Have you failed recently?
I can think of several things we’ve tried recently at Terracotta that failed, either in the small due to implementation or in the large due to it just being a bad idea. I see this failure as spectacular success!
Innovation does not occur without regular doses of FAIL. Innovation means walking back and forth over the edge of the known probing new places to go. Sometimes you fall off. But when you don’t, you find great things.
I get worried when we’re not failing. When everything works out just like we hoped, we’re not pushing hard enough. For an innovative software company, safe is dead. I want people to be trying crazy shit that will never work, cause holy crap what if 1 in 10 actually does? The key is to have an environment where innovation is encouraged required and to expect that innovation means that some healthy percentage of things we try don’t work out. That has to be understood throughout the company as the flip side of the innovation coin.
Over the course of the last year, we’ve hired a bunch of insanely smart and capable engineers and things feel like they’re bursting at the seams right now. It’s awesome. And terrifying. I love it. We’re all getting together next week for a full week of intense crazy stuff and the energy level should be high.
Hi! My name is Alex Miller and I live in St. Louis. I write code for a living and currently work for 
I agree. Failure is important. Last week I came up with an idea for my STM implementation that removed the need to do custom garbage collection. But it turned out to be a bad approach because I had to rebuild very large objects trees completely if one of the leafs had a change. It was nice try anyway :)
It is what you do with the failure that is important. Can you harvest any information from it? If you do, the failure is still a success (from a technology point of view).
Failure is itself information and you now know something doesn’t work. You probably also got ideas for a better solution. I don’t think I’ve ever failed without learning from it.
Your post rocks. It is truly heartening to hear that some people out there get it.
Great post…
A favourite quote of mine is from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, on shooting percentages and life:
We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take.
Very good post. I could not agree more.
Had to comment on my blog: http://jonasboner.com/2008/10/14/reward-failure/
Agree absolutely. We learn by failing and by making mistakes (which by themselves are not necessarily failure). When we stop making mistakes, we have stopped learning anything new.