---
title: "Resilience"
description: "Field notes on systems and sound, by Cory Watson."
canonical: "https://onemogin.com/resilience/"
author: "Cory Watson"
---

Topic · since 2019

# Resilience

Through a career spanning over twenty years at ISPs, eCommerce shops, and technology giants like Twitter, Stripe, and Airbnb I have learned that [complex systems will inevitably fail](https://how.complexsystems.fail). To repair and expand these systems, we need humans! The goal is to create [adaptive capacity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_capacity); to be resilient.

# Professional Work

After years focused on observability, I came to the conclusion that **charts don’t solve problems, people do.** This led me to invest more in resilience engineering and adaptive capacity.

In 2019 I joined [SignalFx](https://www.signalfx.com), later [acquired by Splunk](https://www.signalfx.com/blog/signalfx-signs-definitive-agreement-to-be-acquired-by-splunk/), where I researched resilience engineering and its precursors to inform the design of products, organizations, and tooling. In 2021 I joined [Jeli](https://www.jeli.io), later acquired by [PagerDuty](https://www.pagerduty.com), to work on [incident analysis](https://www.jeli.io/howie-the-post-incident-guide/) so that organizations can more easily learn from their work.

I spent a few fulfilling years building my own startup around ergonomic on-call tooling before joining Airbnb, where I continued that thread working on large-scale reliability initiatives — most notably SLOs — helping engineers understand and trust the systems they build.

These days I’m kicking around working on [Kapell](https://kapell.fm).

# Writing

- A 3 part series on automation:
    - [Stop Hitting Yourself: How Automation Is Hurting You](http://onemogin.com/automation/automation-is-hurting-you.html)
    - [Alternatives To Automation: Amplification, Complexity, and Control](http://onemogin.com/automation/alternatives-to-automation.html)
    - [Improving Automation: Working Together](http://onemogin.com/automation/improving-automation.html)
- Contributor to Jeli’s [Incident Analysis 101 series](https://www.jeli.io/blog/category/incident-analysis-101/) in [Putting It All Together](https://www.jeli.io/blog/incident-analysis-101-putting-it-all-together/).
- I wrote [How to turn an engineering incident into an opportunity](https://leaddev.com/managing-time-crisis/how-turn-engineering-incident-opportunity) for LeadDev.
- Explained [micro-learning opportunities](https://www.jeli.io/blog/micro-learning-opportunities/) for practical, daily improvement.

# Speaking

## RubyConf 2021

[Video: YouTube video player](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSiESJwRmzg)

At RubyConf 2021 I spoke about finding inspiration for resilience in other industries and settings.

## DevOps Days Denver 2024

[Video: YouTube video player](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KqW7rQgrRk)

In 2024 I spoke at DevOps Days Denver about on-call needs a rethink.

## SRECon Americas 2025

[Video: YouTube video player](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWcXm9wnH-U)

Early in 2025 we completed research at Hotpot that showed organizations are not set up to support on-call work so I spoke about it at SRECon Americas.

# Podcasts

- In November of 2021 I [spoke with Software Misadventures about failure and success in software engineering](https://softwaremisadventures.com/podcast/2021/11/cory-watson/).

# Publications

- [Technical Reviewer](https://increment.com/reliability/letter-from-the-editor/) for [Increment: Issue 16, February 2021; Reliability](https://increment.com/reliability/) and [Increment: Issue 17, May 2021; Containers](https://increment.com/containers/letter-from-the-editor/).

# Future

Having spent most of my career on call I believe that organizations can greatly improve the happiness and effectiveness of employees and customers by investing in resilience!