After asking this question at indie hackers, I would like to know if anyone over here would like to share recent lessons from failures.<p>Let's celebrate failures & grow.
Oh sweet sweet failures!
I'll start.
I recently started trying to quit drinking for good, since it slowly turned from a thing that made me all charismatic and happy and jumping around, to a bitter angry man.
This change started when I got together with my current girlfriend, since every time we would go out and have a (probably more than one) drink, I would get jealous (I'm very jealous and insecure, working on it) for stupid silly things.
Problem is the alcohol made my jealousy amplified by 100x (wish it would do the same with my startup revenue)and I would flip out for nothing.
Two weeks ago I promised to my gf and to myself that I would have stopped with this behavior and that I would have drunk less.
No need to say, that same night, I drank waay too much and flipped out because she just glanced at another guy and made her cry and leave me there all alone, drunk and stupid. She couldn't take it anymore.
Fortunately, the day after we talked about it and I decided to quit drinking cold turkey (Allen Carr's book helped a lot in this- suggested if you're in the same boat).
It has been 10 days and I haven't touched a drop of alcohol nor I intend to.
Working on my insecurity/jealousy as well.
Your turn!
Well, not recent, but a few years ago I deleted the production database of my fathers rental company (whoops). The (manual) backup was a week old. Luckily, all data was still there, but on paper (all signed contracts) so I worked overnight to restore all data from the paper pile.<p>After this, I built a script that did a backup once a day and made sure I had to go through some extra hoops to connect to the production database from my own dev machine.<p>All in all, this was a good learning experience.
Most recent: Failed to get out of bed this morning at the time I comited to the night before. I wanted to get up at 8, be at work around 9, got in at 10/11.
Fairly recent: I have been doing it like this for three weeks now<p>My larger failure: I was hired as a contractor/consultant by a major media company earlier this year to help the team develop some cloud based software. I was hired to improve their testing karate. When I started, I was constantly being blocked; all my ideas were rejected and the team kept reverting to they way they had always done it. After 1.5 months the teamleader threw me out. Another team leader was happy take me, there, things were doing great, but I struggled to refactor the mess of TypeScript-AWS-Lambda-Cloud-Crap in a meaningful way.<p>Not all of it was my fault; the situation there was horrible. But I believe someone more experienced than me, or just someone who doesn't get as emotional as quickly as I do could have handled the situation way better. I feel like a failure.<p>I am frustrated by the situation, because while it was going on, I felt that I was doing everything right. Not sure what my lesson is.
I once put adding the recipients for an email to the wrong loop which meant if you were the last user in the database you would receive the email 10.000 times if there were 10.000 users. If you were the user before 9999 times etc.. only the first user that signed up received it once (my test account). So I only found out when the client called me that all their mandrill credits had ran out in a few seconds.<p>In startup failures: didn’t listen to my gut feeling and let my cofounder pile on more features and quibble about the design for a year before validating a single feature with a potential customer. We didn’t make it with that one...
I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression.<p>The growth is realizing that sometimes variance in the data means that really cool model/code you want to write isn't useful, and there's always a trade-off between elegance and utility (if the two aren't in fact opposites)
A few days ago I updated to a new version of Go and noticed a perf regression on one of the programs for a cloudspanner backup. A really bad regression, so I thought the update must have changed something to cause this, and started to debug it.<p>After a few hours, and help of a colleague, we figured out the issue. I wasn't using the companies wired connection but instead was using the much slower wifi..
Last week.<p>Updating DNSSEC infrastructure for a bunch of zones we manage. As part of that update I added extra DS* records at the parent zones. We were using SHA-256 and since our new signer generated SHA-384 signatures as well I included them. All nice and standard. Our tests were all good. dnsviz.net said everything was good, but... It turns out the version of Unbound that was included in older versions of Ubuntu and Redhat can't handle SHA-384 DS records and instead of ignoring them like they are supposed to simply fail validation.<p>Naturally those obsolete nameservers are in use by fun people like Comcast who proceeded to drop lookups for the entire zone. This particular zone was the major commercial zone for a small country ie. co.tld. Around a million subdomains.<p>Fortunately it this was a subdomain inside a country so we could get the SHA-384 signatures dropped at the parent quickly, but yeah tracking down the problem was ... Lets just say it was a bad day.<p>I wonder if I can put "I broke the internet" on my CV?<p>---
* English for everyone who doesn't speak DNSSEC:
DNSSEC is kind of like SSL but for DNS. A DS (Delegation Signer) record is a hash that goes in the parent zone so that resolvers can verify you are using the correct DNSKEYs. Its kind of like X509 certificates in reverse.<p>DNSSEC is VERY complicated and brittle with many ways to hurt yourself.
