No News is Good News, Generally Speaking.

I’ve heard that phrase at least a million times growing up (well, maybe not a million). And today something happened that made me think about it again.

I’m a software developer in my day job, and we published some new software today. A minor change, however, due to a slight typographical error (an extra parenthesis in a query) several of our users were receiving errors. I quickly searched my error logs, found the cause, and corrected it. However, it made me think how our actions impact people, and we may never really know about it at all. I realized today how many hundreds of people are using our software at any one time, generally without any issues at all. When something goes wrong, however, we become aware of our impact, or our work’s impact, on others.

I’m not mentioning this to direct our thoughts to ourselves, but on the contrary, I would encourage us all to remain humble in our thoughts – not thinking too highly of ourselves – but always remembering that our actions do impact others, even if we don’t see it.

I hope you’re having a great week!