I once had to explain to our executive team why a project had been such a shitshow...it had ended in a two-week crunch to basically unfuck the work that had bee

I once had to explain to our executive team why a project had been such a shitshow...it had ended in a two-week crunch to basically unfuck the work that had been to that point, where I cleaned up a mess one of my devs had gotten themselves into (and which, frankly, I had screwed up and let them fall into). I used the emails, wiki revision history, and commit logs to piece back together what actually had happened. It's a lot different looking at things after the fact, and saying "Oh, I guess we really did take that long to do something...oh, interesting, yeah, we never had direction from the biz folks here, here, and here, and that's where this kinda went off the rails." As for keeping together a cohesive narrative, as much as I'd love to be able to look at a bound volume of "The Trials and Tribulations of Angersock, Software Engineer", the only inarguable records are the grey hairs, the worry lines, and the eye tics. Everything else is basically reality-by-consensus, even if you've got the paper trail to claim otherwise. Just let it go.