The Curious Engineer

All blogs / DevOps / SRE / infrastructure

Ferd.ca

ferd.ca

My own blog about programming and whatnot.

DevOps / SRE / infrastructureSoftware / engineering practiceElixir / Erlang

’10’15’20’25
Posts
153 from 13 Jul 2010 to 10 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (8 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://ferd.ca/feed.rss

2026 6

  1. Control and complexity: tension in systems design
  2. On Crisis Engineering
  3. On Joyful Militancy
  4. The Picture They Paint of You
  5. Paper: Challenger: Fine-Tuning the Odds Until Something Breaks
  6. Software Acceleration and Desynchronization

2025 8

  1. Paper: The Failure Gap
  2. Ongoing Tradeoffs, and Incidents as Landmarks
  3. Paper: Behavioural science is unlikely to change the world without a heterogeneity revolution
  4. Paper: Empirically derived evaluation requirements for responsible deployments of AI
  5. The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine
  6. Paper: when resilience engineering questions ergonomics
  7. AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go?
  8. Paper: Fuck Nuance

2024 20

  1. Davies on The Unaccountability Machine
  2. Paper: Algorithmic Monoculture and Social Welfare
  3. Local Optimizations Don't Lead to Global Optimums
  4. Kernick on Catastrophe and Systemic Change
  5. Carrots, sticks, and making things worse
  6. The Roots of Work-as-Done and Work-as-Imagined
  7. My Blog Engine is the Erlang Build Tool
  8. Paper: Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct
  9. Atomic Accidents and Uneven Blame
  10. Paper: Moral Crumple Zones
  11. Hutchins' Distributed Cognition in The Wild
  12. Paper: Systemic Design Principles in Social Innovation
  13. Paper: Charismatic Technology
  14. The Review Is the Action Item
  15. Paper: Understanding and Effectively Mitigating Code Review Anxiety
  16. A Commentary on Defining Observability
  17. Paper: How audits fail according to incident investigations
  18. A Distributed Systems Reading List
  19. Paper: Observation and assessment of crossing situations between pleasure craft and a small passenger ferry
  20. Counting Forest Fires

2023 47

  1. Negotiable Abstractions
  2. RHIP, doctors, and pagers
  3. Paper: Visualizing Uncertainty for Non-Expert End Users
  4. Paper: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?
  5. Paper: How in the World Did We Ever Get into That Mode?
  6. Paper: AI Art and its Impact on Artists
  7. Paper: Four Concepts for Resilience Engineering
  8. Paper: The Strategic Agility Gap
  9. Paper: The Tyranny of Structurelessness
  10. Paper: Seeing the Invisible
  11. On Willpower
  12. Paper: The Psychology of Incident Investigations
  13. On Foucault's Discipline and Punish
  14. Paper: Designing for Expertise
  15. Paper: Managing Without Blame?
  16. Paper: Anticipatory Thinking
  17. Paper: Can We Trust Best Practices?
  18. Paper: Unruly Bodies of Code in Time
  19. Paper: Skills, Rules, and Knowledge
  20. Paper: Ecological Interfaces: A Technological Imperative in High-Tech Systems?
  21. Paper: Building and revising adaptive capacity sharing for technical incident response
  22. Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops
  23. Paper: Imaginaries of Omniscience
  24. Paper: Accident Report Interpretation
  25. Paper: How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speed
  26. Paper: Ironies of Automation
  27. Accidents come from relationships, not parts
  28. Paper: Distancing Through Differencing
  29. Paper: Systemic Contributors Analysis and Diagram (SCAD)
  30. Paper: Can We Ever Escape From Data Overload?
  31. The Real World of Technology
  32. Paper: Nine Steps to Move Forward From Error
  33. Paper: On Nonscalability
  34. Paper: On People and Computers in Joint Cognitive Systems at Work
  35. On the hunt for a bug with a hump and a long tail
  36. The 80% League
  37. Paper: Those Found Responsible Have Been Sacked
  38. Paper: Ten Challenges for Making Automation a "Team Player"
  39. Paper: When mental models go wrong
  40. Paper: Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases
  41. Paper: Failure to adapt or adaptations that fail
  42. Paper: MABA-MABA or Abracadabra?
  43. Paper: Going Solid
  44. Paper: Agentive Language in Accident Investigations
  45. Paper: Rule- and Role-Retreat
  46. Leveson on Severity
  47. A Bridge Over a River Never Crossed

2022 18

  1. Paper: Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals
  2. The Law of Stretched [Cognitive] Systems
  3. How practitioners adapt to clumsy technology
  4. Paper: The Alarm Problem and Directed Attention in Dynamic Fault Management
  5. Paper: Visual Momentum
  6. Paper: Voice Loops as Coordination Aids in Space Shuttle Mission Control
  7. Paper: Managing the Hidden Costs of Coordination
  8. Paper: Moving off the Map
  9. Hiding Theory in Practice
  10. Paper: Repentance as Rebuke: Betrayal and Moral Injury in Safety Engineering
  11. On Theories and Tools
  12. Following Procedures Dilemma
  13. Paper: Past the Edge of Chaos
  14. A brief history of incident models
  15. Paper: Don't Let Knowledge Walk Away
  16. The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents
  17. My favorite Erlang Container
  18. Errors are constructed, not discovered

2021 3

  1. Plato's Dashboards
  2. You've got to upgrade Rebar3
  3. Surfacing Required Knowledge

2020 7

  1. Home Alone: a Post-Incident Review
  2. Interval Tree Clocks
  3. You Reap What You Code
  4. A Pipeline Made of Airbags
  5. Inclusiveness in Language for Outsiders Looking In
  6. Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
  7. Coding for Fun

2019 5

  1. Clever Functional Design
  2. Ten Years of Erlang
  3. Goodbye Joe
  4. Operable Software
  5. Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir

2018 2

  1. Erlang/OTP 21's new logger
  2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected

2017 2

  1. Advent Of Code 2017
  2. Tout est Terrible

2016 5

  1. Handling Overload
  2. On Technical Debt: Shoveling forward
  3. Property-Based Testing Basics
  4. The Zen of Erlang
  5. rebar3 shell

2015 3

  1. The Little Printf
  2. Lessons Learned while Working on Large-Scale Server Software
  3. Awk in 20 Minutes

2014 2

  1. Queues Don't Fix Overload
  2. Vim and Composability

2013 6

  1. It's About the Guarantees
  2. Troubleshooting Down the Logplex Rabbit Hole
  3. Beating the CAP Theorem Checklist
  4. My Male-Centric View of the World
  5. Don't be a Jerk: Write Documentation
  6. REPL? A bit more (and less) than that

2012 7

  1. Simhashing (hopefully) made simple
  2. Code Janitor: nobody's dream, everyone's job (and how Erlang can help)
  3. Poll Results: Erlang & Maintenance
  4. Generic Piece Of Technology
  5. Rebar Releases and Being Wrong
  6. RTB: Where Erlang BLOOMs
  7. Obfuscation

2011 6

  1. Will the real Unicode wrangler please stand up?
  2. Erlang's Tail Recursion is Not a Silver Bullet
  3. Dr. Dj.
  4. YOU WILL REGRET THIS
  5. On the Use of the Process Dictionary in Erlang
  6. An Open Letter to the Erlang Beginner (or Onlooker)

2010 6

  1. Surely they'd fix it
  2. Keep Your ORM Out of my Controller
  3. Yet Another Article on Zippers
  4. Learn You Some Erlang, a Year in
  5. On Erlang's Syntax
  6. Hello, World