TimothyFitz

I wish more web services provided opensource versions (Service-as-a-Software). Large orgs would still pay for service contracts even if they self host, and just having the option makes everyone more likely to invest on top of your service.

Seems to be correct, went from $120 to $200 by the time I made it to checkout... which I then abandoned, but I was buying it for personal stuff.

Chat at "indie scale" is fairly easy. 10-20k concurrent users fit into one or two machines with off the shelf software (ejabberd) with minimal expertise. 1k-2k concurrent users could easily be done in almost any stack.

If you're doing more than 20k concurrent users, odds are you can afford to hire someone to scale up or build out a team to do it, or find a 3rd party service and pay them to host your chat.

The author works for mozilla, and firefox is a common theme on his blog. I think it's for regular readers of his blog to understand the practical impact (readers he assumes care more than average about firefox).

He didn't post it by mistake. He asked Visual Studio to create a private repo and it created a public one. A bug which he reproduced.

Found this after Joël tweeted the quote "The dilemma every artist confronts, again and again, is when to stick with familair tools and materials, and when to reach out and embrace those that offer new possibilities." So true.

If there's one thing I've learn from reading about Systems Theory / reading Russell Ackoff, it's that every field, every practice, every art is far more similar than they are different.

"This method takes a foo object, applies HTML encoding, and returns an array of the original and the clean code." could be a 3-line unit test that's just as clear to read, but has the side effect of actually being true instead of maybe being true!

I would consider that comment just as bad as the ones in my examples, but maybe not quite as obviously so.

Actually, that's EXACTLY the case I had in mind. Obviously I couldn't put a 50 line function with weird data structures in my blog post, or it would be unreadable. But the point is that comments for that function are bad! They'll rot if you ever change the function or the assumptions at all. Instead, you should break the 50-line function up into smaller functions, and add assertions and test cases for all of those "magic-lik assumptions." Then get in the habit of reading tests first. Now your code-as-comments will never rot.