January 12, 2023 • 12 mins
In this episode we take a delightful detour from our usual VOID programming to have Emily Ruppe, a Solutions Engineer at Jeli.io and member of the Learning From Incidents (LFI) community, on the program to discuss the upcoming LFI Conference happening in Denver in February. Find out more about the goals and some of the featured speakers for the event, and we hope to see you there!
Discussed in this episode:
Jeli.io
Learning From Incidents
The LFI Conference (Feb 15-16, 2023 in Denver, CO)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Courtney Nash (00:00):
Hello, and welcome back to the first
episode of the VOID podcast for2023.
I am joined by Emily Ruppe, asolutions engineer at Jeli, and
she's here to talk about theinaugural Learning From
Incidents Conference.
Welcome, Emily.
Thank you for joining.
Emily Ruppe (00:20):
Thank you for having me, Courtney.
I'm excited to be here.
Courtney Nash (00:22):
Okay, so let's start with where you work, Jeli.
Can you tell me a little bitabout what Jeli does?
We are big fans over here ofJeli at the VOID.
Emily Ruppe (00:33):
Yeah.
Jeli.io is an incidentmanagement tool.
We have, a free incidentresponse bot that we make
available to anyone who wants touse that.
We think that incident responseand making that easier should be
table stakes for folks andshouldn't be super involved to
set up and, and kind ofintegrate and get going.
And we have our incidentanalysis platform with the tool
(00:55):
that, makes it easier for peopleto build timelines, gain
insights from incidents, andthen look across different
incidents to really understandtrends and things that are
happening within theirorganization and find places to
make improvements and, andchanges.
So if they can learn fromincidents.
Courtney Nash (01:11):
Aha.
So that's what we're here totalk about.
We're here to talk about, well,first of all there's the, the
Jeli and the VOID to some degreehave both emerged from this
larger community that Nora, theCEO of Jeli was really integral
in starting a few years back,the Learning From Incidents
community or LFI as we oftenlike to call it.
(01:33):
Talk to me a little bit aboutthat and then we'll talk about
what that, what's happening thisyear that's very exciting.
Emily Ruppe (01:38):
Yeah.
The LFI community is this groupof researchers and
practitioners, folks who are onthe ground doing incident
response and analysis, in thetech industry, but also in a lot
of industries across, the globereally.
we have folks who are inmedicine who are in, say,
planes.
Courtney Nash (01:57):
Oh, a fun time.
Just, just for the audiencefollowing along at home.
Today that we are recording isWednesday, January 11th and this
morning the United States FAAflight system, for lack of a
better term, one of theircritical flight systems, just
sort of stopped working andevery single plane coming to or
(02:23):
leaving or on the ground, or inthe air, in the United States,
sort of had to just stop what itwas doing.
And so that's, that's a, we'llcome back to that maybe.
but yes, we have people in theaviation industry involved in
the community.
Emily Ruppe (02:34):
It's a really cool group of folks because it, it
makes it accessible to talk topeople who are dealing with, I
mean, like issues at the scaleof the FAA event today are, you
know, that's, that's at a scalethat is massive and involves
just a lot of people, a lot ofdifferent systems and hardware.
And being able to kind ofdiscuss that within groups of
(02:57):
folks who have different areasof expertise, it's really
fascinating.
It's really helpful forday-to-day practices of
engineers, people who justtrying to do work to understand
how we can kind of solve theseproblems and learn from
different areas of how to makethis work easier for ourselves.
Courtney Nash (03:13):
Yeah.
And as a member of thatcommunity myself, one of the
things I'm most struck by is, inparticular, I think a lot of
people don't understand thatthere are different mindsets in
the world about safety.
What it even means, how oneachieves it, how one, how people
maintain it, how large groups ofof people maintain it.
And I think one of the reallycool things about LFI is the
(03:37):
effort to not just advance ourown practices, you know, in our
industry, other industry, but totry to get the rest of the world
to come along to maybe some newways of thinking and doing
things.
And to that end, this year isthe first time that we are going
to have a Learning FromIncidents conference—an
in-person event, which is superexciting.
