Let's share our biggest f**k up!

Last year I spent $5,000 traveling to 4 different conferences in 4 different countries (within one month) with a goal to get more clients and ended up with 0 clients.

Accidentally sent board minutes to a VC firm that a co-founder (unbeknownst to me) had for some reason written that the firm ‘don’t have the kahones to lead an investment by themselves’

They didn’t invest.

When I was in high-school, participating in my first regional Olympiad in Informatics I didn't qualify to the nationals and only got 3rd place. I did solve the problem correctly, only that I forgot to use long long datatype instead of int, so the solution value would overflow the datatype. If only I declared that variable with the correct datatype I would have easily qualified. The good part is that this motivated me, which lead to me getting 1st place the following two years. It also made me realize that in the programming world, there usually is no "almost right" solution. It either works or it doesn't. If it works in 99% of the casess, it's wrong.

As for the professional career, I don't recall any huge fuck-up, which means that I either didn't do any that is worth remembering or it was so big that it's now a repressed memory 😅.

Yeah, one time I accidentally deleted about 400 million data points or so. That was a really bad day. In retrospect, that was just a small lesson to prevent a bigger fuck up. If I'd do that now I'd lose about 400 years worth of data instead.

Another big fuck up was crashing some (external) mailservers by an infinite loop in some php script, but that one didn't really have consequences lasting longer than a day.

Thanks for the share! Sounds like a very unfortunate situation.. Good thing it got resolved in a matter of hours instead of days!

My biggest fuckup is where I accidentally made a coding mistake which added several hundreds mail addresses of customers in the cc instead of bcc, which then lead to the occasional lawyer emails. Small fuckup which took a lot of time!

Man I'm still living through my biggest fuck up!

I hadn't touched a side project for months. And when I came back to edit it, the dependencies were outdated. Trying to get that tangled mess fixed was so frustrating that I'm building the whole thing again from scratch. 😫

It's wayyy neater now. Will be updating very soon 😊

The project is timeblocks.co

Written about this on IH before, but I wasted $40K leaving a huge test harness running in AWS. Think hundreds of powerful VMs running for like a week.

That was during my first few months of work after uni, definitely not a good day I'll tell you that.

Went to High school and college

Lol :D ! I literally just today posted a video about my **ck-up as a developer, costing our company potentially tens of thousands lost in future revenue.
Do check it out:
https://youtu.be/cJsZchpvFLY