You Are Not Your Last Commit

You shipped the bug.

The big one.

The one with your name
right there
in the blame,

sitting under it
like a confession.

And now
you are quietly certain
that this
is what you are.

A person
who breaks things.

Stop.

You are not
your last commit.

You are not
the worst hour
of your worst day.

You are the whole arc,

the ten thousand lines
that worked,

the quiet fixes
nobody thanked you for,

the times
you stayed late
so someone else
could go home.

A bad commit
is an event.

It is not
an identity.

The best engineers
you know
have broken production
too.

They just stopped
letting it
mean something
about their worth.

They fixed it.

They wrote the note
so it wouldn't
happen again.

Then they went
and got a coffee
and became,
once more,
a person
and not a verdict.

That is the trick.

Not never falling.

Falling,
and refusing
to move in
where you landed.

Your value
was never
priced
per bug.

It was never
a running score
that one mistake
could wipe.

You are allowed
to have written
something bad
and still be
someone good
at this.

Both true.

Same day.

So fix what broke.

Learn what it taught.

Then let it
go back
to being
what it always was,

a Tuesday,

one commit
among the thousands
that make up
the actual,
larger,
unfinished
you.

– Serguey Asael Shinder