the story of this code
======================
now that over a year has passed, I will tell the story of this code...

in my final year of college, I was in a 400/500 level course on scalable web applications.

for the final project, we were assigned teams of four and given the following requirements:
* build a **scalable** web application image uploader (like minus or imgur)
* learn git and use github to collaborate
we were also told that regardless of who contributed what, we would recieve a single grade.

right off the bat, 2 of my teammates indicated they were not going to be contributing at all.
this left me and one other teammate, Brandon. (I put his name in the commitlog, so I'm not even going to bother hiding it.)


personally, I had a passion for Linux web services and high scalability.
I was excited by this project! finally, a chance to build a scalable web service!
unfortunately, Brandon had absolutely no understanding of scalability or avalability.
during the design phase, every single failure scenario I proposed to him was met with "that will never happen."


here's a paraphrased discussion we had:
brandon: this mongo-files thing sounds hard, lets just store files on disk.
me: what happens if a server goes down?
brandon: that will never happen and if it does, we'll just reboot it.
me: ok, so during the reboot, a percentage of your files will be unavalible.
brandon: so?
me: so that means you're not highly avalible.
brandon: ...
me: and what happens if we physically lose a node due to disk failures, fire, datacenter outages, etc?
brandon: none of those things will ever happen, lol.
me: you have now demonstrated that you are too stupid to even understand why you are incorrect.


at this point, I stopped arguing with him.
we agreed that he'd handle the front-end and I'd handle the back-end (ie: the hard part).


less than a week before the due date, my teammate disappeared.
for **4** days.
I emailed him a half dozen times asking if he was working, where his commits were, etc.

Brandon showed up on campus the day the project was due and told me that Git was too hard and gave me a zip file of code.
**learning git was part of the assignment**.


fine, whatever, I've manually merged huge blocks of highly divergent code from teammates that couldn't understand version control.
I started reading his code...


he wrote a custom load balancer with application-specific logic: the load balancer knew what app server had your file on disk and performed an HTTP redirect to the app server. (you couldn't even use a proxy, ffs...)
our project was unscalable, not HA and now stateful.
Brandon had managed to introduce another single point of failure **and** introduce state to an HTTP application.


I began a furious 6-hour hackathon, finishing literally minutes before we presented.
I managed to hook up our application to mongo-files and removed most of Brandon's worst decisions:
the UI was still garbage and did some really dumbass stuff like building URLs using client-side Javascript instead of server-side templates, but I was out of time.


we presented, the software worked, I bragged about the mongo-files portion and how it meant we could scale our file storage layer as well as our application layer.
Brandon rolled his eyes.
we got a great grade.
I somehow managed to not throw Brandon under the bus for his staggering incompetence and willful lack of effort.

what did I learn?
=================
* sometimes, team projects suck. (I learned that in high school)
* javascript is a dumb language full of horrible design decisions.
* nodejs is even worse.
* v8 is cool, but all the coolness is workarounds for stupidity in javascript.
* mongodb is really great for no-setup development environments (schemas are hard, lets go shopping!)
* mongo-files is really cool (although I'd rather use drbd/gluster/SAN)

why is this code even here still?
================================
even though this project was a complete disaster, I leave it here as a monument to my perseverance.
despite working with a teammate that was **willfully ignorant** and using a framework that I found to be completely braindead, I managed to produce a working product that met the specification.

message to brandon
==================
I pray that you are not employed in software development, technology of any sort, or holding a position of any responsibility.
your willful ignorance **will** cause you you to completely bungle projects, damaging your company and your peers.
if your resume ever comes across my desk, I will personally throw it in the shredder and inform all of my colleagues to blackball you.

you should probably unstar this repo. I am never giving you commit access.