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Ask HN: What are some of your recent failures?

72 points by mhrnik 7y ago

After asking this question at indie hackers, I would like to know if anyone over here would like to share recent lessons from failures. Let's celebrate failures & grow.

dukeofharen 7y ago
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. 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. All in all, this was a good learning experience.
- random42 7y ago
  I hope you also periodically validate your backups with restoration as well - A backup is only good if it can be restored.
  - 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
    This! I've been backing up my Ubuntu machine using DejaDup (built in Ubuntu backups), only to realise - when my machine died - that they don't work. This was stupid on my part.
- barking 7y ago
  That was an example of what could be called a teachable moment. I'm remembering my standout moment as I type, the 'oh no, oh no' as I realised what was happening.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I know how that feels. Even worse than any program or script, I especially dislike db management tools that just allow you to fire off random queries against the db. On the other hand you always get these little adrenaline rushes every time you do something like that until you can confirm that you actually fired that delete statement on the correct table... or not.
  - bartread 7y ago
    The trick is to execute a BEGIN TRANSACTION, then do whatever you need to, then verify that you've done everything correctly (consider doing this twice). Then, only when you're absolutely certain all is as it should be, do you execute a COMMIT TRANSACTION. All of this is predicated on the idea that you know exactly what changes you need to make, exactly what state the database should be in afterwards, exactly how to verify this, and also how to check for unintended side-effects. I suppose the real trick is to avoid having to do this kind of thing in the first place but, as well all know, sometimes that's just not possible.
  - zubspace 7y ago
    Oh dear, I know that feeling. It's just a few rows and you've done it a hundred times before. You type in the delete query in a rush and look at it for a minute.. Just to make sure... Well OK: You hit F5 and then it runs... and runs... and runs... (12'503'450 rows affected) Oh crap.
- p3rry 7y ago
  Talking of deletion...I mistakenly deleted production server, yesterday! I was trying to create some AWS micro instance in Mumbai region which were for some reasons were not accessible. Eventually I had to create a mini instance. So I was terminating all those micro instances and some where by mistake one of my important prod instances got selected and boom. Though I had an AMI created few months back and it took around 15 mins to get latest code working but yeah I learnt my lesson. But again I think this is a bad ux from AWS where you can directly terminate any instance without any prompt or warning. I hope they change it some day!
  - pcnix 7y ago
    I'd suggest turning termination protection on across production instances as a first solution, and consider some sort of infrastructure as code in the long term.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  You can avoid accessing the production database entirely, unless you need to alter the structure, by creating a local one - which you've created via the restoration of your last backup.
marmaduke 7y ago
I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression. 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)
- aguzzi94 7y ago
  Wow that's harsh! How did you feel when you realized it?
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Relieved actually, because it allowed to meet an overdue performance deadline.
- mojomark 7y ago
  Ha, this is a great reflection. In a different domain I had a similar experience - working for about 2 years on an unmanned vehicle design I thought was revolutionary, only for a colleage to review the design and point out that reverting to a traditional propulsion engine increases performance by a factor of 2. I felt like a balloon deflating; alas life goes on. I suppose the lesson learned is avoid working in a vacuum of a project for long stretches and instead ask for a variety of consult from colleagues early and regularly.
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    That's a good remark as well: we didn't have effective iterations with feedback, just long arcs of speculative changes.
- cuchoi 7y ago
  What do you think was the cause of the underperformance of your Stan model?
thiscatis 7y ago
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. 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...
- aguzzi94 7y ago
  haha the first one is funny. About the second one, yes it's important to talk to users as soon as possible.
mlacks 7y ago
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. 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.
- mhrnik 7y ago
  I am not sure how hard is for you to not start side project again but you can start with small steps.
mikekchar 7y ago
I couldn't think of something to write here. That was probably the most recent one. I have lots of others, though.
- tohieungoi 7y ago
  Sorry! Can you help me how to get karma point??
aguzzi94 7y ago
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!
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  Please just drink it out tonight.a glass of wine instead if jealousy
  - aguzzi94 7y ago
    You almost got me! I'll opt for a glass of chocolate milk, but thank you :)
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      Can I recommend a strawberry purée + lime + orange juice mocktail? It's my go-to non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated sweet drink and it's delicious!
      - aguzzi94 7y ago
        Thank you sir. I'll take one, with a cherry on top please. Joke aside, I'll try one as soon as I can for real thanks
cambalache 7y ago
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.
- zhdc1 7y ago
  Don't sweat it. My brother in law was in a similar position (education instead of work though), and is now doing very well for himself.
  - michaelbrooks 7y ago
    I too am in a similar situation. Got made redundant after working for a company for 2 and a half years. Decided to start my own business and go forward as a contractor. It's no more or less secure than being full-time nowadays since I've been made redundant 3 times now and all because of money issues.
- vincvinc 7y ago
  Which host country? People on HN might be inclined to help.
  - cambalache 7y ago
