2019 September 26-27

Isa Silveira

Looking under the rug: the art of learning from failure

Hand-drawn sketch notes summarizing the talk of Isa Silveira
Sketchnotes by Malweene,

The tech industry has a longtime history of cultivating heroes and epic stories of success. “Look how this tiny startup became an industry giant!”, “Did you hear Joe just got his dream job?”, “Learn how to ship amazing projects to production in no time!”. We’ve all heard stories like these and they are indeed very inspiring, but how come no one is talking about the ugly parts? Why aren’t stories of things that didn’t work out more common in tech? Why aren’t we more transparent about our experiences and what we learned from them?

In this talk, I’ll go through all the lessons I took from failing miserably at a software project, how that made me a much better developer and the importance of failure in the career of a software engineer.


Isa is a software engineer building the future of payments at iZettle. Throughout her career, she has worked with scientific research and nowadays works both on back and front end applications. Isa has worked on products from world class companies like the Stanford University, Planned Parenthood and Virgin. She never turns down a good talk and a beer, in her free time she thinks about how can she make the world a better place while playing with her dogs and practicing slalom skating.