Hi, everyone. So how appropriate that my talk on how to fail is number zero on the schedule. So yeah, that's fun. So it may seem pretty obvious to a lot of people that making mistakes in your code

or having bugs in your code is common, and you shouldn't be afraid of them. But I'm a chemist by training originally, and making mistakes in the food industry or making mistakes in pharmaceuticals can cost a company millions. You can cause lawsuits. And not to mention, every time you make a mistake, even if it's just spelling,

you have to sign and date, and then have your manager sign and date. And if you mess up the date, yes, you have to cross that out. Sign and date that, too. So I'm not going to say it was traumatizing, but it was a little bit traumatizing.

So when I started coding, I did most of my learning by myself online, as I'm sure a lot of you have done most of your learning by yourself. But missing out on a lot of conversations, I didn't realize that it was OK to make mistakes. So one of the biggest things that I had to learn as a developer

was how to make mistakes. That is really scary, because one drop in chemistry can be the difference between seeing a clear solution or seeing something bright pink or blue or black. And you have to be precise within 1 100th or 1 1,000th at the minimum sometimes.

So learning how to make mistakes, that was an interesting experience. When I started in the industry, I think I made my manager pretty frustrated, because I would rather show him nothing than to show him something that what I considered wrong or a misunderstanding.

I didn't realize reading forums and such learning on my own that making mistakes was OK, because often you see comments that say things like, well, why would you make that simple error? Or it's really simple, you should do this. And that kind of discourages somebody like me who's so afraid to make mistakes and so afraid of failing,

because it could take months to correct that mistake. It makes someone like me really scared to ask questions, because maybe nobody else in the room has had that problem. What I learned from taking a workshop this past weekend was everybody in the room was afraid, had the same mistake,

but everybody in the room was also afraid to say that they had received a certain error when they tried to run their program. And once somebody was brave enough to say, hey, something's wrong here, and then five other people in the room said, oh, yeah, I have that error too. My main point here is that we need to realize

and we need to be more welcoming to questions. And when you're teaching somebody how to code, maybe the fact that they have nothing on their screen, maybe if you pressed undo a little bit, you would see that they had maybe lines and lines of code that may be on the right track.

They just may have some compiler error somewhere around. Along that line, I think that when you are learning, learn how to test your code and ask questions on how to test and learning how to set up test environments. That was extremely helpful.

I'm still learning how to fail and how to fail correctly and how to learn from my mistakes. And I hope that people also follow that journey and learn how to fail correctly. Thank you.