Developers don’t spend enough time thinking about their errors. I see too many projects that throw Error('invalid data') or even worse throw 'invalid data' 😱. That isn’t useful! Give me some context, bud.
But we (myself included) aren’t usually thinking about the failure case. We are thinking about the solution and (at best) are simply guarding against some bad input. That needs to change. Errors need context to be useful. String interpolation isn’t good enough - it still requires thought. An error databag is what we need.
Dead simple and effortless - that was my goal. What I ended up with is a project I am calling Fault-Tolerance. The concept behind it is simple - extend the default Error object to format errors better.
In the most basic example you can throw new Fault('Move along'). In reality, though, that kind of error isn’t as helpful as you want. Errors have context and we don’t want to lose that.
The output from that would look like:
This gives you a much better way to include additional information with the added benefit of a consistent log format.
Check out the Fault-Tolerance on Gitlab for more examples. It is also available as an NPM package.
