2026-09-23 –, Main Stage
Alert storms. Incident wars. Context-switching between Slack, PagerDuty, monitoring dashboards, and runbooks. We've built ops infrastructure that treats human attention like an infinite resource—and we're burning out trying to keep up.
After 25 years in software development (total) and 10 in SRE/DevOps, I've watched attention fragmentation get worse with every tool we add. It costs teams: slower incident response, worse decisions, burnout. But it's fixable.
This talk explores what it means to build systems that respect human attention constraints rather than ignore them—and gives you practical patterns to apply in your own org, whether you're building internal tools, evaluating new platforms, or rethinking your on-call workflow.
Elevator Pitch:
We've optimized ops infrastructure for speed and scale, but not for human attention. This is a framework—and practical patterns—for redesigning ops tooling around how people actually work.
Problem Statement:
Ops teams are drowning in interrupts. Alert fatigue, context-switching, pagerduty storms, Slack avalanches, runbook sprawl. Every tool we add promises to solve the last tool's problem and creates two new ones. The result: slower incident response, worse decision-making, and burned-out people.
This isn't inevitable. It's a design choice. Most ops tooling is built as if humans have unlimited attention.
What This Talk Covers (30 minutes):
The Attention Crisis in Ops (5 min)
- How context fragmentation happens across incident response, on-call, runbooks, and monitoring
- Why it matters: empirical connection to incident response quality, burnout, retention
- This is not a people problem; it's a systems problemA Framework: Pull vs. Push, Ambient vs. Interrupt (7 min)
- Core distinction: systems that push notifications vs. systems you pull information from when you need it
- The difference between "something happened and I need to decide now" and "I should be aware of this state"
- Context assembly: moving this work from human brains to infrastructure
- Decision logging: making patterns visible without requiring real-time attention
- Concrete Patterns in Practice (13 min)
- Designing ops surfaces for intentionality (TUI vs. web dashboards)
- How to structure incident response around attention budget, not alert volume
- Building runbook/context systems that assemble only what's relevant
- Task/intent-driven ops: structuring on-call around actual work, not notifications
- Real examples from building systems that respect these constraints
- What You Can Do Monday (3 min)
- Design questions to ask when evaluating new tools or processes
- How to audit your current stack for attention respect
- One pattern to start with if you're redesigning on-call or incident response
Who Should Attend:
- SREs and on-call engineers (this is your lived experience)
- DevOps/platform engineers building internal tools
- Tech leads and engineering managers concerned about team burnout
- Anyone who's felt like their tools are fighting them instead of helping
Audience Takeaways:
- A vocabulary for talking about attention as a design constraint (like latency or cost)
- Concrete patterns for redesigning ops workflows
- A framework for evaluating whether a tool (or process, or on-call rotation) respects human limits
- Permission to push back on "more monitoring" / "more alerts" as a solution
Abby is a Staff Platform Engineer with 25 years in software development and 10 years in SRE/DevOps. She previously led platform and infrastructure work at Filevine, where she built systems designed around how people actually work. She's currently running Ergon Automation Labs and doing fractional SRE consulting, focusing on ops tooling and developer experience. She's based in Denver.