Six days before the interview, my laptop crashed and we lost our entire demo.
Brandon: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
I'm glad you mentioned how you lost your work because of lack of a backup. There are quite a few snarky comments here about it, mine won't be one of them. Instead I thank you for your candor.
There are some cultures where mistakes and failures aren't explicitly mentioned; they're swept under the rug (wouldn't want to lose face!). I hate that. Instead I think we can all learn a great deal by reading someone say (in not quite as vulgar words): "I fucked up. I made a very simple, stupid mistake". It's of course implied the takeaway is "don't be as stupid as I was".
Yeah, agreed on that one. When I read that line, my first thought was, "GAH! Why wasn't he storing this in source control somewhere remotely?!"
And then I stepped back for a second and remembered that just 4 months ago my laptop was stolen and I lost 6 months worth of photos... which of course I hadn't backed up anywhere.
We all make mistakes. We all forget things in a time crunch that don't seem so important until something really bad happens.
Indeed, I've always been insanely over protective of data (since I had a hard drive crash in the 90's take out an essay I was writing for school) but for some reason I never applied that to my phone.
Then my phone and wallet got stolen and it was a massive mess as it had access to just about all my critical stuff (dropbox, google apps, email accounts etc) and I had no remote wipe and no password on it (yeah I know).
Now I have both remote wipe, a strong password and very little sensitive data on my new phone, far too easy to lose the keys to the kingdom.
You point out one of the most poisonous things about nerd culture. By pointing out when people are doing something that is in retrospect stupid, we train them to hide mistakes.
I've done it plenty myself, so I'm casting no stones here. But there's a giant gap between appearing smart and being smart. We rightly value smartness, which is great. But by playing Nelson to stupid mistakes and stupid questions, we encourage the appearance of smart over actual learning. To keep getting smarter, you have to be willing to look stupid sometimes.
I don't know when all this happened, or when this interview was, but while I'm certainly not always 'backed up', there really is very little excuse for loss nowadays.
Between Github, S3, Dropbox, etc., it just about takes effort to be in a position to lose data.
That said, I don't mean to fault the author as much as I want to encourage everybody to start using the tools available as part of their every day routine. If you're in a position now where catastrophe to a hard drive or a stolen laptop could affect your business in any way, you're doing it wrong, and it takes practice and regiment to correct, so start correcting it now, or you never will until it's too late.
Just to let you know there companies with cleanrooms that can get back the data of your HDD. You will have to pay a big bunch of money but in these cases it worths it. And they are really efficient. I saw a guy doing it for the cloud of his company, almost all HDDs are saved even one that was burned by a lightning strike.
Brandon: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
I'm glad you mentioned how you lost your work because of lack of a backup. There are quite a few snarky comments here about it, mine won't be one of them. Instead I thank you for your candor.
There are some cultures where mistakes and failures aren't explicitly mentioned; they're swept under the rug (wouldn't want to lose face!). I hate that. Instead I think we can all learn a great deal by reading someone say (in not quite as vulgar words): "I fucked up. I made a very simple, stupid mistake". It's of course implied the takeaway is "don't be as stupid as I was".