Proof · How to log
How to write a log founders actually read.
Two minutes a day. The work is easy — the value is in howyou write it. Here’s the difference between a log that gets skimmed and one that gets a reply.
The one move
Write the why, not just the what.
The what is a changelog — AI can generate it. The whyis how you think, and that’s the thing a human reads. Add the because.
✗Built the login page.
✓Built login with OTP instead of passwords because most of our users are on shared family phones and forget passwords.
Same work. The second shows judgment. That’s the whole game.
Four ways to go deeper
Pick one. A real one beats four fake ones.
Weigh an alternative
Name what else was on the table.
“Chose Postgres over Mongo…”
↳ What else could you have picked?
Name the tradeoff
Say what you gave up.
“…even though Mongo would've shipped faster — I'd own the migration later.”
↳ What did choosing this cost you?
Ground it in evidence
Point to what you actually saw.
“The board ran at 80°C under load on the bench, so I added a heatsink.”
↳ What did the data / the error show?
Name an assumption
Surface what you're unsure of.
“I'm betting traffic stays under 1k/day; if not, this breaks.”
↳ What are you taking on faith?
The counterintuitive part
Stuck and failure count double.
The instinct is to log only wins. But “I’m stuck on X, I tried A and B, I think it’s C” is the most valuable thing you can write — it’s exactly what a founder wants to know you’ll say out loud on their team.
✓ Worth reading
Spent 3 hours on a CORS bug. Tried changing headers, then a proxy — turned out it was a trailing slash. Lesson: read the actual error before guessing.
Specific beats polished
One real detail > a paragraph of vibes.
✗Had a productive day, learned a lot, growing every day 🚀
✓Learned that React Query refetches on window focus by default — that was causing my duplicate API calls.
Vague sentiment reads as noise. Write it the way you’d explain your day to a smart friend — not the way you’d write a résumé.
Two minutes · yours to keep
A few honest lines beat a polished paragraph. And the practice changes you: putting the whyinto words every day makes you sharper at explaining how you think — that’s yours, job or no job. The log just makes it readable.
Write the why. A human reads it.
RK
