Move Slow and Don't F****** Break Things

I have worked in start-ups in Berlin for nearly 6 years. One sentence I heard too many times was "Move fast and break things".

Ughhh. I have really grown to hate that sentiment.

It was Facebook's company motto for many, many years. And kind of like a credo for "hip, cool start-ups" all across the world.

Move fast. Break things. Just do it. Just create things. Just get it across the finish line. Don't look left or right.

Sounds great.

But it also means: Make mistakes. Cause irritation. Ship unfinished software. Don't give a f*** about your customers.

Hey, that's totally fine if you sell software that people don't rely on. A meme generator can do that. A social network can do that (well, there's also a reason why Facebook abandoned the motto). Heck, a free video editing app for your TikToks can do that.

But when people rely on the software you create, you need to stop breaking things. You need to slow down.

So, why am I writing this? Well, I am frustrated (who would have thought, right?).

There's a third-party vendor I use for Magic Pages. It's literally the only tool I use in Magic Pages production infrastructure that is not open source and self-hosted. They promised one thing: run a command, click a few buttons, here's a production-grade database cluster (as in pretty cool stuff that bigger companies have entire engineering teams for).

The problem: they wanted to be cool. They wanted to move fast. They probably didn't want to break things. But they did.

Instead of having a cool production-grade database cluster, I now have…a bunch of useless servers (no worries, the Magic Pages databases are accessible – they have not yet been migrated to this solution) collecting dust in a data center.

I'd have absolutely no problem with a bug. But, if you go out on LinkedIn and shout from all roof tops how great your new product is, maybe you should have taken it for a spin first.

Anyway.

If you develop software, please move slow. Test things. Don't f****** break things.

If you don't develop software, well…thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, I guess 😄

(No for real, thanks for sticking around. Please let me know if rants like this should make it to your inbox in the future or if you want more substantial posts 😂).