This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

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

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.

Michael Wettick’s Lund thesis is great, and Laura Maguire’s paper on the Costs of Coordination that is a shortened version of her dissertation is worth a read!

Clint’s SRECon talk that he mentioned a couple times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4UaDDkLOhw

Lorin wrote a great article on incidents and improvisation: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/06/11/when-theres-no-plan-for-this-scenario-youve-got-to-improvise/

Incident.io and the people who work there have hilarious LinkedIn posts about how people use incidents in their org.

We talked about BlackRock3 who do incident command training: https://www.blackrock3.com/

Brent Chapman has also done great incident command training and has done some talks on why IT incident management can learn from fire/emergency response management processes.

We have a LinkedIn! https://www.linkedin.com/company/this-is-fine-a-podcast-about-software-and-resilience-engineering/

And you can ask us questions here: https://forms.gle/rggrbGG6aFVrgZsv9

The O’Reilly book on Chaos Engineering by Casey and Nora Jones is here: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/chaos-engineering/9781492043850/

Some of the Netflix posts introducing Chaos Monkey and Simian Army are here and here.

You can see Lorin Hochstein talking about Chaos Engineering at Netflix here.

The Void is an awesome collection of information on incidents throughout tech and you can find it here.

Casey mentioned Rasmussen’s model. Lorin has a great summary of that on his blog, but you can read the original paper by Rasmussen introducing this model here.

A report on the Netflix outage during Christmas of 2012.

A reminder - you can ask us questions for the podcast at www.thisisfinepod.com

Clint wrote the Socio-Technical Reality Engineer as a blog post it’s a good read.

The Burnout book by the Nagoski sisters is A+++ reading.

Those Found Responsible Have Been Sacked is by the late, great, Dr. Richard Cook and Chris Nemeth

The Perverse Incentives of Reliability by Katie Wilde from Snyk at this year’s SRECon was just an incredible talk.

Colette mentioned the Beaumaiden report from DMAIB. She gave a talk for the DORA community on resilience engineering that you can see here.

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.com

Charles 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 - Day2

Dr. 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 Dobbs

Will Gallego

Juan Carlos Ramirez

Martin Smith

Dr 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 here

The 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 Dependency

Justin Reock is at DX

https://punkrocksafety.com/ are our mutual podcast friends

You can find John at Adaptive Capacity Labs or his (old) blog at Kitchen Soap. 

ITIL is… well, it’s a thing.

Colette’s “You’re surprised it works in the first place” comes from Richard Cook’s brilliant Velocity talk in 2013.

FYI, John wasn’t talking about Franz Kafka, we think he was talking about Apache Kafka. But they are pretty similar, we think.

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=CbSiKAtO7Fk

And at SRECon: SREcon20 Americas - Are We Getting Better Yet? Progress Toward Safer Operations

Colette went to go see whales in the Baja through this tour, it was awesome

Write to us at [email protected] or go fill out our form with a question at Thisisfinepod.com