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This is Fine! A podcast about resilience engineering and software · Colette Alexander and Clint Byrum

Going Solid

·1 hr 2 min·1 clip
Two software reliability engineers do a deep dive into the academic paper 'Going Solid: A Model of System Dynamics and Consequences for Patient Safety' by Richard Cook and Jens Rasmussen. They unpack the paper's core concepts — tight coupling, Rasmussen's boundary model (acceptable performance, economic failure, unacceptable workload), and the nuclear-power term 'going solid' — then apply them concretely to software: SLOs as safety margins, distributed monolith anti-patterns, load-balancing algorithm debt, and database connection pool saturation. The episode opens with a candid conversation about political anxiety and community organizing before pivoting to the technical content, grounding abstract safety theory in lived DevOps experience.

As heard by us

A candid, systems-minded conversation about resilience, margins, and staying functional under pressure.

The episode starts in a bruised but practical register, returning after a short gap and bringing in recent board work on year-ahead goals. Its core tension is easy to follow: there are few jobs to apply to, so the speaker keeps moving through unpaid foundation work, community…

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Why you'd press play

When your work feels one step away from the cliff.

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