
Advertise on podcast: This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software
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This podcast has
38 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Colette Alexander and Clint ByrumExplicit
No
Date created
2024/11/13
Latest episode
2026/09/01
Average duration
59 min.
Release period
22 days
Description
A podcast about resilience engineering and software. Ever wondered why things on the internet break? Do you work in software and wish that you could have a Dear-Abby-Like call-in show that could answer your deepest questions about how to make your workplace suck less? We're here to help! Write us anonymously at our open question form Email us at: [email protected] Call us and leave a voicemail, or text us at: (401) 592-7574
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Check latest episodes from This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software podcast
Crisis Engineering w/special guests Layer Aleph
2026/09/01
If you want to come to the event to chat with Layer Aleph folks about Crisis Engineering you can sign up here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/272451
A small snippet of our communication with Riverside (we’re pretty sure it’s AI, folks!)
—---------------------
Hi Colette,
Thank you for pushing back on our last reply, and I owe you a correction.
You were right about pressing record
Our logs confirm you did start a recording. The countdown you saw was real, and telling you the record button wasn't clicked was wrong. I'm sorry for that.
What the recording data shows
Here's the difficult part. That first recording started and then stopped 13 seconds later. Everything after that point wasn't being captured, even though your studio session stayed open and you carried on recording your episode.
You then started a second recording about eight minutes afterwards, which is the 8-minute 48-second take with Clint.
Those two are the only recordings that exist for that day. There's nothing else stored and nothing recoverable from the period in between, because no content was being written during it.
—----------------------
You can find Layer Aleph here: https://layeraleph.com/
And a good roundup of their recommended reading that was referenced for Crisis Engineering is here: https://crisisengineering.layeraleph.com/reading-list/
Some writing on Mikey’s Pomona College course is here: https://www.pomona.edu/news/2024/02/12-cover-time-back-campus-mikey-dickerson-01-pilots-return-pomona
Weaver referenced Karl Weick early on as an influence. Some of Karl Weick on sensemaking can be found here: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133
And he also is part of the HRO (high reliability organization) group, some of that writing is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2307/41165243
Obviously if we talk about Richard Cook we start with https://how.complexsystems.fail/
Downs’ Inside Bureaucracy seems to have limited printing options: https://a.co/d/08dulLA1
A small plug of Pandoc if you’re looking to get markdown into a .doc format: https://pandoc.org/
It has been 0 episodes since we have mentioned the Dependency comic from xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
If you want to come to the event to chat with Layer Aleph folks about Crisis Engineering you can sign up here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/272451
Handover Communications in Software Operations w/special guest Chad Todd
2026/08/28
Chad’s thesis from Lund is here: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9076274&fileOId=9076276
The great Barry Turner book Man-Made Disasters from the 1970s has recently seen 2nd edition released, it used to be a very rare and difficult book to find: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0750620870
Some Patterson and/or Woods on Handover Communications in medical settings: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45126978 and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2327857919081001 and https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/21/Suppl_1/i19.short and re: NASA - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107118139704100155
Communication coordination during handovers for railway dispatch: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/9020
Chad’s talk on Handover Communications at SRECon can be found here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23americas/presentation/todd
The Law of Fluency comes from Woods’ work in Cognitive Systems Engineering, here’s a paper that mentions it: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Woods-19/publication/224753269_The_Messy_Details_Insights_From_the_Study_of_Technical_Work_in_Healthcare/links/0deec51bb2fc4d4e3d000000/The-Messy-Details-Insights-From-the-Study-of-Technical-Work-in-Healthcare.pdf but there are many other books and papers that do as well.
Common Ground in Joint Activity is another theme that comes up in the Cognitive Systems Engineering world. Gary Klein has written about it lots of places, perhaps most notably here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1363742 and here: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=371wV4dI7ckC&oi=fnd&pg=PA139&dq=common+ground+joint+activity&ots=1RKpCK7p7g&sig=XkyZygexYgU36UC-QtIzM3S67Cg#v=onepage&q=common%20ground%20joint%20activity&f=false
A Tale of Two Safeties is not by Allspaw/Cook, it’s by Erik Hollnagel: https://hf-sts.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/3689b-a_tale_of_two_safetieshollnagel.pdf
The academic and the practical in resilience engineering
2026/06/28
Aerobarrier is super cool if you want to check out how it works: https://glbipro.com/aerobarrier-2/
Colette isn’t drinking alcohol, it’s a delicious herbal mocktail by Casamara Club: https://www.casamaraclub.com/products/como
(Maybe we can get them to sponsor us someday)
On the passive house that survived the Palisades fire: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1hy22ui/house_designed_on_passive_house_principles/
Layer Aleph https://layeraleph.com/ folks have written Crisis Engineering: https://bookshop.org/p/books/crisis-engineering-time-tested-tools-for-turning-chaos-into-clarity-marina-nitze/44736d1287a7da6e and there will be an RISF event with them in September https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/272451 , which means we’re hoping to get them on the pod in August, FYI!