    It does not matter now, because I need to leave in 2 months tops otherwise I will be deported. I am planning to move to the Americas south cone (Argentina or Brazil) so it is preferable an opportunity there or remote than in my current host country.
HNLurker2 7y ago
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)
- psv1 7y ago
  The last one is more likely to happen and things work out better when it isn't an explicit goal.
michaelbrooks 7y ago
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. 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.
zhdc1 7y ago
I haven't been able to motivate myself to finish several projects that are 90-95% done.
- bartread 7y ago
  I really struggle with this too. Victory, or at least the finish line, is in sight, and most of the hard work is done, but what's left is fiddly and annoying - probably time-consuming and boring too - and I just run out of mojo. My current battle is painting my house: the woodwork, in particular, just gets me down. I should be doing that rather than writing this comment.
- yonixw 7y ago
  Same. But I found a loophole in my mind. I make a second phase. By expanding the project scope and targets even more, you are required to finish the first phase bugs and fixes. The only problem is you now have the second phase only 90% completed. Here comes phase 3 ...
- efdee 7y ago
  The last 5-10% takes up 90% of your time :(
Insanity 7y ago
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. 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..
- thoughtpalette 7y ago
  Oh man, this reminds me. Trying to debug/work in changes for a web app and refreshing the production server instead of looking at localhost. Wondering why my changes are not working. It's taken over a half hour sometimes before realizing I'm looking at the wrong domain.
throwaway8879 7y ago
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...
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
  Sorry to hear this, and hope that you're starting to do better. Glad to hear that it sounds like there are folks in your life to support you.
- derpherpsson 7y ago
  You are the most free when you have nothing to lose. A failed suicide attempt can be thought of as that Every Single Moment from that point in life is a Bonus. I know because I was there :) I should have died a few years ago, but didnt. Not giving a fsck and also being adventurous is a nice combo.
pkphilip 7y ago
Plenty of failures. Too many to count.
Gibbon1 7y ago
I spent three hours digging through my build system to figure out why the compiler couldn't find a header file named 'blahblah .h'
_Understated_ 7y ago
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. I couldn't devote all the required time to it so I've stopped it now. Partner in tow, I am working on something else though.
derpherpsson 7y ago
Getting a job at a huge megacorp has shown to be a failure for me. Why? 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 any real work done for the entire day. 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. 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. 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.
- bartread 7y ago
  > 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. Don't worry about it. If your entire CV were full of jobs where you've spent < 12 months (contracting aside), it would a red flag. The odd one here or there doesn't matter: everyone has a job that doesn't work out/isn't for them from time to time. (Also, I too have worked for a megacorp - as a contractor - and it, quite literally, nearly drove me off the rails. I lasted 8 months. Who knew that getting next to nothing done, and being paid for it, could be so stressful? But it really is. You're not wrong about it being bad for your career either. I don't have loads of data, but I have found that developers who've spent too long in that kind of environment don't do so well in our selection process so, if anything, leaving after a short time will only be a positive for your career.)
- algaeontoast 7y ago
  During my time at a FAANG this was my exact experience, I became a worse engineer because of it.
cessor 7y ago
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 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. 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. 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.
- dazzawazza 7y ago
  I'm gonna guess that you have less than 10 years experience? I sounds like you do. My suggestion anyway is to read or re-read the book peopleware by DeMarco. It will help you build distance between you (the internal emotional you) and problems. It's most important lesson is that there are no evil people which sounds trite but when you read the rest of the book you get the point. I've read it quite a few times over my career. Good luck.
  - mhrnik 7y ago
    Agree, Reading may help you improve your thinking process and help you understand that it's fine if you don't fulfil your or other expectations from you.
- tohieungoi 7y ago
  I want to get karma point to connect with "keybase" app, Can you help me how to get karma point pls!!
- dangerface 7y ago
otobrglez 7y ago
As a technology director succumbed to the (product) managements wish for new functionalities over the scalability. Now we have a lot of useful and legitimately needed functionality and unscalable system. Make sure that you always measure and present the numbers of your systems abilities along with new product features to the management. It is a very tricky balance. Hard to master. Communicate!
iKnowWhyIamHere 7y ago
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. 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.
- bbimbop 7y ago
  this is more of a humble brag than a failure
elp 7y ago
Last week. 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. 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. 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. I wonder if I can put "I broke the internet" on my CV? --- * 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. DNSSEC is VERY complicated and brittle with many ways to hurt yourself.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Can I ask why your organization bothers with DNSSEC, when virtually nobody in the industry does? Can I take a wild guess that you're located somewhere in Europe? DNSSEC is a dead letter in the US.
  - elp 7y ago
    We're a backend registry operator. ICANN requires it for the new generic TLDs and all the ccTLDs we support expect the same "best practice". ICANN that wonderful organization that requires us to have TLSA records for our RDAP servers even though browser support out the box is zero.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      You have my deep sympathies.
cirgue 7y ago
