just starting out. He spoke about the technical details with great enthusiasm for a few minutes and then stopped, laughed, and said "Can you tell I love my job?".
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piyushpr134
:(( What happened ?
milesf
All just speculation right now, but apparently there will be a service on Wednesday December 3rd in Portland, Oregon.
mreider
He used to fly little radio controlled helicopters all over our office at Engine Yard. Playful and fun. The real tragedy has little to do with his departure from the world of technology. The real tragedy is that his son, who must be no older than six, has lost his father. So so sad.
rabble
Ezra was a playful hacker who was never afraid to strike out and build something crazy.
[dead] JBFromOZ
very sad news! shit man! you will be missed
JBFromOZ
shit man! that sucks, you will be missed :-{
davidw
Wow... Very sad news. His twitter page shows him living in Eugene, Oregon, my hometown. I wonder what he was doing there.
ogfarmer
He was getting in touch with his glass blowing roots. He had a studio that he opened down there last march or April.
RickHull
Oh wow. So sad to hear about a pillar and pioneer in the Ruby community.
heimidal
I shared a cab ride with Ezra from the New Orleans airport to the RubyConf hotel in 2010. In the very short time we spent in the car talking about his new role at VMware working on Cloud Foundry, his enthusiasm and passion for Ruby and the community's future left a huge impression on me.

Ezra, you will be missed.

tmornini_ey
I woke up this morning to Regan's post on that old photo.

It's an incredibly sad day: a great hacker, founder, and community member has been lost forever.

Goodbye Exra, I'll miss you.

antirez
Ezra was the first to start making Redis popular, wrote the initial implementation of the Ruby client, gave the first talk I remember at lightning conf. One time I met him at EY office with his family, with the 2 months old child. At some point he started to disappear more and more, we were supposed to meet in Portland at a Redis conf and he was not able to make it. I was concerned about him every time I saw a rare tweet. I'm sorry Ezra.
sebie
He left us to early. It is very, very sad. RIP you will be missed :/
asenchi
Ezra hired me at Engine Yard about two months before he left. I loved discussing infrastructure and software with him. He did a lot for the Ruby community and brought to light lots of great tech (redis and nginx). He had a big impact on my career and for that I will be forever grateful. Prayers and thoughts with this family. Rest in peace Ezra.
eternalban
Ezra is an upstanding human, a generous and helpful spirit. He will be missed.
jxf
One time I was working on doing some tricky distributed routing for a freelance customer that was using Merb. At the time I didn't know Ezra and we'd never personally met, but I explained my problem over email and asked if he had any suggestions. I wasn't really expecting a reply -- it was essentially a cold call.

He immediately dropped what he was doing and emailed me back, "that sounds like a really interesting problem -- can I call you and we'll set up a screenshare?" He then spent two hours helping me get it right, free of charge, and he never asked for anything. (I eventually had to email a few of his colleagues to figure out his office address to send him a thank-you present.)

I think that is the sort of thing that epitomized Ezra, from everything I've heard from his many other friends: he was funny, patient, and most of all kind.

jim-greer
That sounds just like the guy I met at RailsConf in 2006. We were starting Kongregate and I saw Ezra's talk on Rails Deployment. It was amazing and after talking to him I decided to try to use Engineyard for Kongregate hosting. We were one of their first five customers and unfortunately the distributed filesystem didn't work well for us. We switched off to our own colo but Ezra helped us at every step of the way, long after it was clear we weren't coming back.

Such a loss.

Link describing the talk:

http://martyhaught.com/articles/2006/06/25/railsconf-2006---...

nathan7
I'll miss Ezra and his outgoing spirit. Goodbye, old friend.
_pius
This is terribly sad. Profound loss for the Ruby community, among many others.
holoway
Ezra was so good to me. He helped write Chef, tool our idea and ran with it as a critical part of Engine Yard cloud. We wrote chef solo together . He and his wife made my wife and I feel warm and welcomed in San Francisco. Rest well, big guy.
Adam_Simms
He moved to Portland, Oregon for a new job, but I believe mostly to jump back into the glass blowing scene he helped create in the 90's. Ezra was a innovator in the glass pipe world. A world class artist that reinvented lampworking.
bphogan
He taught me how to deploy Rails apps, and with his help I figured out what I needed to get a production environment running on Windows. Then he asked me to contribute what I know to https://pragprog.com/book/fr_deploy/deploying-rails-applicat... (out of print now).

He's one of three people responsible for turning my career completely around back in 2005. He always paid it forward, and I have always done that myself since.

He was amazing. Honestly, we need more of that and less "you're doing it wrong."

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.

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