More about the Lund program here: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/
Dr. Woods’ OSU program is here: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration
Our semi-academic, semi-practical space is the Resilience in Software Foundation slack - lots of folks from all ends of the spectrum talk there about RE concepts and practical applications for how to solve things (and pet pictures). You can get access to it by joining the Resilience in Software Foundation: resilienceinsoftware.org
The program in Australia is NOT in Melbourne, it’s in Brisbane at Griffith University, you can see Sidney Dekker’s profile there: https://experts.griffith.edu.au/19027-sidney-dekker as part of the Humanities and Social Sciences school. Drew Rae is also there, and his podcast is here: https://safetyofwork.com/
https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/ and https://www.uptimelabs.io/ are very practical approaches to a lot of these things. Blackrock 3 https://www.blackrock3.com/ does training for incident command.
Interviewing for Incident Analysis w/special guest John Allspaw
2026/05/14
The new website is live! thisisfinepod.com
You can find John Allspaw at Adaptive Capacity Labs: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com
Mike McGill, the skateboarder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McGill
Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, referenced by our question-asker is a great one: https://bookshop.org/p/books/thinking-in-bets-making-smarter-decisions-when-you-don-t-have-all-the-facts-annie-duke/31466984521c3d8a?ean=9780735216372&next=t
Naturalistic Decision Making has its own association, which has a ton of resources (and a conference!) - https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org/
They also have a podcast! https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org/new-podcast/
Gary Klein is the NDM guy - https://bookshop.org/p/books/seeing-what-others-don-t-the-remarkable-ways-we-gain-insights-chief-scientist-gary-klein/c4ae5e017fe005ff?ean=9781610393829&next=t
We contrast him and his style of approaching cognition and decision making with Kahneman and Tversky.
Kahneman and Tversky wrote a lot, but Judgement Under Uncertainty is probably the most famous? https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124
And Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow: https://bookshop.org/p/books/thinking-fast-and-slow-daniel-kahneman-phd/83a544fe6f98df87?ean=9780606275644&next=t
It has been zero episodes since we’ve mentioned Lisanne Bainbridge’s Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf
But also she has Verbal Reports as evidence of the process operator’s knowledge: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1071581979603075?via%3Dihub
And the Etsy Debriefing Guide is super great: https://extfiles.etsy.com/DebriefingFacilitationGuide.pdf
Sidney Dekker and The Field Guide are foundational: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-field-guide-to-understanding-human-error-sidney-dekker/3a4209dfc8b3a721?ean=9781472439055&next=t
From Dekker’s field guide (pg 47) there is a list referencing Gary Klein’s questions for an incident investigation:
Cues:
What were you seeing?
What were you focusing on?
What were you expecting to happen?
Interpretation:
If you had to describe the situation to your colleague at that point, what would you have told?
Errors:
What mistakes (for example in interpretation) were likely at this point?
Previous experience/knowledge:
Were you reminded of any previous experience?
Did this situation fit a standard scenario?
Were you trained to deal with this situation?
Were there any rules that applied clearly here?
Did any other sources of knowledge suggest what to do?
Goals:
What were you trying to achieve?
Were there multiple goals at the same time?
Was there time pressure or other limitations on what you could do?
Taking action:
How did you judge you could influence the course of events?
Did you discuss or mentally imagine a number of options or did you know straight away what to do?
Outcome:
Did the outcome fit your expectation?
Did you have to update your assessment of the situation?
