Sure, one could argue that designers, directors, clients, and managers can all make mistakes in the design process—but how many times does that typically happen in one design session? In one day? In one week? These are product of user error, poor planning, and under (and sometimes over) communication.

There’s a balance to the design process—like a surgical procedure, once you get the steps right and the job is a success, you replicate those same steps again on the next assignment. I’ve learned how the exact opposite occurs in the development process.

Let’s look at my past week’s work, for example:

You see 16 commits, 86 files have been changed and almost 4,000 line additions/deletions in our code base. This overview really underestimates the true timeframe of workflow that happened in this one-week period. Fifteen out of the 16 commits could have been a majority of the work, filled with new features and releases that would make the app remarkably better. However, the thing I’ve learned so far—the exact beauty behind this Facebook post is:

That last commit, which probably allotted to an entire day’s worth of debugging and unit testing, was basically the result of swapping out two single-digit values—quite literally, changing a NO (0) to a YES (1).

Yes, an entire day’s worth of work resulted in a character swap that, in hindsight, takes less than a second to complete.

This is what that status was about. These are the mistakes you should learn from. But the mistake is not what it seems. Let’s not forget about those other 15 commits…

After the full day of testing, tweaking, abusing, and manipulating the code to see if the performance issues I was seeing was due to this misplaced value, I realized that this value was not the root of the issue. This value was just the spark to the witch hunt.

A witch hunt that eventually caused me to completely rewrite the framework I was using to achieve the same thing that this value was watching over. A complete rewrite that sped up the entire flow of the app by minutes! By the time I submitted this ‘quick fix’ commit (that should’ve just had that typo fixed), this submission contained 15 other commits that helped the code integrity of the app for both the developer and the user.

At the end of the day, this tiny typo was something to be proud of. A conquest over past misconceptions and overlooked techniques. After that entire day of proving myself wrong, we have a product here that is twice, if not three or four times better and faster than before!