A Few Common Blogging Myths

At a recent RC event I gave a short talk covering some of the misconceptions people tend to hold about blogging. The core myths I walked through:

  1. You need to be original.
  2. You need to be an expert.
  3. Posts need to be 100% correct.
  4. Good bloggers don’t write bad posts.
  5. You need to explain every concept.
  6. Page views matter.

The slides are available on Speaker Deck, though the aspect ratio appears to be off at the moment.

A Quick Debugging Tip: Instrument the Library

While debugging with someone recently, I was reminded of one of my favorite techniques for dealing with confusing errors.

When you’re using a library and hitting an error that makes no sense—and searching the web turns up nothing useful—try this approach:

  1. Grep the library’s source code for the function or class you’re calling, or for the error message you’re seeing.
  2. Add extra print statements to the library to get more context.
  3. Use that output to figure out the bug.
  4. Remove the print statements once you’re done.

This works particularly well in interpreted and dynamically typed ecosystems like Ruby, Node, Python, and Go, where dependencies often live in a local directory (e.g., node_modules) and are easy to edit and rerun.

Occasionally this process reveals an actual bug in the library itself. But most of the time—around 90%—the issue is in your own code, and the added prints simply help you understand what the library is really designed to do.