I once set an S3 lifecycle setting that accidentally affected 3 years worth of logs to Glacier. The next morning I woke up to a billing alert and an AWS bill with an extra $250k in charges (our normal run rate was $30k/month at the time). Basically I spent my entire add annual cloud budget for the year overnight.
Thankfully after an email to our account rep and a bunch of back and forth I was able to get the charges reduced to $4,300.
Is cloud even cheaper than managing your own infrastructure anymore?
If I never have to buzz into another colo and stand in the exhaust of hundreds of servers again, it's worth every single penny. If I never have to plan for capacity weeks to years in advance again, its worth every penny.
I made this mistake but honestly? AWS is the most confusing clusterfuck of all time. I can’t stand it and refuse to use it for personal projects.
For me the problem came down to four conflicting sources on AWS regarding tiers and then another problem with the SDK. The SDK didn’t match the tiers at all so “archive” meant Glacier for some reason. 👎
That starting the work is half the work. I wasted a lot of time procrastinating, it took me shamefully long to realize that if I could just start an activity for 5 minutes, taking it to completion is then relatively easy
Art school isn't worth it, period. I got a far better art education through my local community college by far, from instructors who weren't incrediblely stuck up and full of themselves.
That was an 80k expense that I'm still paying off almost 20 years later, and I didn't even finish my degree.
I went back to get my AS at a CC and took some art classes there. 10/10, far better instruction for a fraction of the price.
I wanted a newer car, so I rolled my existing auto loan into the newer vehicles loan. So easy right?
I was upside down on it for years and years. It's so disheartening to drive a vehicle that's falling apart and stranding you everywhere but still owe $10k on it. It was an awful decision that took years of pain but that was my lesson on buying things I can afford.
Not me personally, but one of my career mentor's friend's took down the entirety of Google Ads as an intern for like 10 minutes. Apparently it was a multi-million dollar mistake, but they fixed the issue so it couldn't happen again and all was well afterward.
In my first couple months, I broke Amazon so that no-one in Europe could buy video for a few hours. On a Friday, right before going on a week's vacation.
The way that the ensuing investigation and response was carried out - 100% blame-free, and focused on "how did these tools let him down? How can we make sure no-one ever makes that same mistake again?" - gave me a career-long interest in Software Resiliency and Incident Management.
Tried shipping my motorcycle cross country without insurance.
As Eisenhower said,
beware the engagement-wedding-genderreveal-kids-mortgage-divorce-childsupport-legal-industrial complex.
I may be mis-remembering exactly what he said. but I think that was the gist.
First car. I had no idea about anything or how to cars or anyone providing good advice.
I put e10 once as the only other option was 98 and too expensive.
About a month later I get a rattling sound from under the car. Replacing the catalytic converter was really expensive.
As an IT-worker, it's not uncommon to test technology and scrap it due to bad results or unfit implementation. Usually this isn't considered a waste, since there are a lot of things to learn in the process.
However, this one system which was designed for testing applications was a bit different. From the day we were told about it, basically every developer knew that this would be unfit. However the customers were firm on that it should be implemented. I'm not sure if it was because of the looks of the sales person or if it was a genuine incompetense that the decission was landed, but I felt a bit too junior to stand up against it. So about a month of work with 2 developers went down on something that every other developer knew would be scrapped. 2 devs at ~$100/hour, 4 weeks of 40 hours, so roughly $32,000.
The lesson was that I need to be more direct and firm when things like that is decided.
Do not trust financial advisors when they live from the contracts they sell. (Most do, don’t trust them).
They work for their own interest or for that of their employer, yours is only second to theirs.
When buying a house people tell you to make sure the roof is in good condition because that'll be expensive to replace. What they don't tell you is that is all the other things that you may need to replace and how expensive they are. Fence, paint, siding, water heater, washer/dryer, AC, heater, kitchen appliances, etc. Some this might show up in the inspection report, but it's hard to get a good idea of what it'll cost beforehand. Also your realtor will have an incentive to downplay any problems to get the deal done.
Even home warranties won't defray much cost, or often have combined limits for annual reimbursement that are lower than you would imagine.
Home warranties are universally a scam. It was talked about pretty much every week on the Reddit homeowners forum. Just week after week someone getting scammed.
For one, they'll fight tooth and nail not replace things. When there is absolutely no way that heater can be patched up and run a little longer they'll replace it with the cheapest heater possible using the cheapest HVAC guy possible.
