[jfoutz]

Me, personally, here's what i do. I screw up all the time. Odds are, you do too. Usually, it won't matter, like a mistyped password. Sometimes i mistype variable or function names, and the compiler helps me out. Sometimes my logic is wrong, and testing shows me what i've done. But no matter how hard i try, errors seem to leak out to code review, and sometimes even production.

Everybody struggles with this. I find it hugely embarrassing. Don't bother calling people out for making mistakes, if they're any good, they know they've made a mistake. Instead, give advice about how you avoid those kinds of errors. We've all been there. It sucks. Instead offer up some tricks or techniques for avoiding that kind of problem in the future. If it's really bad, a war story about how you really messed up bad can be calming.

The gist is, your coworker is probably feeling a lot of emotions. We've all felt those emotions, and it's going to be ok. Later, we'll have a post mortem and find a way so nobody can ever have that problem again (or make it harder). It sucks coworker had to be the one to break things in that way, but coworker is helping ever other person to come after them. Somebody was going to do that eventually, coworker just got unlucky.