This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum

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: thisisfine.softwarepodcast@gmail.com

Call us and leave a voicemail, or text us at: ‪(401) 592-7574‬

Play

Open in

20 episodes
Avg 56 min
English

Episodes 20

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

S3 · E9
June 28 · 46 min
The academic and the practical in resilience engineering
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.
S3 · E8
May 14 · 1 hr
Interviewing for Incident Analysis w/special guest John Allspaw
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
S3 · E7
May 4 · 44 min
Paper Club: Two Years Before the Mast w/special guest eric dobbs
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
S3 · E6
April 14 · 55 min
SRECon Americas 2026 recap
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
S3 · E5
March 12 · 59 min
The 2025 DORA Report w/special guest Fred Hebert
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!
S3 · E4
February 26 · 1 hr 9 min
Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity Sharing for Technical Incident Response with Beth Adele Long
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
S3 · E3
February 12 · 41 min
Outsourcing and Resilience
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
S3 · E2
February 1 · 1 hr 43 min
The Messy 9 and Coding with AI - A Panel Discussion
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.
S3 · E1
January 17 · 1 hr 1 min
Going Solid
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
S2 · E16
Dec 31, 2025 · 52 min
The Year in Resilience w/special guest John Allspaw
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
S2 · E15
Nov 28, 2025 · 42 min
Incident Status: On Hold w/special guest Will Gallego
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
S2 · E14
Nov 13, 2025 · 1 hr 8 min
Complex Systems and the Messy Nine w/special guests Dave Woods and John Allspaw
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.
S2 · E13
Oct 30, 2025 · 37 min
All the things about Incident Command
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/
S2 · E12
Oct 16, 2025 · 59 min
Root Cause Analysis vs. Resilience Engineering w/special guest Lorin Hochstein
A history of the 5 whys and root cause analysis from papers Some critiques of the 5 whys: From John Allspaw: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-infinite-hows/ From Alan J Card: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/26/8/671 James Reason and the Swiss Cheese Model: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8514562/ James Reason’s book Human Error: https://bookshop.org/p/books/human-error/9e06d8a100a07537?ean=9780521314190&next=t And a classic from Sidney Dekker (et al.) on the implication of complexity within safety investigations: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753511000105?via%3Dihub We always recommend the Howie Guide: https://howie-guide.pagerduty.com/ STAMP is starting to get popular: https://functionalsafetyengineer.com/introduction-to-stamp/ Google’s STAMP paper: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/evolution-sre-google Google’s STAMP discussion on ProdCast: https://sre.google/prodcast/#season4-episode7 And presentation at SRECon: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon25americas/presentation/klein Nancy Leveson’s google scholar is always worth browsing: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=78y4sEcAAAAJ&hl=en Allspaw’s LinkedIn post that we quoted: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jallspaw_important-reminders-about-learning-effectively-activity-7378775591447183360-c_eD Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/ Want to talk more about this subject? We’re doing a live event co-sponsored by RISF and you can sign up for it here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/networks/events/146485
S2 · E11
Oct 2, 2025 · 52 min
First Stories/Second Stories
More robustness than resilience, but worth repeating that you should always check your earthquake go-bag: https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/blog/2019/how-to-make-an-earthquake-emergency-kit Clint did ASA 103: https://americansailing.com/learn-to-sail/certifications/asa-103-coastal-cruising/ Since this is a science podcast, there is a scientific reason people get emotional on airplanes: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/why-do-we-always-cry-on-planes 52 Hertz Whale documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliest_Whale:_The_Search_for_52 And Leslie Jamison wrote 52 Blue as a chapter in one of her essay collections (you can read it excerpted here: https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/52-blue-the-loneliest-whale-in-the-world.html ) Colette was wrong, Jamison referenced a famous Kathryn Schulz piece in one of her own essays, which was the source of confusion - The Big One: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one about a cataclysmic earthquake on the west coast. In case you’re curious, Colette uses scholar.google.com and paperpile.com shamelessly live. We reference A Tale of Two Stories: Contrasting View of Patient Safety by Richard Cook and Dave Woods: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245102691_A_Tale_of_Two_Stories_Contrasting_Views_of_Patient_Safety?enrichId=rgreq-a699511fb5bc518bf1584a0a6613d8d0-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzI0NTEwMjY5MTtBUzoyMDYyMjM2NjExMTMzNDdAMTQyNjE3ODk2MDQ4NA%3D%3D&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationCoverPdf The Beaumaiden report (that dives into a deeper, second story) is here: https://dmaib.com/reports/2021/beaumaiden-grounding-on-18-october-2021 We will continue to point to DORA’s organizational model page: https://dora.dev/capabilities/generative-organizational-culture/ Some Wikipedia on double loop learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-loop_learning Colette mentioned Mads Møller’s Lund HFSS thesis on deaths and accountability: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9106422 And Bram Couteaux’s Lund HFSS thesis on the drunk flight attendants/pilots court: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9111661 J Paul Reed wrote about being ‘Blame Aware’ - https://medium.com/@jpaulreed/why-blameless-postmortems-might-feel-wrong-cbeee00d51b2
S2 · E10
Sep 18, 2025 · 53 min
How (Not) to Introduce Resilience Engineering at Work with special guest Michelle Casey
