On Designing Resiliant Systems

Confession: I'm a prepper. Not in the fun, wacky way where I build bunkers and stock barrels of diesel, but rather in a very practical and simple way. I prioritize savings, thrift, and productive tools. I have clean water storage, food stuffs, and plain camping gear. I camp, learn how to do simple tasks with very little, and in general prepare myself and my family for hardship.

Part of this is in simply setting aside funds for stuff. Emergency liquidity, basic tools, financial assets over transient goods. I prefer ownership over rented commodity. I read Army survival handbooks and I can draw from the appendix and dump a magazine accurately. practical preparedness is in simple tasks that stack up into a system of self reliance and resilience.

In truth, resilience is just a series of trusted components designed together with fault tolerance in mind. If one component fails, the system will tolerate the local failure and continue to operate, even if the component itself never recovers. A depleted food store can be refilled with farming/hunting skills and tools. A damaged HDD on a website's server can be replaced with a backup image of the database and a clone of the latest release image. Resilience in sum, via logical composition of parts.

I don't personally believe in resilience through theory. I prefer practical application of theory, praxis if you are a socialist I suppose haha, whereby I can verify the claims of theory in trials rather than merely assuming completeness. In applying lessons learned the old fashioned way, I can do away with the stacks of assumptions typically prevailing in most fields and build from "first principals."

And if you aren't speed running these trials with LLMs, then you are NGMI. Plain and simple. Learn, and become resilient.