Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Ezra was one of the very first people to ever see Chef. I pulled him aside at
Velocity, in the corner of a Starbucks, and showed him my early working code. At the time, he was literally the guy who wrote the book on Rails deployment, and was busily hacking on the Engine Yard Cloud. His reaction was immediate and gratifying — he talked about how awesome it was, how he had been thinking about building one himself (which he planned to call stemcell, which you can see a remnant of in Cloud Foundry and BOSH.) This was all before Opscode was unveiled, when we were literally just a bunch of guys working on our first release.
From that conversation lead my spending a week with Ez in San Francisco, helping to port Chef as a core component of the Engine Yard cloud. While we were at it, we designed Chef Solo precisely for Ezra — EY already had a database of all the external data they needed, and the server was nowhere near ready for their scale or size (and wouldn't be, quite frankly, for years to come.) Ezra wrote code, he thought fast, and he was, above all, immensely kind and gracious. Ezra contributed to Chef, defended it in public, evangelized it, and made sure that what mattered most was that we were all in it together, helping each other to succeed.
As James Turnbull said in a note he sent me after we learned of Ezra’s death,
so very few people in Open Source start from a position of helping others. Especially as you go from project to company, and from companies to competitors, it is easy to loose the spirit that brought us all here in the first place. Ezra never lost that — his enthusiasm for the work of others, and his commitment to helping solve fun problems, and his willingness to let peoples actions speak for them (rather than dwell on past history) were all things we should strive to embody in ourselves.
In the early days of Chef, it was largely Ezra who lent us credibility outside
of our own community of operations professionals. He did that for so many projects that he believed in. In a time when it feels like so many of us are willing to draw hard, competitive lines between each other, lets take a minute to stop and remember the man that Ezra was in those moments. The one that helped broker the merge between Merb and Rails. The one that helped me launch Chef. The one that helped launch Redis. The one that helped launch HAML. The one who advocated so strongly for an open source Cloud Foundry. The one who taught you how to use Nginx. The next time you have a chance to help lift someone else up, remember what Ezra did for all of us, and do what Ezra would have done. Show your enthusiasm instead, find the kernel of amazing inside what others are doing, and find a way to lift them up on your shoulders. Ezra certainly lifted me on his.
I’ll miss you, sir. Rest well.
