Welcome to Fault Tolerance
Hello and welcome to Fault Tolerance! Thanks for reading.
Fault Tolerance is a blog I started as a place to store and share some of my writing. I will largely be writing about the following topics:
mental health & emotional regulation
friendship
social media & smartphones
software engineering & software engineering interviews
book reviews
other topics, as they emerge
This is a wide variety of topics. I hope you find something that catches your interest.
This writing reflects my own personal goals. For a while now I have felt that I need a place to capture all of the reading and learning I do for professional growth in my career. You can certainly expect technical writing here. Besides that, I also write to process my own feelings. I write to reflect on what is working in my life, and what isn’t. Given the personal nature of my writing, I do not expect a large audience. That being said, I am hopeful that something I write will be helpful to someone.
I do have another motivating factor for writing and (public) publishing. I recently started receiving therapeutic care for C-PTSD. This is a terrifying sentence to write at all, much less in the public forum of the internet. I have spent most of my life intuiting that there is something different about me and concomitantly aspiring to normalcy. I have wasted years hiding a true self I consider defective and insufficient.1 I no longer want to hide and I can think of no more open a place than the public internet, here on this blog I have named “fault tolerance.”
I chose the name “fault tolerance” from the discipline of software engineering (oh, by the way, I am a software engineer). Generally speaking, “fault tolerance” refers to the ability of a software system to continue operating as a whole when one or more of the constituent parts of that software system fail. If you are not a software engineer, this explanation might feel unintuitive. Let’s explore the concept. Imagine you’re watching something on YouTube and your home internet connection wavers. You might experience some minor disruption in the form of buffering, but if YouTube is working correctly then it should pick back up where you left off (maybe at a lower resolution). The system can handle the brief internet failure without cascading into total failure.
In “fault tolerance” there is a useful metaphor outside the world of software engineering. Fault tolerance describes a quality that I - a person, not a software - lack and for which I long. The brief challenges, disappointments, and setbacks that constitute a human life often cascade into total failures of my emotional resilience. I am unable to regulate my emotions and self-sooth. These failures have harmful side-effects. I lose previously healthy friendships and I self-sabotage in countless other ways. I wonder who I could be otherwise…healthy, safe, and emotionally regulated even in the face of disappointments. This is the goal towards which I am working. I don’t want the whole person of Emily to flounder and fail because one or more things go awry.
Thanks for joining me while I seek that.
Incidentally, the ICD-11 (linked above) lists the following as an attribute of C-PTSD:
”Persistent beliefs about oneself as diminished, defeated or worthless, accompanied by deep and pervasive feelings of shame, guilt or failure….”