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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…

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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?".

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. :-)

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.

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.

Yes, it was 100% in response to our customers' needs.

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