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Closed That Tab: What "How Complex Systems Fail" Teaches Software Engineers by Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Programming Insights
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Closed That Tab is back. Erika finally read Richard Cook's How Complex Systems Fail, an 18 point paper Cook wrote with patient safety and medical systems in mind, but one that is frequently discussed in web development and software engineering since the foundational principles apply universally. Erika and Bethany work through what holds up in practice.They cover the difference between normal failure and catastrophic failure, why knowing your system's baseline is its own skill, and why fixes are never free: every change adds complexity, knowledge gaps, and new risk. They get into safety as a set of defensive actions, including rate limiting, caching, rollback plans, feature flags, backups, playbooks, and watching for drift. Then they take on Cook's most contested claim, that root cause analysis is fundamentally wrong for complex systems, and where they agree and disagree. Bethany makes the case that incident reviews are still one of the best learning tools available, as long as psychological safety comes first.The conversation also digs into hindsight bias and self-blame, the difference between taking accountability and taking blame, practitioners as both the risk and the defense in a system, why training and safety work are chronically undervalued, where AI helps during an incident and where you still need a human expert, practicing failure through game days and shadowing, and keeping on-call sustainable so you do not burn out the people holding the pager.HostsOvercommitted: https://overcommitted.devBethany Janos: https://www.trustyduck.devErika Eggemeyer: https://github.com/eggyheadLinksHow Complex Systems Fail by Richard Cook: https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/HowComplexSystemsFail.pdfThinking In Systems: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/thinking-in-systems/
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Jamie Tanna
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