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In his talk titled "The First Feedback We Get" at the Paris.rb Conf 2020, Nicolas Zermati shares valuable insights drawn from his experiences as a developer over the past decade, highlighting a significant mistake he made while working on a payment processing feature for a car-sharing marketplace called Getaround. The key focus of his discussion revolves around improving delivery processes to reduce mistakes and stress in the development team. He illustrates the complexity of handling payment transactions after a regulatory change, which introduced additional authentication steps that led to confusion in the payment lifecycle, ultimately causing him to mistakenly reserve funds instead of capturing payments.

Nicolas identifies key points throughout his presentation:

- **Understanding Stress in Development**: Stress can impact judgment and decision-making, especially in high-stakes environments involving sensitive financial transactions.
- **The Importance of a Robust Delivery Process**: Implementing a structured delivery process helps mitigate risk and manage stress effectively, allowing teams to better handle critical updates and changes.
- **Steps to Improve Development Workflow**: Nicolas emphasizes practices like staging environments for testing before release, automated testing, and gradual rollouts to limit potential disruptions.
- **Learning from Mistakes**: He highlights how continual feedback and reflection after deployment can help identify flaws in the system, thereby fostering a culture of improvement and adaptation.
- **Embracing Stress as Feedback**: Stress can serve as an indicator of areas needing attention; by addressing it collectively, teams can improve their processes and outcomes.

Nicolas concludes that an effective delivery process not only protects against mistakes but also creates opportunities for growth and development within teams. He stresses that individual and team responses to stress are unique, and harnessing this variability can transform challenges into strengths. Overall, the take-home message is that by acknowledging and leveraging stress, development teams can enhance their performance and learn from their experiences, ultimately leading to better results in their projects.

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