(03:59):
So maybe give me all the, thedetails about that.
Emily Ruppe (04:02):
Yeah.
Our first ever Learning FromIncidents conference is going to
be in Denver this year onFebruary 15th and 16th.
We really want to normalizetalking about failures and being
transparent with handlingincidents and difficulties and
successes, things that workreally well, and, and just a way
for software folks tocollaborate on learning from
(04:24):
incidents, not just softwarefolks, but really kind of bring
folks together to have theseconversations.
Courtney Nash (04:29):
Do you know how many speakers are going to be
there?
Emily Ruppe (04:32):
Oh, 60.
Courtney Nash (04:33):
Oh wow.
Okay.
Emily Ruppe (04:34):
But yeah, we have a, a ton of really exciting,
talks lined up and we're reallyalso focusing on, providing a
really robust hallway track.
The magic of what the LearningFrom Incidents community has
been is connecting people whousually wouldn't have access to
each other to talk through.
Like,"Hey, how do you deal withthis?" Or, or,"Hey, in this
(04:55):
talk, you, you said that you allkind of confronted this issue in
this way, or, you know, you, youdealt with thousands of planes
being grounded at once." Like,how did you even approach this?
What stuff do you know?
Every conversation I have haveis adding to my reading list of,
of papers and amazing reports,
Courtney Nash (05:15):
There is that side of it, it's a reading
crowd.
Emily Ruppe (05:19):
mm-hmm.
But yeah, we, we also have somereally wonderful talks.
Dr.
David Woods, John Allspaw, let'ssee, Dr.
Lauren Hochstein from Netflix.
Laura Nolan, Dr.
Laura Maguire, who's with us atJeli.
Courtney Nash, I believe.
Courtney Nash (05:32):
Oh! She's all right...
Emily Ruppe (05:33):
I'm really excited to hear from her.
there's a lot of really awesomefolks, from all over tech
industries as well as, otherkind of safety sciences and
resilience, areas that I'mreally excited to, to nerd out
with and hear everything I haveto say.
Courtney Nash (05:48):
Is the hallway track the same thing as sort of
like the mini Cases Conf,because I know that Laura
McGuire, Dr.
Laura McGuire and, and Nora havedone a Cases Conf at a couple of
other events, which is reallyjust people getting up and
talking about...
our(LFI) nomenclature.
In the LFI world it's call thesethings"cases." Right.
is that what the hallway trackis or is there a whole separate
sort of just really case focusedtrack as well?
Emily Ruppe (06:10):
I think there are numerous talks that we have in
here that are people talkingthrough incident cases,
specific, cases which are, arereally exciting.
There's some that I'm veryinterested to hear from.
but yeah, the hallway track.
I think also we might have someindividual kind of Cases Conf
type events going on.
I kind of like to refer to themas like incident ghost stories
or like, we're kind of gatheringaround the campfire and talking
(06:33):
about these times they're, it'sso much fun to just hear about,
incidents in this way.
It's one of the ways I haveinternally as an incident
commander and an incidentanalyst at other companies have
encouraged the best way to, tolearn and retain knowledge about
incidents that have happened andunderstand that kind of stuff.
And I think that doing that withother companies, adhering those
(06:56):
similar themes and reallyfamiliar stuff is.
oddly comforting to know like,oh, yes, you, you all also are
dealing with, you know, these,this specific switches give you
issues.
Or like, oh, there's always thisOOM kill that has to happen.
Or, oh, we forgot to turn Chefoff.
And it's, it's always really
Courtney Nash (07:17):
It's like a very healthy form of group therapy.
I've found at times, right,where you're like, I am not
alone.
Sometimes we really feel thatway too in, in the more remote
our work becomes, that it'sharder to have that kind of
connection and that remembrancethat we are all human in these
systems that frustrate usimmensely at times.
Emily Ruppe (07:39):
Yeah.
So the, the hallway track shouldbe really exciting.
