This is a point I really am trying to make too... The best code you do, the stuff that required you to actually use your brain hard, is going to be hard for YOU to maintain let alone others. You comment based on your own Eureka moments, you document your understanding, and hopefully it lets a person recognize that you were both solving the problem in a reasonable manner, and that your implementation and solution are in sync.

Beyond that, adding a few lines of code for clarity can also make it easier to debug, to extend and to implement in a different language.

Thank you for writing almost exactly what I wanted to say. I went through a weird emotional response. I almost want to call the writer a young whippersnapper...

It is pretty funny to say you aren't going to buy into dogma when nothing you are talking about is dogma. Even best practices are often stated in contexts. I won't reiterate the excellent rebuttals to the blog both on the blog and here.

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The more brilliant and exciting the code you write the more likely it is not a trivial and obvious solution. If all you do is code obvious solutions to common problems in standard idioms then you may be able to argue that your comments do not matter.

If you are writing something that was difficult for you to write (and the best programmers are lazy enough to try to avoid always rewriting trivial solutions) then you also are writing something that is difficult for not only other coders, but for YOU. That is to say that solving a complex problem in an ingenious and elegant way does not automatically mean that you will understand it later. Even a few months later you are going to wish you had explained some of the why and some of the what.

In the end most programmers comment only when they feel it is necessary. It isn't really enjoyable, it does take effort. Mostly we do it because we must. Depending on the language and context, you may be writing very formal documentation as part of your project, and some of that may be in the code itself. Other times, you write code that you think is a one off, and then somehow it ends up being a large project and suddenly you need to go back and comment to make it possible to hand it off.

I do feel as if the fellow who wrote this blog was not an experienced coder, and had never worked with other programmers...

Agreed 100%. I have had headhunters revise my resume from a format perspective so that it could fit within a format that the companies were looking for (often they want very little formatting) and when they did so they sent me back the revised copy.

The only other thing I have seen them do is remove my direct contact information from resume, to prevent the company from going around them. I respect that.

The article talks about how it is not intended as a complete solution. They do not go into, or intend to, describe their redundancy features, their performance issues, or anything else.

From the Article:

A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block

We have been extremely happy with the reliability and excellent performance of the pods, and a Backblaze Storage Pod is a fully contained storage server. But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post). When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failuresâ"itâ(TM)s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesnâ(TM)t allow for a single point of failure. Each pod in itself is just a big chunk of raw storage for an inexpensive price; it is not a âoesolutionâ in itself.

If you did want to attack this concept, it would be based on the fact that I cannot think of a good general storage use for this besides serving static webpages.

The only access method is through https.

There is only 1gigabyte bandwidth per 67 terabytes. 67 Terabytes is duh, 67000Gigabytes... Thats 536000 gigabits. a 1gigabit/s interface needs 6 days to move all that data. Oh and it can only be accessed through https. So its somewhat questionable that you can actually move nearly that much data. I don't really know what the limitations of the harddrives or SATA are, but no matter how much speed any of that has, the network link and latency are going to be significant if you are really moving large scale data. I can only assume their applications don't require speed, or that by duplicating it over a large number of systems they are going to get some load balancing. So then one asks... HOw many of these pods equal a redundant system with reasonable performance? And what is the power usage involved?

There is Raid6 based on 15 drive sets with 2 parity drives spread across between 1 and 3 controllers but there is no hot swappable drive, fan, or controller.

Essentially a single drive failure requires you to take down the entire system. Now I assume there is a replicated system, so you can just take down any of these boxes with no planning.

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Honestly I am sure this suits their purpose. I can't imagine what purpose it would suit for me.

I think the recent news reports regarding bloggers being outed and then fired for the content of their entirely legal publishing has made the argument that anonymous use of the internet is defensible for freedom of speech. Perhaps because the journalists have a respect for sources that are not disclosed, and protecting those sources, there is a sympathy to this story that is starting to gain momentum. The end result is that the discussion that only criminals benefit from anonymity is weakened.

It is hard for me personally to believe that anyone expects anonymity on the internet, but I have assumed the FBI had recorded all of my posts since 1992.

Ditto. I am betting xpilot was sold as parts of distributions since it first started. If he had wanted to control the usage of the software to prevent others from selling it, he should not have used the GPL. As long as you are providing source code, you are in the right. The fact that it requires someone to pay 99 dollars to bring your source code into an executible object on the iPhone is no different than saying they have to buy a computer to do so. You are, in fact giving away the code, and also charging for a distributed binary. I am pretty sure that this is entirely conventional.

More importantly, you are contributing to the iPhone developer community by letting us see how you were able to port the code. This is helpful both in allowing enhanced versions, and as a learning tool.

Thank you,

If anyone thinks this validates putting up pictures of yourself doing stupid stuff and listing your favorite sexual positions because 'hey a bank in texas' is nervous that something you PUBLISHED to the Internet is an invasion of privacy, then you are probably also one of those people who thinks because one time someone stopped on the NJ turnpike to avoid hitting a kitty, that you can walk across it at will.

Anything you are actually publishing to a publicly visible page cannot EVER be misconstrued as your private business. Any lawyer who was actually awake can pretty easily convince a jury that you were actively promoting whatever behavior it was that they are looking at. The idea that a social site gets a special privelege over any other website is like saying 'hey I was on a reality show... People are supposed to act stupid on those!'

Your employer is likely to do a credit check for goodness sake. They can make you pee into a cup. Do you really think any large company is going to risk hiring someone into a position of responsibility when they are actively promoting themselves as a drunkard, sex-addict, racist, or any other of a thousand image crushing stereotypes?

If anyone actually breathed a sigh of relief, they should suck that air back down. We are not moving towards an error were there is more privacy. This is not a bellwether. The only thing that might happen is that you will be required to sign a form saying you waive your right to privacy if you are applying for a job. And you will.