[Applause]
thank you let's talk in a day yeah you
made it I made it yay I'm literally the
only thing that's keeping you from
drinking beer so bear with me in fact
I'm here with some friends from work
they're right there yay and we seize the
opportunity since we're here in Budapest
and it's a pretty cool place we kind of
threw our friend a small bachelor party
on Tuesday that was pretty fun we drink
some pálinka set the name yay
that is dangerous watch out yeah I
mean we basically just ended up at this
bar and next thing I know I'm like
upstairs in a bar and some creepy dude
starts like chatting me up and then he
just asked me for my email and
it's like what absolutely he's a sexy
surfer at hotmail.com so obviously I
gave him a fake email I thought about
giving him like some Yahoo email but I
thought that that was not gonna be
believable enough our friend is already
married by the way this is what happens
when you delay projects in your real
life yeah so I'm gonna talk about
failures which is something that I think
it's really interesting for us to start
making peace with and and just creating
a more natural relationship with since
in our industry we really like to have
these heroes and cultivate these success
stories or how we ship this amazing
project and how did we get our team to
be the best team in the world but you
only got there basically by screwing up
a lot and this is what I'm gonna talk
about so what is your horse fear I mean
the one that really keeps you up at
night well when I was this Iza which was
a lot of time ago I used to work in the
university today I used to do computer
science in Brazil and it was basically
like the integrated system of all the
University and that meant like the same
system to
to attract like students be enrolled in
subjects or like the the professor's and
which classes they were giving and even
employees because there was a lot of
like research projects and people needed
to like control money flow so it was a
pretty big system we catered for more
than 67 thousand students and around
15,000 employees so it's pretty huge and
basically it was pretty cool because
like while we were students we we just
had the opportunity of touching
basically everything on that stack and
that is like front-end back-end database
DevOps so it was really cool and there
was this one day that I was taking a
look at all the tables like that our
database wasn't pretty fast so I just
remembered that we had a table for
employees and usually we added the
employees before they actually started
at their job just to keep their records
there and make sure that everything was
okay for for when they started and we
usually registered those employees with
the salary equals to zero and then we
would update and but the things that
some of these employees never actually
made it in for some reason
so what I was gonna do is just to
perform this very simple query to remove
all these like employees that weren't
actual real employees but as I was doing
that I typed the first line and someone
called me and asked something else I was
like yeah that's how are you doing no no
I'll take you there and then and I came
back and hit enter that was not cool
because what you what happens if you do
this and you don't specify where is that
you drop the table and of course I
wasn't doing anything that allowed for
rollbacks or anything so that was all
lost so around 15,000 records for all
the employees in the universities were
completely gone and that included names
bank accounts information and that one
was specifically important because the
the way that the university would pay
them is that we would do
query in the database every month and
get their banking information transfer
money and I must add that the this day
where this happened was one day before
payday yeah it's a great story so that
was all gone that was all gone and
honestly that was a moment that first of
all I refuse to believe that that was
actually happened so I tried to look for
the table over and over and over again
and that I couldn't find it obviously it
was gone and at that time I just looked
stared at the void closed down my
computer and honestly a tear held down
my my face and I basically looked like
this puppet monkey so that was that was
stuff no stuff but that wasn't doing
yeah that wasn't the end of me that
wasn't the end of my career it certainly
felt so at the time and but that made me
into Who I am today that made me into
the developer and the professional that
I am today and I'm really thankful that
that happened it taught me so much after
that we obviously did a lot more things
to make sure that this would never
happen again we did backups we did
well we couldn't like Jeff anything
because we did the the sort of trance
transition through that made you like
allows you to roll back operations so
that also made our products way better
of course learning by paying but but
still it was pretty good and if you take
a look at these free gentlemen they do
share one thing in common which is the
fact that they all have failed horribly
in their lives and probably that also
made them into who they are so that's
