Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Epistemology of Incidents and Problem Solving
Jack Kingsman, Atlassian
In high-pressure incident response, critical fundamentals of thought, action, and communication matter more than ever. Engineers need concrete criteria and examples of how to think and problem-solve during incidents, and answers to big questions: What fundamental decision-making loops should we orient ourselves in when disaster strikes? How do we reason about trapping the location and cause of unknown issues? What specific qualities make a hypothesis good or worthwhile, and how do we construct effective tests to prove or disprove them? How can we structure notes and progress updates to provide the most signal and the least noise in fast-paced situations?
Drawn from nearly a decade of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, from small startup to publicly traded SaaS firm, this talk will level up how you think and act when it matters, and equip you with the concepts to teach those skills to others.
View the full SREcon26 Americas program at usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/program
Epistemology of Incidents and Problem Solving
Jack Kingsman, Atlassian
In high-pressure incident response, critical fundamentals of thought, action, and communication matter more than ever. Engineers need concrete criteria and examples of how to think and problem-solve during incidents, and answers to big questions: What fundamental decision-making loops should we orient ourselves in when disaster strikes? How do we reason about trapping the location and cause of unknown issues? What specific qualities make a hypothesis good or worthwhile, and how do we construct effective tests to prove or disprove them? How can we structure notes and progress updates to provide the most signal and the least noise in fast-paced situations?
Drawn from nearly a decade of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, from small startup to publicly traded SaaS firm, this talk will level up how you think and act when it matters, and equip you with the concepts to teach those skills to others.
View the full SREcon26 Americas program at usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/program
