Learn how to fail

Learning how to fail. In my opinion, one of the most important and crucial traits you could possibly ever have! Although many of the patterns covered so far have been essential, I think that learning how to fail is one of, if not the most important thing to take away from the different patterns. From my experiences, learning how to fail encompasses everything! Whether it be coding, hobbies, or anything at all. It is something that I have noticed very early, and it is one of the most crucial parts about my growth as a person.

To relate it to coding, like a few of the other patterns, if all one does is stay within their own box and safety, they will forever become used to their own skills. Hard problems might never be solved, even if the person is capable, and mediocre designs will stay mediocre. Failure is scary, but without failure, you can simply never know what you did is right or wrong. From failure, people are able to overcome their limits and grow! For example, there have been countless incidents where programming interns messed something up, like most recently, a Starbucks intern sent a out a test post publicly, and although I am sure they were worried, it is probably something they will never do again! These failures is what helps you grow as a programmer and coding, and it is so important to learn from these mistakes. In my experiences, if I didn’t mangle this project or mess up that problem, I think I would not be where I am today. I still have much to learn, but if I stumbled into one solution after another, I think I would be a very very poor programmer. By far, I have learned infinitely more from failure than I have from success!

Failure as a whole is not something that someone should be ashamed of, but something that someone should be critical of! If you fail, why did you fail! What will you do to prevent it next time, and what will you do if you keep failing! These are all important steps to learn, and as one becomes more familiar with each step, failure will become rarer and rarer. I personally don’t think anything can ever be perfect, but with enough time and dedication, things can come very close! And that is something that I believe everyone should strive for!