Leave a Trace | Jake WorthAlways leave something behind. If you find something interesting, leave a trace<br>that you were there.<br>This is a little thing that over time leads to a friendlier, more humane<br>internet. Here are a few examples.<br>Blog post that helped you#<br>Imagine you’re reading a blog post and you find it helpful. Or, you agree with<br>it, but find one part of the argument lacking. Before moving on, leave a<br>comment!<br>As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets<br>thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve<br>received over all the years is a small fraction of that.<br>I want to hear it! Praise is encouraging. Criticism is often enlightening. If<br>it’s a nitpick or aside, that’s almost always interesting.<br>When it doubt, reach out.<br>Something that helped you#<br>Imagine you’re stuck on a tough bug, and you’re searching the internet for help.<br>You find a solution to your problem in a forum post, buried on the second page<br>of results, down the page. Before celebrating and moving on, stop and leave a<br>message!<br>It could be simple “This worked!” or even an emoji. Leave something behind that<br>showed you were there and that the solution helped you.<br>Something that didn’t help you#<br>Imagine you’re about to abandon a software tool. The docs seemed promising, but<br>it doesn’t satisfy your use case, and you’re moving on. Before doing so, leave a<br>friendly message telling the provider that you’re leaving and why.<br>It can be as simple as “I couldn’t get single sign-on to work. The<br>authentication console is different from the screenshots in the docs.” Drop a<br>stack trace. Share a link to source code or a repository that reproduces the<br>issue.<br>Tell them it didn’t work and why.<br>Why bother#<br>By bother with this? Why not just consume and move on? Nobody is going to care<br>immediately if you do and it’s an investment of your personal time.<br>First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the<br>internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. That solution<br>to the tough issue you found was sitting on a forgotten webpage. That project<br>you’re abandoning might be about to crater and the maintainer would love to know<br>that anybody has tried it, regardless of the outcome. Leaving something adds a<br>little humanity to the internet.<br>Second, it highlights signal in a sea of noise. That solution? It helped you, so<br>it’s likely a useful idea. Help others find it.<br>Third, you’re building a learning exhaust that shows you exist and are doing<br>real things with software. And if you create an account in the place you’re<br>commenting then you now have a profile you can access that collects the things<br>you found noteworthy. My Stack Overflow account is essentially an index of<br>upvoted hacks and great answers to esoteric questions. It’s valuable.<br>Leave a trace.
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