My greatest mistakes

I believe that it's important not only to admit mistakes and learn from them, but also to allow everyone else to learn from them. That's why I am documenting my greatest mistakes here as I commit or recall them

Mistakes and failures

• 2001: Intel ISEF conference – I won national science project competition with kinda mediocre project (others were just worse): I "invented" new image compression algorithm, but nothing revolutionary (and the experts in the US noted that accurate enough to not cause any butthurt for a young brain ). As I was not excited with my project, my motivation was near 0, so my presentation was terrible. Correct action would be to decline invitation straight away, or prepare the project properly.
• 2006: I was doing massive cleanup on a site(social network) implemented by previous team of developers (all fired). After some time, we've noticed that blog posts gets removed every day, and we were unable to fine a cause. Each day was starting with restoring missing records from DB backup. After few days of struggle and access log analysis, I've found that blogs administration page was allowing everyone (even not-logged in users) to remove blog posts. Google eventually found this page, and started to index all links on it, hitting [delete] button for different posts few times a day lol I needed to verify authorization on every page in the very beginning.
• 2008: I was managing a small sub-project to implement a Flex-based e-shop. We were using PostgreSQL on production, but developer had MySQL and was unable to download Postgree right away. I said "Not a big deal, DB is small, do it on MySQL, we'll migrate DB via SQL export/import". I can see you smiling now Of course it wasn't that easy, there were issues with Boolean fields, and case sensitivity of field names. My decision caused 10 hours of extra work.

What I do not consider as mistake or failure

• Leaving university (twice) – that was pretty far ago, and I never regret that. I don't fill like I am missing some knowledge – while my mates were sitting in the auditoriums, I wasn't just playing computer games, but rather self-educating and getting work experience on my profession.
• Programming championship results degradation since 2001: I completely lost interest in academic programming, so my results were quite inertial. It hard to motivate you to do thousands of hours of training just to get yet another medal at IOI, "good buy, you've got a medal!" is just not worth it. So I stopped almost all trainings, and proceeded to "industrial" development instead. Again, never regret that decision.