Let me start with a confession. I really love the dev.to community. There are not a lot of developer communities, that are so kind and friendly.
But why this tribute to the community? Because it was a community member who told me about the idea, that I will write about. It was Joseph Jude who commented on the article Take Notes on Everything by Max Antonucci. Joseph commented, that he keeps a log of every error (and the corresponding solution) he gets while developing. What a great idea!
It's a shame, how often I have to google the same error message or bug, that I googled a couple of months ago. The idea of an "error log" is just awesome.
Format
I use markdown. Why? Because I love markdown. It is a simple and powerful markup language. It's easy to insert code snippets, images, links and much more.
And if you use a good editor, like MarkdownMonster or VS Code , it's even more fun.
Markdown Template
I created myself a little template for every error I log. It consists of
- a title
- a few tags (to make it better searchable)
- a description of the problem
- a description of the reason/cause of the error
- and of course the solution to it.
It looks like this:
## Title (for example an error message)
**Tags**:
> these, are, my, tags, for, the, search
### Problem
A short description of the problem/bug/error.
In most cases it contains the situation
in which the error occurs
and the error including the stacktrace.
### Reason
Why did the error happen?
### Solution
What's the solution for this problem?
Where to keep it
I wanted to have this error log accessible from almost everywhere. That's why I use GitHub.
GitHub also provides a pretty good search functionality. That helps a lot.
Of course you can just use a simple directory structure on your disk and sync it to your Dropbox, or something like that. But for me, GitHub was an excellent choice.
Summary
I said it before and I will say it again: all credit goes to Joseph Jude. I learned that from his great comment.
Please let me know what you think. Do you already keep an "error log" or maybe something similar?
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