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This wasn't necessarily the most constructive thing to say, but it unintentionally invites a silver lining: studying failure is the most effective route to succ

This wasn't necessarily the most constructive thing to say, but it unintentionally invites a silver lining: studying failure is the most effective route to success. This is as true in software as it is in operations, economics, finance or pretty much any other discipline.

koolba 7y ago
Studying failure is better than not studying, but it can’t hold a candle to to studying success. As an extreme example, seeing ten spaghetti codebases does not teach you much more than the first. But expanding your mind by studying new patterns and paradigms, skillfully and elegantly woven, will build upon everything you’ve already mastered.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Absolutely not true. I've learnt more from my failures than my successes. I'm more interested in other people's failures than their successes. Understanding why a conceptual error was ever allowed to be realised is very instructive and a very cheap lesson (if it's something you weren't involved in!). Seeing a clusterfuck of microservices blooming darkly in the midst of a project, watching time being wasted sorting it out every bloody time more code was checked in, sucking precious time from the rest of the projct - you can learn a lot immediately. Lesson: don't use them without good reason. Or seeing a function that takes a geographical area and returns a list of progressively larger areas that enclose it eg. give buenos aries, it returns argentina, south america, america, the world. But note that the function does not return its input (buenos aries) which caused every bloody call of that function to have extra code to add it back in because it was needed. Lesson 1: the output of a function like this is always likely to need its input for our app, so provide the input with the output. Lesson 2: If it's evident a function isn't quite adequate, provide a wrapper function that does what's needed so the users don't have to write workaround code every time. > skillfully and elegantly woven (giggle). Not on my planet!

koolba 7y ago

Studying failure is better than not studying, but it can’t hold a candle to to studying success. As an extreme example, seeing ten spaghetti codebases does not teach you much more than the first. But expanding your mind by studying new patterns and paradigms, skillfully and elegantly woven, will build upon everything you’ve already mastered.

tempguy9999 7y ago
Absolutely not true. I've learnt more from my failures than my successes. I'm more interested in other people's failures than their successes. Understanding why a conceptual error was ever allowed to be realised is very instructive and a very cheap lesson (if it's something you weren't involved in!). Seeing a clusterfuck of microservices blooming darkly in the midst of a project, watching time being wasted sorting it out every bloody time more code was checked in, sucking precious time from the rest of the projct - you can learn a lot immediately. Lesson: don't use them without good reason. Or seeing a function that takes a geographical area and returns a list of progressively larger areas that enclose it eg. give buenos aries, it returns argentina, south america, america, the world. But note that the function does not return its input (buenos aries) which caused every bloody call of that function to have extra code to add it back in because it was needed. Lesson 1: the output of a function like this is always likely to need its input for our app, so provide the input with the output. Lesson 2: If it's evident a function isn't quite adequate, provide a wrapper function that does what's needed so the users don't have to write workaround code every time. > skillfully and elegantly woven (giggle). Not on my planet!