Failures Are More Fun When Shared With Friends
Greetings, friend!
Thank you so much for subscribing! Unless half of you unsubscribe the moment they realize that I don't only rant about versioning schemes, I think I consider this whole experiment a success and will keep it going for now. I have a huge backlog of topics I'd like to blog about and this is somewhat helping me to try to go for a ~monthly cadence (narrator: lol).
A Brief Look Back
Speaking of versioning schemes. Now that the dust and emotions have settled, it's interesting to look back at the reactions to my last post. To be clear, the overwhelming majority was positive. But as we humans do, one focuses mainly on the few negative ones.
The fun thing here is that I don't remember seeing many people arguing against what the article said. However, some were irritated by my general stance toward Semantic Versioning that is both on the record and not even thinly veiled by my wording. It doesn't matter that the post focused on users, wrong expectations, and harm reduction. I got a surprising amount of "SemVer is useful, actually and here is why you’re wrong..." although it's literally right there in the post – from day one.
This only goes to show what touchy topic versioning is; despite the fact that at its core it's quite boring. It's fair to say that my tone distracted some people from the message. But on the other hand I don't care. I don't think those knee-jerkers are gonna be swayed and I'm trying to share my perspective with accompanying context – not the universal truth.
Fresh Content!
Let's move on to why I'm sending this newsletter in the first place!
It’s a lighter, hopefully less controversial topic. I even doubted if I should publish it, but as my good friend ?.L. told me:
It's a short fun post, publish it. Fits your blog perfectly. Not every post needs to be a 10k word behemoth that you meticulously update for years to come.
So here we go!
This time the story starts on Christmas Eve 2020 when while playing with alternative web analytics (JFTR I’m still using a self-hosted Matomo with anonymized IP addresses) I realized that I fucked up big time. I've wiped myself from all but one search engines and in the following learned that fixing such mistakes takes a lot longer than one would think. Therefore, I started logging my progress on getting back, because who doesn't love a comedy of errors? Here you go:
Although it's more about entertainment than information, I think some of the lessons might actually be useful. At least one of my proof-readers already found out that they’ve made a similar mistake with the same consequences.
Thanks for sticking with me, stay healthy, and until the next time!
Best,
—h