I’ve been meaning to start this for a while and finally got around to setting up all the required boilerplate. The reason for this is I want to find a good job and all the cool developers have a blog for the last year or so I’ve noticed that the most challenging things I had to do at work were not related to writing new code, but to investigating issues in production and dev environments.

During the last year I’ve had to

In almost all of these cases a key insight into the problem came from someone’s blog. Not from StackOverflow, not a book, but from some developer somewhere writing about their experience investigating a technology or chasing down a problem.

The most eye-opening moment came when in two neighbouring weeks a colleague and me came across two particularly gnarly bugs and in both cases after hours of pulling hair and debugging the world were saved from going crazy only by bumping into a blog post from https://www.zpqrtbnk.net/ describing the bug. They were:

Before that I could justify to myself that people who’s blogs I read have the moral right to write because they are unusually smart and famous, while if I wrote anything it would only amount to internet pollution. But this guy does not strike as someone doing rocket science software development – just working on a CMS and some libraries. And he saved our asses because he encountered these issues and decided to write about them. If he didn’t, we would have lost much more hair and nerves. Thank you, Stéphane Gay.

So, here goes. I hope that in the near future I will have the time to write up some of the issues we’ve encountered and maybe this will save someone some time if they run across something similar.