Real Alpha has cut 8 moments of Sam Newman (Independent consultant & author) talking, from an interview on The Pragmatic Engineer published Oct 7, 2026.
What Sam Newman said
Fail open or fail closed depends on the business context
“Keep that problem exactly the same, but now change the business context. Now we're sending concert tickets. So you're getting tickets to go see Tay-Tay, right?”
Sam Newman1:22:21 Make retries safe with idempotency keys, not just fingerprints
“so that's the problem with an item potency you want to make it safe to retry important”
Sam Newman1:10:54 Robustness is only one of four parts of resilience
“One of the really nasty things about robustness is the things we often do to make our systems more robust in turn increases the complexity of our system”
Sam Newman1:26:36 Decide how resilient you need to be before building resilience
“They probably looked at that and said, well, for us to come out with a multi-region approach, it's going to have this impact.”
Sam Newman1:06:56 Spec or code as source of truth depends on tacit knowledge
“as human beings to be able to unpack that tacit knowledge that we have and make sure it's in the spec.”
Sam Newman39:14 Run an AI software factory on one module, not the whole system
“this area here is where we're trying a full software factory approach, where we don't look at the code anymore, but we specify the interface.”
Sam Newman1:47:06 Thundering herds have different causes, so the fixes differ
“No, because then your distributed denial of service attack becomes a distributed denial of cash attack, right?”
Sam Newman1:20:23 Hedge AI vendor risk by being multi-model and using plain code
“They need to be generating $2.6 trillion in revenue to justify their capex expenditure by 2030. The entire software market is $1.4 trillion.”
Sam Newman1:33:42
The episode
The Pragmatic EngineerBuilding resilient systems with Sam Newman
Sam Newman
1:21:33of 1:59:05 · Oct 7
