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Ezra Zygmuntowicz has died

429 points| milesf | 11 years ago | reply

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.

69 comments

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[+] jxf|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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---...

[+] eliziggy|11 years ago|reply
This is Ezra's brother, Eli Zygmuntowicz. Thank you all for you kind comments. I know he valued his programming and tech community immensely. He will be sorely missed by his family, friends and son. If any of you are interested, we are having a memorial service for him in Portland this Wednesday, Dec 3. We are also setting up a memorial trust fund for his son, Ryland. Please email me at [email protected] if you would like details about either the service or fund. Best. Eli
[+] evanphx|11 years ago|reply
Thanks so much for the info Eli. For those that want to attend the service, do you have a time and location available? Or should they contact you to get that? I'd like to pass it along to people who have asked on twitter.
[+] antirez|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] hcatlin|11 years ago|reply
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. :(

[+] mreider|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] eliziggy|11 years ago|reply
Hello everyone. Here is the link to my Brother Ezra's son Ryland's Memorial fund. If I know one thing at this time it was that my brother loved and wanted to provide for his son. Please help us do that any way you can. Please share via Twitter or any media or with friends who want to help out. Thanks for all the support.

http://igg.me/at/ezrazyg/x/2405939

Best, Eli Zygmuntowicz

[+] holoway|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] asenchi|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] heimidal|11 years ago|reply
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.

[+] macournoyer|11 years ago|reply
When I was getting started with Thin (the Ruby web server), Ezra sent the first few patches, talked about it at confs, used it at his company and helped me debug it on IRC for hours. Only because, he thought it was cool tech. His passion was contagious.

He's the reason why my tiny project became popular and I'm sure many other tech we use today. Thank you Ezra!

[+] mikepence|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
Right there with you. I can't count the number of times he helped me on IRC.
[+] tomfakes|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] brumir|11 years ago|reply
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…

[+] Nutella4|11 years ago|reply
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?".
[+] tmornini_ey|11 years ago|reply
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. :-)

[+] tmornini_ey|11 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jasonwatkinspdx|11 years ago|reply
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.

[+] rabble|11 years ago|reply
Ezra was a playful hacker who was never afraid to strike out and build something crazy.
[+] bphogan|11 years ago|reply
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."