Ep:29 Humans, Systems or AIs - The Principles of Reliability Apply - With Tech Veteran Anne Currie

<p>Shownotes</p><p>Building reliability out of unreliable humans, with unreliable human Anne Currie</p><p>What happens when a podcast about unreliability meets a household full of colds? This week, I use the podcast itself as a worked example of building more resilient systems.</p><p>With Jon too ill to join me, I explore three techniques: setting expectations, planning graceful downgrades and buffering work in advance. Along the way, I explain why a backup co-host who lives in the same household might share your failure mode, how listeners can help a system remain stable, and why recording a stockpile of episodes turned out to be surprisingly difficult.</p><p>The catch is cognitive load. A hard drive can store an episode and forget about it. I can’t. Unpublished conversations stay in my head and find their way into the next interview, even though nobody else can listen to them yet.</p><p>A shorter solo episode about systems, networking and the inconvenient fact that humans are human. Let me know whether this particular graceful downgrade works for you.</p><p>Topics covered</p><ul><li>The supplier, network and consumer as potential points of failure.</li><li>Setting expectations before something goes wrong.</li><li>How a reliable track record can undermine a warning about unreliability.</li><li>Giving people enough information to adapt their behaviour.</li><li>Trying a shorter solo episode as a graceful downgrade.</li><li>Correlated failures when your backup catches the same cold.</li><li>Buffering episodes and the cognitive load of unpublished conversations.</li><li>Why techniques that work for technical systems need rethinking when people are involved.</li></ul><p>Mentioned in the episode:</p><ul><li>Sam Newman and the earlier conversation about resilience, identified in the recording as episode 26.</li><li>Building Microservices and Sam’s book on resilient systems.</li><li>Matthew Skelton, Team Topologies and cognitive load.</li><li>Yanqing Cheng and the earlier discussion about AI managers and feedback loops.</li><li>Jon Berger and a planned conversation about feedback loops.</li><li>Content delivery networks, or CDNs.</li></ul><p>Listener question</p><p>Does a shorter solo episode work as an occasional graceful downgrade? I’d love to know whether you enjoyed this one.</p>