About Me

I love experiencing the world as interdependent systems. I'm a Product Manager at Gruntwork by day and a travel writer by night.

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Increment Issue 16

On adaptive capacity in incident response

Increment, Issue 16
February 2021

Learnings for tech orgs looking to adopt a resilience engineering perspective. Co-written with Dr. Richard Cook & John Allspaw.

Better Incident Command

The Lead Developer
24 April 2018, New York City

Incident Commanders (ICs) help resolve incidents faster and increase learning by regulating the flow of incidents.

Slide Deck | (Video TBA)

On-Call Rotations and Incident Response

February 2018, New Relic Blog

How we approach incidents and on-call at New Relic.

Part 1: On Call Rotations
Part 4: Incident Response

DevOps Takes Practice

New Relic FutureStack 2017
London / Berlin / New York City

DevOps requires a learning culture and constant adaptation. Matthew Flaming and I discuss how New Relic has evolved reliability practices.

Video (London) | Video (NYC)

Geek Out with Me

Here's a curated list of articles, papers, and videos to explore if you're interested in complex software, cognitive systems, or resilience engineering.

  • How Complex Systems Fail

    This concise paper by Dr. Richard Cook rewards attentive first, second, and twentieth readings. If you work in software (or any field with systems of any complexity), you should study this gem.

  • The Stella Report

    The SNAFU Catchers' report from their first cycle of study highlighted challenges like strange loops and dark debt, not by studying cosmology but by studying how humans cope with complexity in modern software.

  • Moving Past Shallow Incident Data

    John Allspaw points out the limits of shallow incident data like MTTR and MTTD, proposing deeper ways of engaging with incident data.

  • Just Culture

    Human factors and systems safety pioneer Sidney Dekker shares a short film on how one organization transformed to a "just culture" of learning, accountability, and trust.

Curious?

Elsewhere, I write about broader topics, including but not limited to productivity, self-trust, and death.