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.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of time on doing something only loosely related at best. So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you are considering this a failure, then you can turn it into a success by releasing the forum software for others to use.
  - AndrewStephens 7y ago
    > This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. I've done exactly this. It was a really good game engine - sprites, animation, LUA scripting, and everything. But once I had it running the original inspiration for the game was gone. I learned a lot in the process so I don't count it as wasted time. More recently,I built a my own static site generator like everyone else and their dogs. I guess I really never finished it but it is feature complete enough to do exactly what I need even if nobody else is ever going to use it. Like the gp's forum software, that is a kind of success.
  - cirgue 7y ago
    I set out to build a product I would want to use from scratch. I succeeded in that I deployed a web app that does everything it's supposed to do (More or less a Metafilter clone). This is the first thing I've ever put on the internet, and I definitely learned a huge amount (my day job is in ML and most of my side projects are data/stats/ML related). I guess the answer is that I set out to do both. I did one, and have been dragging my feet on the other.
closingin 7y ago
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). 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. 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. What I learned from this : don't speak with someone else while deploying, huge focus loss. PS : The company is an ISP.
platoscubicle 7y ago
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.
ryanmercer 7y ago
My life mostly. I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some sort of skill where I might 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. 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". 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? 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. Yup. 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. (obligatory disclaimer: not suicidal, just honest and mostly defeated).
- CogitoCogito 7y ago
  Do you have time to do things outside of work? For example running with a club of people or something. I just wonder if you are able to do things on the side that are real and difficult goals but that you can achieve on your own (though possibly after a lot of work). This obviously wouldn’t make your career life any better but you might have other things going on that would lead you not to describe life as a failure.
tekstar 7y ago
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.
Jedi72 7y ago
I've been trying to customize emacs into a useful editor for weeks now.
- AndrewOMartin 7y ago
  This sounds like the start of a Zen Koan. A master approaches an apprentice, the master has a software engineering project for them both to work on, and tells the apprentice to make it clear when they were ready to start. Weeks pass and the apprentice never says anything, but just hacks away at their own machine. The master asks them why they aren't ready, and the apprentice replies, "We'll be ready once we've customized vim/emacs into a useful editor. But don't blame me for the delay, you have just installed stock vim/emacs, you haven't even started your customization", the master replied "I've already finished". Then the apprentice was enlightened.
prune998 7y ago
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 !
mister_hn 7y ago
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.
- mhrnik 7y ago
  emotional thinking > practical thinking
- sbierwagen 7y ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
  - mister_hn 7y ago
    yes, I know, but from scratch in the sense of porting the portions of code in another environment and at same time using unit tests and code coverage tool to isolate the parts and adapt to a better architecture.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Bit of advice I've found that the easiest way to introduce a new technology is to use it on something that is isolated and not totally critical first.
woutr_be 7y ago
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. 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.
- Slimbo 7y ago
  Try to stay positive, looks like you have a good idea what the issues are which means you can plan to make it better. Ideally you should do your best to find someone who can help by simply talking these issues though, ideally face to face. It looks to me that it's food that's the problem rather than your weight, so why not look at that first. With a longer term view; try to reverse that trend of weight slowly going on, to weight slowly going off. Things that worked for me are intermittent fasting (mostly because it's easier to follow than diets), and some rules around processed food. Try to go with foods with under 5 ingredients, prioritising foods that are low in sugars or flours (wheat, cornflour, etc). If you slip, don't sweat it, just get back to it as soon as you can.
  - woutr_be 7y ago
    Thanks, my weight is the aftermath of the unhealthy food, and I do consider it my biggest problem. I constantly feel embarrassed when doing things, I feel shy when meeting new people, constantly wondering whether they're judging me on my weight or not. I've been trying for years to eat healthier, tried intermittent fasting as well. Usually it works for a few days, and then I screw it up over the weekend. I think that constant failure is having a negative impact on everything else too.
omergultekin 7y ago
The key to the success lock is the unsuccessful experience.
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ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
I was writing a series about ecoterrorist sorcerers but then I started a tough contract at work that took all my energy away The MVP was promising tho
muddi900 7y ago
My current venture is has been a week away from insolvency for the past 6 months.
keerthiko 7y ago
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. The payment platform's API's `updatePlan` function had an optional flag for `reactivateSubscriptionAndBillImmediately` with default value of `true`, as it turns out. 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. 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. 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.
haolez 7y ago
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). 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. 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. I’ve made a bad choice because he was my friend and I valued that above the business parameters. It was a terrible mistake.

