A lot’s been said about last week’s Gitlab outage so I’m not going to go over the details here but I do want to talk about one point that was when I was watching the guys fix the issue live on youtube.
A lot of the people making comments kept asking if the person who made the original mistake was going to be fired (and I mean a lot of people were asking). Finally one of the guys on the channel responded by saying that this wasn’t a personal mistake, it was a process failure and if the person who had made the original error hadn’t taken a backup before he started this work, they would not have been able to recover anything at all.
I did wonder about who was asking the question though and I came to the conclusion that it couldn’t have been anyone who’s worked in the tech industry for any sustained period time.
Show me a senior technical person who has never made a mistake causing an outage and I’ll show you a fibber
People do not get fired for making one mistake, could you imagine? Everyone that I know in tech has made at least one error causing an outage, others (like me) have made more than one. OK, yes, if this was the latest in a line of mistakes that that person had made at GitLab then maybe, but I doubt that it was.
It comes down to the age old adage, learn from your mistakes. Bet that guy at Gitlab won’t make that mistake again 
Have a good (mistake free) week.
