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What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

E14Alice

Hello Everyone!

Hope you are all doing well. I’m excited to announce that this month's AskE14 question is: What is the worst mistake or problem you've encountered during a project, and what did you learn from it?

Sharing your experiences can help others identify similar challenges and understand how to overcome them. I hope this discussion will be beneficial for those who are just starting out on a project or feeling stuck with a problem.

Here's the question:

What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it? 

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Competition Details

You'll have to be a member of the element14 Community to join in and take part in this “Join, Share & Win” challenge. It's simple, all you have to do is:

1. You need to make sure you are Register  or Login
2. Then answer the following question by adding a reply or commenting!

What’s the worst mistake/problem you’ve made during a project, and what did you learn from it?  

The Community team will then select the best 3 answers to win a Raspberry Pi 400!

This month, we are giving away:

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  • I managed to bring down a small datacenter once when setting up a new machine. I simply assigned the next available IP on the subnet the server was on, trusting the docs about what IPs are used and for what. Turns out, the IP I assigned conflicted with another machine's that was doing very important ingress failover and coordination related things, and brought down the entire uplink to the internet. Whoops.

    Technically it wasn't just my fault, but a long chain of small mistakes that leads here, as it always happens in these sort of cases. The docs were obviously not updated correctly, the ingress code made some assumptions that seem correct in normal operation but aren't necessarily true in some wacky scenarios, and I didn't make sure that the IP I assigned was really unused.

    Figuring out what was happening was a fun experience too, when your pings go through but things still can't communicate for some reason, and all sorts of weird things are happening on the network.

    The worst part is that you can't really highlight a single mistake that caused it. Yes, the docs should've been updated, but it happens that someone forgets. It shouldn't be a problem, and it usually isn't. Sometimes you might enter the wrong IP, things go down, but there are failovers and redundancies for this case, that kick in. And there are also bugs in code that you have to live with, and we do. But sometimes the stars align in the exact way to line up all of these issues in a way that something catastrophic happens, so I'm not really sure what the ultimate conclusion is. At least we fixed a bug, I guess.


  • in reply to vmate

    My boss would say,  mistakes dont happen if you're not working 

  • in reply to robogary
    robogary said:
    My boss would say,  mistakes dont happen if you're not working 

    "Wie niet werkt maakt ook geen fouten (Dutch)" the first thing I learned from one of my co-workers when starting as an engineer right after college.

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