This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

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 InfoQ⁠

⁠A talk at SRE Con Americas in 2022⁠

Courtney’s ⁠recent talk on Automation and AI⁠

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs started as ⁠a talk⁠ and then a ⁠great book⁠

Want to read more about HABA-MABA and CSE/RE?

Lisanne Bainbridge’s ⁠The Ironies of Automation⁠ is a perennial recommendation in our show notes

⁠The 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 society

If 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 Slack

And of course, you can email us at [email protected] or write to us via http://thisisfinepod.com 

We talk about our favorite recommendations for someone who's just getting into this whole resilience engineering thing.

A small note: Clint's voice is a little low in this one! We tried to do audio magic as much as we could to fix it, but hopefully you'll forgive us with your holiday spirit and we'll do better next time. <3

Notes:

⁠How Complex Systems Fail⁠ by Richard I. Cook

⁠Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems⁠ by Richard I. Cook at Velocity NY, 2013

⁠Moving Gracefully from Compliance to Learning⁠ by Ivan Pupulidy at LFI Conf, 2023

⁠Going Solid⁠ by Richard I Cook and Jens Rasmussen (NOT Dave Woods, Colette had a brain malfunction)

⁠Prosaic Organizational Failure⁠ by Lee Clarke and Charles Perrow

Lee Clarke also wrote the stellar ⁠Mission Improbable⁠ about Fantasy Documents

You should check out Ben Hutchinson on⁠ LinkedIn⁠ and also he wrote about ⁠Fantasy Documents/Enabling Devices⁠

⁠The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error⁠ by Sidney Dekker

⁠The Maintenance Race⁠ by Stewart Brand

⁠Wisdom From The Sharp End⁠ Agile2024 slides by Clint Byrum

Clint’s talk at Agile 2024 doesn’t seem to be on YouTube yet?

⁠The Howie Guide⁠ is now at PagerDuty since they bought Jeli

Okay fine, you want ⁠Colette’s thesis involving Fantasy Documents, Enabling Devices and Cybersecurity⁠?

Remember, you can find us at thisisfinepod.com or email us at [email protected]

Fred’s wonderful blog

This year’s DORA report

Lee, Ramsey & Hicks on productivity and performance

Bainbridge’s classic: The Ironies of Automation

And, as always, visit our website or send us email at: [email protected] to send us questions!

We talk to the pioneer of resilience engineering in the software world John Allspaw about how he discovered this world, and we answer a reader question together: does software need safety?

Correction: we thought this would be episode 3, but it ended up being 2, because of scheduling conflicts with guests...

You can submit your questions at www.thisisfinepod.com

⁠[email protected]⁠

The introduction episode of This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering in the software world. Clint and Colette discuss conferences and a little bit of their history. Then they answer a question from a (prospective) listener: How do you politely ask executives/senior members of a company to step away from an incident...?