Hiring SREs and incident commander skills

Colette’s talk at SRECon intro: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/alexander

Clint’s talk at SRECon intro: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/byrum

Dan Slimmon is an excellent engineer (per Clint’s shoutout) and ALSO an excellent podcast creator/host: https://techblows.net/

Michelle Brush’s Keynote summary is here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/brush

Jevon’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s talk summary: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/forsgren

DORA is always worth a dive into if you haven’t taken a look yet: https://dora.dev/

The blog post Colette mentioned comparing AI gold rush to Mao’s Revolution: https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/

Many people have written about why MTTR is a bad metric to track, you can read a write up from Adrian Hornsby here: https://newsletter.resiliumlabs.com/p/mttr-problems-better-incident-metrics

And watch the OG, Courtney Nash, speak about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCgBOHo8EY

Beth Long’s SRE Soundbath: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/long

Vanessa Huerta-Granda’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/huerta-granda

Martin Smith and Abe Hoffman’s talk is summarized here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hoffman

Some information about Metrist: https://vault42consulting.com/about/portfolio/metrist

AI Agents Good Bad and Ugly talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/budichenko

The CAST talk: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barroso

Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson is worth a look: https://bookshop.org/p/books/engineering-a-safer-world-systems-thinking-applied-to-safety-nancy-g-leveson/57b01ef464f9f81b?ean=9780262533690&next=t

Erik Hollnagel wrote the book on FRAM and it has a lot of support in the safety world across industries: https://functionalresonance.com/ and https://etn-peter.eu/2021/02/11/fram-in-a-nutshell/ are good resources.

Daria Barteneva’s closing keynote on game theory and SRE was great: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/barteneva

Some good stuff on Above the Line/Below the Line, if you’re curious: 

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3380777

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA5U85LSk0M

Lorin Hochstein’s closing keynote on storytelling was rad: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26americas/presentation/hochstein

SRECon EMEA 2026 (in Dublin) has their CFP up: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon26emea/call-for-participation

As always, you can check out the Resilience in Software Foundation at resilienceinsoftware.org