This is pretty awful. Steve and Corey are both well-known in the Ruby community.

Steve is an instructor at gSchool in Denver, for example, which trains software engineers. It's bad enough that they're both respected in the community, but being a student is a vulnerable position. If Steve were my teacher and he reacted that way to a project I released, I'd be absolutely humiliated.

http://www.gschool.it/#instructors

I don't think encouraging participation in open source and being a good teacher are that different. A more productive response would've been to submit some issues or pull requests to Heather's project.