How do I cope with only getting noticed when something breaks?

When your work runs smoothly, you are invisible; when it breaks, it is suddenly your fault. Living inside that lopsided deal wears on you in a way that is hard to explain to anyone outside it. You get no credit for the thousand things that worked and all the blame for the one that did not. It is quietly demoralizing. The first thing to protect is your own sense of your worth, because the asymmetry will lie to you if you let it. A failure is not proof you are bad at this. Complex software breaks; that is its nature, and a break is a normal event, not a character flaw. The measure of your work is the whole body of it — everything that quietly runs because you built it well — not the single moment it stumbled. You can also tilt the balance back a little. Make your invisible wins visible: when you prevent a problem, ship something solid, or fix a mess before anyone noticed, say so plainly. Keep your own record of what you have built and shipped so the failures do not get to write your whole story. And when something breaks, fix it, learn, and let it go — do not carry it for weeks. You do far more good than the outages suggest. Do not let the loud moments drown out the quiet ones.