You were right, however, that the post was never about code quality or code comments. It was only about "history's great, yo; here's what you can do with it".
Notice the code comment. I took it out for the example in the blog post to illustrate how we would deal if there was never a code comment in the first place.
Where did the 5 extra "miles" come from? He picks a quote where “20 miles/day” is a good pace to have set for yourself, but then adds this about his team: “We’ve been constantly marching at a good pace (~25 miles per day)“.
The app is running on a single (free) Heroku dyno, PostgreSQL as db & full text index, and fronted with Rack::Cache using 5MB memcache for storage (also free).
It survived being first on HN for hours, no probs.
I have considered it myself, but quickly dismissed it because, yes, the output would grow considerably.
I love Coffee and would use it for everything, but this is one of those cases where we simply need to squeeze every single byte and scream each time that we have to let one go.
Worth noting that H1B is more difficult to get without a college degree (so I've been told). I have no credentials and the companies I'd like to work for don't care for them either, but unfortunately the government cares because that's their only grading system for people (it's not like they're gonna look at your GitHub profile).
There have been several companies in the past years that expressed their interest in hiring me but were put away by this problem. I don't blame them, I blame the system.
You've misinterpreted the "hurt your workflow with split windows" bit. You understood it as if NERD Tree's split window is what hurts your workflow. I was saying that my existing split window workflow was hurt by presence of the NERD Tree.
You were right, however, that the post was never about code quality or code comments. It was only about "history's great, yo; here's what you can do with it".