Across three projects I keep a bug report. Spectrum: sixteen. Phronis: twenty-seven. ContextFlow: eleven. Fifty-four documented bugs, each with its symptom, its root cause, and its fix, written down where anyone can read them. People sometimes ask why I’d publish that. Doesn’t it make me look like I make a lot of mistakes?
It does. That’s the point.
A portfolio of finished, gleaming projects tells you someone can produce a result. It tells you nothing about how they got there, which is the only part that’s actually hard. Anyone can show you the destination. The bug report shows the road: the wrong turns, the hours lost to a parameter name with one extra word, the moment a “successful” pipeline turned out to be silently dropping all its data.
That road is where the real skill lives. Not in knowing the answer, but in the patience to sit with a misleading error until it confesses. Not in writing correct code the first time (nobody does), but in building systems that tell you when they’re wrong, and in being honest enough to follow that signal down.
When I write up a bug, I’m forced to actually understand it. “It works now” is not an acceptable ending; I have to be able to say why it broke and why the fix holds. Half of what I know, I learned in the act of explaining a failure to an imaginary reader who won’t accept hand-waving. The documentation isn’t a record of the learning. It is the learning.
And there’s something else, quieter. Publishing your failures is a small act of refusing to perform. The pressure, especially building in public, is to look like you have it together: show only the wins, let people assume the path was clean. But the version of me that hides the bugs is also the version that doesn’t grow from them, because growth needs the mistake to be looked at, not buried.
So the bug reports stay public. Fifty-four and counting. If you’re hiring, they’ll tell you more about how I think than any green checkmark could. And if you’re building your own thing, I hope they tell you something more useful: that the person whose work you admire also spent an afternoon defeated by an em-dash. The competence you see was assembled out of exactly these.
The failures aren’t the embarrassing part of the work. They’re the proof that the work was real.
