This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

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 networks in your own area, including immigrant aid networks
https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/ does good work, too

The Hometown Holler podcast with Tressie McMillan Cottom was a wonderful discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gr4mW8aR-g

The Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s interview that I quoted clumsily is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html

The paper itself: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/14/2/130.short

If you haven’t seen The Pitt, you should, it’s super good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pitt

Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents has more definitions/examples of coupling: https://bookshop.org/p/books/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies-updated-edition-professor-charles-perrow/cad38a43fcffa1f8?ean=9780691004129&next=t

Some stuff on microservices and coupling here: https://microservices.io/post/architecture/2023/03/28/microservice-architecture-essentials-loose-coupling.html

Colette’s #notanad endorsement for paper organizing is https://paperpile.com/

Rasmussen’s boundary model comes initially from his paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925753597000520

And if you want a good writeup on Rasmussen’s boundary model explaining it, you can always read Lorin’s blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Dr Cook’s talk at Velocity is a classic, and goes over Rasmussen’s boundary model really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

Fred does a great job writing about the Law of Stretched Systems and how it applies to his own work on his blog: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html

“Plans are nothing, but planning is everything” is a paraphrase of Eisenhower: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-national-defense-executive-reserve-conference

Want to chat about this paper with other folks? Come to the RISF live event for a Paper Party! https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/157553

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/

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-20/lafd-report-on-palisades-fire-was-watered-down-in-editing-process-records-show

Corey Quinn’s commentary on the AWS outage in October is here: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/

Time to reset the clock on how many episodes it’s been since we’ve mentioned the Ironies of Automation: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf

Also on Rasmussen’s Boundary Model, which Lorin does a great write up on: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Lorin’s Law is our favorite law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/

You can ask us questions or write to us using our form linked from our website: thisisfinepod.com

Resilience in Software Foundation is at resilienceinsoftware.org

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 question at thisisfinepod.com

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 Engineering school: https://ise.osu.edu/human-systems-integration

Dave was talking early on about the discussion on the war on expertise, it was this webinar through the NDM association: https://vimeo.com/1129606494?fl=pl&fe=sh&mc_cid=c807a504fb

Dave was a part of the

Paul Feltovich got a shout out - he wrote a lot, but one of the best is with Gary Klein on Common Ground and Coordination in Joint Activity: https://www.academia.edu/download/31764257/Common_Ground_Single.pdf

And Studies of Expertise from Psychological Perspectives: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paul-J-Feltovich/publication/200772882_Studies_of_expertise_from_psychological_perspectives/links/58bd18b2aca27261e528de07/Studies-of-Expertise-from-Psychological-Perspectives.pdf

Dave mentions his “Command-Adapt Paradox chapter” - you can find that here: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/88327/1/978-3-031-45055-6.pdf#page=77

Shout out to Norbert Weiner, the godfather of cybernetics: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24945913

For just two studies on how private equity in hospitals causes worse outcomes for patients you can see: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/private-equitys-appetite-for-hospitals-may-put-patients-at-risk/
And
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X25001151

Dave talks a bit about saturation and crossing boundaries towards failure - it’s worth familiarizing yourself with Rasmussen’s boundary model - Lorin Hochstein writes a good summary over at his blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2021/05/31/transgressing-the-boundaries-rasmussen-and-woods/

Dave also mentions graceful extensibility - this is a concept he’s written quite a bit about, you can start here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-018-9708-3

Shout out to Slight Reliability: https://slightreliability.com/

One of the great Woods/Cook write ups on anticipation in anesthesiology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0952818096900094

In case you’re unfamiliar with the Chicago Seven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven

The Messy 9 are:
congestion
cascade
conflict
lag
saturation
friction
tempo
surprise
tangles

Keep an eye on the merch store over at https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/ if you want the t-shirt.

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: https://greatcircle.com/im/