Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

If your infrastructure disappeared tomorrow, would you understand how to rebuild it? Not just what needed to be restored or what configuration might need to be reapplied, but what depends on what, which teams need to be engaged, and that one command, run by that one person, that one time, that somehow became the thing standing between you and recovery.The truth is, creating infrastructure is often the easy part—especially today, when an answer is only a prompt away. The hard part is understanding the story behind it: why things exist, when they need to happen, and how the pieces depend on one another. That story is unique to every environment, and too often only exists in the memories of the people who built it.By utilizing Domain Storytelling, we can preemptively survive our infrastructure doomsday scenario. Through a collaborative visual exercise, we can identify actors, systems, decisions, and dependencies so that the entire organization can understand how an environment would need to be rebuilt. We’ll also explore how these stories can reveal a team’s gaps in understanding, uncover issues with circular dependencies, and use these conversations to drive changes in the in the architecture and operational practices themselves. Most importantly, these stories become living artifacts that evolve alongside our infrastructure, ensuring that our understanding grows as our environments change. Because when doomsday arrives, the difference between recovery and rebuilding from scratch is not whether you have a backup. It’s whether your organization knows the story that got you there.