John mentioned Uptime Labs, who do staged worlds for software incidents: https://uptimelabs.io/
Facets of Complexity in Situated Work is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345523195_Facets_of_Complexity_in_Situated_Work
On the Jamie Zawinski quote: https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
If you don’t know the parable of the blind men and the elephant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
Paper Club: Two Years Before the Mast w/special guest Eric Dobbs
2026/05/04
Mitchell Hashimoto’s post on leaving Github: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github
The Reddit post on Github’s availability historically (that we find questionable): https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1rnvhs9/githubs_historic_downtime_scraped_and_plotted/
A reminder, the Messy 9 are: congestion, cascade, conflict, lag, saturation, friction, tempo, surprise, tangles
We have sometimes loved his stuff, but Gergely is annoying us with these posts: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-is-github-still-best-for?r=78c7k&utm_medium=email
https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2048017382036082706
You can find the RISF store with Hindsight Bias merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/
You can find a copy of Richard Cook’s Two Years Before the Mast at Lorin’s Blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/twoyearsbeforethemast.pdf
A reminder, Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail can be found at http://how.complexsystems.fail
Some writing on the 1996 Annenberg conference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351953417_Coming_Together_The
Folk models paper (not by Woods, by Dekker and Hollnagel), which is specifically targeting Situational Awareness as being a folk model: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10111-003-0136-9
Some stuff about SNAFU Catchers: https://www.snafucatchers.com/
And https://snafucatchers.github.io/
Eric referenced our conversation with Beth Long about Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity, which she co-wrote with Richard Cook about New Relic’s real-life example of resilience engineering: https://youtu.be/A_rU4-M61Hk and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020301903?via%3Dihub for the paper
Erik Hollnagel’s RAG get’s referenced: https://erikhollnagel.com/onewebmedia/RAG%20Outline%20V2.pdf
Once again, we link you to Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/
Eric is referencing Lund, that is their Human Factors and Systems Safety program: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/
Check out Crisis Engineering! https://crisisengineering.layeraleph.com/crisis-engineering-the-book/
The upcoming RISF event on Practice of Practice Gamelan: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/245030
SRECon Americas 2026 Recap
2026/04/14
Colette’s talk at SRECon intro: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/alexander
Clint’s talk at SRECon intro: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/byrum
Dan Slimmon is an excellent engineer (per Clint’s shoutout) and ALSO an excellent podcast creator/host: https://techblows.net/
Michelle Brush’s Keynote summary is here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/brush
Jevon’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s talk summary: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/forsgren
DORA is always worth a dive into if you haven’t taken a look yet: https://dora.dev/
The blog post Colette mentioned comparing AI gold rush to Mao’s Revolution: https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/
Many people have written about why MTTR is a bad metric to track, you can read a write up from Adrian Hornsby here: https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/p/mttr-problems-better-incident-metrics
And watch the OG, Courtney Nash, speak about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCgBOHo8EY
Beth Long’s SRE Soundbath: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/long
Vanessa Huerta-Granda’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/huerta-granda
Martin Smith and Abe Hoffman’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hoffman
Some information about Metrist: https://vault42consulting.com/about/portfolio/metrist
AI Agents Good Bad and Ugly talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/budichenko
The CAST talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barroso
Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson is worth a look: https://bookshop.org/p/books/engineering-a-safer-world-systems-thinking-applied-to-safety-nancy-g-leveson/57b01ef464f9f81b?ean=9780262533690&next=t
Erik Hollnagel wrote the book on FRAM and it has a lot of support in the safety world across industries: https://functionalresonance.com/ and https://etn-peter.eu/2021/02/11/fram-in-a-nutshell/ are good resources.
Daria Barteneva’s closing keynote on game theory and SRE was great: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barteneva
Some good stuff on Above the Line/Below the Line, if you’re curious:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380777
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M
Lorin Hochstein’s closing keynote on storytelling was rad: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hochstein
SRECon EMEA 2026 (in Dublin) has their CFP up: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26emea/call-for-participation
As always, you can check out the Resilience in Software Foundation at resilienceinsoftware.org
The 2025 DORA Report w/special guest Fred Hebert
2026/03/12
You can find the 2025 DORA Report here: https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/
Read more of Fred’s work/opinions here: https://ferd.ca/
If you want to know more about Lund’s Human Factors and Systems Safety program, you can read here: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/
DORA has some good writeups of generative leadership and Westrum’s model here: https://dora.dev/capabilities/generative-organizational-culture/
We can reset the counter, it’s been 0 episodes since we mentioned Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/
Fred writes well about the Law of Stretched Systems: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html
We’re still trying to schedule a DORA event with our friends who make the report, but keep an eye out on https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events - it will pop up there when we do!
Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity Sharing for Technical Incident Response with Beth Adele Long
2026/02/26
The Keewenaw snow gauge that Colette mentioned is a tourist attraction. If you want to see where measurements are at for the season you can find them here: https://www.pasty.com/snow/
The paper we’re talking about today can be found here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020301903
If you want to know more about SNAFU Catchers, you can see their website here: https://www.snafucatchers.com/
They produced the STELLA report: https://snafucatchers.github.io/
Richard Cook’s Bone Talk is kind of famous - here’s a version from REDeploy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LbePBiOvZ4
Some writing from New Relic about NERFs: https://newrelic.com/blog/observability/best-practices-incident-commander-training
We failed to mention it in the podcast itself, but Michael Wettick did a great thesis at Lund on asking for help in software operations incidents: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9150096&fileOId=9150099
Speaking of Hitchhiker’s Guide, etsy has some cool merch: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1071043200/dont-panic-hitchhikers-guide-to-the
You can find David Woods’ paper on Graceful Extensibility here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-018-9708-3
Our Paper Club event on this paper on March 17th can be signed up for here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/164680
Outsourcing and Resilience
2026/02/12
Colette mentioned Menlo Innovations https://menloinnovations.com/ and Atomic Object https://atomicobject.com/ who both build custom software for folks. The CEO of Menlo is Richard Sheridan who wrote Joy, Inc. - https://bookshop.org/p/books/joy-inc-how-we-built-a-workplace-people-love-richard-sheridan/7677689?ean=9781591847120&next=t
Chad Todd’s thesis on Handovers in Software Operations is worth a read: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9076274&fileOId=9076276
Clint refers to Zingerman’s and their servant leadership model, one of Colette’s favorite places to learn about leadership from. If you want to know more, go to https://www.zingtrain.com/ and in particular, read https://shop.zingtrain.com/products/a-lapsed-anarchists-approach-to-being-a-better-leader
The Messy 9 and Coding with AI - A Panel Discussion
2026/02/01
Special thanks to John Allspaw, Sheeri Cabral, Martin Smith, and David Woods for joining us!
Ben Affleck’s been making the promo rounds, but the specific convo we reference is recapped here: https://www.moviemaker.com/ben-affleck-ai-explains/
The Messy 9 are:
congestion
cascade
conflict
lag
saturation
friction
tempo
surprise
tangles
Dave’s been doing a set of videos on Resilience Engineering, some of which have some crossover with the Messy 9 - you can find the first one here:
https://resiliencefoundations.github.io/video-1-introduction-pt-1-it's-all-about-viability.html
Previous TiF episode on the messy 9:
https://www.thisisfinepod.com/the-pod/complex-systems-and-the-messy-nine-wspecial-guests-dave-woods-and-john-allspaw
Richard Cook on Above the Line/Below the Line:
Written - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3379510
A good excerpt from a talk from John Allspaw on Above the Line/Below the Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxj-FLEi10&list=PLb1aZTnPf3-OMChMkrr6WsokRI6LOnuem
Colette mentioned the competence knowledge model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
There’s a good argument based on the conversation here that AI makes it harder for Consciously Incompetent people to graduate to Conscious Competence. And, in Martin’s case, it makes Unconsciously Competent folks need to backtrack into Conscience Competence to “teach” it how to do things they don’t always think about.
We can reset the clock to 0 episodes since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf
There is a good blog on Jamie Zawinski’s saying on regular expressions here: https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
Alex Gorbachev and The Battle Against Any Guess seems to have become a paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251255185_Battle_Against_Any_Guess
Dave talks about Robust Yet Fragile as part of Resilience Engineering here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFotUdLL2zs
Lorin Hochstein’s blog post that Dave is referencing is https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/19/amdahl-gustafson-coding-agents-and-you/
Fred writes a good one on the Law of Stretched Systems: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html
The 1985 paper Dave keeps mentioning could be any number of things he released that year, but I have a hunch it’s this one: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/511 or this one: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-50329-0_11
Dave references a lot of things around the economic sustainability around AI, and Ed Zitron has been writing quite a bit about that for the last year and change. See: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
https://www.wheresyoured.at/big-tech-2tr/
Among others.
