Not the kind you can blame on junior engineers, flaky hardware, or vague documentation. I mean real mistakes. Misconfigured firewalls that broke production. Deployments that triggered outages. Security controls that looked great on paper but failed under pressure. Strategic decisions that aged poorly as the full picture emerged.
I used to hide them — tidy them up in postmortems. Frame them as “learnings.” Bury them in chat threads. Smile in meetings and say “we handled it.” That’s what we’re trained to do — protect credibility, defend authority, keep the gears turning.
But somewhere along the way, I started trying to do the opposite.
I started talking about my mistakes — openly, plainly, and often. With my team, with peers, with industry friends and even with competitors. I stopped trying to make failure look like foresight. I stopped treating mistakes like weaknesses. Because the truth is: the people I respect most are the ones who own their mistakes the loudest.
Mistakes Aren’t the Opposite of Expertise
They are expertise.
Every informed decision I make in IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, or AI pipelines is backed by a pile of dumb ones I’ve already tried. The shortcuts that exploded. The “clever” configs that weren’t. The automation jobs that fired at 3AM and did more harm than good.
Experience isn’t built by reading best practices. It’s built by tripping over edge cases and figuring out what actually happens when theory meets real-world complexity.
So Why Share Mistakes?
Because no one else is. Not publicly. Not enough. And especially not in tech — where everyone’s busy curating perfect workflows and conference talks with zero footnotes.
But behind the scenes, we’re all debugging the same problems. We’re all introducing new risks while patching old ones. We’re all learning the hard way.
The more transparent we are, the more resilient we all become.
I plan to keep making tons of mistakes.
And I’ll keep writing about them because that’s what Root Cause is for. Not just a highlight reel, but a documentation of what didn’t work, what I misunderstood, what blew up at 2am. Because those are the moments that actually shape us.
So here’s to the broken deploys, the bad assumptions, and the misconfigured DNS records.
Let’s learn from each other’s failures — before we have to learn them the hard way.