pretty cool I'm gonna talk about their
stories and in the following slides so
bear with me I am Iza you can call me it
sees a Bella but please call me ISA I'm
a Mozilla tech speaker and as Paul said
I work at I settle in Stockholm
originally from Brazil and I love
karaoke
and one really cool fact that I found
out it by myself last week is that I'm
the lost twin
of the impossibru meme guy that was
pretty cool it was actually pretty funny
because that picture was the thumbnail
of a pretty cool video of an interview
that I did with my Yuko a while ago and
it was really interesting because as we
took this picture I didn't actually see
it I just asked like hey how's a picture
she's great
the picture came out great I was like ah
awesome so yes this is what happens when
you ask your friend if the picture is
great
your friend is great you're not but
that's it this picture is gonna be
immortalized in the Internet for no one
but you should totally watch the
interview it's awesome
okay so why do we fear failing why why
is it so hard and so crippling scarily
insanely the threatening to fail I I
give it some thought a while ago like
why is it so daunting and my conclusion
is that basically we're just afraid of
shame we we don't want people to
discover that in fact we're not as good
as we strike us to be and and that is
not really nice right because shame is a
toxic emotion it's it's not like you're
you're like afraid or or you're
concerned about what you did which would
be guilt or you're not concerned about
your intentions which would be like I
don't know regrets shame is
fundamentally feeling bad about who you
are this is not cool and being afraid of
shame gets you to do a very a set of
very concerning and and horrible
behaviors such as self-sabotage who here
has never procrastinated to do something
that you're really not sure if you can
do it or or perhaps like took in sanely
long to to make a task that would be
simple otherwise if you just take a stab
at it our or even just refusing to try
something because you think you're gonna
fail news for you this is self-sabotage
like I've done this time and time again
and I still do and and it is really hard
because it basically keeps you from
really being good at something or
learning
something or not being afraid to try new
things and also another another way that
this manifests itself is a thing that we
I think we're all very familiar called
parcel syndrome I think everybody here
has felt at least once in their lives
that holy look at all these people
in conferences there is so much better
than I am look at all these things that
I don't know that I have to learn and
this seems like really scary it seems
like you deserve you don't deserve to be
where you are and that's another
manifestation of what shame and and
those emotions feel like but it is it is
very very concerning because if you if
you do feel this way if you do feel like
you don't belong there or that you can
never learn there would be as good as
other people then you're never gonna
learn anything in the first place
because if you're if you're too afraid
of actually trying something and failing
well you're not gonna learn because the
main way that we learn things is by
doing is white practice actually there's
a pretty cool paper about the psychology
of learning that says that well
basically 80% of learning is just doing
by practice training four senses like
the actual lectures but fundamentally
you just learn something by trying it
and you're probably gonna fail I'm sorry
if you don't know something and
something is like completely new to you
then odds are you're you're not gonna be
great at first or you're gonna fail at
something so that's that's really a
shame that we don't have these kind of
things well you're also not gonna evolve
you're not you're not gonna grow because
if you're sag nating at a place and
you're kind of like afraid to take the
extra step because what if I'm not
good what if I can never get there what
if I try and I fail in front of everyone
and what are people gonna say well then
you're not gonna grow I'm sorry it's
just not gonna happen most importantly
and I think it's a very contradictory
thing since it's such a buzzword and
companies and tech conferences nowadays
you have no innovation which is
something that well we know that every
company nowadays has it's the innovation
team and blah blah blah we do machine
learning well the way they learn
machine learning is by trying and
faily and honestly I I can say by
experience because I try I do
machine-gunner myself because I think
it's super cool and interesting and it
is a really really frustrating thing to
to learn because there's so many things
that you don't get straight out of the
box because it is a very like academic
and theory heavy thing so it is very
taxing and if you're afraid of like
maybe not making it or not understanding
machine learning well you're not gonna
know machine learning so these are
pretty important three things that we
will be missing out if we are just too
afraid to fail and which was failure was
one of the things that will happen to
