Fred Hebert

People tend to have a mental model where a system is stable until disturbed, far more often than they have one where the system is balanced because it is constantly intervened with. The latter is a more useful approach to thinking about complex systems.

Me? No, I would never financially pay for an open source ecosystem. I’d much rather pay indirectly through elaborate systemic consequences. That lets me still find people to be mad at, and that’s comforting. Also think of the content.

pondering my root cause

I first put learnyousomeerlang.com online in 2009, while I was still working my first PHP job. Today, 17 years later, I’ve had to take it down for maintenance for the first time while awaiting a PHP security patch. It uses it for variable substitution in links and establishing cross-chapter links.

Disabling all certificate checking in my client code so nobody uses the bad intermediary certs to own me

An element in this tooling we built is the approach: if we're stuck solving puzzles, we can either try to make a puzzle-solving machine to make puzzle-solving faster, or we can re-represent the components of the puzzle such that they're less demanding, less of a puzzle overall. We chose the latter.

In 1997, James Reason published 'Managing Organizational Accidents'. It was influential in popularizing his concepts around the Swiss Cheese model, his specific brand/recipe of safety (and just) culture, etc. and discussed ever since. But it also has this line in it just throwing incredible shade:

This is a good example of the substitution myth in automation, applied to software workflows. Coactive work and the integration of various functions is different from the individual functions being doable in isolation.

mornings are starting to be colder which means it is once again time to hover my hands above the toaster while it cooks toast like it’s a campfire

Today's blog post: a play in one act. surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/09/19/h...

I think it’s now been more than a year since I last wrote software just for fun (with or without AI). It feels more like chores or work by now. It feels like it had been a long time coming, but it just became clearer recently.

Another very cool post you might have missed from our community, on how expertise copes with overload, highlighted by treating incidents as first-class work: resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11453533

If I were a scientist my email signature would absolutely contain the words “more research is needed”

I just realized I hadn’t shared this one yet, but I wrote about how the team I’m on restructured its workflows to lean into the code review bottleneck rather than trying to eliminate it when code generation took over, and what that ended up doing: www.honeycomb.io/blog/embraci...

Every risk register should have an entry that reads “we have misjudged the risks” which is in the “likelihood: high” and “impact: high” region of the risk matrix.

Fix code review bottlenecks by doing like private torrent trackers and only allowing people to get their PR reviewed if they reviewed enough PRs beforehand to keep their ratio high enough.

The first rule of the papers-reading club is that you’re unfortunately already in the papers-reading club and I will send you links and summaries

Yet again hearing how some skilled work never truly mattered now that it's getting automated, while it absolutely did and was a point of professional pride for many. It's a significant aspect of 'deskilling', which is a known consequence of automation. Pretending otherwise is needlessly unkind.

this seems more accurate given the frequency of errors right now

This is a very good text on comparing ecology and organizational dynamics when it comes to harvesting signals; big fan of this one. psychsafety.com/a-practical-...

Wrote up a bunch of stuff about some patterns in system design, about the tension, contrast, and possibility of composing approaches of analytical decomposition to increase control, and of complexity-aware stances for emergence, and some pitfalls of either stance: ferd.ca/control-and-...

Quick little brainstorm-y blog post about traditional versus resilience engineering focuses (foci?): surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/08/02/t...

Delegating pressure to the final individual, who is now tasked with continuously fixing the entire system’s misalignments through their personal choices.

I was a reviewer for this book so I can give you some spoilers about it: it rules, get a copy of it, start telling everyone about cumulative culture, unbuild the myths that keep your teams down, make shit be meaningful.

One of the ironies about AI agents in ops tasks is that it feels like there has never been as much interest in creating a forgiving environment with proper structural support than through promising to remove humans from it, finally forcing a less individualistic and blameful approach to design.

at this point why not just host my repos on the staging servers, github

These Angine de Poitrine fans got the best flags I’ve seen in a while; that’s some amazing concert gear.

Even after years, one of the weirdest parts of gardening to me is needing to harden the seedlings before transplanting them. Like “yes hold on a minute I gotta take the plants out so they can play outdoors for a while, but they gotta be in before streetlights turn on” is a real and necessary thing.

“decisions with lasting social consequences are attached to a future moment when the technology is assumed to have revealed its true form, rather than addressed in the present in which it already operates. […] it defers responsibility by attaching accountability to a moment that never materializes”

New blog post about flipping the bozo bit: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/05/09/f...

“[…] we reached for Recon, an amazing tool for diagnosing issues […] (the related Erlang in Anger is more-or-less required reading as all on-call engineers end up scouring its pages eventually)” Wild! I wrote these 10 years ago to help coworkers, and they’re still useful for real world issues now!

Infinite love to my SRE coworkers, one of whom casually dropped this single line in a retro: "the industrial hourly deploy train and its consequences have been a disaster for society"

Writing my action items on a piece of paper that I will burn to ward off spirits

I wrote for @resilienceinsoftware.org on "Superficial Blamelessness", where under the label of "blamelessness", we avoid punishing people, yet still focus fixes and interventions based on the same individualistic framing rather than a broader systemic stance. resilienceinsoftware.org/news/11502437