Many posts, but one discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8282923

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20Complex%20Systems%20Fail...

Fantastic discussion. Glad you posted it. I'd hate to have not seen these arguments.

Richard Cook's writing and talks on systems have hugely shaped my thinking on systems.

For those interested in more, he gave a highly entertaining talk on system resiliency here and introduces a helpful model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

I also wrote a post summarizing how I think about Rasmussen’s model in startups and web applications. https://medium.com/@sunils34/managing-systems-ecbf161066cf

> a highly entertaining talk on system resiliency

Thanks for posting that! It's a great summary and explanation of the fail safe attitude that should be the foundation for all complex systems.

It's worth noting this was published in 2000.

Interesting read though, I especially like "Failure free operations require experience with failure" <-- obvious, but easy to lose sight of.

These same principles are explored more completely and systematically by Nancy Leveson in her writings, specifically https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world (free pdf) and her yearly workshops at MIT (also free!).

John Allspaw at Etsy talks about these safety culture luminaries all the time.