Not everything pans out

A conference I was going to be speaking at this Halloween, Cursed Code, has cancelled. Ticket sales weren't going well enough so organizers had to pull back and regroup. It sucks to be in their shoes. Given the circumstances I think they made the right choice. They put in a lot of work. I'm very sorry to see it not pan out.

I am not planning on investigating their failure. It feels rude to call it a failure but I'm sure they feel like it was and I think the word is appropriate. My plan is instead to investigate some of my failures.

Especially since both me and others have been beating the drum about Goatmire and how well it went. Humility is in order and a reminder that good outcomes are not guaranteed and usually require both good plans, realistic expectations and a bunch of leg work.

I've done meetups that I'd consider failed for the intended purpose. It wasn't a bad time, but 4-5 people and me running an under-prepared workshop was not what I envisioned. I've also run events where I considered the same amount of people a good start. Kind of depends what you are aiming for.

I tried to start a community space for tech leads and technical decision makers in the Elixir space. I called it Alchemists Guild. I had some good people sign up. I could absolutely not make it gel or activate it worth a damn. I think the right person could but it is a type of work I'm not entirely suited to I think. I can do aspects of community building. I think one big challenge is also that it is inherently a community for busy people which means they are less likely to socialize which makes it hard to build the fabric. Regardless. I got people to try it and I could not make it work. It sucked on my end and I'm sure it was deeply underwhelming for those who signed up.

I've started more ambitious code projects than I can count that never go anywhere. Not going to bother with those. How many times have you tried to build a CMS?

The worst failures are those that impact my clients. I've made technical choices that I've regretted significantly and that we've had to live with for a significant time. Those that come to mind were influenced by somewhat dysfunctional organization, tight timelines and so on. But I've also just made poor choices and mistakes at various times. In a recent one I just took on something that was difficult and it took waaay longer than I expected and I was not sure if I could finish it. Which was embarassing and awkward.

The only guaranteed way to avoid failures and embarassment is to never stretch yourself, never take a swing on an idea or step outside of your comfort-zone and it still is not fool-proof. And if you do take that extremely careful approach it is very likely that you'll grow incredibly slowly.

What I think is important is to consider the blast radius of your attempts. If they fail, who takes the hit and how bad can it be? All the private code projects that ended up failing generally only bothered me. A lackluster meetup inconveniences a few people but they got roughly what was promised. A thing like Goatmire. NervesCloud. The Nerves Project. Major screw-ups in those will be felt. While a venture like Oswag generally only has the risk of a shirt at a time and some up front costs for the print transfers. It is low risk, low reward.

Most people that do things you like have probably failed a bunch of attempts. José tried to build an object-oriented language on Erlang before he made Elixir. The attempts are just a curiosity of history.

Thank you for reading, I appreciate it.