Lorikeets are pretty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_lorikeet You think Colette’s kidding about the kangaroo? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQjHVRHXbc8 The Mackinac Bridge is long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Bridge Michelle’s Blog post: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/news/1288714 DORA has some good writing on Westrum’s cultural models if you’re wondering about it: https://dora.dev/capabilities/generative-organizational-culture/ The link to our TiF live event with Michelle where we will be discussing the blog post! https://resilienceinsoftware.org/networks/events/143194 Please ask us questions! You can go to thisisfinepod.com to get the link to our anonymous google form!
S2 · E9
Jul 25, 2025 · 44 min
How long should you wait after an incident to do your retro?
Corn sweat is a real thing: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humidity-from-corn-sweat-intensifies-extreme-heat-wave-in-midwest-u-s/ Also, plugging Tajin here, because: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj%C3%ADn_seasoning Wikipedia tells me Tajin is Mexican. I dunno, Clint. Beaumaiden report, for those that didn’t listen to the prior episode where we mentioned it: https://dmaib.com/reports/2021/beaumaiden-grounding-on-18-october-2021 John Allspaw’s talk at Spotify that we referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8mYPyRG1fQ Lorin’s Law is always a good plug: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/ Clint’s book recommendation: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-15-commitments-of-conscious-leadership-a-new-paradigm-for-sustainable-success-diana-chapman/14574335?ean=9780990976905&next=t Send us questions! at thisisfinepod.com or find us on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/this-is-fine-a-podcast-about-software-and-resilience-engineering/ You can come to the Lund panelist event for RISF by signing up here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/networks/events/133948
S2 · E8
Jul 10, 2025 · 1 hr 4 min
Lund University - Academic Theory and Practice
A huge thanks to our panelists: ⁠John Allspaw⁠ ⁠Jed Needle⁠ ⁠Chad Todd⁠ RISF and TiF will host a live follow up to this episode on July 31st! You can sign up here: ⁠https://resilienceinsoftware.org/networks/events/133948⁠ If you’re interested in Lund’s Masters of Science program in Human Factors and Systems Safety, or any of their learning labs, you can check out more info here: ⁠https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/⁠ ⁠Adaptive Capacity Labs⁠ is how Jed was introduced to some of the concepts of LFI & Resilience Engineering, which eventually landed him at Lund. John mentioned SciShow Tangents, a podcast by Hank Green and Ceri Riley: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/scishowtangents⁠ As well as Conway’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law And Dunbar’s Number: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number⁠ And the Theory of Graceful Extensibility, which you can read about here: ⁠https://infoscience.epfl.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/87cfe245-c138-43cb-87c9-4062dc1a0519/content⁠ Lund theses list: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/ny-sajt/msc-programme/msc-theses/ Our panel’s select theses that they love: Colette’s pick: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9106422⁠ Chad’s pick: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9009930⁠ John’s picks were all of the software theses, I’m probably missing some but this is my attempt: John’s (was the first): ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/8084520⁠ J Paul Reed: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/8966930⁠ Chad’s thesis on handovers in software: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9076274⁠ Michael Wettick: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9150096⁠ Colette’s thesis on QRA: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9148570⁠ Jessica De Vita: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9149521⁠ Dr. Raymer’s I want to Treat the Patient and Not the Alarm: ⁠https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/2861164⁠
S2 · E7
Jun 27, 2025 · 58 min
What’s the ROI on Reliability and Resilience work?
Dave Wood’s Talk at SRECon 25 was on Complexification and SRE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmBvUJnGUX4 Jens Rasmussen’s model - Is really well explained by Richard Cook’s talk at Velocity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60&t=3s Lorin’s blog also has a good summary: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/ And finally, Jens Rasmussen’s original paper on the subject: Risk Management in a Dynamic Society https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0925753597000520 SRECon 25 talk on Incident Metrics that Matter that was awesome - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrR2SvpWvdg Want to read about how things are getting a bit fash-y in tech these days? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism Perrow/Normal Accidents: https://bookshop.org/p/books/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies-updated-edition-revised-charles-perrow/10369279?ean=9780691004129 High Reliability Organizations (HROs): Started (ish) with “A Rejoinder to Perrow” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5973.1994.tb00047.x And you can find Rochlin & La Porte behind a lot of the early writing on HROs, including https://www.jstor.org/stable/44637690?seq=1 and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5973.1996.tb00078.x As well as Weick and Sutcliffe: https://bookshop.org/p/books/managing-the-unexpected-sustained-performance-in-a-complex-world-kathleen-m-sutcliffe/11267666?ean=9781118862414& https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/41165243
S2 · E6
Jun 3, 2025 · 53 min
Runbooks: the Good, Bad and Ugly w/special guest Andrew Hatch
You can register for the After-the-Episode chat with Andrew at https://resilienceinsoftware.org/networks/events/129997 Tickets are free for members, $10 for non-members. You can join the Foundation at https://resilienceinsoftware.org/signup Zuul is what Volvo uses for their CI, and it’s part of the OpenInfra Foundation, it’s rad. You can find Andrew on LinkedIn here.

Showing 1–20 of 20 episodes