Erroring out ??

Now This?????

It's been a blip since I heard from a dear friend the phrase: "Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn", what a great phrase and so full of it.

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Or at least that's what I thought first time I came across it, don't know who coined it, but I do know that my friend uses it like someone paid him to say it, out loud for cat's sake, I think of it as the "Serenity now" phrase from Frank Costanza and it cracks me up, cause much like that phrase in the series, it's about masking a human reaction. Errors are stressing, they're horrible glitches in the universe that, let's be honest, make up for most of what we care for. Deviations from standard are what life itself is made of, if you wanna call them errors or not, that's what they are really. Now please don't be scared by this tiny dissertation, I won't get philosophical or too sciency, that's about as much terminology as I'll use for this piece.

And I won't get into why things in my world, the world of code fail, I wrote a piece that goes a little into that in a previous iteration of yours truly Rocket Bicycle Log, or any other reasoning behind failure, rather I wanna tell you a little story about mistakes and humanity.

Serenity now!

I started in software much by accident, and much like Lemony, a series of unfortunate events unraveled from there, very soon I knew what a yelling client looks like, and sounds like, and pays like... (spoiler alert, not very well). Ignorance is bliss state can only be maintained when you actually ignore or stay away from everything you're ignorant about, in my case I threw myself head first into something I ignored without as much as knee pads, let alone a helmet, metaphorical or otherwise. I very much like the jump on rake meme (if you're a curious raccoon ?? like myself, just google: "jump on rake meme programming"), can now at least make it entertaining to watch how I fail gloriously, but I started that way and have been ever since. Nevertheless I deliver, I think that's one thing I can (at least decently) achieve, just saving some of my own honor there. But that's how it all started with a rake swing to the face, and one after another I realized that I this was turning into a theme. And it's a profession thing we recognize too, there are rite passage jokes (that are very much also anecdotes) about bringing down production environments, coding is orchestrating a lot of moving pieces with moving targets, not very far from piecing together a plane while in flight, but I believe and this is a personal take that we sort of live with it, cause we rely so much on software that we don't event take that much notice on it. And software fails, a lot.

So well coming back to when I started, after a while, I realized along with my then business partners that selling software development was rather a complicated endeavor during before, during and after a project, it came with a lot of errors, problems, hard times, some sporadic happiness and a lot of problem solving, that's for sure, like if you're looking into getting into something that won't bore you, oh sparky do I have the industry for you. So aaaanyway in order to clear out some of the confusion that came from both parties and after being advised to do so by more experienced companies, we started adding what I like to call the "humanity clause" to our contracts.

"And what a 'humanity clause''s is ,precious? ??" you might be asking while rubbing your hands against each other as you grin with excitement. Well it's a clause that essentially says:

"Hey mr. Client, we might screw up, and we will do so out of stupidity and incompetence, never out of ill will and we will be accountable for it and try to fix it to the best of our abilities as soon as we realize".

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(Visible outrage)

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Hey please calm down dear reader (worst thing you can say to an altered person, never calms down anyone), I'm not pulling your leg here, now one or two things to consider: I'm no lawyer and also I'm human and back then I led a human team, made out of human pieces and we wrote (and still write) mostly human made software.

It's not that we were, or I was, or am careless, that's really not what this was ever about, it was about recognizing and then trying to fix and stand up to mistakes. That's why I laughed and probably cringed at the "you win and you learn" phrase, cause for me learning is actually an enjoyable process, nothing like an all nighter or a stress sprint of hours trying to fix a bug you yourself introduced, nothing will humble you down as much as a git blame that gives your username (a git blame is a command that shows you who wrote a line of code in a source controlled project). That's not delightful, that's not enjoyable, that's a stressful, hairline area reducing, headache inducing experience but it's almost always unavoidable.

And from our trench best thing we could do was brace for impact and have a plan in place to account for that, but as the Titanic crew can attest, even raft botes are not enough, and for those cases, I guess insurance or other mechanisms can take place.

I don't actually recall the exact phrasing, it might be off, I've never wrote contracts myself I always left that in the hands of experts, lawyers, now I also recognize and acknowledge that this clause might not be something outside of Mexico where we were doing business when we used that, it was an emerging, and still is, field at least in terms of laws that regulate technology don't have a ton of precedent, so we did what we could, we still only can.

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind- of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough), any wounds being inflicted of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”?

Ozamu Dazai

You'll be surprised to learn that this entire issue was created by a Human Interface known as Luis (hi there! ??) which leads the score as follows:?

Luis - 11

chatGPT3/4 - 0

Now before you leave, let me tell you about some other projects I have in store just for you ??

• Podcast seventh?episode?is up! We fell off the wagon again, we broke some continuity there, but will be back on track soon, or else...
• a?#twitter?collection?that is already past halfway, at 55% and still there, this is not moving as fast as I'd like.
• A series of videos will come after the books is fully in tweets
• Spanish version of this issue will come out in other channels:?https://gwitchr.hashnode.dev/?and?https://medium.com/@gwitchr?at this point who knows when. ????
• Public learning at?https://www.twitch.tv/gwitchr?(I'll get there, I have a course on waiting that will probably get out there), and also public building that will come sometime in the future (podcast took a year from blog post announcing it to first episode published, with a lot of mishap in between)

I wanna touch base a little bit and say that I understand this is about consistency, not a fan of it (jajaja, yeah I laugh like that cause I'm Mexican). but hey, this piece was in my head for a while and I was a little bit encouraged by a dear friend that I hope reads this piece.

Alrighty then sparky, if you're interested in writing or have a project yourself, don't hesitate to reach out, if you came this far I already owe you one, I'll proof read anything you send my way.