Having a little bit more fun with Cloudflare and AWS public incident data: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/28/i...

Spent my Thanksgiving playing with public incident data and seeing if it was under statistical control. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/27/f...

I finally got around to writing up my thoughts about the recent Cloudflare outage. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/26/b...

New blog post, on the role of attrition in software incidents, and how we don't talk about that in incident write-ups: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/11/02/y...

New blog post on the recent AWS incident: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/25/q...

Manual intervention was necessary to correct. Oh the humanity!

I hope this email never finds you. I hope you’re free.

More fun with Sora. sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68f9b2d0...

EVERYBODY GO READ THE AWS INCIDENT WRITE-UP! aws.amazon.com/message/1019...

Fun with Sora sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68f6e3ae...

OH: "Why are all my industry incident-friends utterly destroyed today?"

New blog post: Caveat promptor. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/12/c...

I once asked a very skilled and experienced rower how people who make every boat they are in better do it. He said that he'd known two people like that, and they weren't the fastest or stronger rowers, but their superpower was adding stability where the boat needed it. Not something you'd see ...

New blog post: The illegible nature of software development talent surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/08/t...

Google blacklisted the iCloud private relay ip addresses. Been broken for ages while now. On iOS safari you need to press the “show ip address” option and then try searching again and it works.

I can't access Google Scholar over my phone (it gives me an error when I try to search or click a link on a paper), and I have no idea why.

New blog post, some thought experiments about learning from incident write-ups: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/10/04/t...

New blog post that's nominally about statistics, based on various things I've been reading lately: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/28/a...

New blog post on the problem of fixation during incident response: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/20/f...

New blog post on the trade-offs of fine-grained progressive rollouts surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/13/t...

New blog post: Nothing fails like a history of success. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/09/07/n...

Good public incident write-up from UptimeLabs. Quick notes: * A patch-level dependency update unexpectedly changed behavior. * Failure mode: saturation * The role of health checks (a tool to improve availability!) in enabling this incident. uptimelabs.io/when-fast-fl...

and he would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for those meddling kids

I would not have gotten my PhD if this rule was in effect when I was a student. (I started off in an EE PhD program at Boston University, decided I wanted to do CS instead, and left BU with an MSEE for U. Maryland, where I got my PhD. That was six years on my student visa).

New blog post: My favorite developer productivity research method that nobody uses surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/24/m...

pretty sure the fire pigeons aren’t gonna care about your silly little sign

New blog post: the problems that accountability can't fix. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/23/t...

“When the following Director of Engineering was asked about the relationship between OceanGate’s engineering and operations teams, he described it as severely dysfunctional, stating, ‘They didn't talk. They hated each other.’” – from U.S. Coast Guard the Marine Board Investigation report

But does he live inside the beltway?

we used to build household shrines to Going On The Computer and it's no coincidence that as we abandoned these we started straying further from god's light

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH

I wish somebody would hand me a bag of potato chips stuffed with cash. ERIC ADAMS IF YOU’RE LISTENING!!!

continuous-incident-ation

Slightly diminish a band: Ezra

Manager: "What's this milestone 'Living on a prayer' ?" Me: "That's the documentation deliverable." Manager: "What's the status of that?" Me: "We're halfway there" Manager: "Why is progress so slow?" Me: "You fired Tommy" Manager: "So?" Me: "Tommy used to work on the docs"

Skeeting like a state

Did we ever find out what the secret of the ooze was or no? I feel like it was skipped over.

New blog post, inspired by Rich Hickey's classic "Simple Made Easy" talk from 2011. surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/17/e...

Evolution by natural selection is the ultimate greedy algorithm

A quick little blog post: The trap of tech that’s great in the small but not in the large surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/08/16/t...

X: "You're looking... haggard today... are you ok?" Me: "Yeah... I just have resting AI face..."

Increase a band: 11,780 Maniacs

If I were Sisyphus, you know what I would REALLY hate? Pushing that darn boulder

Thinking of putting "PhD-level expert" in my LinkedIn tagline.

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Business idea: non-fungible LLM tokens

Is vibe-trolling a thing?

The rhythm is gonna get ya (threatening)

“Fixed issue where fish could spawn in any blue fluid.”