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1. Technical Catastrophe Challenge

This is a challenge made for solopreneurs/indie founders. But anyone doing it, will also learn a lot about personal resilience and disaster recovery.

Situation

There was a fire and all your hardware was destroyed. Your laptop(s), your phone(s), your physical bank cards, your NAS backup, your USB sticks, your Ubikey. You basically have the clothes on your back and nothing else.

The Preparation

  • NEW HARDWARE: You should start from new hardware. For this challenge, you can use an old one of yours, that was reformatted. But in real life, you would need to buy new ones. So you would need access to money, even when all your bank cards were destroyed. We're going to assume you can depend on your family, your friends or your banker. You need a plan for that. But anyway: you start with a new phone and a new laptop.
  • SEPARATION: separate yourself from your home and your office. Put yourself e.g. in a Starbucks or a library. You have no access to your existing hardware.
  • TIME YOURSELF: ideally all tasks should be finished in one afternoon.
  • TAKE NOTES: take notes of what you're doing and what you're learning. Use a pen and paper. Prefix with the time.

The Tasks

  1. Pay a bill: pay 10$ from your business account to your personal account.
  2. Purchase online: buy a pocket notebook from Amazon with the business account.
  3. Fix a bug: add the character ↑ ↑ to the footer of all your websites and outgoing emails.
  4. Change a credit card: change the credit card that is used for your XYZ account. (could be any SaaS service, like hosting, Dropbox, Office 365)
  5. Send an invoice: create new client in your invoicing system and send an invoice for 0$.

Learnings

  • how easy is it to recover your password manager?
  • how easy is it to recover your 2-factor authentication account?
  • how easy is it to recover your email?
  • how easy is it to get new credit cards and replace those in every service you use?
  • how easy is it to pay stuff when your cards are gone?
  • how easy is it to recover SSH keys, gain access to GitHub/Bitbucket, be ready to deploy software?