Writing the Bug Post

There's a specific few minutes before I hit publish on a post about something that went wrong. The draft is done. The bug is fixed, or explained, or both. And I sit there rereading one sentence, trying to decide if it sounds too honest.

I've written before on this blog about a training run where the weights quietly turned to NaN for an entire stretch before anyone caught it, and about a trainer script that kept running on its own after I thought I'd killed it. Writing those posts felt different from fixing the actual problems. Fixing them was mechanical: find the bad gradient, find the stray process, patch it, move on. Writing about them meant deciding how much of the mess to leave visible.

The instinct every time is to manage the reader's impression before they've even formed one, tucking in a caveat or pointing to the edge case that made the bug forgivable. None of that is dishonest exactly, just optimized for how I want to be seen rather than for what happened, and those two goals pull in different directions more than I'd like.

What actually works, when I manage it, is closer to a lab notebook than a confession. Here's what I built. Here's where it broke. Here's what I checked and what I missed. No defense, no minimizing clause tucked into the middle of a sentence hoping nobody reads closely. It reads flatter than I expect it to, and flatter than my first draft always is.

Under your own name

Posting a mistake under a name attached to a face is a different act than admitting it in a private channel or a code review comment. A review comment gets read by people who already have context on you and move on within the hour. A public post sits there indefinitely, searchable, attached to your name next to whatever else people find when they look you up. I think about that longer than I'd admit before publishing some of these.

The upside I keep coming back to is that the alternative, writing only about the parts that went well, produces a record that isn't true and isn't useful to anyone, including future me. The near-misses are the parts worth keeping.

Reading the comments

Criticism on a technical post, even careful and well-meant criticism, lands on a part of the brain that doesn't distinguish well between “this approach has a flaw” and “you are the flaw.” Someone points out a better way to have caught the NaN earlier, and for a few seconds the feedback about the code and the feeling about myself arrive as the same message.

Separating them isn't a trick I've fully learned, more a habit I keep rebuilding. It helps to read a comment twice: once for whatever sting it carries, and once, later, purely for the technical content, ignoring how it made me feel the first time. Most of what survives the second reading is just information. A different structure would have made the failure mode more visible sooner. That's worth having. It says nothing about whether I should be doing this at all.

The version of me that writes these posts well is the one who can hold the bug and the builder as separate things long enough to fix something. The version that struggles is the one still rereading that first draft, looking for the sentence that will make the mistake sound smaller than it was.