🎭 Owning up to your mistakes

Jakob pinged me on Slack at 23:18—one of those “hey, quick question” messages you know isn’t quick. He’d noticed the DNS entry I copied earlier in the day was off by a single character. Nothing caught fire, but mail stopped flowing and the monitoring dashboard lit up like — well, like a Christmas tree in April. My reply? A curt “DNS changed.” No “my bad,” no context, just two words that might as well have been a shrug.

A minute later we were arguing. Not about the typo itself (that was fixed in thirty seconds) but about the way I’d refused to own it. That back-and-forth poked a hole in my ego and, annoyingly, stayed on my mind all week. I’m writing this to untangle why saying “sorry, my fault” sometimes feels harder than deploying to production on a Friday. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m the only one who trips over this.

🛠️ The backdrop: over the last few months at mindnow we’ve been stitching together a content-and-music platform for a TelCo on a deadline that keeps shrinking. Bugs everywhere, integrations failing at 02:00, coffee that tastes like cardboard. When you’re firefighting five issues an hour, apologies start to feel like overhead—just patch the thing and move on. (I should be upfront: this attitude works until it very suddenly doesn’t.)

There’s a school of thought that says you can dodge most of this by bootstrapping solo—no team, no blame game. I get the appeal; fewer moving parts, fewer awkward conversations. But teams exist for a reason, and once co-founders are in the picture, relationship upkeep becomes part of the job. Ignore it and the “little” frictions compound faster than technical debt.

🤖 Constant problem-solving dulls the “oops, my fault” reflex. You start treating every incident like a ticket in Jira: identify, fix, close. That efficiency is great for uptime, terrible for trust. Owning a mistake means pausing the sprint treadmill, admitting vulnerability, and giving the other person context so they’re not stuck guessing. Easier typed than done, obviously.

Even then the voice in the back of my head goes, “I followed the checklist, this shouldn’t have happened.” Perfectionism masquerading as logic. Statistically speaking—even Einstein locked himself out of the house a few times—so expecting flawless execution from myself is, to put it kindly, optimistic.

💡 Transparency hurts in the moment but compounds positively. People don’t judge the slip as much as the cover-up. Acknowledging the screw-up early also sidesteps a bigger failure mode: co-founder resentment. I’ve seen projects implode not because of bad code, but because grievances were swept under the rug until the rug couldn’t lie flat anymore. (I got this wrong for about the first two startups I worked on.)

🧭 The httpie fiasco is a neat cautionary tale: the repo went private, 60 k GitHub stars gone overnight, and the internet piled on—until the author posted a raw post-mortem. Once people saw the full timeline, sympathy flowed, though the results were mixed. Same energy as a hypothetical scenario where a developer mis-routed an Apple payout; they might call the old boss, explain everything on speaker with finance listening in, and the immediate transparency could defuse what might’ve been a lawsuit. Different scale, same principle.

That said, not every “mistake” needs a grand apology tour. Sometimes the real fix is procedural: update the compliance document, adjust the payout script, tighten the CI gate. Apologising without changing the process is like rebooting a server with a memory leak—it’ll just crash again tomorrow.

🗿 When emotions flare, I try—emphasis on try—to treat the situation like a stack trace. What happened? Why exactly? How do we prevent the repeat? If my pride butts in (“They’ll think you’re incompetent!”), I remind myself that pride never shipped working code. Still slips through now and then, but awareness helps.

Mistakes are table stakes. A clear, honest post-mortem lets everyone course-correct faster and saves you the mental tax of pretending perfection. Next time I bungle a DNS record, I plan to write five extra characters: “Sorry—my mistake.” We’ll see if I remember when the pager goes off at 23:18 again.