Mistakes at Work, Part II
Hello, this is the second part of mistakes at work, let me share with you some stories and the things I learned.
Deleting files
In my second job, I made more mistakes, not only the one about the soccer game.
One afternoon, the CTO of the company called by phone and explained to me some steps to execute a command on the server. I executed the command without any problem, but I didn't realize that I wrote it wrong.
If you're curious about what command I executed, It was the famous and dangerous rm -rf * (if you are not familiar with this, it deletes everything inside the folder you are in).
After some minutes, the CTO called me again and explained my mistake, he wasn't angry at all he was laughing, at that time I felt very ashamed, but he managed to restore the files, and he executed the command.
Until now, he always jokes about this (this mistake happened seven or eight years ago)
What I learned from this experience
- Double-check the command you are executing, there is no garbage bin or undo command.
- Write all the new commands you learn in a text file and learn how to use them.
My First Experience using Django
In my third, I learned about Python and a beautiful framework called Django. One time we had to develop a small website where users had the chance to win a pizza for Valentine’s Day, this was my first Django project, so I was very excited.
I didn't have experience in applications with several concurrent users at once, so this website crashed a few times, my partners helped me to fix these problems.
The CEO of the company yelled at us and told us:
Let me know if you can fix this, If you can't, I can bring someone that can
What I learned from this experience
- Double-check what you are doing.
- Read the documentation or the best practices of the framework you are using.
- Google, a lot about applications for concurrent users.
My first HTML5 application
In this job, I was hired because of my knowledge of Action Script 3 and PHP.
As many of you know, flash is a dead technology that had some advantages and disadvantages, but this is a topic for another post.
Like many flash developers, I changed to using an HTML5 framework called CreateJS.
At that time, we have a requirement to develop an application that can control a video using the user keyboard and show some animations like a game.
The main issue with this application was with the frontend developer, she suggested this idea and told the creative team it was a piece of cake to develop it.
As days passed, she couldn’t make her demo work, so my boss asked me for help because they know I had experience with this kind of application. As I mentioned before, I couldn’t use flash, so my only alternative was to use CreateJS, but I was very novice at using it.
I only had a couple of days to develop this, I managed to do it by mixing a lot of technologies and tools, for example, I used Flash to export the animations I needed and YouTube API to control the video. The application looked good and people played a lot.
After reading this story, you will think Luis you didn't make any mistake, but there was a big mistake I made, I accepted all the conditions that the frontend chose without questioning them, the CEO of the company instead of cheering me up only questioned me for not using Influxis Service instead of YouTube, my team didn't back me up and the frontend that couldn’t make it didn't speak a word of it.
What I learned from this experience
- Analyze the requirements and don't be afraid of questioning the tools they are planning to use.
- There is no I in the team, you have your team’s back, and they have yours.
He forgot to start the servers
This happened some years ago in my current job, I didn’t make this mistake, it was my teammate’s mistake, let’s call him “Little Lion”.
We were in charge of giving support to a live survey every Friday for a certain period of time, as TI we had to turn on some instances and create some readers' databases for the main cluster.
This specific day, Little Lion forgot to do these activities and no one checked if everything was OK, one member of the commercial team called me and told me that the survey was not working, so I logged in to the account to do all the things I mentioned before.
As you are reading, you will tell me Luis is not a big deal, but It was because this survey was broadcasting on Live TV and for several minutes the presenter didn’t know what to do to buy us time. The client was calling my bosses to ask about the problem and the solution, they managed to handle the client.
After the TV show ended, and we turned off all the servers and database, my bosses called me and Little Lion to demand an answer to this problem, Little Lion was very scared, and I decided to answer:
I took full responsibility for this, I haven’t checked if Little Lion did all the things he had to do.
My bosses at the time, only wanted to blame Little Lion for this instead of looking for alternatives.
What I learned from this experience
- There is no I in the team, you have your team’s back, and they have yours, this is the most important thing I can teach you.
As you can see, in every job you will have you will make mistakes or your teammates will do, it’s up to you to take advantage of every lesson you learn and don't forget to improve yourself.