I'm not great at sitting stilland, and, paying paying
attention for long periods oftime, but I really love talking
to people, so I'm really excitedfor everything that we are going
to be offering, and we reallyhope that folks are able to take
away, one that feeling thatthey're not alone, that there
are a lot of other people whoare trying to make this
(08:01):
progress.
I know that for me personally,it kind of felt like I was an
island trying to say"Hey, wecould be doing this differently.
This doesn't have to be sohard." And finding the LFI
community helped provide me withresources and, and ways to help
kind of make my case and, andreally get other people on board
with that.
And primarily making it feellike you're not alone.
(08:21):
There are other people who aretrying to, to make the same kind
of progress and we can kind ofshare, pool our resources and
help each other out.
But also really learn someincredible stuff from people who
are on the cutting edge of, ofsystem safety and resilience.
Courtney Nash (08:33):
It's very pragmatic in the way of like
marrying theory and practicetogether.
you know, one, one can go readall the art.
Architectural, whatever, youknow.
But to talk to people who bothpay attention to the research
out in the world, right out in,in academia, in in industry
research and are connecting thatto what we know on the ground, I
(08:56):
think is, is really great.
Sometimes in the tech industry,we are really good at just doing
stuff and making things up andhoping it'll work.
Emily Ruppe (09:04):
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Nash (09:05):
And I like seeing that research, be brought in
more formally, but, in a waythat I think will, people won't
find, onerous or, you know,
Emily Ruppe (09:12):
It makes it accessible.
I think, especially pairing likethe research folks with people
who are doing this practically,because we can have those really
open conversations of Yes, in anideal world, I would like to do
these things, but I have to,like, I'm working within an
existing culture, with anantiquated, bunch of different
systems that are workingtogether.
And so how do I start, how do Imeasure any sort of progress
(09:35):
here?
For me at least, the only placewhere I've had that kind of
interaction with the folks whoare talking about the theory and
doing the research to be able tosay okay, but how do I actually
do this thing?
How do I actually put this intomotion?
I've gotten so much advice andvalue out of having access to
those kind of folks in LFI, soI'm excited for us to bring that
to the conference.
Learning From Incidents.io isour site where you can check out
(09:58):
all of our conferenceinformation and register there.
We have a ton more informationabout where it is, who's
speaking.
You can see a lot of details andyeah, register to, to come hang
out with us.
Courtney Nash (10:09):
I will put all of the various things that we've
talked about in the show notesfor the episode, we'll get that
out very shortly so people stillhave time to buy tickets and, I
hope that we are all actuallyable to fly there in February.
Emily Ruppe (10:24):
Yeah.
Yes.
Courtney Nash (10:26):
and lots of love to the people on the ground
trying to solve what sounds likea very unfun problem today
Emily Ruppe (10:33):
It's the thing that I think it's, it's on our site,
but it's been like the kind ofcore place of LFI.
We are a bunch of incidentnerds.
When I woke up this morning, Iwas reading about it.
My husband came in, he was like,do you want coffee?
I was like,"The FAA is down,"And he was like, he was like,
"okay..." I was like, this is,this is unprecedented.
(10:54):
I don't think you understandlike the wealth of information
we're gonna get about how all ofthese systems work and how to
deal with things at this kind ofscale.
Like my little nerd brain wasjust like, we're gonna learn so
much from this! And I thinkthat's kind of the core of us is
we're not ambulance chasers, butwhen events like this happen,
we're like, oh my God, what anincredible opportunity to learn
(11:14):
about
Courtney Nash (11:14):
yes.
Emily Ruppe (11:14):
all of these different systems and how in
real life we actually canrecover from things like this.
Courtney Nash (11:21):
For me, the immediate thing is just the like
gut punch of like, what thesepeople are going through right
now.
Right?
Emily Ruppe (11:27):
Yeah.
That immediate like, oh no, Ithat, that in your chest that
got punched.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Like, it's, it's, yeah.
It's a physical hit of, we kindaall relate to.
but like it's a thrill.
And also the Oh, sinking feelingof something, oh this is a big
one.
