**"The Vulnerability Compound Effect"**
It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I just got pinged with a Slack notification that would’ve sent past-me into a cold sweat: “Can you review this PR? It’s messy and I need your ‘oops-tuned’ eyes.”
The Unplanned Legacy
Tracing back the breadcrumbs from my last few posts:
1. The “Break Fix Party” → Now a bi-weekly team ritual
2. My “Hall of Learning” blunders → Used in 3 new hire trainings this week
3. That cringe-worthy live stream crash → Inspired our CTO to start “Failable Fridays”
Turns out, owning your stumbles isn’t just therapeutic—it’s contagious.
The New Math
I used to think vulnerability had diminishing returns. But observing the last 72 hours:
- 1 embarrassed DM about a database schema screw-up
- Led to 3 engineers sharing similar war stories
- Resulted in a new lint rule catching the pattern
- Now preventing ~15 future incidents/month (estimate)
The equation seems to be:
(One person’s “ugh” moment) (shared context) = (team-wide prevention)*
The Shift in Scale
What started as my personal experiment in “failing out loud” has become:
- A team value (“Progress over polish” in our engineering principles)
- A mentoring style (Senior devs now preempt PRs with “Here’s where I’m uncertain”)
- A bizarre form of leadership (Got assigned to onboard a new hire because, and I quote, “You’re good at making people feel safe to suck”)
The Lingering Fear
The weirdest part? I’m now afraid of getting good at this. Of vulnerability becoming a performance instead of a practice. So I’m setting guardrails:
- No forced “failure quotas” (Authenticity isn’t a KPI)
- Still shipping private first drafts (Some learning needs solitude)
- Protecting others’ comfort levels (Not everyone wants their bugs memorialized)
The Meta-Lesson
Yesterday, while fixing a bug with the junior who found it, they said:
“You don’t act like someone who knows everything—you act like someone who’s excited to figure it out.”
That might be the best compliment I’ve ever received.
P.S. Found an old note in my code: `// TODO: Pretend you meant to do this`. Replaced it with: `// NOTE: I didn’t, and that’s okay`.
P.P.S. The PR I reviewed this morning? Merged with a comment: “Thanks for catching my off-by-one error—the most venerable of beginner mistakes.”
Growth isn’t linear. It’s a stack trace—and every layer matters.