Okay, so let's get started. Why are we here? We're here because eight years ago, a person under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created a new technology, and this technology is the blockchain technology that is part of Bitcoin. Now, this technology is not just one thing. In fact, there are four different technologies coordinated together. Bitcoin was the culmination of decades of research into cryptography and digital currencies. It started back in the 1970s with the invention of public key cryptography, which is a mathematical trick for doing things like digital signatures and encryptions with public and private keys. If you don't understand any of that, it's okay. You don't have to understand that in order to use the system. It helps, but you don't have to. So over the years, many people who are involved in this technology and cryptography over the 80s and 90s started thinking about how could we use cryptography to create systems of commerce and systems of money. And there were many interesting inventions in this. But there was one fundamental problem that no one could seem to solve, and this problem was really simple. Digital information is easy to copy, right? There's no such thing as a unique copy of a digital item. If you have a JPEG or a text file or a Word document, how much does it cost to make a copy of that? Zero. And how many copies can you make? Infinite. And how different is each copy? Not at all. They're all identical. So you can't make something that is digital and rare, which is a bit of a problem because one of the most important characteristics of money is that it is rare. If it's abundant, it's not very good money. Why don't we use hair as money? A lot of old people would be very upset about that scheme, myself included. I would be very poor in that environment. But we don't use things that are abundant in nature. We don't use things that you can find everywhere. For thousands of years, people use various things they could find in nature, but never things that were common. So people use seashells for money, right? But guess where they didn't use seashells? By the seashore. Because you can't use seashells as money by the seashore because you can just find it everywhere. But if you were to mount inside, then you could use seashells as money because there it's rare. And so you see the fundamental concept of money, which is it has to be rare, conflicts with digital information, which is not rare. And so one of the ways we tried to get around that was to have people check the digital information. So what you could do is you could take a digital piece of money, you could give it a serial number. So it has a number inside it. And you could sign it with a key, digital signature. And then if somebody tried to spend it, you have a big list of all of the serial numbers. And when somebody spends it, you go to that list and you go, okay, scratch that one, that one's being used. And then you go to the next serial number. And that way you can only use it once. So you can make it rare, right? As long as you register all the serial numbers. And as long as you scratch out the ones that have been used, you can use a digital thing as money. Report cards do that. If you have a card for a store, a gift card, right? For an electronic store. How do they know that you're not going to use it twice? Well, when you go in and use it, they're going to type it into the computer, and they're going to cancel that gift card. And then you can use it again. So we can make digital information that can't be copied. You can copy the number on the gift card, but it's going to be useless because once you spend it, it can't be used again. One small problem with this scheme. You need someone to sit in this central position that has the list of all the serial numbers, and they're responsible for writing off every single one. That causes two problems. One, you have to always be able to communicate with a central database, right?  I remember in the early 90s, maybe late 80s, when ATMs had this problem where if you had just $10 in your bank account, and you went to one ATM, and you withdrew $10. If you went to another ATM, one block away very, very quickly, and withdrew $10 again, the bank wouldn't notice. They fixed that quickly. But as a student, it was very useful in London because I often had a balance of just 10 in my bank account. So the problem is you have to always be able to communicate with a central party. The other problem it causes is this central party is a single point of failure, right? If their network goes down, if they go out of business, if they're shot down, the system goes away. So a lot of the people involved in digital currency said, let's set up digital currencies and we'll make central parties. And we'll make our own system of money. And they made their own system of money. And the government of the world, various governments, looked at that and said, you can't do that. You can't make your own system of money. That's not our job. What you're doing is not allowed. And sometimes the banks would sue these companies or the government would come in one day, take all the servers away, and there goes your system of digital money. So that was the problem. In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto solved this problem. It's called a double spend problem. He managed to create or sheet or fade. We don't know who it is. Managed to create a system whereby you could make sure that nobody could double spend. But you didn't have to have one central location. Instead, what happens is everybody participates in this system across the network. And everybody has a copy of the list of what effectively almost like serial numbers exists and who has spent them and who wants them. And when you present a transaction, it's copied to everyone. And everyone could check that it's correct and hasn't been spent before. And every 10 minutes, the entire network gets together to agree on the current state of that ledger. And that ledger is called a blockchain. And sometimes people say, what is a blockchain? Can you explain a blockchain in like less than 20 words? And my favorite answer was Peter Todd who said, yes, it's a chain of blocks. Two words done. Which is funny because it's true because that's what a blockchain