gmb.dev -> blog

Photo by tian kuan on Unsplash

UPDATE There’s a follow-up to this with a better solution here

I’m going to start keeping track of little notes to self here on this blog. First, because it actually means I’m deliberately writing stuff on it, which, yay. Second, because it’s a good place to collate these things. Third, it might help someone else.

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

It’s something that can’t be overstated in software development: a well-written bug report can make an engineer’s life so much easier. A poorly-written one can make your day a living hell.

Something that I find myself bringing to almost every client is a sense of what a well-written bug report looks like. This is largely carried over from my Launchpad days: we were a distributed team spread around the world, and we didn’t always have the luxury of high-bandwidth comms with bug reporters. Instead, we relied on well-crafted bug reports to give us unambiguous problem statements, and — where possible — unambiguous guidance for fixing those problems.

Image by Patrick Fore

It’s weird, starting out all over again after not really blogging for much of the last decade. We got so consumed by social media, by striving for pith at the expense of something well-reasoned, that blogging sort of died on its arse.

Except that it didn’t, of course. Everyone just thought that.