Ask HN: What is your failure story?

Can confirm, I'm subscribed to Software Clown for almost a year now and still have fun reading it every week (and I like to think I've learnt something from it as well). I love how you keep the articles short and dense so is no problem to read them even standing in crowded bus :)

Failure 1: I'd planned to do a PhD eventually, but I ended up more or less self-sabotaging my degree grade by being depressed and not doing anything about it (2:2 in the UK system vs. the nominal 2:1 ostensibly required for MSc/PhD applications to most places)

Failure 2: For the longest time, I never managed to make a good routine for myself. To learn, build things, exercise, meditate, etc. Good habits seem to be a pre-requisite for success in virtually any endeavor.

Failure 3: I had an interview scheduled with Google once, right after I had finished my military service in Finland (it's more or less mandatory for men).

I had scheduled it a tiny bit too close for comfort, just after I was supposed to have been out of the garrison. Turns out they called an hour too early (I specified UTC timezone but they marked it down as BST..) so I could only awkwardly tell them I could not talk at the time, and ask if they could call again an hour or a day later.

I never could get another call and settled for a crap job (by some standards). Maybe I could have earned a lot more and learned a lot more (and had a better network of contacts) if things had turned out differently :p

On a more positive note, I started doing freelancing/consulting last year after "no one" seemed to want to hire me at a decent salary and proceed to make OK amounts of money through random gigs.

Still figuring out how to network effectively. I figure the best bet is through gaining visibility online by publishing something useful.

I was responsible for a software bug that forced the entire United States Coast Guard to revert to using paper records to track all of their Aviation Logistics for an entire month. The bug was in an aircraft maintenance dashboard that had over a dozen filters on it. It passed a thorough round of QAing, but once in production it was found that a specific selection of filters would create an infinite loop in the report that would crash the system. With hundreds of mechanics using the dashboard, someone was triggering that selection of filters every two to three days.

It was a very rough month for me. When an emergency patch failed to solve the issue, management decided to take the whole system down (it was too big a release and had been in production too long to revert). User satisfaction surveys bottomed-out. There was discussion in upper-management about firing me, but my immediate supervisor defended me and pointed out that this required failure at many levels. When we got the system back online, they had to hire dozens of contractors to manually enter all the paper records into the system.

I continued to code for the Coast Guard for five more years, got a big promotion to Senior Developer at one point, and left the organization with much respect. Every once in a awhile someone would present a graph of user satisfaction surveys over the years and there would be that awful month where the graph bottomed out, but I could eventually smile about what that junior developer did.

Built and marketed a free business application. Ran out of energy and money before I could finish my rewrite and pro version.

Fast forward twelve years, it still bothers me and I can't let it go. I am well on my way to doing it right this time.

Tons of work, and the drawback is that I know how much I have in front of me, but I'm having fun and can't wait to engage my users again!