The “Happy Path” is a Lie.
Modern software documentation is frequently little more than marketing collateral. It is designed to sell a frictionless “Happy Path” where every deployment is perfect, every API is intuitive, and every framework scales linearly.
But production is not frictionless. Production is where theory breaks. It is where undocumented constraints surface and where “best practices” become liabilities. error(first) exists to document the chaotic maturation of the modern web. We bridge the gap between the polished marketing promise and the reality of the 2:00 AM production log.
The Operating Doctrine
We do not publish “Hello World” tutorials. We do not rewrite official documentation. We adhere to a strict forensic standard for every piece of intelligence we release:
- Forensic Value: If a solution is easily found on Stack Overflow or in a README, it does not belong here. We specialize in the edge cases, the migration nightmares, and the architectural trade-offs that only appear under load.
- Evidence Over Opinion: We do not trade in “vibes” or framework tribalism. Every investigation is backed by raw evidence: logs, traces, memory dumps, and code diffs. We prioritize the “Theory vs. Reality” gap.
- Information Gain: Every asset in this archive must provide a new data point to the internet. Our goal is to ensure that when a reader closes a tab on this site, they possess technical intelligence that the original creators of the tool never intended for them to need.