Failure Driven Development

How learning from failure helps us build better systems, products, engineering culture

Transcript

1. Failure Driven Development Because I’m really good at breaking stuff
2. Mercedes Coyle Hackbright Alumna Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure at Real Gravity @benzobot
3. Software sucks.
4. Being comfortable with breaking your code will help you avoid “perfectionist paralysis”. First make your code work, then make it pretty.
5. Text Think of your code as “beater code”
6. Is your application broken, or is that a feature request? In the wild, people will use your code in ways you don’t anticipate or expect.
7. My code is broken, but all my tests passed…?!
8. At some point, you will need to fix broken code under pressure.
9. How can I practice failure without disastrous consequences? Write tests for your code! Create a staging environment that closely mirrors your production environment. When something breaks, recover quickly. Dont’ go it alone.
10. No matter how hard you try, date times will always screw with you.