In 2025, I began writing down the things that have influenced me as a manager of an incident response team. I didn't want this to be complete, but more of a diary style. There's already a much better list of Resilience Engineering articles online so go spend time with that. I wanted something mostly for me to track what I've been checking out, and possibly share if they turn out to be useful to others.
I'm currently not adding to this list though I continue to read, watch, and listen to a lot of range of thing, and decided to leave this here for posterity.
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📺 Secret Service Agent: How To Stay In Control When Someone Is Trying To Manipulate You! - DOACEO - nice pairing to Chris Voss's approach to communication
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📖 Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die - Designing the reliability into US government in emergency
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📖 How AI Can Degrade Human Performance in High-Stakes Settings - Shockingly it's not all unicorns and candy. Good research backed take on where/how/where not to include AI
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📖 To Intervene or not to Intervene: The Dilemma of Management by Exception - Airflight examples and based off work by Dekker and Woods
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📺 Secret Service Agent: How To Stay In Control When Someone Is Trying To Manipulate You! - More frameworks on effective communication and negeotation
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📖 The AI coding trap - Data informed push back on the AI fluency arguement
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📖 The same incident never happens twice, but the patterns recur over and over - The title says it all.
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📺 The Race for the Next Generation of Rockets, with Jeff Thornburg - Interesting takes on safety vs engineering in spaceship building
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📖 You're definitely going to be a manager now - Blurring the lines between being an IC and Manager in the age of AI
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📖 The problems that accountability can’t fix - Nice post form Loren on org pressures including outlining double blinds
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📺 Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - There's enough research to see the impact to productivity.
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📖 Intercept: Secret History of Computers and Spies - Encryption and bridging popst WW2 espionage and rise of tech
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📖 I Am an AI Hater - I'm here for the hot takes and good to balance all the "amazing" posts with the opposite views.
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📺 Netflix doc on the Titan disaster - What happens with the "boundery of functional acceptable performance" gets ignored
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📺 Uptime Labs and the Multi Party Dilemma - Sorta meta take on incident reveiew. I really enjoyed watching Eric's facilitation techniques.
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📖 Can LLMs replace on call SREs today? - GPT5 era data backed take on "SRE Agents"
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📺 Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: reality check - Overview of AI coding usage broken down by company type
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📺 Making Your Bets with AI - How sure are we that solo AI will work?
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📖 Is AI-assisted coding an incident magnet? - Feels obvious in hindsight but draws a distionction between "read and write" mode for AI
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📖 In defense of shallow technical knowledge - This puts into words how I've been thinking about how to approach technical knowledge for an Incident Team.
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📺 A 3-step AI coding workflow for solo founders - Very good overview to integrate great PRD/Task generation prompts in Cursor.
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📖 What Do I Think I Think About LLMs - Always good to read what your colleagues write
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📺 State-Of-The-Art Prompting For AI Agents - Very good overview to integrate great PRD/Task generation prompts in Cursor.
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📺 Anthropic MCP Server Course - 90 minute training on MCP stuff.
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📺 How custom GPTs can make you a better manager - Good take on AI for Managers
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📺 Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so | Big Think - Talks about what is essentially the line of representation for reality.
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📺 A conversation with Jony Ive - Lots in here but good insight on to what he thinks a god team is and how it works.
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📺 The CIA method for making quick decisions under stress - Prioritization and decision making under time pressure.
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📺 Former CIA agent: The truth about manipulation - Another good take on decision making. Task saturation and "what do we do next".
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📺 SREcon25 Americas - SRE & Complexification: Where Verbs and Nouns Do Battle
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📺 SREcon25 Americas - AIOps: Prove It! An Open Letter to Vendors Selling AI for SREs
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📺 SREcon25 Americas - Running DRP Tabletop Exercises - Good take on some DR stuff. Expands on templtes, things to cover and participant follow up.
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📖 Advice for time management as a manager - Two good useful things here. 1. Deadlines are things where important things get missed if they aren't met. They are not arbitrary. And a good "I'm overwhelmed" checklist.
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📺 Why Your Team is Probably Missing the AI Revolution (And NASA Can Explain Why) Talks about the adoption of AI for teams vs individuals
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🎧 Generative AI in the Real World: Getting Ahead of the Curve with Claire Vo - Good soundbites on her take on how things are gonna change with the direction of AI
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📺AWS re:Invent 2017 - Nora Jones Describes Why We Need More Chaos - Chaos Engineering, That Is Oldie but goodie. Found some really good take aways even though I had seen it before.
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📺The Repeat Incident Fallacy: What Jurassic Park Can Teach Us... Revisiting for no reason. It's so good!
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📖 How we identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken It's getting easier and easier every day...
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📺 Captain Sully's Minute-by-Minute Description of The Miracle On The Hudson In his own words and how to triage during the incident.
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📺 SREcon25 Americas - Incident Management Metrics That Matter - Good overview on meaningful and insightful metrics that can be used by Incident Ops teams.
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📖 10 Years of Engineering Ladders - 10 years after Rent the Runway career ladder
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📖 The Senior Shortcut - If AI is removing the need for Junior Engineers (massive air quotes) then how do folks get to Senior?
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📖 How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors -Failure modes of early state managers
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📖 An Incomplete List of Skills Senior Engineers Need Beyond Coding - If you're looking to become more experienced, this is a good place to start looking.
