What My Error Logs Would Say If They Could Talk

If my logs could speak, they’d probably scream.
Or worse - passive-aggressively whisper things like:

“Oh, now you care about tracebacks?”
“This exception happened six times last week. You said nothing.”
“Please don’t just grep me. I have structure. I have feelings.”

Observability? I barely observe anything.

Every startup I’ve worked on hits this moment where the system is technically logging things…
but no one’s really looking.

• The logs are too noisy
• The dashboards are half-broken
• And we only open Datadog when something’s on fire - which is always

Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent more time writing log filters than writing actual code.

When did debugging turn into divination?

We’re out here tailing logs like they’re tea leaves.

“Ah yes, this 500 error clearly points to… some middleware I forgot existed.”

Logs aren’t supposed to be puzzles.
They’re supposed to be helpful.

But when your stack is fragmented and your tooling is duct-taped together,
even the most detailed logs feel like static.

What my logs should say:

“This broke here, and here’s why.”
“This retry logic is spiraling. Please stop.”
“This wasn’t a bug. You just wrote bad code. Take a walk.”

I’m slowly learning to design systems that don’t rely on psychic debugging or divine timing.

Because logs are only as useful as the ecosystem around them.
And I’m tired of yelling into the void.