This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

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/272451A 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-pomonaWeaver 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.1050.0133And he also is part of the HRO (high reliability organization) group, some of that writing is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2307/41165243Obviously 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/08dulLA1A 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:_DependencyIf 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

Chad’s thesis from Lund is here: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9076274&fileOId=9076276The 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/0750620870Some 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/10.1177/107118139704100155Communication coordination during handovers for railway dispatch: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/9020Chad’s talk on Handover Communications at SRECon can be found here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon23americas/presentation/toddThe 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=falseA 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

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-integrationOur 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.orgThe 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.

John Allspaw, a resilience engineering and systems expert with 20+ years including time as Etsy CTO, joins to explain how to study real decisions. He discusses naturalistic decision making, limits of verbal recall, the critical decision method, queued recall, using logs to triangulate actions, and designing staged drills from real incidents. Practical interviewing techniques and mock interview examples round out the conversation.

Eric Dobbs, Principal incident analyst at Oracle and longtime learner from incidents, discusses Richard Cook’s Two Years Before the Mast. He explores the New Look systems view of safety. Short takes cover why operational experience matters, debates organizational learning, and how resilience learning can fade without continuous practice.

They recap standout conference talks on disaster recovery, resilience engineering methods, and alternatives to root cause analysis. They touch on AI hype, measurable productivity claims, and agentic tools for incident investigation. Stories about documentation, teaching teams to learn, and hands-on incident analysis exercises make appearances. Breathing-based recovery techniques and hiring practices for SRE roles are also discussed.

Fred Hebert, a Staff SRE and Lund student known for work on SLOs, error budgets, and the Law of Stretched Systems, discusses the 2025 DORA Report. He unpacks why the report reframes around AI-assisted development. They explore AI adoption models, survey limits, platform vs AI impacts, cognitive load and burnout, and how new capacity can be reabsorbed by organizational demands.

Beth Adele Long, Principal at Adaptive Capacity Labs and resilience practitioner, shares field-tested practices from New Relic. She describes the NERF rotation, incident command vs support roles, and how calm coordinators reduce org-wide disruption. Conversation covers lowering friction to ask for help, making operational work a career path, and using management and tools to sustain adaptive capacity.

They debate outsourcing software and the risks of partial handoffs versus full ownership. They explore how trust, in-person time, and clear agency shape reliable operations. They riff on outsourcing everyday tasks, construction trade adaptations, and cultural practices like servant leadership and joint retrospectives.

David Woods, resilience engineering founder and Professor Emeritus, brings foundational perspectives on the Messy 9 and socio-technical risks in AI systems. Shiri Cabral, enterprise architecture leader with experience at MongoDB and Salesforce, explains using AI for diagnostics and knowledge retrieval. They discuss AI in coding workflows, de-skilling risks, automation pitfalls, observability with AI, and designing collaborative human–AI systems.