An SRE's Guide to Camping in Extreme Conditions (emf2026)

Winter camping in the Alps sounds beautiful… doesn't it? That is, until the pipes freeze or the heating goes out when it’s -21°C outside. By day, I'm an SRE responsible for incident management, triaging alerts, and calling in subject matter experts when required. It turns out that those skills are transferable to handling real-life situations, too! In this talk, I’ll share a fun (slightly traumatic) guide to applying SRE thinking to camping. I'll talk about hacky fixes to resolve the immediate impact, the process of narrowing down the root cause, and the beauty of pattern matching in observability. You’ll see that monitoring, escalation, and redundancy aren’t just for data centres. They’re survival tools. If you’ve ever been on-call or just like a good disaster story, join me for this slightly chaotic, entirely true adventure in off-grid reliability. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/230-an-sres-guide-to-camping-in-extreme-conditions