Mistakes of a senior engineer

Hi, my name is Shaun and despite having 15+ years in software development I want to hold my hand up and show that I still make mistakes and silly mistakes at that! I am writing this in the hope that it helps you realise that when we make a mistake we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it, we are only human.

I recently added a change to the .NET MAUI Community Toolkit (or should I say tookit). Essentially I introduced an XmlnsDefinition here https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/Maui/pull/247 that was aimed at making developers’ lives easier. However it turns out that despite looking over it multiple times I made a silly typo (toolkit became tookit) which is ultimately going to make their lives a little more painful if they grabbed this new version.

I mean I even went through and corrected the typo in all of the uses in the samples just not in the main source! I beat myself up quite a bit when I realised this.

I owe a big thanks to my team (Brandon, Gerald, Pedro and Vlad) that helped me realise that it is perfectly normal to make mistakes, we are only human after all. If you can I thoroughly recommend finding someone, or some people that can help you out like this. If you don’t have people around you to help here then feel free to reach out.

I hope that next time you make a mistake, you can attribute it to simply being human, accept it happened, laugh at it, learn from it and move on.