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.
Jack Kingsman is a Site Reliability Engineer at Atlassian, EMT, scuba diver, and serial hobbyist. He draws on his unique blend of experiences in infrastructure engineering, incident command, and emergency medical care and instruction to provide practical, battle-tested, people-oriented tools for operations and infrastructure. Jack believes that the most important part of any technical system is the people who build and tend to it, and that excellence in engineering begins with excellence in people, and providing them the tools and methods to rise to that excellence.
author = {Jack Kingsman},
title = {Epistemology of Incidents and Problem Solving},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
