**"Breaking the Build (On Purpose)"**

It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I just committed code I know will fail CI. The red X is coming, and for the first time, I’m excited to see it.

The Experiment

After three weeks of documenting my accidental stumbles, I decided to test a theory: What if I deliberately engineer failure to learn faster?

Yesterday’s playbook:
1. Wrote a feature with intentional anti-patterns
2. Tagged a junior dev: “Bet you can spot 5 bugs before CI does”
3. Scheduled a “Break Fix Party” stream for tonight

The Unlikely Win

The outcome surprised even me:
- They found 7 bugs (including two I’d missed in prod last month)
- We documented each fix as a learning module (their idea)
- The “broken” commit sparked a thread about technical debt (30+ devs chiming in)

Turns out, showing your worst code doesn’t make people judge you—it makes them join you.

The Shift

Old fear: “If they see my mistakes, they’ll think I’m bad at this.”
New data: “When I show my mistakes, they show me theirs—and we all improve.”

This week’s evidence:
- A senior engineer DMed their own “hall of shame” code snippets
- Our team wiki now has a “Lessons From Broken Things” section
- My anxiety about PR reviews dropped by roughly 37% (measured in sweat stains)

The New Playground

I’ve started treating failures like DLC content:
- Main Story: Shipping working features
- Side Quests: Publicly dissecting why things broke
- Achievement Unlocked: “Helped Others Avoid Your Mistakes”

P.S. That junior dev just sent a PR titled “Fix Jake’s Dumb Array Bug (Love You)”. Growth feels suspiciously like friendship.

P.P.S. Found myself explaining pointer arithmetic to someone today—a concept I only learned last month because I asked a “dumb question” on stream. The circle continues.

Maybe expertise isn’t about knowing everything. Maybe it’s just about being the most recent person to learn something, so the lesson’s still fresh when someone needs it.