Cloud computing, Java, TypeScript—whatever technology you’re diving into—there’s one constant that remains: errors. It’s an inevitable part of software engineering. But, are all error messages created equal? The answer is a resounding ‘No’. In our exploration today, not only will we delve into the art of constructing meaningful error messages, but we’ll also introduce an innovative approach—crafting a custom exception class. This technique promises to elevate the clarity and actionability of our errors, positioning them as invaluable tools rather than mere nuisances.

JSON has become the de facto standard data representation for the web. It’s lightweight, human-readable (in theory) and supported by all major languages and platforms. However, working on the CLI with JSON is still hard using traditional CLI tooling. Lucky, there is jq, a command-line JSON processor. jq offers a broad range of operations to transform and manipulate JSON based data structures from the command line. Looking at the documentation however reveals an overwhelmingly huge number of options, functions and things you can do with jq.