Courtney Nash (11:44):
Well maybe next year at the second annual LFI
Conf, someone from the FAA willcome and tell us true tales of
how they tackled this.
So we shall see.
Thank you so much, Emily, forjoining me.
Yeah.
Thank you, Courtney.
I wish you an incident free day
Emily Ruppe (12:03):
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome back to the first
episode of the VOID podcast for2023.
I am joined by Emily Ruppe, asolutions engineer at Jeli, and
she's here to talk about theinaugural Learning From
Incidents Conference.
Welcome, Emily.
Thank you for joining.
Emily Ruppe (00:20):
Thank you for having me, Courtney.
I'm excited to be here.
Courtney Nash (00:22):
Okay, so let's start with where you work, Jeli.
Can you tell me a little bitabout what Jeli does?
We are big fans over here ofJeli at the VOID.
Emily Ruppe (00:33):
Yeah.
Jeli.io is an incidentmanagement tool.
We have, a free incidentresponse bot that we make
available to anyone who wants touse that.
We think that incident responseand making that easier should be
table stakes for folks andshouldn't be super involved to
set up and, and kind ofintegrate and get going.
And we have our incidentanalysis platform with the tool
(00:55):
that, makes it easier for peopleto build timelines, gain
insights from incidents, andthen look across different
incidents to really understandtrends and things that are
happening within theirorganization and find places to
make improvements and, andchanges.
So if they can learn fromincidents.
Courtney Nash (01:11):
Aha.
So that's what we're here totalk about.
We're here to talk about, well,first of all there's the, the
Jeli and the VOID to some degreehave both emerged from this
larger community that Nora, theCEO of Jeli was really integral
in starting a few years back,the Learning From Incidents
community or LFI as we oftenlike to call it.
(01:33):
Talk to me a little bit aboutthat and then we'll talk about
what that, what's happening thisyear that's very exciting.
Emily Ruppe (01:38):
Yeah.
The LFI community is this groupof researchers and
practitioners, folks who are onthe ground doing incident
response and analysis, in thetech industry, but also in a lot
of industries across, the globereally.
we have folks who are inmedicine who are in, say,
planes.
Courtney Nash (01:57):
Oh, a fun time.
Just, just for the audiencefollowing along at home.
Today that we are recording isWednesday, January 11th and this
morning the United States FAAflight system, for lack of a
better term, one of theircritical flight systems, just
sort of stopped working andevery single plane coming to or
(02:23):
leaving or on the ground, or inthe air, in the United States,
sort of had to just stop what itwas doing.
And so that's, that's a, we'llcome back to that maybe.
but yes, we have people in theaviation industry involved in
the community.
Emily Ruppe (02:34):
It's a really cool group of folks because it, it
makes it accessible to talk topeople who are dealing with, I
mean, like issues at the scaleof the FAA event today are, you
know, that's, that's at a scalethat is massive and involves
just a lot of people, a lot ofdifferent systems and hardware.
And being able to kind ofdiscuss that within groups of
(02:57):
folks who have different areasof expertise, it's really
fascinating.
It's really helpful forday-to-day practices of
engineers, people who justtrying to do work to understand
how we can kind of solve theseproblems and learn from
different areas of how to makethis work easier for ourselves.
Courtney Nash (03:13):
Yeah.
And as a member of thatcommunity myself, one of the
things I'm most struck by is, inparticular, I think a lot of
people don't understand thatthere are different mindsets in
the world about safety.
What it even means, how oneachieves it, how one, how people
maintain it, how large groups ofof people maintain it.
And I think one of the reallycool things about LFI is the
(03:37):
effort to not just advance ourown practices, you know, in our
industry, other industry, but totry to get the rest of the world
to come along to maybe some newways of thinking and doing
things.
And to that end, this year isthe first time that we are going
to have a Learning FromIncidents conference—an
in-person event, which is superexciting.
(03:59):
So maybe give me all the, thedetails about that.
Emily Ruppe (04:02):
Yeah.
Our first ever Learning FromIncidents conference is going to
be in Denver this year onFebruary 15th and 16th.
