Comment by mb20281
This example is pretty weak as multiple things are wrong here. Seems like there was a lack of error handling all the way through (or participants would've noticed errors on completing). And why wouldn't you save in DB before sending the email? After all, you can always recover sending the email - and it's awkward to send an email with results that didn't make it to your DB.
Oh, there were definitely multiple things wrong. Bear in mind that this was 12 years ago, so this is just what I took away with me as an on-going learning. Obviously showing errors to users is an obvious takeaway, but it's a side discussion from affordance.
Results were sent as a CSV file - basically a raw export of the data the server got, not something that was read from the DB. So the operation to save to DB and to send the email were intended to be (almost) parallel operations. The errors weren't shown to users, though there was error handling for other cases that did show the user.