• dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    I’ve never understood the mentality of offloading reading comprehension to others. Why do I bother to write clear error messages at all?

    You’re not writing error messages for your users. You’re writing them for you. Most users, especially the higher up the chain you go, are not computer savvy in the least. In fact, they know maybe a handful of apps and only specific to what they need to use it for. They are absolutely terrified of anything that is not what they know, because they know that could mean their job if the problem is big enough (data loss, hacking, etc).

    Hollywood has done a fantastic job of drilling that into the consumer. Just like every Hollywood movie always has that one squeaky computer nerd who can fix anything just by looking at the screen. Those nerds also terrify people because it reflects on how little those people know, and that’s always scary.

    Long story short, write your logging for you; not them. If anything it makes you look like the hero every time. And Hollywood also taught us to adore our heroes.

    • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.ch
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      6 days ago

      Right but in this specific case if I just didn’t show that there were no credentials configured then I’d be yelled at for it “not working.”