We really want to normalizetalking about failures and being
transparent with handlingincidents and difficulties and
successes, things that workreally well, and, and just a way
for software folks tocollaborate on learning from
(04:24):
incidents, not just softwarefolks, but really kind of bring
folks together to have theseconversations.
Courtney Nash (04:29):
Do you know how many speakers are going to be
there?
Emily Ruppe (04:32):
Oh, 60.
Courtney Nash (04:33):
Oh wow.
Okay.
Emily Ruppe (04:34):
But yeah, we have a, a ton of really exciting,
talks lined up and we're reallyalso focusing on, providing a
really robust hallway track.
The magic of what the LearningFrom Incidents community has
been is connecting people whousually wouldn't have access to
each other to talk through.
Like,"Hey, how do you deal withthis?" Or, or,"Hey, in this
(04:55):
talk, you, you said that you allkind of confronted this issue in
this way, or, you know, you, youdealt with thousands of planes
being grounded at once." Like,how did you even approach this?
What stuff do you know?
Every conversation I have haveis adding to my reading list of,
of papers and amazing reports,
Courtney Nash (05:15):
There is that side of it, it's a reading
crowd.
Emily Ruppe (05:19):
mm-hmm.
But yeah, we, we also have somereally wonderful talks.
Dr.
David Woods, John Allspaw, let'ssee, Dr.
Lauren Hochstein from Netflix.
Laura Nolan, Dr.
Laura Maguire, who's with us atJeli.
Courtney Nash, I believe.
Courtney Nash (05:32):
Oh! She's all right...
Emily Ruppe (05:33):
I'm really excited to hear from her.
there's a lot of really awesomefolks, from all over tech
industries as well as, otherkind of safety sciences and
resilience, areas that I'mreally excited to, to nerd out
with and hear everything I haveto say.
Courtney Nash (05:48):
Is the hallway track the same thing as sort of
like the mini Cases Conf,because I know that Laura
McGuire, Dr.
Laura McGuire and, and Nora havedone a Cases Conf at a couple of
other events, which is reallyjust people getting up and
talking about...
our(LFI) nomenclature.
In the LFI world it's call thesethings"cases." Right.
is that what the hallway trackis or is there a whole separate
sort of just really case focusedtrack as well?
Emily Ruppe (06:10):
I think there are numerous talks that we have in
here that are people talkingthrough incident cases,
specific, cases which are, arereally exciting.
There's some that I'm veryinterested to hear from.
but yeah, the hallway track.
I think also we might have someindividual kind of Cases Conf
type events going on.
I kind of like to refer to themas like incident ghost stories
or like, we're kind of gatheringaround the campfire and talking
(06:33):
about these times they're, it'sso much fun to just hear about,
incidents in this way.
It's one of the ways I haveinternally as an incident
commander and an incidentanalyst at other companies have
encouraged the best way to, tolearn and retain knowledge about
incidents that have happened andunderstand that kind of stuff.
And I think that doing that withother companies, adhering those
(06:56):
similar themes and reallyfamiliar stuff is.
oddly comforting to know like,oh, yes, you, you all also are
dealing with, you know, these,this specific switches give you
issues.
Or like, oh, there's always thisOOM kill that has to happen.
Or, oh, we forgot to turn Chefoff.
And it's, it's always really
Courtney Nash (07:17):
It's like a very healthy form of group therapy.
I've found at times, right,where you're like, I am not
alone.
Sometimes we really feel thatway too in, in the more remote
our work becomes, that it'sharder to have that kind of
connection and that remembrancethat we are all human in these
systems that frustrate usimmensely at times.
Emily Ruppe (07:39):
Yeah.
So the, the hallway track shouldbe really exciting.
I'm not great at sitting stilland, and, paying paying
attention for long periods oftime, but I really love talking
to people, so I'm really excitedfor everything that we are going
to be offering, and we reallyhope that folks are able to take
away, one that feeling thatthey're not alone, that there
are a lot of other people whoare trying to make this
(08:01):
progress.
I know that for me personally,it kind of felt like I was an
island trying to say"Hey, wecould be doing this differently.
