Codekit (software which web developers use for lots of cool things, but which I mainly use for compiling LESS) started acting up after a reboot of my computer recently, showing me an error starting with the following words:

Error: EACCES, permission denied ‘[FILEPATH]’…

I remember googling around and landing upon linux file permissions documentation, and eventually realizing that if I went into the root (sudo -s — a command I learned from a hackathon teammate just the week before, thanks A.!) and did chmod a+rw style.css, the compilation error was magically solved.

Now, I am about 80% certain that my fix isn’t a 100% true fix, but I am *so glad* I recorded the method I used to solve it in e-mail because… yeah, the problem just popped up again. And I went crazy for a few minutes doing git revert and trying to figure out what went wrong (I was only editing a .less file!) before I realized that the codekit error looked kind of familiar, and… hmm. Searching “EACCES” pulled up the solution I had documented in my own e-mail archives.

Moral to the story: document your bug fix methods (even if temporary), especially if the fixes are obscure.