We fail a lot. Even the shiny, bright, successful people do, though you’d never know from looking at their Instagram feeds. Failure is almost invariable painful, but it’s not always bad. Yeah, no, f’real, a lot of the time failure is plain awful, and a complete disaster. There’s no denying that. But not always. Sometimes it’s just a necessary evil. Sometimes it can even be done artfully. Let’s talk about how to fail a bit less, fail less painfully, and fail more strategically. Katrina is an engineer at GitHub. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for code practice and programming mentorship.