Shrimp Soup for the Software Soul
by Vinayakam Murugan, Chief Everything Officer
This Thursday, our team stepped out for a well-earned dinner.
One of those evenings where laughter flowed freely, plates piled high with meat were passed around, and I-the lone non-meat crusader-scanned the menu for that solitary green leaf symbol. I found comfort in a warm bowl of vegetable soup and, with a touch of friendly coercion, convinced Ajay to share it with me.
The soups arrived. We did our due diligence and confirmed mine was the non-meat one.
Green tick. Spoon in.
Halfway through, I bit into something that didn’t quite belong. It was too crispy. Too suspicious. I paused, squinted, and poked at it like an amateur archaeologist unearthing a tiny fossil.
And there it was: shrimp.
Sitting smugly in my soup like it had RSVP’d without checking the guest list.
In that moment, I was instantly reminded of an old incident. Same discomfort, different context-this time from the world of software.
A few years ago, we were working on a seemingly harmless cosmetic update to a product page in an e-commerce application. A layout tweak. Nothing backend, nothing functional, just UI touch-up. Low risk.
Or so we believed.
Unfortunately, that tiny tweak came with a hidden sting. The wrong SKU started getting passed during checkout. No errors, no alerts-just silent chaos for a good 3 to 6 hours. Customers received incorrect products before we caught it.
The client? Calm, focused, professional. Instead of finger-pointing, they zeroed in on: What’s broken? How do we fix it? What checks can we add?
From our end, we dove into late-night recovery mode-retrieved impacted order data, corrected records, and pushed the fix.
We had a review afterward, walked through the gaps, and implemented changes to prevent cosmetic tweaks from skipping functional validations again. A bug, a process flaw, and a lesson well-learned.
Back to the soup. I gently pushed the shrimp aside. The restaurant staff apologized sincerely, didn’t charge for it, and promised to be more cautious.
No drama. Just resolution. Ajay, meanwhile, performed an exaggerated water cleanse worthy of an Oscar-an especially funny sight given how much he loves fish ;)
Mistakes happen. In kitchens. In code. Even in well-intentioned conversations.
But what matters most is how we respond, how we recover, and-crucially-what processes we put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Sometimes, all it takes is a calm head, a little empathy, and the good sense to focus on what needs to be done next.
Even if dinner ends with just breadsticks and stories.
