This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software
This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software
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
What is an incident? How come no one declare them?
We talked about the politics and trouble with declaring incidents, and how to improve how your organization handles them.
May 21, 2025
55 min
Chaos Engineering w/special guest Casey Rosenthal
We chatted with Casey Rosenthal about what chaos engineering is and how it’s different (or the same) than resilience engineering.
May 7, 2025
48 min
Burnout on Aisle 3
Colette and Clint talk burnout and why resilience engineering sees so much of it.
Apr 26, 2025
46 min
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.comCharles 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 - Day2Dr. 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.
Apr 9, 2025
55 min
Live From SRECon
We grabbed a room at SRECon and some folks talked to us about Resilience Engineering.
Mar 28, 2025
49 min
Teaser Episode - Season 2
The XKCD comic that’s in Colette’s thesis is DependencyJustin Reock is at DXhttps://punkrocksafety.com/ are our mutual podcast friends
Mar 12, 2025
24 min
Episode 9 - Learning from Incidents with special guest Alex Elman
We talk about what shifts in perspective and skills people need in order to really learn from incidents.
Feb 12, 2025
49 min
Episode 8 - Why Human Factors and Not Technical Ones
We talked about why the resilience engineering community focuses on human factors and not technical ones, and how to talk to a skeptical boss about that.
Jan 29, 2025
37 min
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 InfoQ⁠⁠A talk at SRE Con Americas in 2022⁠Courtney’s ⁠recent talk on Automation and AI⁠David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs started as ⁠a talk⁠ and then a ⁠great book⁠Want to read more about HABA-MABA and CSE/RE? Lisanne Bainbridge’s ⁠The Ironies of Automation⁠ is a perennial recommendation in our show notes⁠The thread⁠ Courtney mentioned from Gergely Orosz
Jan 22, 2025
54 min
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 of The Culture series, a set of fiction books based in a post-scarcity societyIf 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 SlackAnd of course, you can email us at [email protected] or write to us via http://thisisfinepod.com 
Jan 8, 2025
55 min
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