Java was famously promoted with the idealistic Write Once Run Anywhere and simultaneously derided with the sardonic Write Once Debug Everywhere . Neither is correct, of course, but the idea that one implementation can work for all consumers continues to be attractive, and the fact that it doesn't continues to frustrate. Nowhere is this truer than as a reader of someone else's awful ticket, PR description, wiki page, code comment, or README: write once, WTF everywhere. And, unfortunately, we've all been there ... on both sides of the problem, sometimes as the author and , months later, confused recipient of the same miserable text. Which is where today's post comes in. Last year's Heuristics for Working Today was a presentation I gave at work listing nine practices that I find generally useful, one of which I called The Author Pays . It's the idea that since much of what is written is read multiple times, it seems reasonable in general for the ...