Lorin Hochstein, Airbnb
We humans love stories, so much so that we both tell them and listen to them for fun. As SREs, our community has a particular fondness for incident stories.
In this talk, I'll discuss how these kinds of incident stories make for a more effective tool for learning from incidents than bullet points or metric trends. We'll see how stories provide us with glimpses into the complexity of our system that we'd otherwise never see, and enable us to learn from the experiences of others. We'll explore what makes for an effective story, as well the dangers of stories that oversimplify the nature of complex system failure. And we'll look at how to foster an internal incident storytelling culture within an organization.
Lorin Hochstein is a Staff Software Engineer, Reliability at Airbnb. He was previously Senior Staff Software Engineer at Coupang, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, Senior Software Engineer at SendGrid Labs, Lead Architect for Cloud Services at Nimbis Services, Computer Scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Lorin has a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from McGill University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Boston University, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He is also a proud member of the Resilience in Software Foundation and the Resilience Engineering Association.
author = {Lorin Hochstein},
title = {The Power of Stories},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}