72 points by mhrnik 7y ago

After asking this question at indie hackers, I would like to know if anyone over here would like to share recent lessons from failures. Let's celebrate failures & grow.

dukeofharen 7y ago

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. 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. All in all, this was a good learning experience.

random42 7y ago
I hope you also periodically validate your backups with restoration as well - A backup is only good if it can be restored.
- 2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
  This! I've been backing up my Ubuntu machine using DejaDup (built in Ubuntu backups), only to realise - when my machine died - that they don't work. This was stupid on my part.
barking 7y ago
That was an example of what could be called a teachable moment. I'm remembering my standout moment as I type, the 'oh no, oh no' as I realised what was happening.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I know how that feels. Even worse than any program or script, I especially dislike db management tools that just allow you to fire off random queries against the db. On the other hand you always get these little adrenaline rushes every time you do something like that until you can confirm that you actually fired that delete statement on the correct table... or not.
- bartread 7y ago
  The trick is to execute a BEGIN TRANSACTION, then do whatever you need to, then verify that you've done everything correctly (consider doing this twice). Then, only when you're absolutely certain all is as it should be, do you execute a COMMIT TRANSACTION. All of this is predicated on the idea that you know exactly what changes you need to make, exactly what state the database should be in afterwards, exactly how to verify this, and also how to check for unintended side-effects. I suppose the real trick is to avoid having to do this kind of thing in the first place but, as well all know, sometimes that's just not possible.
- zubspace 7y ago
  Oh dear, I know that feeling. It's just a few rows and you've done it a hundred times before. You type in the delete query in a rush and look at it for a minute.. Just to make sure... Well OK: You hit F5 and then it runs... and runs... and runs... (12'503'450 rows affected) Oh crap.
p3rry 7y ago
Talking of deletion...I mistakenly deleted production server, yesterday! I was trying to create some AWS micro instance in Mumbai region which were for some reasons were not accessible. Eventually I had to create a mini instance. So I was terminating all those micro instances and some where by mistake one of my important prod instances got selected and boom. Though I had an AMI created few months back and it took around 15 mins to get latest code working but yeah I learnt my lesson. But again I think this is a bad ux from AWS where you can directly terminate any instance without any prompt or warning. I hope they change it some day!
- pcnix 7y ago
  I'd suggest turning termination protection on across production instances as a first solution, and consider some sort of infrastructure as code in the long term.
stevekemp 7y ago
You can avoid accessing the production database entirely, unless you need to alter the structure, by creating a local one - which you've created via the restoration of your last backup.

