Anyone else tired of running their life like a Jenga tower that wobbles every time a coffee shop blender turns on? I want to treat my nomad setup like an actual distributed system with SLAs, failover, and fewer “sorry, the volcano ate my Ethernet” messages. Let’s crowdsource a Nomad Reliability Engineering playbook.
Looking for real-world architectures, not just vibes:
- Uptime and SLAs: What commitments do you make to clients during border runs, long-hauls, or when you’re YOLOing an overnight train? Do you have a formal “in-transit mode” with defined response times?
- Redundancy: How many layers deep is your internet failover? Phone tether + local SIM + eSIM + travel router + coworking day pass + “run to the Marriott lobby” plan? Anyone using travel routers with WAN failover or a tiny UPS for the power-cut lottery?
- 2FA and auth sanity: How do you avoid getting locked out when SMS codes don’t arrive, your number gets banned, or you swap SIMs weekly? Hardware keys stashed in separate bags? 1Password/Bitwarden “travel mode” strategies? Burner device playbooks?
- Chaos drills: Do you simulate disasters? Examples: rebuild laptop from zero in 90 minutes; day of forced offline deep work; “lost phone Friday”; “bank froze me” scenario. What’s your personal RTO/RPO for your brain and your business?
- Monitoring and observability: Do you monitor your own life like a server? Track meeting misses, average jitter/packet loss per neighborhood, coworking QoS, or power outage frequency? Any automations that alert you when your primary uplink dies so you can fail over before Zoom becomes interpretive dance?
- Tooling and kits that actually saved you: Travel routers (Pepwave/GL.iNet), multi-carrier eSIMs, dual-laptop setups, split backups, remote desktop into a home box with a static IP to dodge KYC tantrums, offline maps/docs, portable monitor/keyboard to avoid T-Rex posture injuries.
- Legal/finance gotchas: KYC meltdowns from foreign IPs, cards flagged at the worst moment, “proof of address” when your address is literally “table near the fern.” Any clean, non-sketchy solutions that don’t get accounts nuked?
- Insurance and claims: Has anyone successfully claimed laptop/phone theft across multiple countries without aging 12 years in paperwork? Which policies actually pay out?
- Cost-of-chaos math: How do you model the hidden friction tax of moving (SIM churn, visa runs, currency spreads, ergonomics, time zone lag) vs. just staying put and developing feelings for a chair? Anyone got a spreadsheet or heuristic?
- Checklists/templates: First hour in a new apartment, power/desk/Wi-Fi validation, 2FA smoke test, escape hatch plan if the place is secretly a Faraday cage. Exit-city shutdown checklist to avoid subscription zombies.
I’m after specifics: gear lists, screenshots, runbooks, metrics that moved when you changed something, and the weird hacks you only admit after two espressos. If there’s interest, I’ll compile a “Nomad DR/BCP” template we can all fork. Bonus points for war stories where your setup saved a launch, or, alternatively, when a hostel cat ate your only USB-C cable and you had to pair program with despair.