This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software

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

We have sometimes loved his stuff, but Gergely is annoying us with these posts: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-is-github-still-best-for?r=78c7k&utm_medium=email

https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2048017382036082706

You can find the RISF store with Hindsight Bias merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/

You can find a copy of Richard Cook’s Two Years Before the Mast at Lorin’s Blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/twoyearsbeforethemast.pdf

A reminder, Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail can be found at http://how.complexsystems.fail

Some writing on the 1996 Annenberg conference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351953417_Coming_Together_The

Folk models paper (not by Woods, by Dekker and Hollnagel), which is specifically targeting Situational Awareness as being a folk model: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10111-003-0136-9

Some stuff about SNAFU Catchers: https://www.snafucatchers.com/
And https://snafucatchers.github.io/

Eric referenced our conversation with Beth Long about Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity, which she co-wrote with Richard Cook about New Relic’s real-life example of resilience engineering: https://youtu.be/A_rU4-M61Hk and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020301903?via%3Dihub for the paper

Erik Hollnagel’s RAG get’s referenced: https://erikhollnagel.com/onewebmedia/RAG%20Outline%20V2.pdf

Once again, we link you to Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/

Eric is referencing Lund, that is their Human Factors and Systems Safety program: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/

Check out Crisis Engineering! https://crisisengineering.layeraleph.com/crisis-engineering-the-book/

The upcoming RISF event on Practice of Practice Gamelan: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/245030

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 creator/host: https://techblows.net/

Michelle Brush’s Keynote summary is here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/brush

Jevon’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s talk summary: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/forsgren

DORA is always worth a dive into if you haven’t taken a look yet: https://dora.dev/

The blog post Colette mentioned comparing AI gold rush to Mao’s Revolution: https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

Many people have written about why MTTR is a bad metric to track, you can read a write up from Adrian Hornsby here: https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/p/mttr-problems-better-incident-metrics

And watch the OG, Courtney Nash, speak about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCgBOHo8EY

Beth Long’s SRE Soundbath: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/long

Vanessa Huerta-Granda’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/huerta-granda

Martin Smith and Abe Hoffman’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hoffman

Some information about Metrist: https://vault42consulting.com/about/portfolio/metrist

AI Agents Good Bad and Ugly talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/budichenko

The CAST talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barroso

Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson is worth a look: https://bookshop.org/p/books/engineering-a-safer-world-systems-thinking-applied-to-safety-nancy-g-leveson/57b01ef464f9f81b?ean=9780262533690&next=t

Erik Hollnagel wrote the book on FRAM and it has a lot of support in the safety world across industries: https://functionalresonance.com/ and https://etn-peter.eu/2021/02/11/fram-in-a-nutshell/ are good resources.

Daria Barteneva’s closing keynote on game theory and SRE was great: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barteneva

Some good stuff on Above the Line/Below the Line, if you’re curious:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380777

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M

Lorin Hochstein’s closing keynote on storytelling was rad: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hochstein

SRECon EMEA 2026 (in Dublin) has their CFP up: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26emea/call-for-participation

As always, you can check out the Resilience in Software Foundation at resilienceinsoftware.org

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 writeups of generative leadership and Westrum’s model here: https://dora.dev/capabilities/generative-organizational-culture/

We can reset the counter, it’s been 0 episodes since we mentioned Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/

Fred writes well about the Law of Stretched Systems: https://ferd.ca/the-law-of-stretched-cognitive-systems.html

We’re still trying to schedule a DORA event with our friends who make the report, but keep an eye out on https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events - it will pop up there when we do!

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: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020301903

If you want to know more about SNAFU Catchers, you can see their website here: https://www.snafucatchers.com/

They produced the STELLA report: https://snafucatchers.github.io/

Richard Cook’s Bone Talk is kind of famous - here’s a version from REDeploy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LbePBiOvZ4

Some writing from New Relic about NERFs: https://newrelic.com/blog/observability/best-practices-incident-commander-training

We failed to mention it in the podcast itself, but Michael Wettick did a great thesis at Lund on asking for help in software operations incidents: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9150096&fileOId=9150099

Speaking of Hitchhiker’s Guide, etsy has some cool merch: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1071043200/dont-panic-hitchhikers-guide-to-the

You can find David Woods’ paper on Graceful Extensibility here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-018-9708-3

Our Paper Club event on this paper on March 17th can be signed up for here: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/164680

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. - https://bookshop.org/p/books/joy-inc-how-we-built-a-workplace-people-love-richard-sheridan/7677689?ean=9781591847120&next=t

Chad Todd’s thesis on Handovers in Software Operations is worth a read: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9076274&fileOId=9076276

Clint refers to Zingerman’s and their servant leadership model, one of Colette’s favorite places to learn about leadership from. If you want to know more, go to https://www.zingtrain.com/ and in particular, read https://shop.zingtrain.com/products/a-lapsed-anarchists-approach-to-being-a-better-leader