The Ten-Minute Bug Postcard: Tiny Notes That Keep Big Debugging Jobs Moving

You’re deep in a nasty bug. The logs finally make sense, the repro steps are clear in your head, and you almost see what’s wrong. Then: meeting. Slack ping. End of day. Context shattered.

Next time you sit down, you stare at the code and think: “What was I doing?” Twenty minutes vanish just recreating the mental state you had before the interruption.

The Ten-Minute Bug Postcard is a tiny, structured note that helps you dodge that cost. It captures exactly where you’re leaving off, so you can reload your brain in minutes instead of reconstructing everything from scratch.

What Is a “Bug Postcard”?

Think of a bug postcard as the shortest possible status update you write for your future self at the end of a debugging session.

It’s:

Tiny – 2–10 lines, written in a couple of minutes.
Structured – always follows the same fields.
Focused – only on one active bug or investigation.

Despite the name, it doesn’t need to be physical. It can live in:

A markdown file in your repo
A note in Obsidian/Notion/OneNote
A page in your paper notebook
A section in your existing dev journal

The key is that it’s small enough and structured enough that you’ll actually do it, even when you’re tired and “just want to stop.”

The Core Structure: Four Things Every Bug Postcard Captures

Each postcard answers four questions:

What is the current bug symptom?
How does the problem show up right now, in user-visible or system-visible terms?
What’s your latest hypothesis about the cause?
What do you currently think is wrong—and why?
What have you tried so far?
Which experiments, logs, or code changes did you already do, and what did they reveal?
What is the very next experiment you plan to run?
If you had 10 focused minutes right now, what’s the precise next step you’d try?

That’s it. You’re not writing a postmortem or a design doc—just a snapshot of the debugging state.

A Sample Bug Postcard

Here’s what one might look like in markdown:

### Bug Postcard – 2026-01-03 – Payment timeouts in EU region

**Symptom**  
~5% of EU card payments fail with `GatewayTimeout` after ~30s. Only EU, only during peak hours.

**Current hypothesis**  
Likely queue backlog in the EU payment worker -> requests sit too long before processing. The US region has more workers + shorter queue times; failure rate is near-zero there.

**What I’ve tried so far**
- Checked logs: timeouts cluster around 18:00–20:00 CET.
- Verified gateway SLA: external provider shows no errors at those times.
- Compared worker counts: EU has 3 workers vs 10 in US.
- Added extra logging to record queue wait time per request (deployed, data still gathering).

**Next experiment**  
Once metrics are in, graph queue wait time vs. failure rate. If correlated, temporarily double EU workers and see if timeouts drop in tonight’s peak window.

If you stop here and come back tomorrow, your brain doesn’t have to re-derive all of this. You just reload the postcard.

Why Postcards Beat Context Switching

Complex debugging is mostly mental state: the half-formed hypotheses, the places you’ve already ruled out, the clues that seemed promising.

Interruptions blow that state away. Research suggests it often takes 20+ minutes to fully regain context after a switch—more if the system is complex.

Bug postcards act as a bridge over that gap:

They pin your current mental model to a concrete note.
They prevent duplicate work (“Wait, did I already try rolling back the config?”).
They shorten ramp-up: instead of re-reading logs and code, you skim your postcard and step right back into the investigation.

Over time, this saves hours—and cuts down on the frustration of feeling like you’re always starting over.

Integrating Postcards into a Lightweight Developer Journal

Bug postcards work best when they live inside a simple developer journal, not as random one-off notes scattered across tools.

You can structure it like this:

# Dev Journal – 2026-01

## 2026-01-03
- General notes: Pairing session on auth refactor; learned more about token caching.
- What’s working: Smaller commits = easier rollbacks.
- What I’m stuck on: EU payment timeouts.

### Bug Postcard – EU payment timeouts
... (postcard contents) ...

---

## 2026-01-04
- General notes: ...

This way:

Debugging notes sit next to learning and reflection. You see not just the bug, but the surrounding context of your day.
Over weeks, you can review your thinking patterns, not just your code changes.

The journal doesn’t need to be fancy. One rolling markdown file per month is often enough.

Use Writing as Rubber-Ducking

The act of writing the postcard is as valuable as the note itself.

If you struggle to fill in any of the four sections, that’s a signal:

Can’t clearly state the symptom?
You might not actually have a solid repro or clear understanding of the problem’s surface.
No coherent hypothesis?
You may be flailing—trying random changes instead of deliberately testing a theory.
Hard to list what you’ve already tried?
You may be repeating experiments or not observing results carefully.
Can’t define the next experiment?
You’re probably not breaking the problem into testable steps.

In other words, writing is rubber-duck debugging for your thought process. The postcard forces you to explain the bug and your plan in plain language. Any fuzziness that appears on the page usually mirrors fuzziness in your understanding.

When that happens, don’t push ahead with more code. Step back. Clarify the symptom, refine the hypothesis, simplify the next experiment.

Reviewing Old Postcards: Finding Your Bug Patterns

Once you’ve accumulated a few weeks or months of postcards, they become a rich source of insight.

Spend 30 minutes occasionally reviewing old entries and ask:

What kinds of bugs keep repeating?
Off-by-one errors? Concurrency issues? Misconfigured infrastructure? These point to weak spots in your understanding or test coverage.
Where did I waste time?
Were there long stretches of trying random changes before forming a clear hypothesis? That suggests you could benefit from more systematic debugging strategies or better observability.
What worked surprisingly well?
Maybe a simple logging tweak, or a particular tool, or pairing with a colleague. Codify these into your default debugging playbook.
Are there systemic issues?
E.g., “Half my bugs come from unclear APIs” or “Prod and staging drift constantly.” That’s a prompt for team-level improvements, not just individual heroics.

Your postcards turn debugging from a chaotic series of emergencies into a learnable skill, with data you can actually reflect on.

Keeping It Frictionless: Make Postcards a Two-Minute Habit

The power of bug postcards depends on one thing: you actually writing them.

To keep the habit sustainable:

Limit yourself to a couple of minutes.
If it takes longer, you’ll skip it on busy days. The format is intentionally small.

Use a consistent template.
For example:

### Bug Postcard – <date> – <short bug label>

**Symptom**  
...

**Current hypothesis**  
...

**What I’ve tried so far**  
- ...

**Next experiment**  
...

The less you have to think about structure, the easier it is to just fill it in.

Tie it to a trigger.
- End of day
- Before every meeting
- Whenever you switch tasks or branches
“I don’t close the laptop until I’ve written a postcard for any active bug” is a simple rule that works well.
Store them somewhere you already look.
If you keep them in a place you never open, they’ll die. Put them next to your TODOs, in your daily note, or in the repo.

Conclusion: Future You Will Be Grateful

Debugging complex systems will always be hard. But it doesn’t have to feel like groundhog day every time you’re interrupted.

A Ten-Minute (or really, Two-Minute) Bug Postcard:

Captures the current symptom, your best hypothesis, what you’ve tried, and the very next experiment.
Acts as a defense against context switching, slashing the ramp-up time when you return to a hard bug.
Doubles as rubber-ducking for your thinking, revealing where your mental model is fuzzy.
Becomes part of a lightweight developer journal, giving you a history of your debugging process and patterns.

You don’t need new tools or heavy process—just a small, repeatable note you write for your future self.

Try it on your next non-trivial bug. When you come back later, postcard in hand, and feel yourself drop straight back into the investigation without the usual 20-minute spin-up, you’ll see why it’s worth the habit.