Bill Gates not sure if you guys know but
before Microsoft he had another company
called travel data if I'm not mistaken
the whole gist of the company is that
they they would like collect traffic
data from local authorities to try and
predict how the traffic was gonna be
that was like especially important for
trucks and and frights things and
shipments and that that was pretty cool
idea but it turns out it didn't really
work but there's actually this thing at
a at a computer museum or something and
I found the text in this little plaque
here pretty interesting this is Paul
Allen Bill Gates a partner said that
well basically travel data wasn't a huge
success but it was essential for them to
actually be able to have Microsoft and
for Microsoft to be as successful as it
is it wouldn't have happened if they
hadn't failed first at something else
and tried something again they really
learned from it so that's that's how
Microsoft was built so there's a few
perks in when failing failing horribly
at life the first one is that it
improves confidence after you try
something you fail and you realize that
well you know what I survived
that's awesome I can try this again or I
can try different things so it really
makes a few more confidence at your own
ability to solve problems your own
ability to recover crisis your own
ability to manage and unpredictable
things so it is really
good to just get yourself out there and
try things for the first time because it
gets you more used to this way of
thinking because honestly ultimately it
is a way of thinking second thing is
that it just gives you tons of new
things that you learned about like well
when you tried something for the first
time that didn't happen so oh yeah I
learned that next time I'm gonna do it
differently so most of these things that
we learn about programming you're about
teching about talking and dealing to
people you usually just get it you
understand that by trying something and
and realizing what's the outcome and
most times the outcome is not gonna be
great but that's fine that's part of
life so it does teach you a lot I would
say like it's it's you just learn so
much more from horribly of failure
experiences than these successes because
those are the experiences where as
something unpredictable happens and you
deal with it and they teach you so much
more than just like the success outcome
it could lead to happy accidents
sometimes we do have a plan in mind and
and honestly the thing that we haven't
envisioned doesn't really happen but you
just end up in really interesting
scenarios that perhaps you didn't even
know about them it's it's not related to
tech but it is a pretty interesting
story that that was actually the case of
penicillin so basically I forgot his
name but the guy that was like making a
study on penicillin forgot to basically
put a lid on the on the bottle thingy
and then mold started to appear and he
was like really ready to throw away the
whole thing when he actually he realized
that the the penicillin was killing the
mode the mold so that was a pretty cool
thing and perhaps he wouldn't have
reached that conclusion that this was
actually something that was worth
looking into if he didn't have that
accident that well you can look at it
and see okay that was a mistake but
actually that led to a pretty cool and
interesting solution and the last one is
that like for the future events and for
the future opportunities you're gonna be
able to recover so much faster from
mistakes because I think it's really
unrealistic to try and
set a goal to yourself was like oh you
know what I'm gonna try that I'm gonna
be perfect
sorry you're not but it's a much more
realistic goal to just say okay I'm
gonna try this and I'm gonna be brave
enough to just see what it how it goes
and see how I can deal with this and
honestly if you have like failed a
couple of times at the same thing you're
just able to recognize like your own
patterns of thinking your own ways of
like okay how does that mistake make me
feel like okay I get really anxious when
this happens so perhaps the next time
I'm gonna be able to understand more and
why I feel this way and be able to
manage that situation faster and this is
only going to happen if you failed a
couple of times there's really no way
around it it's just something that we
have to live with so the important thing
here is that I think it's way more
healthier if we're just like transparent
about our mistakes and accept the
mistake as the mistakes of others
because ultimately it does create like a
much healthier environment in the sense
that well if I'm in a team that nobody
ever asked me for help or says oh you
know what I just up at this thing
I'm never gonna feel confident enough to
just go up to someone and admit that oh
yeah you know what I tried this and it
didn't work can you help me figure out
how to do better you're not gonna feel
comfortable enough and that that's
really important especially in
development like we can brush up our
tools as much as we want or we can
create the best frameworks but
developments about people and it's about
teams and it's about how comfortable you
