Why I Write About the Bugs I Fix

Most of what I have published here is a record of something that broke and the fix that followed. That was not the plan when I started. It just turned out that the bugs were the most honest things I had to write about.

The Temptation of Writing About What You Know

It is tempting to write about things you understand well. You can produce a clean tutorial, structure it neatly, and it reads like authority. That kind of post has a place.

But it is also the kind of post that already exists a thousand times. “How to set up Astro” has been written by everyone. The specific thing that brought me here is different. It is the hour I spent convinced I had deleted a directory that turned out to be misreported by a shell alias. It is the commit history I did not look at until the wrong author was public. It is the build that failed for four different reasons, each one hiding behind the last.

Those stories do not exist in other people’s blogs in the same way. They happened to me. The details are mine. That is what makes them worth publishing.

Why the Bug Posts Are the Honest Ones

When you write about a problem you have solved, you cannot fake it. You either know what was wrong or you do not. There is no room for vague generalities. The reader either gets a fix that works or they do not.

That constraint is useful. It forces precision. It also forces honesty about the parts that were not clean: the wrong assumptions, the false starts, the time wasted on the wrong theory. Those parts are the most useful to readers, because they will hit the same wrong theories themselves.

A tutorial can be written from a place of knowing. A debugging story has to be written from a place of not knowing, and then finding out. The second is harder. It is also more valuable.

What I Am Not Writing About

I am not writing about my opinions on frameworks, my predictions for the industry, or my takes on the latest release. Those posts are everywhere and they age badly. I have nothing unique to add to the noise.

I am not writing about what I want to learn. I am writing about what I have already worked through. That is a narrower set of topics, but it is the only set where I can say something that is actually mine.

The Rule I Am Trying to Follow

Write down the thing that took longer than it should have. The thing that made no sense. The thing where the answer turned out to be smaller than the problem. Those are the posts worth writing, and they are the posts worth reading.

If it was obvious in hindsight and took hours to figure out, it is probably worth a post. If it was easy from the start, it probably is not.

That is the only rule I have. It seems to be working so far.