This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

Ben (Goodheart), Dave (Provan) and Ron (Gantt) have the very awesome podcast Punk Rock Safety (punkrocksafety.com) - you can get your own punk rock safety merch at punkrocksafetymerch.comCharles Perrow wrote Normal Accidents and talks about safety and power in his essay (book, really), Complex Organizations.Drew Rae lit the stage on fire about safety work as soothing rather than actually improving safety: EHS Congress Berlin 2024 - Day2Dr. Richard Cook’s concepts of ‘Above the Line/Below the Line’ got a shout out - here’s the paper, and here’s John Allspaw giving a talk about the concept.

No video for this one because it didn’t really end up working.We had some awesome people with us for this show:Eric DobbsWill GallegoJuan Carlos RamirezMartin SmithDr Richard Cook’s talk on The Marvelous Resilience of Bone(one of our absolute favorites)You can see the schedule for the SRECon 2025 Americas conference hereThe keynotes from the day we recorded were Dr David Woods and Katie Wilde (from Snyk)

The XKCD comic that’s in Colette’s thesis is DependencyJustin Reock is at DXhttps://punkrocksafety.com/ are our mutual podcast friends

You can find ACL (Adaptive Capacity Labs), the folks who train software engineers how to do LFI and who we speak so fondly of here.Colette mentioned Allspaw’s take on Five Whys - if you want to know why we think there are better options for learning out there, you can read it here.Alex did a great talk with Sarah Butt on some LFI related things at LFI Conf in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbSiKAtO7FkAnd at SRECon: SREcon20 Americas - Are We Getting Better Yet? Progress Toward Safer OperationsColette went to go see whales in the Baja through this tour, it was awesomeWrite to us at thisisfine.softwarepodcast@gmail.com or go fill out our form with a question at Thisisfinepod.com

The spicy Allspaw take that inspired our listener is here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jallspaw_a-im-a-bit-salty-today-b-if-you-dont-activity-7287968197742411776-5_Ay Charles Perrow is the guy who wrote Normal Accidents (https://bookshop.org/p/books/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies-updated-edition-revised-charles-perrow/10369279?ean=9780691004129&next=t&next=t) , which Colette is somewhat controversially a fan of, and thus a Perrow-ian? (a lot of resilience engineering people are not fans!) Not many notes today, here go check out a page on one of Colette’s favorite chicken breeds: https://greenfirefarms.com/shetland_hen.html

The VOID⁠ is one of our favorite things!Some of Courtney’s inoculation of the MTTR virus can be found here:⁠An interview with InfoQ⁠⁠A talk at SRE Con Americas in 2022⁠Courtney’s ⁠recent talk on Automation and AI⁠David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs started as ⁠a talk⁠ and then a ⁠great book⁠Want to read more about HABA-MABA and CSE/RE? Lisanne Bainbridge’s ⁠The Ironies of Automation⁠ is a perennial recommendation in our show notes⁠The thread⁠ Courtney mentioned from Gergely Orosz

Steve is the host of the Google SRE Prodcast, you should check it out!Colette got her chickens from Greenfire Farms, and her chicken coop from Carolina Coops, if anyone is wondering.The Chris Hayes podcast Colette mentioned about unconditional cash transfers is here.Iain M. Banks is an author of The Culture series, a set of fiction books based in a post-scarcity societyIf you didn’t get the Vizzini/Inigo Montoya references, you should probably find a way to see The Princess Bride.Colette mentioned STAMP - which is more along the lines of reliability engineering than resilience engineering, technically, but is related. You can read about how Google is using it here.Lord, you want the history of ITIL? Okay.**** note, none of the below sponsor us (yet), so these are pure-hearted endorsements from Clint during the episode ****Adaptive Capacity Labs will teach your teams how to be more resilient.Incident.io is who Clint mentioned as one of the many incident automation tools out there (Rootly and FireHydrant are a couple others).Backstage is an open source Spotify product, and anyone who’s worked at Spotify will talk your ear off about how great it is if you let us.*************************A new Resilience Engineering community that Colette and Clint are a part of has launched! You can find us at resilienceinsoftware.org and join to be a part of the conversation in SlackAnd of course, you can email us at thisisfine.softwarepodcast@gmail.com or write to us via http://thisisfinepod.com 

Dive into the intriguing world of resilience engineering, where insights from skiing mishaps lead to a discussion on complex system failures. Explore the evolution from Safety One to Safety Two, emphasizing learning cultures and practical safety measures. The hosts critique resource challenges in the field, advocating for concise guides over vague narratives. They also tackle the pitfalls of unrealistic safety expectations, using real-world examples like the Exxon Valdez spill to highlight the gaps between planning and reality.

Fred Hebert, Staff SRE at Honeycomb.io and technical author, brings a wealth of knowledge in resilience and distributed systems. He discusses the impact of the DORA report on software engineering and workplace culture. The conversation delves into the nuances of burnout, emphasizing self-care amidst rapid technological change. They analyze the complexities of AI adoption in the workplace, highlighting trust issues and leadership styles that can enhance employee well-being. Fred also critiques how corporate interests can skew data interpretation in assessing productivity metrics.

Vanessa Huerta Granda, a technology manager passionate about resilience engineering, shares her insights on navigating metrics in incident management. She discusses the challenges of code freezes and the importance of adaptable metrics. Vanessa emphasizes the significance of context when analyzing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and how it can lead to meaningful insights. The conversation also highlights the necessity for better communication between tech teams and executives to ensure effective decision-making based on accurate data.