Our new book, Crisis Engineering, is about what actually happens when systems break under pressure and how to fix them. It comes out April 7, 2026, everywhere books are sold, as a paperback, and audiobook (read by Cassandra Campbell). For bulk orders below 500 copies, purchase on BulkBooks. For bulk
Inestimable cyberneticist Dan Davies, author of THE UNACCOUNTABILITY MACHINE, and the "Back of Mind" blog/mailing list, reviewed our forthcoming book last Friday. [...] there’s a new book coming out which I saw an advance copy of and which is now available for pre-order, and it’s really
The latest episode of ProdCast features Layer Aleph partner Carla Geisser, who gives a great overview of how to tell an incident from a crisis, and the 5 signs you may be in a useful crisis (including what to do if your cat wakes you up to invite you onto
For most of the economy, the "AI" recession looks much like other recessions. That's good news for anxious policy-makers; at least they know what to expect. The much bigger hazard will be the financial wildfire that starts in the tech industry itself.
Layer Aleph is a group of four people who each had success leading our own bands before we decided to work together. Each of us has worked on large complex systems for about 20 years, and as Layer Aleph, we have taken on around 30 consulting jobs that were interventions
Watch Carla's presentation on "The Magic of Crisis" at the LeadDev conference: The magic of crisisDiscover how Staff+ engineers can use moments of crisis to drive lasting technical change and strengthen organizational systems.LeadDevCarla Geisser
Most of our jobs at Layer Aleph have been to fix a specific, urgent problem. We founded the company hoping to be a kind of Titan Salvage for computers—we are available on short notice, we go where most people won’t, and we take contracts where the deliverables are
Clients hire us to make sense of all sorts of crises and systemic problems. While the specific goals and outcomes of each engagement vary widely, the majority of our projects follow a set pattern the first few days. Our engagements are almost always (only) 2 weeks long. Day 1 We
We normally don’t reveal the names of our clients, but it’s public information that we were part of the “strike team” that helped assess and turn around California’s unemployment claim backlog in 2020. As more states seek to modernize their unemployment systems, we have some advice about
The scale and force of phone-number indexed surveillance data available on via the commercial (and, let’s say, “commercial-adjacent”) market has slowly but persistently come to light over the past ten years. The ways and means of putting a cell phone number to task in locating an individual or disrupting
The size, scope, and impact of information (“cyber”) security problems – which we will simply call security problems, now – is finally matching the breathtaking upward slope we see in other technological progress. Incidents large enough that they are impossible for even powerful victims to conceal appear weekly in major news media.
We work with clients on extremely short timelines, and they often ask us for guidance in hiring more people who can do what we do: * work with a variety of systems * communicate well across the organization * prioritize effectively during a crisis * solve problems located in arbitrary places of either the