What was the biggest mistake you've made this month?

Admitting your mistakes is just as important when continuously growing as a developer and designer.

Adopted an antiquated framework? Enabled and force pushed your changes to a team's master? Built everything with script.aculo.us?

More times than you think, it's also beneficial to your colleagues as well (whether they admit it or not), since you're sharing something that can help them improve their skill sets with intellectual feedback based on personal experience.

Well, here I am, shaking my head in disappointment. I was so happy that I had separated two database models last week, but as the "full picture" started to become much more clear to me that it was not only an unnecessary approach (since there are better ways to handle the intended goal), but also started an avalanche of changes that went against my personal love of writing DRY code. (aka , "Don't Repeat Yourself".)

I don't feel time was wasted, because now this goes into my mental log as "shit not to do", which is a fairly critical part of your evolution as a professional.

So, as a friendly counter to the question, "What was your biggest success this week?"...

What was the biggest mistake you've made this month?

Not being a more assertive scary Project Manager who escalate issues and risk a more time fashionable way.

I've made a typo on a join clause of very long SQL query, ended up with sending 118 emails to wrong clients.

My mistake was:

... join user on application.id = user.id

Instead of:

... join user on application.user_id = user.id

Big facepalm.

The mistake I made this month is underestimating my ability according to job necessity !

That's a mistake I make several times a day, seven days a week. :D

Sometimes, just reluctant to do something. Pretty lazy. Initially, I planned to complete experiments for a paper. Later I found there're lots of hidden traps, having to figure out all challenges one by one, which wasting lots of time. I was frustrated by some unexpected problems, then wanted to give up. But finally I have to face the problems. Therefore, what I learned is that difficulties are there, keep yourself calm and solve them without any anxiousness. That's life.

I over engineered my Android app. I am kind of restructuring it into just 3 classes now.

I created a Board game and created a lot of unnecessary components like Cell, Piece and Player when they aren't needed. The UI could just switch players automatically and the pieces could be stored as ints in a 2D array.

IDK what was up with me. But I am now writing all that crap in 3 files. I just finished have of it today.

Never write unnecessary code just to make it extra flexible and/or reusable in the unknown future.

I feel relieved telling this here ;)

My issue, stated in the original post, was "predictability". I wanted accounts to be flexible enough to be used globally, for multiple products.

But then, the reality of spending too much time on an unreleased product, which I honestly know will eventually have many pieces refactored with a clean slate mentality, kept reminding myself of the task at hand and the importance of seeing it as a viable way of creating something new with room for improvement, as opposed to updating something that was already pulling in revenue.

Doubling-up my code and separating important sets of logic for user accounts and profiles, that really didn't need to be outside of the User model, would have actually prevented me from helping it grow from an idea to an effective, functional prototype for something that could also become much bigger than I currently think it could be.

So I KISSed it. "Keep It Stupid Simple" - or, in my case - "Keep It Simple, Stupid". ;)

Alan Guitard - I think you didn't understand the quote fully - unknown future means for something that you won't ever aim for.

I mean, the Player object is not required, because the game was already two players. I just now have an state with two ints - for first and second player. It could PM_LOCAL, PM_COMPUTER, PM_NETWORKED - so whenever onTurnChanged is called, the UI just invokes the required action. For PM_LOCAL, nothing, the user will do an input. For PM_COMPUTER, use the analysis object and get the best move for current computer settings. For PM_NETWORKED, just send the move over Firebase.

My previous player really didn't do these things. Player was just an abstraction over whose turn it was, and it was the broker b/w the UI and the game for the moves.

After reading this, what do you think?

Yes, Sukant, I agree, I would use the same logic in your shoes. However, in your use case, a Player class is not needed in the first place since it has no information so the question of responsability is not even in the table. But if your player had for example life points, I think it is worth to put it in a class even if it is simpler to put a array of integer in the main class. The quotes would tell the opposite but not the separation of concerns.

I totally agree with your initial statement, don't get me wrong :)

I think mine was mergibg my test server and development server into one by mistake.. Book was not very clear but managed to sort it in the end 😂

The process of self-education: "What? But, how? Omfg, what?!? C'mon... WHY? Grrrr... oh. Hmmm. Oh, duh. Sweet!"

