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All Developers Make Mistakes, Good Developers Don’t Make the Same Mistakes Twice

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
Dev Genius
Published in
2 min readMay 5, 2022

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Photo by Gratisography from Pexels

“I like people admitting they were complete stupid horses’ asses. I know I’ll perform better if I rub my nose in my mistakes. This is a wonderful trick to learn.” Charlie Munger

You Cannot Create Software Without Bugs, Problems and Mistakes. You can reduce the probability of mistakes, you can make sure you can recover, but you can’t avoid them.

You can’t avoid making mistakes, but you can avoid making the same mistake multiple times.

Experience is what you get in return for making mistakes. Mistakes are feedback. They happen when you do something wrong.

Good developers acknowledge mistakes because this is how you learn from mistakes and avoid in the future. Great developers will automate the process or put in a manual process with documentation to help everyone in the development team avoid making that mistake in the future.

Experience is valuable for developers because development is a skill. You get better by writing code and creating software.

If ignore mistake you get the pain without the benefit. When you acknowledge a mistake, you choose to learn from it. If you don’t take time to acknowledge a mistake, you are missing the learning.

Avoid making mistakes

It's often easier to avoid making mistakes than it is trying to be great. If you can make steady progress each day as a developer and development team, most of the other problems will eventually fade away (after the shouting has died down).

Checklist manifesto promotes using checklist and process to avoid mistakes. Automation, code reviews, unit tests, definition of done, code rules are all methods of reducing mistakes.

Software development is a loser’s game and the most effective software development teams are the teams who make the fewest mistakes.

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Published in Dev Genius

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Written by Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner

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