Going Solid
2026/01/17
If you’re feeling like you need to do more to respond to our moment:
Lots of place to donate to in the twin cities are listed here: https://mspmag.com/arts-and-culture/general-interest/ice-minnesota-support-immigrant-communities-fundraisers-food-drives-trainings/
You can always find mutual aid networks in your own area, including immigrant aid networks
https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/ does good work, too
The Hometown Holler podcast with Tressie McMillan Cottom was a wonderful discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gr4mW8aR-g
The Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s interview that I quoted clumsily is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html
The paper itself: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/14/2/130.short
If you haven’t seen The Pitt, you should, it’s super good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pitt
Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents has more definitions/examples of coupling: https://bookshop.org/p/books/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies-updated-edition-professor-charles-perrow/cad38a43fcffa1f8?ean=9780691004129&next=t
Some stuff on microservices and coupling here: https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2023/03/28/microservice-architecture-essentials-loose-coupling.html
Colette’s #notanad endorsement for paper organizing is https://paperpile.com/
Rasmussen’s boundary model comes initially from his paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753597000520
And if you want a good writeup on Rasmussen’s boundary model explaining it, you can always read Lorin’s blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/
Dr Cook’s talk at Velocity is a classic, and goes over Rasmussen’s boundary model really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60
Fred does a great job writing about the Law of Stretched Systems and how it applies to his own work on his blog: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html
“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything” is a paraphrase of Eisenhower: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-national-defense-executive-reserve-conference
Want to chat about this paper with other folks? Come to the RISF live event for a Paper Party! https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/157553
The Year in Resilience w/special guest John Allspaw
2025/12/31
Seriously though, can’t wait to gtfo of this year.
Palisades fire links: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/anonymous-letter-demands-independent-palisades-fire-investigations/3800442/
https://internationalfireandsafetyjournal.com/palisades-fire-report/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-20/lafd-report-on-palisades-fire-was-watered-down-in-editing-process-records-show
Corey Quinn’s commentary on the AWS outage in October is here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
Time to reset the clock on how many episodes it’s been since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf
Also on Rasmussen’s Boundary Model, which Lorin does a great write up on: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/
Lorin’s Law is our favorite law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/
You can ask us questions or write to us using our form linked from our website: thisisfinepod.com
Resilience in Software Foundation is at resilienceinsoftware.org
Incident Status: On Hold w/special guest Will Gallego
2025/11/28
Mentioned multiple times, Em Ruppe’s amazing talk on incident severity: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24americas/presentation/ruppe
We talk about the RIS Slack sometimes - you can join us in the slack, by joining the Foundation here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/
Please ask us a question at thisisfinepod.com
Complex Systems and the Messy Nine w/special guests Dave Woods and John Allspaw
2025/11/13
The writeup on the AWS outage from AWS themselves, if you haven’t seen it: https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
Dave’s department at OSU, Cognitive Systems Engineering: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration/cognitive-systems-engineering is a part of the larger Integrated Systems Engineering school: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration
Dave was talking early on about the discussion on the war on expertise, it was this webinar through the NDM association: https://vimeo.com/1129606494?fl=pl&fe=sh&mc_cid=c807a504fb
Dave was a part of the
Paul Feltovich got a shout out - he wrote a lot, but one of the best is with Gary Klein on Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity: https://www.academia.edu/download/31764257/Common_Ground_Single.pdf
And Studies of Expertise from Psychological Perspectives: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-J-Feltovich/publication/200772882_Studies_of_expertise_from_psychological_perspectives/links/58bd18b2aca27261e528de07/Studies-of-Expertise-from-Psychological-Perspectives.pdf
Dave mentions his “Command-Adapt Paradox chapter” - you can find that here: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/88327/1/978-3-031-45055-6.pdf#page=77
Shout out to Norbert Weiner, the godfather of cybernetics: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24945913
For just two studies on how private equity in hospitals causes worse outcomes for patients you can see: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/private-equitys-appetite-for-hospitals-may-put-patients-at-risk/
And
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25001151
Dave talks a bit about saturation and crossing boundaries towards failure - it’s worth familiarizing yourself with Rasmussen’s boundary model - Lorin Hochstein writes a good summary over at his blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/
Dave also mentions graceful extensibility - this is a concept he’s written quite a bit about, you can start here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-018-9708-3
Shout out to Slight Reliability: https://slightreliability.com/
One of the great Woods/Cook write ups on anticipation in anesthesiology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952818096900094
In case you’re unfamiliar with the Chicago Seven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven
The Messy 9 are:
congestion
cascade
conflict
lag
saturation
friction
tempo
surprise
tangles
Keep an eye on the merch store over at https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/ if you want the t-shirt.
All the things about Incident Command
2025/10/30
It’s Spamton G (not J) Spamton, Clint! Get hip to the game characters!
https://deltarune.fandom.com/wiki/Spamton
There are a couple of incident command trainers out there who tend to get recommended in the tech world (that we know of): https://www.blackrock3.com/ and Great Circle: https://greatcircle.com/im/
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