We've all encountered setbacks and faced failures along our coding journeys, but they often serve as powerful teachers that help us grow and evolve. So, let's take a moment to reflect on those experiences that left us scratching our heads or may have had us feeling defeated at the time.
Share a story about a failure or setback you encountered as a developer and how it shaped your perspective and growth.
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Top comments (4)
Pet projects are in constant limbo of "not even started, there is a thousand more Ideas in my brain already." And that is, in fact, normal. Please, do not be harsh toward yourself because your "Game of Spline" is stuck on "creating openGL window for the last three years", and you have another thirty... hundreds pet projects.
Do not push yourself to finish them. Starting from the beginning is a valuable skill in our sphere. And by doing that, you will find new skills, solutions, etc... that can stuck too!
Pet projects are not created to be finished, but rather, to polish specific skill in your arsenal.
When I first started design school I remember learning so much about failing fast, it was wild. I remember a specific group project I worked on of making our own typeface where we just would go back to the drawing board everyday and still couldn't make it perfect— it drove me up a wall.
In hindsight, I think this project taught me to let things be imperfect and to move on when it is not serving me! It is difficult sometimes to want to scrap an idea that you feel really happy with, but that is taking the life out of you. I think ultimately moving in a different direction or scrapping a project altogether is inevitable and super important in the iteration process.
Always check when things can go to production, I once worked at an older job that was migrating to Git at the time.
One project was still on a NAS (Networked Attached Storage) Someone created a debug truncate SQL line somewhere in the file I was working, which wasn't in production yet.
So when I started working it truncated all the cars in the whole website. Luckily we had backups. But eventually I asked the lead developer to check with me as I had no Idea where it was coming from (15 minutes between runs, so ever 15 minutes it truncates the whole table, and with an API tries to import the new cars. But that was not in use anymore).
With that I quickly learned to ask for help early.
learned design patterns :)