When the System Breaks, So Do You

Not long ago, one of my apps crashed hard in the middle of the night, and I woke up to a flurry of error alerts. In that bleary 3 AM moment, I felt my stomach drop — not just because the system broke, but because a part of me broke too. I had poured myself into that project, and seeing it fail unexpectedly hit me on a personal level. It got me thinking about how intertwined we are with the systems we create and rely on, and how important it is to build both our code and ourselves to handle failure gracefully.

On the technical side, this experience was a wake-up call. I hadn’t designed enough fail-safes or monitoring. Since then, I’ve been more vigilant: adding better error handling, setting up backups, making sure there’s a fallback plan (as I did with my AI assistant switching to a local model when the API fails). I’ve adopted an attitude that anything can break at any time, and I code accordingly. It’s not paranoia, it’s preparedness. The funny thing is, that mindset actually reduces anxiety — if you know you have a plan B (and C), you sleep better.

Emotionally, I’ve had to work on resilience in parallel. Part of that is expecting things to go wrong and not tying my entire self-worth to everything working perfectly. When a system fails now, I take a breath before I react. I remind myself that fixing the issue is the goal, not beating myself up over it. I also try to diversify my “emotional portfolio,” so to speak. If one project tanks for a bit, I have other aspects of life to lean on (friends, hobbies, another project) so I’m not all-in on that one success or failure.

The connection between system design and personal mindset is pretty fascinating. Both benefit from a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will, eventually. By engineering systems to be fault-tolerant, I learned how to be a bit more fault-tolerant myself. When something breaks, I’m more prepared to bend instead of snap. It’s still not fun when things fall apart, but at least now I know that neither the code nor I have to break completely.