Surfing Complexity

Recently, two AI-related pieces of content caught my attention. The first was the blog post On-Call is Now Theatre by Boris Tane. He argues that AI agents are now capable of doing the majority of on-call work that is currently being done by humans, and th

In yesterday's post about the recent GitHub outage, there was a detail in the writeup that I didn't say anything about: the autoscaling policy on the service with the saturated Istio sidecar. Originally this was caused by an Istio sidecar pod reaching its

It wasn't even a week ago when I wrote about a major GitHub incident. Yesterday, they had another big incident, which lasted almost eight hours. There's a public write-up already posted, which is surprisingly quick. While I'm personally very impatient to

The folks at Microsoft Azure recently wrote up a post incident review for a networking issue in their West U.S region. From the included timeline, it looks like the impact was on the order of five hours. It's a pretty short write-up, but let's take a look

On August 6, 2026, GitHub had a pretty rough incident: GitHub Actions was degraded for about nine hours. GitHub posted a public incident write-up. It's only a few paragraphs long, but there are some interesting details in here. This was yet another incide

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 brainstorm some of the differences in focus between what I'll

There's a new software reliability conference that just spun up called Software Should Work, and I had a chance to give a talk there. I took the opportunity to speak about one of my favorite topics: saturation. Here's a recording of it. Links from the tal

Mephistopheles (a medieval demon from German folklore) flying over Wittenberg, in a lithograph by Eugène Delacroix. Modern software systems contain within them a mind-boggling level of complexity. …

We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. - Matthew Prince, How I Choose…

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…