The Thing We Hope To Always Hate Doing

In the years of building FoxyCart, we’ve occasionally made mistakes that we’ve had to apologize for. If you’ve ever received one of these email apologies, hopefully it’s come across in the text how seriously we take our responsibilities to you, the FoxyCart user.

We pushed out some code on Friday that impacted a very small number (less than 1%) of our users, but we still lost sleep over it. In drafting the email notifying our users that some emails didn’t get properly sent, we had this exchange over jabber:

Me: ok i’m going to get the list of emails and send it.
i hate sending these emails. not because we have to say sorry.
but because i don’t like knowing that we messed things up for our users.
Luke: thanks dude. I know how much you hate this stuff
I hate it also
but that comes out of actually caring deeply for our customers
so I always want to hate it

In thinking about what Luke said, we wanted to share this little bit of internal dialog. Obviously we’d rather not make any mistakes, thereby avoiding impacting our users (and these emails) entirely. But with this perspective perhaps the next time we draft one of these emails we’ll take comfort in the fact that we don’t handle it flippantly. It’ll be small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

— Brett