I’m working on a lessons learned post for Shotput Ventures from this last summer but thought I’d do one real quick about a particular skill of my own that came in handy to some of the companies this last summer.  You see, I break things.  Not intenionally always but I have an uncanny ability to break stuff.  A number of the Shotput companies experienced this first hand when given their product I managed to mangle it up and cause application errors within minutes.

I think I honed this skill while working at Arris Interactive.  You see, there I was the first Systems Engineer hired and often ran testing for products before they shipped.  In this capacity I viewed it as my job to make sure products never shipped.  Because when they did, I knew they were solid and that I had discovered as many problems as possible before they hit the field.

My latest display of this prowess was again completely unintentional. I saw the recent post of DailyBooth on TechCrunch and thought I should get over there and claim my username (occasionally other “Sanjay”s land grab “sanjay” before I can and thus I have to settle for “sanjayparekh”).  In playing with the site I somehow autofollowed a bunch of suggested users. I thought “no, I don’t want that” and in an effort to clean that up, I ended up somehow confusing the system into thinking that I’m following nearly 4.3 billion users on DailyBooth. Although the site is getting good traction, I’m thinking there aren’t that many users there.  Especially since none are listed on my following page.  I’m sure that will get fixed at some point but for now you can see for yourself that I’m shown to be following nearly 4.3 billion users.

So the point is, do you have a really good person who is testing your app and is capable of breaking it in ways you didn’t even imagine? If not, it’s going to fall on people like me who have that ability and that isn’t gong to be fun for any of us.

UPDATE: DailyBooth fixed my following counts. Good on them. Wonder if I can break it again…