I barely am able to plan groceries for a few days to a week ahead, especially with two middle schoolers eating everything in sight. While I would agree with the sentiment (definitely something will disrupt heat/water/food access), I struggle with actually executing on doing anything other than having some real basics around. 30 days of spare food feels like such an enormous amount of space and material.
Mine is just a shelf of Chef Boyardee and Campbell's.
I eat one or two a week as regular lunches, to rotate stock. When there's some room at the empty end of the shelf, I shove everything down, and buy some new cans to stuff in at the intake end.
It takes no more time than going to the pantry for a can of soup regularly would. And saves time, because I'm _never_ out and scrambling to find another option. Whether I'm 8 cans down or 24, one trip to the store will replenish it regardless.
Don't overcomplicate it. Folks who blog about things tend to do so because they're proud they achieved something difficult, so you compare yourself to a difficult standard. Resist that.
This is the way. And I have no shame when I warm up a can of ravioli in the microwave at coworking.
Even though the campbell's exec declared it "poor food" the jazzy jambalaya has replaced our instant pot recipe. We buy two cans of it, add a package of microwaveable ready rice and have decent (although very carb and sodium heavy) dinner in ~3 minutes.
It also cooks up great in a small pot on a pocket rocket and tastes great right of the can as far as it being suitable for emergency food.
There are different strategies.
One is to have cheap dry food plus some canned food in 5 gallon buckets. If you buy dry food like beans, rice, and pasta, you can get them from
Walmart/Costco for about $1 a pound. This type of food will last a number of years, more if you put them in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. You need roughly 1 pound of food per person per day, and you can fit about 30 lbs of food in a 5 gallon bucket. For a family of four, you’ll need about 5 buckets for 30 days if you want to put in some canned food and things like spices etc so it’s palatable. A lot of people have some out of the way corner they can put 5 buckets.
Of course you’ll need a way to cook the dry food. The most sustainable way I know of is a small portable solar system and an instant pot. The instant pot is very energy efficient so you don’t need a very big solar system depending on where you live. If you store flour, you can also get a bread maker, which is pretty efficient.
The reason I like this strategy is that it’s cheap, and you don’t have to think about it very often. You can just trash the food after some number of years. You also don’t have to eat food close to its expiration date normally.
The only hiccup is fat. Cooking oil goes rancid, so you probably want to replace that every year or so, but canola/soybean oil is very cheap.
Of course none of this is very healthy, so you’ll want to include some vitamins…
I’d just do your best to keep extra of stuff you know you’ll eat, you know the old two is one and one is none.
Grab 2 packs of dried pasta instead of 1 for example. Rice. Beans. Canned stuff like veggies, fish, even the little single serve veg/beans etc.
Anything is better than nothing which is where most people land. Even knowing you got enough food stuffs for a day is enough comfort to ward off panic in disaster situations.
A 24/30pk of 500ml water can be had for like $5/10. Also very useful outside of disaster if they’re cycled through.
I feel similarly, but I did get some stuff in Feb 2020 when I could tell that COVID was going to be a huge deal. Camp stove, water storage containers, bulk bags of dry beans and rice, and several buckets of freeze dried food that have a shelf life of decades and could keep my family alive for at least a couple months. It's not really enough tbh, but it's something.
Did you get toilet paper? As I recall that was the main thing everybody was short of. (I'm lucky, we made our regular costco run about that time and got our regular 3 months supply of toilet paper and so didn't need more until supplies returned).
The grocery stores all had plenty of fresh food (some things ran short, but there was always plenty) I'm reasonably sure you never needed the camp stove, or any of the other supplies. They might have been nice to have anyway, but never needed.
The reality is that it's probably a skill issue. Scaling a mature platform 10x can be a really, really hard problem, they obviously don't have their arms around a solution, and are probably spending a majority of their time on ops to keep the bleeding down. In the old days you would have Jeff Dean come down from heaven and invent a new database for you or something like that. It doesn't really seem like Github has that kind of technical ability, so they're probably trying to cobble together Azure ops with internal bandaids while everyone internally is cranking out AI code and it's just not going to be enough.
I don’t think their engineers « learn the codebase » anymore, that’s so 2025. It’s all agentic now, the model learns the codebase, the engineer ask the agents to do their best and believe in themselves
Which is why my colleague pushed fix after fix but still failed at addressing the root cause of a bug. Turns out outsourcing all your thinking to a machine that doesn't truly understand your system yet hallucinates isn't going to work.
I'm still heartbroken by how this has turned out, and it doesn't feel like things have gotten better over the last 9-10 months. I really feel in 10-20 years we will look back at these events as a dark time for this community. I hope to still be writing Ruby in that future. I hope the wounds here, both personal and professional, actually get healed.
It's rough not having Canada's population in here. There's way more than 100k people in all directions north from Buffalo and it doesn't feel accurate.
In case you need a real example that's not just gaming or concerts, join me and thousands of others watching Sumo live hosted by MidnightSumo (he's not a cat)
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