No, but also not just someone, Ted Nelson. I highly recommend Geeks Bearing Gifts or Computer Lib/Dream Machines. He is a crank, who has never been involved in a successful software project as far as I am aware. He is also great.
I have, and so have a lot of people. (Look up “Ward Number”). He worked at Tektronix back in the day. He created the WikiWikiWeb in about 90 lines of tight Perl. He is currently building the Federated Wiki. He’s currently working at New Relic, last I heard.
He also created Fit, which I had the pleasure of working with him on. It was a very different coding style than mine, very tight and flexible. I learned a lot.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with his business acumen, but he was a pretty talented software developer. I originally knew of him from the Purify memory debugger.
He's actually a really nice person. He helped me out (to him I was just some stranger on the phone) when I was trying to decide what to do with my career when I was in NYC.
Zed Shaw is probably one the best people you can know in the developer community, a very good guy.
Your sensationalism based on some of the stuff he says on Twitter and Blogs is amusing though.
That's great to hear. He's still generous and giving to developer communities in what he's doing now. Learned a ton from him and his tools make our work better.
Long, long before he put up his infamous Rails rant, I spoke with him several times about Mongrel implementation, build issues and getting stuff running on different linux systems.
He seems to me to be a nice guy, a clean coder and yes, a guy who gets things done. Very much in contrast with the generally abrasive character he's built on his website.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I'd have no trouble hiring him.
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