Embracing failure is key to success

Becoming a Better Engineer — Part 3

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill

I deleted a database in production

“I am done. It is the end and I will be fired now.”

These were the words I kept repeating to myself. I had just deleted a production database critical to our customers. It was late in the evening, and it had been a long day. I had been trying to fix an issue that was impacting our customers. But instead of fixing it, I made it worse by mistakenly connecting to the production environment and deleting the database.

Suffice it to say neither my leadership nor our customer was happy.

Fortunately, we had a database backup, and recovering it worked more or less as expected. We lost some data, but considering I had deleted the production database, we were “happy.” It could have been a lot worse. Saying I was traumatized by what happened that day is an understatement.

I felt guilty. I felt terrible, and I felt like a failure.

After recovering our service, I called our customer and apologized for my mistake. When I hung up…