Daily Prompt: 2024-06-20
Do you have any projects that you consider a failure? What happened?
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I was once on a project where we made literally every mistake. We used an inappropriate programming language, an inappropriate type of database, a cutting-edge and largely untested async framework. We didn't have proper guidelines or linting rules so as time crunch occurred to get the product released quality fell, drastically.
I learned so much from that product... but in the end, it actually was a very stable product and required very little maintenance right up until the day that it was sunset.
Obviously I am being vague about what the product does because I am not proud of my work there. I learned a lot about taking ownership of the entire process of software development, not just the code. I learned that I couldn't always 100% trust the most senior engineer. He needed me to pushback earlier.
The only thing that saved us was that I invested time and effort creating a comprehensive functional test suite that gave us much more confidence in the product. Quite literally we would have definitely shipped broken code several times without that test suite.