My biggest mistake this month....is that I still haven’t quit my job 🤪. But actually, I’ve made a mistake of listening to my superior during PR. I had an elegant solution to a particular problem(a bit of a duck 🦆 typing in C# for 2 similar, but not related entities), he said it’s too complex(yeah, fill object’s properties and turn it into a desired type is soooo complex 🤣). Made me rewrite it into a bulk of copy-paste logic, that took 3x more space and looks awful(+ harder to maintain). He said it will cut some logic branching, but it did not at all, it has even increased it....

I know about reducing complexity and all for it, but it just triggers me, when developers complain about ‘complex’ solutions, just because they don’t know the language features and can’t utilize them(even though this feature fits the problem like a glove and was even introduced to solve such problems).

Sorry for the rant 🤭

It's hard to balance between using rare but appropriate features that confuse your colleagues, or sticking to the basic functionality but needing much more code.

I also like to think that you should be able to expect colleagues to know the language fairly well. But maybe that's besed too much of Python and Java - it's probably harder to know all the stuff in Ruby or C++.

There has to be a cutoff somewhere though. If you write something that only 1 of your 40 colleagues understands without Google, then it's probably not productive to use it (whether it's your colleagues fault is another matter).

Yeah, I get all that, but still frustrating. It’s all about balance) There were 2 huge DTOs with all the same properties but the name of 1 id(one entity was split into 2), So what I did, is fill an expando object with all the properties, including both ids, and then just call a simple method that created an instance of a generic target type with filled properties from the expando. Then I would just call this method with one of this 2 types as target when I need them. The method is just 4 lines on creating an instance and filling it using for each over expando’s dictionary. That’s it. Maybe it’s just my bias, but to me it’s simple, takes little space and just 1 method. Would appreciate any feedback)

coming back from my vacation ;D ...

Take it from me, coming back from vacation to a full-time job is way easier than the work required to single-handedly build a new company from the ground up. There's never a vacation, plus you eat, sleep and work at home.

@hypergeek I am cofounder of 2 companies and stakeholder in a third :)and work for 2 other companies as consultant and freelancer. i cannot say anything about your experience but I think to some degree i see your point :)

Out of excitement I introduced Redux and all the middlewares of Redux like Redux-Saga, Redux-Actions, Redux-blah blah in my part-time project.. despite knowing it wasn't necessary 😅

Now for anything I want to write in React, I endup writing 3x more code in Redux middlewares 🤦🏻‍♂️

Lesson learnt: Before you add any framework/library to your project, make sure you try to picture the maintenance overhead it could add to your project

The biggest mistake I made was to introduce a bug on a production app yesterday. So, how did I introduce the bug?

I wrapped my component with an error boundary. In addition to wrapping my component, I accidentally wrapped a dropdown within the error boundary. When the dropdown changes, the error boundary resets (using a key) and everything within it (component tree) is re-constructed. This means that the dropdown componentWillUnmount is called and a new dropdown constructor is called.

So, what was the bug? When I open the dropdown, I remove the body scroll. And when the dropdown is closed, the body scroll is set again (to auto). I forgot to put this logic in componentWillUnmount. As a result, when the error boundary is reset, the body scroll is not reset.

Why is this the biggest mistake of the month? It was embarrassing. After the release, customers used the Dropdown and after that they were not able to scroll the page.

Second, there were multiple technical mistakes:

Dropdown was within the error boundary
Not resetting the scroll when un-mounting the component

Overall, I feel a bit guilty because I am a senior developer and should not be introducing these sort of bugs while coding. I am waiting for the day when I write perfect code :)

Is this thing in React? Well, it was a bit hard to understand. Cool though.

My recent fails are less coding mistakes, but more of the every-day kind...

My biggest mistake today? Ordering pizza when I'm on a diet. I am so weak 😖, but it's so good 🍕

And on Monday, I was a bit shaky, so I managed to evenly distribute my meal across the whole room.

Well, but I also got one at work: I accidentally truncated a few tables of a productive DB, whoops. Good thing: The data in there is mostly configs, and the DB in which I wanted to originally truncate the tables still held the copy, so I fixed it without anyone noticing. Really, where was my head, though....

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What was the biggest mistake you've made this month?

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What was the biggest mistake you've made this month?

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