This doesn't have to be sohard." And finding the LFI
community helped provide me withresources and, and ways to help
kind of make my case and, andreally get other people on board
with that.
And primarily making it feellike you're not alone.
(08:21):
There are other people who aretrying to, to make the same kind
of progress and we can kind ofshare, pool our resources and
help each other out.
But also really learn someincredible stuff from people who
are on the cutting edge of, ofsystem safety and resilience.
Courtney Nash (08:33):
It's very pragmatic in the way of like
marrying theory and practicetogether.
you know, one, one can go readall the art.
Architectural, whatever, youknow.
But to talk to people who bothpay attention to the research
out in the world, right out in,in academia, in in industry
research and are connecting thatto what we know on the ground, I
(08:56):
think is, is really great.
Sometimes in the tech industry,we are really good at just doing
stuff and making things up andhoping it'll work.
Emily Ruppe (09:04):
Mm-hmm.
Courtney Nash (09:05):
And I like seeing that research, be brought in
more formally, but, in a waythat I think will, people won't
find, onerous or, you know,
Emily Ruppe (09:12):
It makes it accessible.
I think, especially pairing likethe research folks with people
who are doing this practically,because we can have those really
open conversations of Yes, in anideal world, I would like to do
these things, but I have to,like, I'm working within an
existing culture, with anantiquated, bunch of different
systems that are workingtogether.
And so how do I start, how do Imeasure any sort of progress
(09:35):
here?
For me at least, the only placewhere I've had that kind of
interaction with the folks whoare talking about the theory and
doing the research to be able tosay okay, but how do I actually
do this thing?
How do I actually put this intomotion?
I've gotten so much advice andvalue out of having access to
those kind of folks in LFI, soI'm excited for us to bring that
to the conference.
Learning From Incidents.io isour site where you can check out
(09:58):
all of our conferenceinformation and register there.
We have a ton more informationabout where it is, who's
speaking.
You can see a lot of details andyeah, register to, to come hang
out with us.
Courtney Nash (10:09):
I will put all of the various things that we've
talked about in the show notesfor the episode, we'll get that
out very shortly so people stillhave time to buy tickets and, I
hope that we are all actuallyable to fly there in February.
Emily Ruppe (10:24):
Yeah.
Yes.
Courtney Nash (10:26):
and lots of love to the people on the ground
trying to solve what sounds likea very unfun problem today
Emily Ruppe (10:33):
It's the thing that I think it's, it's on our site,
but it's been like the kind ofcore place of LFI.
We are a bunch of incidentnerds.
When I woke up this morning, Iwas reading about it.
My husband came in, he was like,do you want coffee?
I was like,"The FAA is down,"And he was like, he was like,
"okay..." I was like, this is,this is unprecedented.
(10:54):
I don't think you understandlike the wealth of information
we're gonna get about how all ofthese systems work and how to
deal with things at this kind ofscale.
Like my little nerd brain wasjust like, we're gonna learn so
much from this! And I thinkthat's kind of the core of us is
we're not ambulance chasers, butwhen events like this happen,
we're like, oh my God, what anincredible opportunity to learn
(11:14):
about
Courtney Nash (11:14):
yes.
Emily Ruppe (11:14):
all of these different systems and how in
real life we actually canrecover from things like this.
Courtney Nash (11:21):
For me, the immediate thing is just the like
gut punch of like, what thesepeople are going through right
now.
Right?
Emily Ruppe (11:27):
Yeah.
That immediate like, oh no, Ithat, that in your chest that
got punched.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Like, it's, it's, yeah.
It's a physical hit of, we kindaall relate to.
but like it's a thrill.
And also the Oh, sinking feelingof something, oh this is a big
one.
Courtney Nash (11:44):
Well maybe next year at the second annual LFI
Conf, someone from the FAA willcome and tell us true tales of
how they tackled this.
So we shall see.
Thank you so much, Emily, forjoining me.
Yeah.
Thank you, Courtney.
I wish you an incident free day
Emily Ruppe (12:03):
Thank you.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.