Jeff Atwood, Michael Krakovskiy "The role of catastrophic failure in software design"

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Everyone knows success is boring! Anyone can succeed, and they won't shut up about it after they do. Happy families are all alike, as the saying goes. Let Michael and Jeff take you on a grand tour of what really matters in software development: failure. Take a glorious, life affirming tour through the variaous ways they've failed at building major software projects, from Stack Overflow to Fast Company, from Discourse to Inc Magazine. You too, can fail spectacularly, and look good doing it.

Technology

The Role of Catastrophic Failure
in Software Design
💥
Jeff Atwood & Michael Krakovskiy
Discourse & Modern Guild

Michael Krakovskiy
CTO, Modern Guild
20 years
Web architect
CMS expert

“War is long periods of boredom
punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”

“The most boring
of stories is that
of the happy
people”
Taras Shevchenko

I actually ask people when hiring how
many failures they've worked on, and I'm
actually more likely to hire someone
based on how many failures they've
experienced. I think it's the best learning
system.
— Will Wright

Learning doesn't happen from failure
itself but rather from analyzing the
failure, making a change, and then
trying again. Over time this gives you a
deep understanding of the problem
domain.

Have you ever made a
mistake? And, if so,
what was your worst
mistake?

❌ “Gee, I haven't really had
one.”
❌ “I've had a couple of bad
outcomes but they were due
to things outside my control.”

✅ “I make mistakes all the
time.”
✅ “A horrible thing that
happened just yesterday,
here’s how it went...”

They had the ability to rethink
everything that they'd done and
imagine how they might have
done it differently.

Planes that got hit in the
engine … weren’t
coming back.

To succeed in software
development, you must
be obsessed with
failure.

1. Industry failures
2. Our past failures
3. Our future failures

How do you get the
beneﬁt of failing
without… actually
failing?

A common artifact of the game
development process whereby the
game industry documents the fact that
everyone seems to continuously make
the same mistakes. 🤦‍♂

Every week there's some new, crazy
scheme to escape the island, but at the
end of the episode, the castaways
always end up stuck on the island for
yet another week.

36
Classic
Software
Development
Mistakes

Endeavor to make
all-new, spectacular,
never-seen-before
mistakes!

During the course of a safety system
test just before a routine maintenance
outage, Chernobyl 4 was destroyed
as a result of a power transient on 26
April 1986.

You are dealing with something that has never
occurred on this planet before.

How fast did we ﬁx it? ⌚
… and how can we ﬁx it even faster
next time? ⏱

Don’t be the guy with all
the answers.
Be the guy with all the
questions.

“Why worry about something that isn’t going to
happen?” Oh, that’s perfect, they should put that
on our money.

Do you perform safety system tests?
What does a safety system test look
like in software? 🤔

How can we change things so this
problem never happens to us
again?

How can we change things so this
problem never happens for
ANYONE again?

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