marmaduke 7y ago

I spent 3 years building a complex statistical model in Stan, only to double its performance with a trivial linear regression. 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)

aguzzi94 7y ago
Wow that's harsh! How did you feel when you realized it?
- marmaduke 7y ago
  Relieved actually, because it allowed to meet an overdue performance deadline.
mojomark 7y ago
Ha, this is a great reflection. In a different domain I had a similar experience - working for about 2 years on an unmanned vehicle design I thought was revolutionary, only for a colleage to review the design and point out that reverting to a traditional propulsion engine increases performance by a factor of 2. I felt like a balloon deflating; alas life goes on. I suppose the lesson learned is avoid working in a vacuum of a project for long stretches and instead ask for a variety of consult from colleagues early and regularly.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  That's a good remark as well: we didn't have effective iterations with feedback, just long arcs of speculative changes.
cuchoi 7y ago
What do you think was the cause of the underperformance of your Stan model?

thiscatis 7y ago

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. 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...

aguzzi94 7y ago
haha the first one is funny. About the second one, yes it's important to talk to users as soon as possible.

mlacks 7y ago

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. 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.

mhrnik 7y ago
I am not sure how hard is for you to not start side project again but you can start with small steps.

mikekchar 7y ago

I couldn't think of something to write here. That was probably the most recent one. I have lots of others, though.

tohieungoi 7y ago
Sorry! Can you help me how to get karma point??

aguzzi94 7y ago

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!

HNLurker2 7y ago
Please just drink it out tonight.a glass of wine instead if jealousy
- aguzzi94 7y ago
  You almost got me! I'll opt for a glass of chocolate milk, but thank you :)
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Can I recommend a strawberry purée + lime + orange juice mocktail? It's my go-to non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated sweet drink and it's delicious!
    - aguzzi94 7y ago
      Thank you sir. I'll take one, with a cherry on top please. Joke aside, I'll try one as soon as I can for real thanks

cambalache 7y ago

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.

zhdc1 7y ago
Don't sweat it. My brother in law was in a similar position (education instead of work though), and is now doing very well for himself.
- michaelbrooks 7y ago
  I too am in a similar situation. Got made redundant after working for a company for 2 and a half years. Decided to start my own business and go forward as a contractor. It's no more or less secure than being full-time nowadays since I've been made redundant 3 times now and all because of money issues.
vincvinc 7y ago
Which host country? People on HN might be inclined to help.
- cambalache 7y ago
  It does not matter now, because I need to leave in 2 months tops otherwise I will be deported. I am planning to move to the Americas south cone (Argentina or Brazil) so it is preferable an opportunity there or remote than in my current host country.

HNLurker2 7y ago

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)

psv1 7y ago
The last one is more likely to happen and things work out better when it isn't an explicit goal.

michaelbrooks 7y ago

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. 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.

zhdc1 7y ago

I haven't been able to motivate myself to finish several projects that are 90-95% done.

bartread 7y ago
I really struggle with this too. Victory, or at least the finish line, is in sight, and most of the hard work is done, but what's left is fiddly and annoying - probably time-consuming and boring too - and I just run out of mojo. My current battle is painting my house: the woodwork, in particular, just gets me down. I should be doing that rather than writing this comment.
yonixw 7y ago
Same. But I found a loophole in my mind. I make a second phase. By expanding the project scope and targets even more, you are required to finish the first phase bugs and fixes. The only problem is you now have the second phase only 90% completed. Here comes phase 3 ...
efdee 7y ago
The last 5-10% takes up 90% of your time :(

Insanity 7y ago

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. 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..

thoughtpalette 7y ago
Oh man, this reminds me. Trying to debug/work in changes for a web app and refreshing the production server instead of looking at localhost. Wondering why my changes are not working. It's taken over a half hour sometimes before realizing I'm looking at the wrong domain.

throwaway8879 7y ago

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...

