I think it’s now been more than a year since I last wrote software just for fun (with or without AI). It feels more like chores or work by now. It feels like it had been a long time coming, but it just became clearer recently.

Another very cool post you might have missed from our community, on how expertise copes with overload, highlighted by treating incidents as first-class work: resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11453533

Expertise and Overload | Resilience in Software Foundation

Resilience engineering views incidents through a different frame than the conventional approach in the software industry, which tends to treat incidents as an i

resilienceinsoftware.org

If I were a scientist my email signature would absolutely contain the words “more research is needed”

I just realized I hadn’t shared this one yet, but I wrote about how the team I’m on restructured its workflows to lean into the code review bottleneck rather than trying to eliminate it when code generation took over, and what that ended up doing: www.honeycomb.io/blog/embraci...

How I Came to Embrace the Code Review Bottleneck

Faced with an endless stream of AI-generated code reviews, our team made the counterintuitive choice to lean into the bottleneck rather than reduce it.

honeycomb.io

Every risk register should have an entry that reads “we have misjudged the risks” which is in the “likelihood: high” and “impact: high” region of the risk matrix.

Fix code review bottlenecks by doing like private torrent trackers and only allowing people to get their PR reviewed if they reviewed enough PRs beforehand to keep their ratio high enough.

The first rule of the papers-reading club is that you’re unfortunately already in the papers-reading club and I will send you links and summaries

Yet again hearing how some skilled work never truly mattered now that it's getting automated, while it absolutely did and was a point of professional pride for many. It's a significant aspect of 'deskilling', which is a known consequence of automation. Pretending otherwise is needlessly unkind.

this seems more accurate given the frequency of errors right now

Although there have been changes in cognition and systems theory, I wanted to bring up some stuff Rasmussen published in the 80s that was really elegant. I'll use 3 diagrams he published, covering the ideas of abstraction hierarchies and how people operate systems when troubleshooting them.

This is a very good text on comparing ecology and organizational dynamics when it comes to harvesting signals; big fan of this one. psychsafety.com/a-practical-...

Organisational Indicator Species: being an Organisational Ecologist

The more elaborate and expensive our system for understanding something, the less we may actually understand it. Ecologists face the same problem — you can't measure the health of an ecosystem directl...

psychsafety.com

Wrote up a bunch of stuff about some patterns in system design, about the tension, contrast, and possibility of composing approaches of analytical decomposition to increase control, and of complexity-aware stances for emergence, and some pitfalls of either stance: ferd.ca/control-and-...

Quick little brainstorm-y blog post about traditional versus resilience engineering focuses (foci?): surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/08/02/t...

Traditional versus resilience engineering views

As a fan of resilience engineering, I often differ with people on where we should focus our scarce engineering cycles in order to improve reliability. I thought it would be a useful exercise to bra…

surfingcomplexity.blog

Delegating pressure to the final individual, who is now tasked with continuously fixing the entire system’s misalignments through their personal choices.

I was a reviewer for this book so I can give you some spoilers about it: it rules, get a copy of it, start telling everyone about cumulative culture, unbuild the myths that keep your teams down, make shit be meaningful.

Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 2mo ago

IT'S POST'S BOOK BIRTHDAY! 🥳 Want a guidebook to the human side of tech? Want to cut through the noise of despair and anger to craft more meaningful work? Want to get sharp metacognitive strategies for this new era? Get all that *and* Launch Squad bragging rights here: www.drcathicks.com#book

One of the ironies about AI agents in ops tasks is that it feels like there has never been as much interest in creating a forgiving environment with proper structural support than through promising to remove humans from it, finally forcing a less individualistic and blameful approach to design.

at this point why not just host my repos on the staging servers, github

These Angine de Poitrine fans got the best flags I’ve seen in a while; that’s some amazing concert gear.

Even after years, one of the weirdest parts of gardening to me is needing to harden the seedlings before transplanting them. Like “yes hold on a minute I gotta take the plants out so they can play outdoors for a while, but they gotta be in before streetlights turn on” is a real and necessary thing.

The ongoing stream of software engineering pieces that mention that the future is in writing spec but never bother to define what a specification is or at what abstraction levels it should be is appalling; arguably, tickets are a spec, the code is a spec, and work between both is connecting dots.

“decisions with lasting social consequences are attached to a future moment when the technology is assumed to have revealed its true form, rather than addressed in the present in which it already operates. […] it defers responsibility by attaching accountability to a moment that never materializes”

Waiting for AGI - AI & SOCIETY

AI & SOCIETY -

link.springer.com

New blog post about flipping the bozo bit: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/09/f...

Flipping the bozo bit on flips the learning off

I’m too young to have seen Bozo the Clown myself, but I’m old enough to get the references “Flipping the bozo bit” is an expression from the software world. Think about a ti…

surfingcomplexity.blog

“[…] we reached for Recon, an amazing tool for diagnosing issues […] (the related Erlang in Anger is more-or-less required reading as all on-call engineers end up scouring its pages eventually)” Wild! I wrote these 10 years ago to help coworkers, and they’re still useful for real world issues now!

You’ve Got (Too Much) Mail: Behind the Scenes of the 3/25/26 Voice Outage

On March 25th, voice and video on Discord suffered major degradation beginning at 12:13 PDT, lasting a little over three hours. Learn how the issue originated, how it affected systems across Discord, ...

discord.com

Infinite love to my SRE coworkers, one of whom casually dropped this single line in a retro: "the industrial hourly deploy train and its consequences have been a disaster for society"

Writing my action items on a piece of paper that I will burn to ward off spirits

I wrote for @resilienceinsoftware.org on "Superficial Blamelessness", where under the label of "blamelessness", we avoid punishing people, yet still focus fixes and interventions based on the same individualistic framing rather than a broader systemic stance. resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11502437

Superficial Blamelessness

In 2012, John Allspaw (then CTO of Etsy) wrote a seminal blog post on the need for what he called Blameless Postmortems. Built off the notion of a “Just Culture” from the research of Sidney Dekker, he...

resilienceinsoftware.org

I've gotten an early copy of Crisis Engineering by Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson, and just in time for its release today, here's my review of it: ferd.ca/notes/on-cri... TL:DR; I like it, good perspectives and an interesting mix of approaches.

One of my assignments asks whether a given set of psychological constructs amount to “good science” and it’s very weird as someone who’s written zero papers and done no real science to just attempt to go “sure dawg it’s okay science I guess but these hundreds of researchers could pick better models”

Every time I am faced with this Swedish login form, I have to say 'Logga in' out loud with a terminator voice. It is one of the few rules we can't change and must be respected.

hell yeah @resilienceinsoftware.org swag is in! the law of requisite variety states that only variety in the regulator can destroy variety in the system being regulated. so if you need to deal with complexity you know you gotta join the club & begrudgingly increase complexity to keep things simple