Wrote some thoughts about complexity and LLMs: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/31/a...

New blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...

Resilience engineering is about how successful systems are able to modify themselves to deal with a shock that is outside of what they can handle. This video by David Woods illustrates this phenomenon using the real-life example of an ER dealing with an influx of burn patients. youtu.be/duNMGTmZ4FA

New blog posts on multiple coding agent scaling: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/19/a...

Power engineer talking to software dev: “Imagine a distributed system where the load varies dynamically…” “Gotcha.” “…you can only shed load under emergency conditions…” “OK, still with you.” “…and you can’t use queues.” “Wait, what?”

DOJ investigating whether Denmark lied on its Greenland mortgage.

I wrote a post about the Moylan arrow, and its relationship to Jens Rasmussen's skills, rules, and knowledge model. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/17/f...

Tired: learn to code Wired: learn to predict the future

I know it’s only January, but I’d like to nominate this for most “2026-y” headline. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/n...

I'm anxiously awaiting to hear the details about just what happened with that Verizon outage that occurred yesterday. In the meantime, here's some completely uninformed speculation on my part about what that report will say: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/15/v...

Dreamland by Joni Mitchell, except instead it’s “Greenland”

My prediction: post-incident investigation of today’s Verizon outage will reveal planned maintenance as one of the contributing factors. Note: I have no actual knowledge of what happened today. This prediction is just to keep me intellectually honest.

Path dependence is a helluva drug

I am calling for a complete and total boycott of the Mercator projection in all news stories about Greenland until every member of the American public has seen this

Somebody's already made this joke, right?

look upon my works, ye mighty, and let me know what you think

It‘s only been four days since I originally posted this, but I think it’s holding up pretty well so far.

can we stop for just a sec?

Did Frank Black ever find his mind?

A systems-thinking approach tends to require a focus on interactions over components. Here I try to bring a temporal dimension to these interactions. Drift accumulates across loops and creates inconsistencies as mental models lag when trying to keep up with acceleration. ferd.ca/software-acc...

Liked this observation from Addy Osmani: “Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call.” addyosmani.com/blog/21-less...

Gonna be a long year, I see

How close are we to being able to build a working version of KITT from Knight Rider?

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (April)

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (August)

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (February)

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (November)

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (March)

2025 Headline of the Year nominee (July)

Systems are designed from the top down, but fail from the bottom up.

malaise is the new ennui

There was a thoughtful essay written in Aeon by an anesthesiologist (Dr. Ronald Dworkin) who began suffering from anxiety, and how it affected his practice. My thoughts on that essay are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/28/o...

As a former colleague of mine at Akamai put it, for most of our customers, an SSL certificate was a technology whose main effect was to make their web site not work at surprising and inopportune moments

Yesterday, the Bazel team was dealing with an expired SSL certificate that broke builds for external users. I wrote a quick post on why I think SSL certificates are so dangerous: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/27/t...

10,000 Maniacs in 1997 is worth about 20,200 Maniacs today.

spoiler alert: the line was “It’s plurbin’ time”

There's a new blog post on Waymo's blog on the surprising behavior of their robotaxis during the recent power outage of SF. My thoughts on the post are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/23/s...

Some thoughts I had for rating incidents on more than just severity: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/22/a...

Optus recently released an independent report on the emergency services outage that happened in Australia back in September. I wrote a post with my thoughts on that report: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/21/q...

got my adhd upgraded to ad4k

time to pull out the seasonal favorites

I suspect people think in terms of correction of error because 1. the reality that complex/complicated systems are absolutely riddled with errors is disconcerting 2. so is the idea that we don't know why things work

I wrote a post about why I don't like the name that Amazon uses for their post-incident review process: "Correction of Error". surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/20/w...

There was a great talk at re:Invent about the Oct. 25 us-east-1 outage! My impressions on the talk are here: surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/14/a...

Ironically, if you write sloppily, nobody will mistake your writing for AI slop.