Software engineering is my one true love. And like many love stories, I have had my heart broken and shattered into a million pieces. How can we cope with the pain of failed software projects - when we give everything we have: long years of late-night debugging, intense weekends of deployment, romantic dinners spent alone in front of the monitor - only to see our creation obliterated and forgotten? Software development is not for the fainthearted. It can leave you with grief so deep that you attempt to just walk away from it all. I want you to know that you are not alone. I sometimes feel the same way too. Two decades of failures have left me with deep scars, but they also show a brand of bravery and the refusal to give up on something we believe in: that technology can and does improve lives and it is worth enduring the pain it causes to achieve that.