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📺 The Real Story Behind the Apollo 11 Computer Error What really went wrong?
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📖 Your Strengths Are Your Weakness - Something I believe to be true. Traits of shadow sides and will show up differently in different situations.
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📖 But what if I really want a faster horse? - Overused reference, but interesting take on product development and - probably - the need for revenue to always grow.
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📖 How to Get a Standing Ovation as a Conference Speaker - Good overview /checklist for public speaking and what to think about.
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🎧 The Rest is Classified - Podcast - Range of topics but includes modern day bank heists and other interesting topics..
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📖 Semantic Diffusion - When is vibe coding not vibe coding?
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📖 The Reality of Tech Interviews in 2025 - updates with 2025 AI and Market updates
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📺 How Fukushima Actually Happened: Second worst nuclear disaster
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📖 System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load: Prime your mental caches!
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📖 The Software Engineering Identity Crisis: A take on impact to the craft of engineering of AI
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📖 Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google: System Theoretic Process Analysis - promises being able to solve unknown unknowns. But need to reread.
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📖 The Helpfulness Ladder: How to be more helpful, and get more help
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📖 Our interfaces have lost their senses. Back to my designer days. IMO the evolution of interfaces has been disappointing. Reminds me a bit of Wilson Miners When We Build talk.
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📖 Teach, Don't Tell - I’ll be revisiting this one for sure. Too many great quotes to pull out by talks about difference between Teaching and Writing Docs and how they can overlap.
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📖 Zombie theories: why so many false ideas stick around: Taken from medical research but broadly applicable
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📖 Wheel Reinventor's Principles: When/why should you reinvent a wheel?
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📕 Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage: Technology, encryption and humans
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📖 Production Pressures: Automation is good right. RIGHT?
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📖 Chaos in Cloudflare’s Lisbon office: securing the Internet with wave motion: What is random, really? And Cloudflare generates…. random.
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How a Bunch of Lava Lamps Protect Us From Hackers - also good reading
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📖 AI fakers exposed in tech dev recruitment: postmortem (sic) - Incidents don’t scare me. Nation State Actors gaining access to our systems and stealing all the money scares me.
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📺 12 Logging BEST Practices in 12 minutes - Good overview
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📺 What is a BACK BRIEF? Learn how to prevent communication errors. Quick video on a military term to ensure clear communication.
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📺 RIC ReDeploy Panel Excerpt - probably the most valuable 9 minutes I spent this week. Dr Cook on learning as it pertains to self vs Org/Job and doing work as “the resistance”
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📖 Heuristics for Supporting Cooperative Dashboard Design - A long paper that I used AI to summarize but good research backed heuristics on dashboard design.
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📺 A Few Observations on the Marvelous Resilience of Bone & Resilience Engineering - Dr. Richard Cook - It’s not what you think. But you do learn about bones
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📖 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report - Not IncOps specifically but a fun read
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📺 Plaid’s Predictions for FinTech in 2025 - Some surprising things (to me) in here including Ads and Stable Coins.
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🎧 ThisIsFine Podcast - Evergreen. I got behind and am catching up on some episodes.
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📖 How doctors handoff patients (how it applies to incidents) - We’ve started doing more on call handoffs these days. What can we learn from Doctors?
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📖 Surviving Cardiac Surgical Chaos - Again, what can we learn from other / medical fields. Take away in my words: “During a crisis, there’s no time for prolonged discussion; team members should focus on following the lead surgeon’s directives.” This is an interesting take on “Leading Incidents”
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📖 The Theory Behind Understanding Failure - The title says it all. Looks at some common (?) practices in “failure” and the models behind them. Eg. Rasmussen Migration Model. Has many drill downs and videos to dive off on.
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📖 Using ML to detect and respond to performance degradations in slices of Stripe payments - Pretty much what the title says
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📺 Richard Cook interviewed at Velocity 2012 - Nice and short
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📖 Incident SEV scales are a waste of time - Sorta preaching to the choir but a nice short read
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📖 An Incident Command Training Handbook - Same author as above. Some good points and mental models
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📺 The Five Dirty Words of Continuous Improvement - Preed making another appearance!
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📺 1994 Black Hawk Friendly Fire Shootdown Incident - Allspaw recommended the book but it’s not on audible so tried to learn more about it.
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📖 Markers of Progress in Incident Analysis - Another Allspaw post on what improvement looks like
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📺 Ice, confusion, and the 38,000ft crash - Contributing factors and complexity in incidents. Ironies of automation.
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📺 How Hackers Stole $1,000,000,000 From Banks - We aren’t immune
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📖 Thoughts after 10 years - Like the framing of what opinions have changed etc. I wonder what this would be like for me. Our team? Incident Response industry in general?
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📖 Why ‘Blameless’ ‘Postmortems’ Can Feel Wrong - Reread (Re-Reed?)
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📺 What’s Driving the Rising Cost of Observability. Good overview / info on “modern” state of observability.
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📺 Was it technical failure or human error? - Historical take on the history of the topic
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📺 How to do Performance Testing with k6 - Saw someone at Chime in infra talking about this. Good overview of the tool and core perf testing concepts
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📕 Midnight in Chernobyl - Lots to learn about one of, if not the most, catastrophic “man made” disasters in human history.
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📺 Famous Pickpocket Apollo Robbins Demonstrates Tricks of the Trade - Spoiler, it’s about attention focus and how our attention can get overloaded.