This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software
by 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: [email protected] Call us and leave a voicemail, or text us at: (401) 592-7574
Episodes
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Crisis Engineering w/special guests Layer Aleph
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/272451 A small snippet of our communication with Riverside (we’re pretty sure it’s AI, folks!) —--------------------- Hi Colette, Thank you for...
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Handover Communications in Software Operations w/special guest Chad Todd
Chad’s thesis from Lund is here: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9076274&fileOId=9076276 The 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:...
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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...
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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:...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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. -...
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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...
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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...
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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/...
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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:...
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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/…
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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:...
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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...
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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...
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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:...
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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…
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What is an incident? How come no one declare them?
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…
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Chaos Engineering w/special guest Casey Rosenthal
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…
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Burnout on Aisle 3
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...
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Resilience, Complexity, and Your Boss a collab w/Punk Rock Safety
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...
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Live From SRECon
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...
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Teaser Episode - Season 2
The XKCD comic that’s in Colette’s thesis is Dependency Justin Reock is at DX https://punkrocksafety.com/ are our mutual podcast friends
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Episode 10 - When They go Full ITIL on You w/special guest john allspaw
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...
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Episode 9 - Learning from Incidents with special guest Alex Elman
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...
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Episode 8 - Why Human Factors and Not Technical Ones
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...
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Episode 7 - AI and Resilience with special guest Courtney Nash
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…
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Episode 6 - Can You Buy Resilience? With Special Guest Steve McGhee
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…
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episode 5 - curating your resilience engineering 101
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...
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Episode 4 - A look at the 2024 dora report
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!
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Episode 3 - lions, tigers and metrics, oh my!
We answered a set of questions about how to deal with dashboards and MTTR and how to make the best of the situation with the help of special guest Vanessa Huerta Granda.
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Episode 2 - Does Software Need Safety?
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…
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Episode 1 - Every Second Counts
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…
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About this show
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: [email protected]
Call us and leave a voicemail, or text us at: (401) 592-7574
Hosted by
Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum
Categories