I was laid off from a middle manager position , I was with a H1-B like Visa (not in the US) the only chance to stay in my host country was to open a business and get an investor visa. I did that with a business partner, the business went down, my partner fled with the remaining money and now the government is giving me 2 months to leave since I am not longer and investor. Good times. I have always coded so I am moving into that direction. So although this is not a thread for that, if you are looking for a Rails or Phoenix guy please reach to me. I work with Python too.
I failed to start a business that would provide reliable income post-military enlistment. I tried for maybe six good years a few ideas: investing in real estate, running facebook ads for business, and building routers were some of my best projects with foreseeable upside and a runway towards sustainability. I failed to focus on just one or two core products and this - combined with my active duty work schedule- really made it difficult to see each project through the tough parts.<p>Its not a total failure; I have a steady career with great benefits that I can retire from in ten more years (total of 20) with a pension. I've learned to focus on my core competencies which has of course catapulted my progress in the selected field. I miss my side projects but I know now that I really can't do everything at once.
I've been really struggling with my weight for the past few years. It has gotten to a point where it's affecting my social life and my mental health. I've always been fairly introverted and shy, but nowadays I find myself sitting at home wishing I was out with friends, or wishing someone would text me.<p>I'm a fairly active gym-goer, but I have incredibly bad eating habits, so instead of losing, or just maintaining weight, I've been slowly gaining it.
This combined with my general shyness and low confidence, has caused me to just cancel social events, and stay home. And of course eat fast food to compensate. I'm struggling with sleep, and I'm at a point where I don't care much for work anymore (I've been arriving late, and leaving early for the past few months). I realize I'm borderline depressed, and my best guess is that my weight is the major cause of this.
My life mostly.<p>I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some sort of skill where I <i>might</i> be able to get around not having a degree like some sort of CS skills, I basically make a little less each year due to inflation and increase in insurance costs not being higher than the tiny merit based increase my employer gives, I've never had a relationship as an adult, I'm repeatedly denied jobs because of lack of degree and/or my bankruptcy and/or the fact my job doesn't really transfer to anything else and I've been doing it for 13 years, I can't afford to even contribute enough to my 401k to get the full employer match.<p>Even someone, with considerable means that told me thier success is purely due to luck (and obviously through chances they've been given by mentors), told me that they are sorry/find it unfortunate that a degree is treated as a de facto dues card... yet the past 2 companies they've ran, require degrees for their entry level work and when I flat out asked for any job that could give me new experience, asked to take a chance on me, I got an "I'm real busy right now, but I'd love to work together some day".<p>I could try and get a degree, but I don't test well and while I'm quite intelligent school was always difficult for me. So taking out tens of thousands of dollars of loans and spending my free time doing something I'll almost certainly hate and/or be frustrated by, just to bury myself in debt for the second time in my life and graduate around 40 to compete against 20-22 year old people for entry level jobs in a new field with my fancy piece of financed paper... doesn't sound very smart, does it?<p>In literally hundreds of appplications in the past 3 years I've had 3 interviews, 2 of them declined and the 3rd I declined when they told me the starting pay was a 5$ and change less than I make an hour now and less than 4$ above minimum wage. Doing roughly what I already do, just for freight on ships instead of planes.<p>Yup.<p>Basically my life is a complete failure. If I dropped dead today my mother, that lives with me, would notice and honestly that's probably it. I'm a wholly replaceable cog in a machine.<p>(obligatory disclaimer: not suicidal, just honest and mostly defeated).
Getting a job at a huge megacorp has shown to be a failure for me.<p>Why?<p>At my previous job - a small firm - I spent 8 hours actually working, each day. At my new job I am doing bureaucracy all days long, and very little actual work. Sometimes I come home without actually having had <i>any</i> real work done for the entire day.<p>I flipped out after maybe 3-4 weeks, because Not Doing Actual Work turns out to be extremely stressful for me. I felt guilty for not achieving anything.<p>But no one cares. This is "normal" at my new job. I brought it up with my boss and told him how I felt. I also told him that, I can not stay at this job for too long, since it will in the long run be really bad for my career. If I don't write code, I will eventually become bad at it. Weirdly, he said that he understood and thought that more of my coworkers need to realize this, before it's too late for them.<p>So now I am planning my escape. I am a bit worried that only working for this company like 8-10 months will look bad at my CV... I have not decided how long I should stay.
I’ve been building a forum. The software part is done, I worked for like 9 months on and off to get it deployed, and now I just don’t have the motivation to do the work involved in building the community.
I once was changing the pricing for the primary subscription product for all 8000+ users registered in our CMS, and accidentally resumed the subscription and charged 300+ customers $75 who had cancelled the plan months or even years ago.<p>The payment platform's API's `updatePlan` function had an optional flag for `reactivateSubscriptionAndBillImmediately` with default value of `true`, as it turns out.<p>I had to stay up till 6AM writing a script to detect all of them, refund their money, send an apology email with some free credit, and cancel their subscriptions, and also write a note to my cofounders outlining the situation so they could crisis manage while I was out cold.<p>After which I wrote an angry email to the billing platform (probably harsher than they deserved given I didn't test their API appropriately on our dev instance). To their credit, they promptly changed the default. They were a young company and apparently not that many clients had used that API endpoint before.<p>It resulted in some very angry customers threatening to cite us to various business practice enforcement bodies around the world, but all in all some floor-sweeping profuse apologies and prompt action laid concerns to rest and no harm was done.
