SRECon Americas 2026 Recap

Description

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