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.
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…
