It’s been 0 days since my last screw up
I wasn’t planning on writing about this topic this week, but here we are: I screwed up at my new job for the first time. Luckily, I was able to fix it pretty easily, but there was a 10-minute period where I feared there was no easy solution and I would have to go to my manager with the bad news. Let me tell you about it.
The knowledge management software we use, called Guru, doesn’t have a native find-and-replace feature, so there’s no way to mass-edit content to replace terminology with new terminology. But I discovered a way to do it using a Google Sheet and Guru’s API. Basically, I can make changes to Guru content through GSheets in ways not possible directly in Guru, including mass-editing content with find and replace. The only downside is I have to export data from Guru as a .CSV file and import it into GSheets first—kind of a bummer, but not a huge deal.
I entered in the terms I wanted to replace and the new terms to replace them. From there, it showed me a list of all the documents that the changes would affect. It also showed me the documents that the changes wouldn’t affect, which is fine, but I only wanted the spreadsheet to show the former.
So I wrote a FILTER formula that filters out the latter and only shows affected documents. It looked good from my cursory glance, so I let the tool loose to make the necessary terminology edits in the background. Once it was done, I closed the spreadsheet and logged on to Guru to see the changes.
That’s when things took a turn.
I opened a document to check my work and noticed it had all the content of another document. Same with a few others I looked at. The spreadsheet ended up jumbling a handful of documents, and I didn’t know which ones. While the spreadsheet has a “revert changes” feature, I already reset the spreadsheet and closed it out, so it wouldn’t work this time. Big oof on my part.
You might ask if Guru itself has a “revert changes” feature, and the answer is an exasperated no. So even if I knew which documents I screwed up, I couldn’t just go in and revert it back to a previous version.
By this time, I figured out what I did wrong. Well, I did many things wrong, but the main thing was the FILTER formula. It was incorrect. It filtered out certain columns, but not others. So when the spreadsheet was reading the data on a per-row basis, the content was out of sync, resulting in the jumbled documents—a super simple bug that I would’ve caught if I did even the most trivial of testing.
I sat there for a good 10-15 minutes going back and forth thinking about solutions and also how screwed I was. Worst case scenario is that we would have to restore from a backup, but the most recent one was seven days old, and we made a lot of updates to the docs over the last week. (Not creating a more recent backup: mistake number two, or three?)
Then it hit me. Since I had to import the data into GSheets first, that meant I had a snapshot of all the documents as they were before I screwed up. (And if you’re asking why I couldn’t just restore that export back into Guru, that’s another downside—Guru doesn’t let you import .CSV data. If you think I'm side-eying Guru, I am.)
As a workaround, I created a find-and-replace parameter that would affect every document, like replacing every “a” with an “e.” The spreadsheet would use the data I originally imported as the baseline, reversing my screwup, but now with every “e” being an “a.” Then, I immediately reverted the changes (without resetting the spreadsheet and closing it out this time), which simply edited all the documents back to the baseline. Voila!
Creative fuckups require creative solutions.
I kept my manager updated on what was happening as it was happening. While I’m sure she didn’t appreciate the scare, she was glad I was able to reverse my screw up and let me off lightly, saying that mistakes happen and I learned from this one, so it’s all good. We moved on.
I wish I was that kind to myself, and I’m still kind of agonizing over it. But you know what? There’s been a lot of stuff I haven’t screwed up—my ratio of screw ups and non-screw ups is still pretty good, and that’s something to celebrate.
Whenever the last time you screwed up at work was, I hope you treated yourself with kindness and forgiveness. Like I said in a previous newsletter, you will make mistakes (both honest and dumb)—it's best to prepare for them now.
Overtime
Other work-related stuff I want to talk about without dedicating an entire newsletter to it.
I recently started using a new screenshot tool on my Mac, called Monosnap, and it's very good. MacOS's built-in screenshot tool isn't terrible, but it's pretty basic. Monosnap lets you easily markup screenshots with arrows and text, and it also has screen-recording capabilities. I feel like I take way more screenshots now, because it's really easy to demonstrate something to a coworker over Slack when you can quickly grab a screenshot and mark it up with arrows.
(FYI, this isn't sponsored. I just think it's a really cool tool that more people should know about.)
Happy Hour
Fun things I’m doing, TV shows and movies I’m watching, games I’m playing, music I’m listening to, and other neat stuff I want to share.
My wife and I went to LA over Labor Day weekend and had a blast with family and friends. We love traveling and hanging out with people we care about—we don't do it as often as we should.
I installed an exhaust fan on our cats' litter box, and holy moly, it makes a huge difference with the smell and the amount of litter dust that gets kicked up. Highly recommended.
I had no idea Field Notes made left-handed versions of their notebooks. There's nothing fundamentally different about them, other than the front and back covers are switched, but I appreciate Field Notes' awareness for southpaws.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in two weeks. In the meantime, catch up on some older newsletter issues if you’re a new subscriber, and feel free to follow me on Twitter or Instagram for my off-hours shenanigans.