tl;dr:“There’s a lot of juice to be squeezed out of error messages if you know what to look for. It’s worth learning the skill of extracting all the detailed information you can. That gives you a head start on debugging problems yourself, and a better chance of writing a good bug report for somebody else – and perhaps even a better chance of deciding which of those things to do. In this article, I’ll try to give an overview of the kind of things you can tell from the details of an error message – right down to things as trivial as the punctuation.”
tl;dr:“When I’ve looked at other guides, they don’t seem to be focusing on the most important things. The one that first started me making notes towards this article consisted of a 7-point list of guidelines, most of which were tiny details of the initial ‘subject line’ part of the commit – what tense to use, whether to end it with a full stop, capitalisation – and the final rule just said ‘Use the body to explain what and why vs. how’.” Simon shares his approach.