are making making stuff happen with like
a set of five other people that are
doing this with you so it's really
important to be in the same game
together and you know what I like the
most
vulnerability vulnerability in a team is
really important because without you
feeling comfortable enough to feel
vulnerable with other people and without
you making sure that people are
comfortable of being vulnerable with you
you're probably not going to ship a
great tech product I'm sorry it's not
going to happen
you're not basically you're not gonna be
able to single-handedly make a huge
platform happen you're not gonna be able
to push like great things to detect
community so you need to be vulnerable
with your team and you need to embrace
their vulnerability because that's what
makes things happen better and as a
second anecdote there's a really
interesting story of Steve Jobs and I
think everybody knows his story that he
was actually fired from Apple basically
because he was a jerk and so he had all
these like really high level of demands
and he was all like very hard on his
criticisms and ultimately that drove the
team's to such an inhale thei
environment and an unhealthy way of
dealing with the product and and that
was just not working so basically what
happened is that like the whole Board of
Directors got together and said like hey
man you need to leave I'm sorry and in
the case of Apple since it was like a
public company and you have stakeholders
that actually was possible of happening
and for him that that would have been
like absolute doom were for anyone that
is in that situation to be fired from
the company that you started yourself
could be considered like horribly
terrifyingly big a failure but I
saw this really interesting quote for
him and you don't need to read the whole
thing but basically he's saying that
well getting fired from Apple was the
best thing that ever happens for him
because he was at this status where he
needed to be the king he needed to be
the genius guy that always presented
amazing things and after he had that
first fall from grace he just felt like
he was liberated he was set free by the
whole thing
he didn't need to be the genius guy all
the time again and that eventually
sparked his creativity to the fullest
and obviously I'm not Steve Jobs and I'm
not even that successful but I can't
really sympathize with that like
sometimes in our careers we just reach
to a level where we just feel like okay
wasn't accept what's an accept how am I
gonna get bigger and that is addicting
that is kind of almost kind of like
golden golden chains so it is really
important for us to think that it's okay
to make mistakes and it's okay to make
different decisions because that's what
gonna makes us feel more created and
more free to to think in different ways
so that's really important so okay
Oh all that said I went ahead and made
you all something that I call the guide
to recovery and I hope you enjoy
it I think it's gonna be useful so the
rules are first of all when confronted
with a massive horribly failure
in your life first thing you need to do
is breathe calm down
obviously because when when we were
confronted with something that is
unexpected and that never happened
we get really excited in sciatica and
just like afraid and scared of how am I
gonna do to figure this out and when
you're in that stage of distress you're
probably not gonna come up with a lot of
good ideas you're gonna come up with
that spread idea so take take a moment
to yourself take a deep breath be calm
talk to someone talk to someone really
helps especially because it's really
nice to have the perspective as someone
that is not within the problem so that's
something that for me is always very
useful so keep calm second it's
important to create an action plan
because obviously when when you're
confronted with a really serious like
situation of something that went
terribly wrong you you you basically
don't know what to start like how do I
start unfuckin this like how do I start
making this well again so try to dissect
the problem try to figure out okay what
causes how can I revert this is it
possible to revert this and if it's not
how do I manage the the whole situation
how do I get the data to be back in the
database how do I get the server to be
back up and if you're not sure if you
don't know please ask for help like it's
fine to us for help sometimes we as
developers tend to think of ourselves as
like lonely heroes but it really does
help for you to just like
get someone to help you and get someone
to at least share that discomfort and to
be by your side to back you up
next up establish prevent preventive
measures because obviously you don't
want to make the same mistake a lot of
times right so it's really important
like as I as I shared in a case of my
happening we did establish measures to
make sure that this wouldn't happen
again such as trying to create backups
create routines for checking if the
database is all right create a pipeline
on Jenkins or a CI or whatever it is to
to make sure that you have things to
prevent you from doing something that
could be destructive or at least prevent