Past winter, I had to deploy a new version of a package that was used by a lot of our applications (at least 5 apps, some for our customers, and some internal ones).<p>Because it was a "simple" package, we did not have any deployment system ready, and deploying was just SSH/SCP commands that created a directory with the package version and upload my dist. I forgot to bump the package version, and ended up wiping a working and in-use package. The problem is that this package can only work up to a specific angular version (which wasn't set in the package.json, so my build installed the wrong one), therefore the only thing that our applications were producing was a blank page.<p>And because I had wiped the original package, I had no way to know which angular version we needed, and we had to find a cached version to get it, by reading the angular license comment in the minified code. The shittiest 5 mins of my life, even though I'm sure no one noticed it.<p>What I learned from this : don't speak with someone else while deploying, huge focus loss.<p>PS : The company is an ISP.
More like a decade of failures really, resulting mostly from hard addiction to drugs and drinking that led to a failed suicide attempt in 2017. Still recovering from it. Initially there was hatred and resentment towards people who "saved" me, but I can see why people would do it for their fellow human, especially as time goes by. I'm 30 now and starting over...
I wrote a video synthesizer based on the idea behind cha/ves, but used an Arduino to generate the oscillator waves that control the VGA pins. I used an Arduino Uno that was laying around. It ended up spending most of the time just reading the MIDI data. It could do about 10 "pixels" per screen refresh. It was neat to see how slow the code I wrote was though, if I accidentally added a modulo or divide operation I would get half as many pixels onto the screen. Too bad the Arduino standard library uses % for serial buffer checking, random, and other features.. it made some cool glitches but was just too slow. Moving on to a raspberry pi and working through the book of shaders now.
I'm a pre-final year undergrad failing to get a research internship in Computer Vision/Deep Learning/Information Retrieval abroad(I'm from India) because of poor grades(GPA 6/10).
I have won Kaggle Medal, various deep learning/machine learning Hackathons, got a job(Data Scientist) offer by the end of sophomore year and a few interview calls in the last 5 months all from great start-ups. They all didn't knew I was a still student or God knows why they approached.
Still nothing is helping.<p>I don't know how to approach the next two years. I don't wanna work in industry at least for now and enroll in a MS program.
I had the opportunity to receive relevant angel investment to my newly born startup if I could find a cofounder (the investor asked me to not be a solo founder).<p>The person that I chose was a close friend that I’ve worked with before, but deep down I knew he wasn’t really entrepreneurial material.<p>In the end, he accepted, just to turn around and say “no” when we got the term sheet to sign (“it’s just too much work for me”). The investor aborted the offer.<p>I’ve made a bad choice because he was my friend and I valued that above the business parameters. It was a terrible mistake.
I failed starting running.
I failed getting into my preferable school and disappointed my family
I failed getting a gf this year also (3 months left we all going to make it)
I failed to start an IG video channel talking about starting your own contracting business. Released two or three videos and then just stopped, and probably won't go back.<p>However, I have now started a Youtube channel for vlogging which is one of my old loves. I had a vlogging channel in 2006 and stopped because of bullies and life getting in the way. Feel like I'm getting my creative side back which has been a revelation for me.
Most recent: trying to convince my superior to throw away our old Java monoliths (still running on Java5/6) and start from scratch with other technology than Java, in a cloud-native manner. Still, my superior is a super Java-fan and has summoned fears about changing everything, because people who worked on those monoliths are long gone from company.
As a technology director succumbed to the (product) managements wish for new functionalities over the scalability.<p>Now we have a lot of useful and legitimately needed functionality and unscalable system.<p>Make sure that you always measure and present the numbers of your systems abilities along with new product features to the management.<p>It is a very tricky balance. Hard to master. Communicate!
I've been failing to grow. I feel stagnant at my current job and yearn for greener pastures. Bad habits prevent me from being productive in my spare time. Very little action is being taken to improve my situation and I feel like a slave to the habits I've cultivated.
I tried to create a blogging platform called Readology but I knew that with other commitments (day job, family) I needed a business partner to really get it off the ground.<p>I couldn't devote all the required time to it so I've stopped it now.<p>Partner in tow, I am working on something else though.
I had a lot of failures since my company switched to Azure AKS... losing clusters, losing API server=crashing operators and so much more...
Lesson in : don't go with AKS !
I was writing a series about ecoterrorist sorcerers but then I started a tough contract at work that took all my energy away<p>The MVP was promising tho