Will Turman on Defender’s Corner

Great article! Error handling and exposure are challenging to even implement much less *get right* in a piece of software - especially recently as software increasingly exists as productivity increasing glue between applications and services. (Perhaps overly?) Defensive programming with consistency in delivering actionable information to users at not only a level of understanding, but a level at which *they care* is crucial. If you’re maintaining cURL you’re probably going to want to expose corresponding HTTP error codes - if you’re building a website your users probably don’t care about an HTTP 401 or 403 - they should just be shepherded to a login page. Microcopy is a term used to capture those small pieces of text that guide users through an application or software - including error messages. It’s hard to get right, and it’s great to think about them across the various levels of technical understanding of a piece of software. I’ve tried to build software to a point where I don’t get phone calls - basically aiming to deliver decipherable predictable decently documented tools with an error implementation that makes them supportable by the people with an intermediate understanding of the space between users and myself.