you from doing something with that
asking for like a double check
confirmation kind of thing so make sure
that this you're creating a setup for an
environment where this is not gonna
happen again it's important to revisit
goals because we're talking about
accidents here but sometimes a failure
is not gonna be indexed and a failure is
something that you have conviction of
something that you really thought it was
gonna work and it didn't so it's
important to revisit the goals that you
have through yourself and make sure okay
like do they still make sense or should
I change something here what did I learn
with this episode that I could possibly
like apply two different different
episodes and that's really important
because you don't want to insist in a
plan that well it's like fated to to
fail so it's really important that you
just sit down reanalyze the whole thing
basically regroup and finally repeat the
cycle because this is gonna happen again
I mean if you fail today it's very
likely that you're gonna make some
mistakes in the future nobody's shielded
from anything so be okay with this make
peace with the fact that you're gonna
make mistakes and that other people are
gonna make mistakes and that's okay
it is really important for especially
we're talking about like a product
company if you have like a really long
relationship with the thing that you're
building you're gonna have a lot of
convictions that are gonna be proven to
be wrong and and it's really like nice
to make peace with this whole cycle in
understand oh okay things can go out
out of what is expected and that's fine
we don't need to marry an idea because
it's another thing that I get a little
bit not pissed off but like annoyed
sometimes as ow
we just like have an idea of something
that would work and we try to make your
work regardless of how many signs or how
many signals were getting of the fact
that well perhaps is another way perhaps
we have to figure out another solution
so like don't be married to ideas they
it's okay if they're not the absolute
truth you can always like think of
something else and for the nest the next
story here in the three gentlemen this
is Thomas Edison and he was a guy that
invented lamps and Lexor City and light
bulbs and before inventing the perfect
one the one that got to the market he
failed not once not twice but ten
thousand times ten thousand
times and and that was the whole cycle
that took him like all the way from like
no not knowing how this would be
commercially viable because like you
don't you're not gonna be able to sell
something if you're selling it for like
too much money so when someone asked him
about like okay but do you never get
frustrated or how did you manage to
you're like insists for so many times
he's have something that I think it's
very interesting he said why would I
feel like a failure and why would I ever
give up I now know definitely over 9000
ways of electric an electric light bulb
will not work success is almost at my
grasp so that's also a really cool way
of thinking about mistakes now you know
something that definitely not works and
and it's a pretty cool way to reach a
solution you just can do you can rule
out things by elimination and that's
also a very valid process it is the
process as Thomas Edison took can it
worked for him so that's a pretty cool
thing cool so now you can all pet
yourselves in the back you're a
certified experts congratulations
you deserve a round of applause
when my key message here is that we all
need to like celebrate our failures as
much as our successes as much as our
conquests because they are equally
important for our lives as much as like
all the things that we do right all the
things that we do wrong teach us even
more about how to get to the Holy Grail
how to get to your gold so make sure
that you celebrate all of them and make
peace with the fact that you're not
going to be perfect always and to close
up the talk I have quite big quotes but
I would like to read it to all of you
because I love it it's by theory our
Theodore Roosevelt and he has a quote
that says it is not the critic who
counts not the man who points out how
the strong man stumbles or where the
doer of Deeds could have done them
better the credit belongs to the man who
is actually in the arena whose face is
marred by dust sweat and blood who
strives valiantly who airs who comes
short again again and again because
there is no effort without error and
shortcoming but who does actually strive
to do the deeds who knows great
enthusiasms the great devotions who
spends himself in a worthy cause who had
best knows in the end the triumph of
high achievement and who at worst if he
fails at least fails while daring
greatly so that this place shall never
be with those cold and timid souls who
never know victory nor defeat
thank you
if you want to share your up story
I would be more than happy to listen to
it thank you so much for listening to me
if you have any questions or you want to
share your story I'm available on
Twitter or my fake hotmail email thank
you so much for listening guys have a
great party
[Applause]