Paper Club: Two Years Before the Mast w/special guest eric dobbs

Mitchell Hashimoto’s post on leaving Github: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github

The Reddit post on Github’s availability historically (that we find questionable): https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1rnvhs9/githubs_historic_downtime_scraped_and_plotted/

A reminder, the Messy 9 are: congestion, cascade, conflict, lag, saturation, friction, tempo, surprise, tangles

We have sometimes loved his stuff, but Gergely is annoying us with these posts: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-is-github-still-best-for?r=78c7k&utm_medium=email

https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2048017382036082706

You can find the RISF store with Hindsight Bias merch here: https://www.bonfire.com/store/risf/

You can find a copy of Richard Cook’s Two Years Before the Mast at Lorin’s Blog: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/twoyearsbeforethemast.pdf

A reminder, Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail can be found at http://how.complexsystems.fail

Some writing on the 1996 Annenberg conference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351953417_Coming_Together_The

Folk models paper (not by Woods, by Dekker and Hollnagel), which is specifically targeting Situational Awareness as being a folk model: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10111-003-0136-9

Some stuff about SNAFU Catchers: https://www.snafucatchers.com/

And https://snafucatchers.github.io/

Eric referenced our conversation with Beth Long about Building and Revising Adaptive Capacity, which she co-wrote with Richard Cook about New Relic’s real-life example of resilience engineering: https://youtu.be/A_rU4-M61Hk  and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003687020301903?via%3Dihub for the paper

Erik Hollnagel’s RAG get’s referenced: https://erikhollnagel.com/onewebmedia/RAG%20Outline%20V2.pdf

Once again, we link you to Lorin’s Law: https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2017/06/24/a-conjecture-on-why-reliable-systems-fail/

Eric is referencing Lund, that is their Human Factors and Systems Safety program: https://www.humanfactors.lth.se/

Check out Crisis Engineering! https://crisisengineering.layeraleph.com/crisis-engineering-the-book/

The upcoming RISF event on Practice of Practice Gamelan: https://resilienceinsoftware.org/events/245030