Letters and Logs

Two o'clock in the morning is a bad time to learn that your past self was lazy with log lines. The cursor blinks. The grep returns nothing. The pager keeps buzzing.

Good logs are not exhaustive; they are legible. They tell a story with a beginning (what was attempted), a middle (what happened), and an end (what the system decided to do about it).

Treat each log line as a sentence you might one day need to read aloud in a war room. It changes how you write them.