If it wasn't Jeff Atwood but me, would it be more their fault? Or would I just be less disingenuous?
Nobody's calling them names, or threatening to take business elsewhere or anything. But it's good to get sunlight in there, show them consequences, when they fail you. When a company providing you with service fails, you're allowed to scream it from the rooftops if you feel like it.
Someone else pointed out in another comment, there's a good analogy to be drawn to Atwood's own words here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001079.html
Fair enough. But he's not complaining about looking foolish (nor is grandparent as far as I can see). He's complaining about losing data.
In that link he isn't saying "it's your fault no matter what the world throws at you, suck it up." He's saying, "look harder at yourself before you decide somebody else is to blame." Not an issue here; can we agree it is their fault?
Is his tweet. Sounds like blaming to me. I suppose it's a matter of personal taste but if you write about how you're serving your images off S3 and how everyone should be making redundant backups and then get bitten by the fact you somehow wrote about these things but didn't actually do them, you're not looking very hard at yourself.
My simple point is - if you're an advice-giver who's been shown to not follow his own advice on backups, don't compound it by being an advice giver who doesn't follow his own advice on humility.
I thought we were arguing about whether he cares about looking foolish.
Of course he's blaming them. There's reason to blame them. Regardless of what he did or didn't do, they screwed up. In fact I think he's being very restrained and humble taking 50% of the blame. I'd be fucking pissed if that happened to me. Even if I restored from backups in 30 minutes (extremely optimistic).
"if you're an advice-giver who's been shown to not follow his own advice on backups, don't compound it by being an advice giver who doesn't follow his own advice on humility."
Again, the humility he was referring to was to assume first that it was your fault until you determine otherwise for sure. What's that got to do with them screwing up?
You're basically saying: if I act holier-than-thou and advocate backups, then Slicehost or Amazon can give me crappy service because I'm not allowed to 'blame' them or mention how they suck. Which is really weird.
(I feel for the guy. I'm sitting here yakking because I can't connect to my EC2 slice for the last n hours.)
I didn't say he deserves crappy service or that his provider didn't screw up by firing his VM into Neptune. What I'm saying is (in 17 different ways, at this point) - if you are a vocal advocate but don't actually practice or believe what you preach, you're not really an advocate or useful commentator but a hack. When circumstances (that incidentally and in part happen to be someone else's fault) expose you as somewhat of a hack, it's a little uncouth to be pointing fingers at others for their much more minor screw-ups. Being a hack is bigger screw-up than accidentally (or through negligence) firing someone's VM into Neptune, that's all.