I truly hope that Zed has some "just fucking do it" left in him after the slaps in the face he's taken from some of the Ruby/Rails community. If he makes good on his plans, stops talking about himself, and lets his actions and intelligence speak for themselves, I'll gain a world of respect for him.
Oh, and Zed: "Any more" is written "any more" when referring to additional items. "I will not write rants anymore" would be grammatically correct, however. Just a bit of constructive criticism. :)
Generation Y by birth, though I feel like I can appreciate aspects of each generation listed. 90's indie music had a big influence on me too, and my parents are Baby Boomers (yes, they had children late in life). Perhaps I'm transgenerational?
Being given a Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer at age 6, and messing with it enough to learn BASIC via "brute force". A few months later being given a manual that filled in some of the blanks.
I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone's implying that these sites' success is due to their backends. However, backend choices do affect uptime, scalability, ease of development, ease of finding/fixing bugs, etc. So I would certainly take issue with your claim that "this sort of stuff is irrelevant".
Good comments. I think I had some of those thoughts early on (specifically referring to your first paragraph), I must have just gotten disillusioned with them. I will attempt them again.
As far as getting him to stop looking at competitors, 100% agreed.
We are all idea guys in one sense. The reason I've been referring to one guy as the "idea guy" is that he's not a coder and if I were to gauge the number of ideas each of us has put forth, he would easily take the highest percentage. So because he mostly talks to clients on the phone, does other PR-related things, and brainstorms ideas, I find it easy to refer to him as the "idea guy".
> It sounds like what you've got is more of a painful group hobby. I think it might be time to consider a better format for being productive.
I think you're right, at least for my part. One problem is that the idea guy IS my friend, but I don't think he shares my point of view about this. I wrote up the blog post in order to collect my thoughts to relate them to him.