2T1Qka0rEiPr 7y ago
Sorry to hear this, and hope that you're starting to do better. Glad to hear that it sounds like there are folks in your life to support you.
derpherpsson 7y ago
You are the most free when you have nothing to lose. A failed suicide attempt can be thought of as that Every Single Moment from that point in life is a Bonus. I know because I was there :) I should have died a few years ago, but didnt. Not giving a fsck and also being adventurous is a nice combo.

pkphilip 7y ago

Plenty of failures. Too many to count.

Gibbon1 7y ago

I spent three hours digging through my build system to figure out why the compiler couldn't find a header file named 'blahblah .h'

_Understated_ 7y ago

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. I couldn't devote all the required time to it so I've stopped it now. Partner in tow, I am working on something else though.

derpherpsson 7y ago

Getting a job at a huge megacorp has shown to be a failure for me. Why? 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 any real work done for the entire day. 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. 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. 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.

bartread 7y ago
> 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. Don't worry about it. If your entire CV were full of jobs where you've spent < 12 months (contracting aside), it would a red flag. The odd one here or there doesn't matter: everyone has a job that doesn't work out/isn't for them from time to time. (Also, I too have worked for a megacorp - as a contractor - and it, quite literally, nearly drove me off the rails. I lasted 8 months. Who knew that getting next to nothing done, and being paid for it, could be so stressful? But it really is. You're not wrong about it being bad for your career either. I don't have loads of data, but I have found that developers who've spent too long in that kind of environment don't do so well in our selection process so, if anything, leaving after a short time will only be a positive for your career.)
algaeontoast 7y ago
During my time at a FAANG this was my exact experience, I became a worse engineer because of it.

cessor 7y ago

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 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. 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. 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.

dazzawazza 7y ago
I'm gonna guess that you have less than 10 years experience? I sounds like you do. My suggestion anyway is to read or re-read the book peopleware by DeMarco. It will help you build distance between you (the internal emotional you) and problems. It's most important lesson is that there are no evil people which sounds trite but when you read the rest of the book you get the point. I've read it quite a few times over my career. Good luck.
- mhrnik 7y ago
  Agree, Reading may help you improve your thinking process and help you understand that it's fine if you don't fulfil your or other expectations from you.
tohieungoi 7y ago
I want to get karma point to connect with "keybase" app, Can you help me how to get karma point pls!!
dangerface 7y ago

otobrglez 7y ago

As a technology director succumbed to the (product) managements wish for new functionalities over the scalability. Now we have a lot of useful and legitimately needed functionality and unscalable system. Make sure that you always measure and present the numbers of your systems abilities along with new product features to the management. It is a very tricky balance. Hard to master. Communicate!

iKnowWhyIamHere 7y ago

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. 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.

bbimbop 7y ago
this is more of a humble brag than a failure

elp 7y ago

Last week. 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. 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. 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. I wonder if I can put "I broke the internet" on my CV? --- * 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. DNSSEC is VERY complicated and brittle with many ways to hurt yourself.

tptacek 7y ago
Can I ask why your organization bothers with DNSSEC, when virtually nobody in the industry does? Can I take a wild guess that you're located somewhere in Europe? DNSSEC is a dead letter in the US.
- elp 7y ago
  We're a backend registry operator. ICANN requires it for the new generic TLDs and all the ccTLDs we support expect the same "best practice". ICANN that wonderful organization that requires us to have TLSA records for our RDAP servers even though browser support out the box is zero.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    You have my deep sympathies.

cirgue 7y ago

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.

scrollaway 7y ago
This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. You built a forum, that's great. If you set out to build a forum, you succeeded. If you set out to build a community, you just wasted a bunch of time on doing something only loosely related at best. So the question is, what did you actually set out to do? If you are considering this a failure, then you can turn it into a success by releasing the forum software for others to use.
- AndrewStephens 7y ago
  > This reminds me of why you don't make your own game engine when you are building a game. You'll spend months or years working on exactly what isn't a game. I've done exactly this. It was a really good game engine - sprites, animation, LUA scripting, and everything. But once I had it running the original inspiration for the game was gone. I learned a lot in the process so I don't count it as wasted time. More recently,I built a my own static site generator like everyone else and their dogs. I guess I really never finished it but it is feature complete enough to do exactly what I need even if nobody else is ever going to use it. Like the gp's forum software, that is a kind of success.
- cirgue 7y ago
  I set out to build a product I would want to use from scratch. I succeeded in that I deployed a web app that does everything it's supposed to do (More or less a Metafilter clone). This is the first thing I've ever put on the internet, and I definitely learned a huge amount (my day job is in ML and most of my side projects are data/stats/ML related). I guess the answer is that I set out to do both. I did one, and have been dragging my feet on the other.

