I wouldn't usually call out open source code in a blog post, but honestly, this made me Laugh Out Loud in the office yesterday. I'd ended up poking around in the part of the Tridion Digital Experience Manager framework (DXA) that deals with media items. Just to be clear, the media items in question would usually be either binaries that have some role in displaying your web site, or in this case, more specifically, downloads such as a PDF or whatever. The thing that made me laugh was in a function called getFriendlyFileSize(). A common use case for this would be to display a file size next to your download link so the visitor knows that they can download the PDF fairly quickly, or that maybe they'd better wait until they're on the Wifi before attempting that 10GB ISO file.

getFriendlyFileSize() converts a raw number of bytes into something like 13MB, 7KB, or 5GB. What made me laugh was the fact that the author has also very helpfully included support not only for GigaBytes, but also TeraBytes, PetaBytes and ExaBytes.

Sitting in my office right now, I'm getting about "140 down" from Speedtest. That is to say, my download speed from the Internet is about 140 Mbps, which works out in practice that if I want to grab the latest Centos-with-all-the-bells-and-whistles.ISO (let's say 10GB) it'll take me about 10 minutes. Let's say I want to scale that up to 10PB, then we're talking about 400 years or so, which somewhat exceeds the longest web server uptime known to mankind by an order of magnitude and then some.

Well maybe this is just old-fashioned thinking, but I'm inclined to think we don't need friendly Exabyte file sizes for website media downloads just yet. In the words of the old Extreme Programming mantra, "You ain't gonna need it". (YAGNI)

I'm not here to take a rise out of the hard-working hackers that contribute so much to us all. Really. I can't say that strongly enough. It made me laugh out loud, that's all.