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Case Study: Product Development & The Museum of Bugs

3 min readMay 30, 2025

How we stopped hiding our mistakes and started collecting them at Sigma Collection.

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1. The Usual

You release a new update.
Some stuff’s better. Some stuff’s broken.
So you fix the broken.
And you write the same thing everyone else writes:

“Bug fixes and performance improvements.”

That’s it. No soul. No story. No truth.

It’s like leaving the crime scene without even lighting a candle for the victim.

2. The Ugly Truth

We had bugs. Here and there.
Some were small and stupid.
Some ruined everything for a week.
Some just made us question why we ever started this thing.

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Bug first draft for Sigma Collection Bug museum
Bug first draft for Sigma Collection Bug museum

But you know what?
They were kind of beautiful.
Like little monsters with armor.
Shiny. Twisted. Unique.
Each one its own mess.

We stared at them long enough to realize —

maybe we shouldn’t kill them.
maybe we should
remember them.

3. The Idea

Screw the “bug fix” cliché.
We decided to do something weird.
Something disruptive and buggy, even.

We froze the bugs.
We built them in 3D —
and then encased them in glass.

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Bug drafts for museum of bugs
Bug drafts for museum of bugs

Not squashed. Not erased.
Just… still. Suspended.
Like a breath you forgot to exhale.

4. The Museum

Each fixed bug became an exhibit.
Frozen in a glass block.
Labeled like some rare species found in the back of your grandmother’s closet.

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Bug in a glass container concept by Sigma collection

“January 2025 — Token mismatch in color layer styles.”
That kind of thing.

We called it The Museum of Bugs.
A timeline of our failure.
A celebration of everything that almost broke us, but didn’t.

5. Why Bother?

Because you can’t build honest things by hiding the shit that went wrong.
You build them by owning it.
By saying —

“Yeah, this happened. But look how we climbed out.”

It made our team care more.
It made our users curious.
It made the whole thing feel real.

6. What It Became

Now, every bug fix comes with an artifact.
One more piece for the archive.
A growing museum of frozen chaos.
You can scroll through them.
You can laugh.
You can cry if you’re into that kind of thing.

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Eventually, we’ll open it up.
Let the world see the crap we crawled through to make something beautiful.

Final Thought

Mistakes are part of the code.
You either pretend they didn’t happen —
or you trap them in ice and show them off.

We chose the latter.

Because sometimes
what nearly ruined you
deserves a glass case and a spotlight.

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