"I worked at a startup at the time, our team used this ancient bug tracker. May have been Bugzilla. The point being that tool was not particularly configurable. You either got notifications or you did not get notifications. If you configure for notifications, you got notifications. You touch a bug, you get an email. Somebody touches a bug, they get an email. Somebody else touches a bug, you get 10 emails. Get the idea. The team decided, this is not tenable. We need a concise daily report that shows you the life of our bugs for the day."
"I built it. Wrote the cron job because that's what you would have used back then for scheduling. Tested it locally. Everything looked great. Then I pushed it to production. Except, I had a typo. You knew that was coming. There's something wrong with the story. I had a typo in my cron expression. Instead of sending a concise daily report, it sent a concise report every minute to the entire engineering organization, including our CTO."
"One, test your cron expression. I mean, look at that thing. Two, humility comes free with automation. Also remember how the team handled it. Nobody yelled. Nobody made me feel stupid. My direct manager was messaging me frantically through this whole thing. Like, just make it stop. Whatever. Make it stop. We all just laughed. We fixed it. We moved on."
"That small moment stuck with me, because I realized how safe I felt learning from that mistake. It was one of the first times that I understood that great teams are not defined just by their technical skills. They're defined by how they communicate and how they help each other get better. That idea has followed me through most of my career."
A junior engineer built a daily bug report using a scheduled cron job because the existing bug tracker only supported basic notifications. After testing locally, the job was deployed to production with a typo in the cron expression. Instead of sending a concise daily report, it sent a concise report every minute to the entire engineering organization, including the CTO. The manager urgently tried to stop the flood of emails while the team responded without blame. The incident led to lessons about validating cron expressions and about humility gained through automation. It also reinforced that strong teams are defined by communication and mutual support, not only technical skill.
Read at InfoQ
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