A month ago I posted a short piece inspired by a post by Maële Salmon She actually reached out to me in 10 minutes, telling me I made a weird spelling error (no excuses, I really make those a lot). Then a day or two later Jon Spring walked through the code and realized that I switched two outcomes in the code.

Just about 10 days ago I posted about downloading multiple files and Mara Avarick noticed a weird ‘«««’ sign on my website. It was only happening on chrome ( I couldn’t reproduced it in firefox, and it had to do with a few botched merges in the past). But I would have never found out about it on my own.

And that is awesome! Some people make the effort to reach out via twitter or on github, just to make things better for everyone.

That is the great thing about blogging using version-controlled software, not only can I change what I did, but the history and thank yous are part of the entire project. It is very transparent (if you know about git) and available for everyone to read. imagine if this was an academic paper (granted, I would have checked my work slightly more thorough before publishing), not only would you probably not be able to read it (it would be behind a paywall), it would be incredibly difficult for me to change the content of the paper.

Now I guess there is an official American holiday to thank people, but since I am not American I can thank whoever, whenever I please^1.

The point is, I am incredibly grateful for all those helpful comments, issues, and sometimes even emails! So thank you!

If blogging was like academia, we would all be saved, thank you for your edits. was originally published by at Clean Code on December 19, 2017.