closingin 7y ago

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). 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. 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. What I learned from this : don't speak with someone else while deploying, huge focus loss. PS : The company is an ISP.

platoscubicle 7y ago

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.

ryanmercer 7y ago

My life mostly. I'm 34, have a GED, have a bankruptcy, do not have a degree, do not have some sort of skill where I might 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. 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". 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? 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. Yup. 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. (obligatory disclaimer: not suicidal, just honest and mostly defeated).

CogitoCogito 7y ago
Do you have time to do things outside of work? For example running with a club of people or something. I just wonder if you are able to do things on the side that are real and difficult goals but that you can achieve on your own (though possibly after a lot of work). This obviously wouldn’t make your career life any better but you might have other things going on that would lead you not to describe life as a failure.

tekstar 7y ago

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.

Jedi72 7y ago

I've been trying to customize emacs into a useful editor for weeks now.

AndrewOMartin 7y ago
This sounds like the start of a Zen Koan. A master approaches an apprentice, the master has a software engineering project for them both to work on, and tells the apprentice to make it clear when they were ready to start. Weeks pass and the apprentice never says anything, but just hacks away at their own machine. The master asks them why they aren't ready, and the apprentice replies, "We'll be ready once we've customized vim/emacs into a useful editor. But don't blame me for the delay, you have just installed stock vim/emacs, you haven't even started your customization", the master replied "I've already finished". Then the apprentice was enlightened.

prune998 7y ago

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 !

mister_hn 7y ago

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.

mhrnik 7y ago
emotional thinking > practical thinking
sbierwagen 7y ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- mister_hn 7y ago
  yes, I know, but from scratch in the sense of porting the portions of code in another environment and at same time using unit tests and code coverage tool to isolate the parts and adapt to a better architecture.
Gibbon1 7y ago
Bit of advice I've found that the easiest way to introduce a new technology is to use it on something that is isolated and not totally critical first.

woutr_be 7y ago

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. 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.

Slimbo 7y ago
Try to stay positive, looks like you have a good idea what the issues are which means you can plan to make it better. Ideally you should do your best to find someone who can help by simply talking these issues though, ideally face to face. It looks to me that it's food that's the problem rather than your weight, so why not look at that first. With a longer term view; try to reverse that trend of weight slowly going on, to weight slowly going off. Things that worked for me are intermittent fasting (mostly because it's easier to follow than diets), and some rules around processed food. Try to go with foods with under 5 ingredients, prioritising foods that are low in sugars or flours (wheat, cornflour, etc). If you slip, don't sweat it, just get back to it as soon as you can.
- woutr_be 7y ago
  Thanks, my weight is the aftermath of the unhealthy food, and I do consider it my biggest problem. I constantly feel embarrassed when doing things, I feel shy when meeting new people, constantly wondering whether they're judging me on my weight or not. I've been trying for years to eat healthier, tried intermittent fasting as well. Usually it works for a few days, and then I screw it up over the weekend. I think that constant failure is having a negative impact on everything else too.

omergultekin 7y ago

The key to the success lock is the unsuccessful experience.

annetteharma 7y ago

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ulisesrmzroche 7y ago

I was writing a series about ecoterrorist sorcerers but then I started a tough contract at work that took all my energy away The MVP was promising tho

muddi900 7y ago

My current venture is has been a week away from insolvency for the past 6 months.

keerthiko 7y ago

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. The payment platform's API's `updatePlan` function had an optional flag for `reactivateSubscriptionAndBillImmediately` with default value of `true`, as it turns out. 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. 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. 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.

haolez 7y ago

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). 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. 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. I’ve made a bad choice because he was my friend and I valued that above the business parameters. It was a terrible mistake.