When I launch my startup, I'm gonna insert all kinds of very stupid and weird error messages in place of the actual errors just so the people can have a chuckle instead of being annoyed
maybe someone's gonna post it on reddit or something, I don't mind, that's actually a good thing

Like this

And this

And this

...and this.

@kiki ⚠️👌

Make the error message count. Enable corrective user action if applicable by telling the user exactly what is wrong in a correct, easy to read and short message. Enable fast debugging by including the log entry ID and a timestamp for fast log file selection and grepping.

@Oktokolo "grepping" I found the Linux sysadmin!

NERD ALERT!

@sariel Sometimes, the simple tools do the job just fine. Not an admin though.

I use Gentoo btw.

@Oktokolo you know such fever dreams could indicate a serious condition, like fate in humanity :P

i hate you all today and i want you to die.

You should call your startup mental breakdown

@Oktokolo I always try to recover from as many errors as possible in my code, so error messages are the last resort. All error messages you'll get in this product will mean the same thing — “something serious broke, there are no recovery steps, ~~contact the developer~~ we already know things are broken bc sentry”, so they might as well be funny

For example, I will parse the hell out of any user input to make sure the program reads the user _intention_, not their trivial human errors

@kiki I would never dare to guess the intent of the user with such a confidency to just keep on working using it instead of actual user input. I myself am just a user for the overwhelming majority of software i use. And the guesswork of the devs that wrote that software mostly turned out to be wrong. I am not expecting myself to be a better oracle than them.

I am all for sane defaults and obviously more error detection is better. But i prefer to fail early to empower the user to detect and fix the mistake instead of silently continuing with corrupt or at least questionable data.

Something like:

"The following operation is illegal in most countries, please check this documentation to find out the legal repercussions in your country."
"Proceed?"