Talk · Confitura 2026
Building Resilience: Sustain the Maker
Every resilience pattern you ship, you copied from the human body. Then you never ran it back on yourself.
The abstract
Every resilience pattern you ship (redundancy, feedback loops, graceful degradation, anti-fragility) was borrowed from the most battle-tested system in existence: the human body. We're brilliant at applying these patterns to machines and apply none of them to ourselves. We fight for a maintenance budget at work and allocate zero for the one system we can never rewrite, migrate or redeploy.
This talk runs the borrowing back the other way, and I don't run it alone. My AI sidekick, Loyal, shares the stage and doesn't just nod along. Together we trace how sitting quietly remodels you around your chair, why the developer identity fossilised around a constraint that no longer exists, and why nobody is watching the slow stretch where a resilient body becomes a fragile one. Then we build the maintenance system for it: identity, environment, a sustainable start, feedback, accountability, recovery, with the discipline you give production. Fair warning, you won't spend it sitting still, and you'll leave with a contract you wrote yourself for the maker, not just the machine.
What attendees will learn
- The resilience patterns already in your stack (redundancy, feedback loops, graceful degradation, anti-fragility) came from the human body, and how to run them back the other way
- Where the unmonitored decline actually lives, and why "nothing hurts, so nothing's wrong" fails the same way an unpatched legacy server does
- A six-part maintenance system (identity, environment, a sustainable start, feedback, accountability, recovery) you configure for yourself instead of a one-size routine
- A starter configuration you can apply tomorrow: a break every hour, 10,000 steps a day, a few intense sessions a week, plus a failsafe so a bad day never drops to zero
- Why redesigning your defaults and environment beats willpower, for the same reason you automate instead of relying on discipline
Cited in the talk
- Multisystemic Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Contexts of Change
The resilience framework behind the talk — process, not trait
- Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability
Resilience as the capacity to change in order to sustain identity
- Structural spinal abnormalities on MRI and associations with weight status in a general pediatric population
MRI found a disc bulge in 73% of 559 Dutch children around age ten — it doesn’t show pain or cause
- Effect of prolonged sitting and breaks in sitting time on endothelial function
Three hours of unbroken sitting reduced leg-artery dilation in 12 young men; 5-minute walking breaks prevented it
- Insulin resistance induced by physical inactivity
Nine days of bed rest changed the expression of 4,500+ muscle genes in 20 healthy young men
- Resilience in the Salutogenic Model of Health
The river of life — no one is on the shore