is. It's a chain of blocks. One of the blocks. Blocks are just containers that contain lots of transactions and they're chained together with digital fingerprints so that one block depends on the information that was in the previous block, which depends on the information that was in the previous block. So you know what sequence they came in. If you have a fingerprint from the previous block in your current block, you know that the current block could only have been created after the previous box. So you chain them together. You have this historical record, fairly simple technology. Of course, that's not the only technology in these systems. There's another really important technology called proof of work, which is a consensus algorithm, which is, okay, so you have this chain of blocks. But inevitably, if everybody's keeping a copy of this chain of blocks all around the world, how do you know which one is real? How do you know which one is the most recent? How do you know that you don't have an old copy? And how do you know that someone's not faking it? And so the really interesting invention by Santoshina Komoto was to say, you have to commit work, computer work. You have to make your computer do some work. And that work takes power. You know, if you have your computer crunching away, I don't know if you've ever noticed when you're doing something fancy on the laptop and almost the fans turn on, your laptop gets really loud. And then five minutes later, it's so hot you can't actually use it as a laptop anymore. It hasn't become a tabletop because it's burning your lab. So that's computer work. And what computer work means is that it's consuming electricity, sometimes quite a lot of electricity, and it's converting that electricity into two things, heat and information. And so because there's only so much energy in the world, and because there's only so many computers in the world, and because it's not easy to set up a system like that, that's a good way to know that the other person really validated the ledger. And so behind the system of Bitcoin and all other or most other open public blockchains is this idea that all the participants who are verifying the security and checking to produce this chain of blocks in a way that everyone can trust are spending energy as a guarantee that they're telling the truth. And the way it works is a simple competition.  I'm committing this energy. I'm staking it. I'm putting a pledge. And that's my guarantee. And if I burn this energy and correctly validate all of the transactions, I check each transaction and say, has these been spent before? Is this person lying? Is that signature correct? Do the amounts add up? I do all of the rules. I check all of the rules. Great. Then if I produce this block and I prove how much energy I've put in and that block is acceptable to everybody else, I get a small reward. I get paid the fees and I get paid some new Bitcoin. And that's the competition. It's a really simple idea, really. It's market economics applied to this competition.  Nothing really, except that I'm going to put all the electricity, produce a block that contains a lie. Everybody else will see that block will say, that's a lie. That signature was wrong. That transaction didn't add up. That one had been spent previously, whatever it might be. He didn't do the work. He didn't securely check the rules. So we're all going to ignore your block and they ignore my block. Now, I don't get reward. But the problem is, I've already spent the electricity. And come the end of the month, I'm going to get an electricity bill.  If you're doing it with your laptop, you've ever burned a dollar of electricity, produced a fake block. Everybody rejected it. You lost your dollar of electricity. Today, on a global basis, we're talking at several millions of dollars of electricity per day. So now, if you have a warehouse with 200,000 of these computers burning power in order to check the blocks, and as they're burning that power, they're checking the rules. And if they make a mistake and produce a block that's not valid, instead of getting a reward, which is worth quite a lot of money, they get nothing. Now, at the end of the month, when they get the electricity bill, the electricity bill says $250,000. So they go, and they haven't made the money. So now cheating, I can get really expensive, really fast. And that's the whole point. So these two simple inventions together, using a chain of blocks to create an ordered history of all of the transactions that have ever happened. Together with saying, open to everyone, everyone can participate. No one's special. No one's in charge. Everybody has to check the rules.  The electricity they guaranteed to put down will get repaid by the small reward. And people who play fair make money. And people who cheat lose money. We don't need to have anyone as a boss. We don't need to have the blockchain police. The blockchain police is how much money you're going to lose if you try to cheat. And so this system creates a new model for doing network consensus. What do I mean by network consensus? How do you get hundreds of thousands of people around the world to agree every 10 minutes on one version of the truth, even when they can make money by lying? That's the problem that Satoshi Nakamoto solved. And that problem, well, the obvious thing you can do with it is make a system for money. You can make a currency. Because if you get everybody in the world to agree on what the truth is every 10 minutes, then you can agree, oh, the truth of he has two Bitcoin, but now he spent 0.5 Bitcoin and this person got 0.2 Bitcoin. And that's the truth we're all agreeing on. But we can agree on other things. Like how about we agree on who's voted in the last election? How about we create a corporation and vote on what things to do with a corporation and count the votes of the directors with the same mechanism? How about we use it to decide the truth about who owns that piece of land? Or whether they sold that piece of land to someone else and record the ownership of land? How about we use it to decide who owns a car and who a car is registered to so that you can sell your car? And you don't need to tell a central location, like the registered vehicles or the Department of Transportation, as we do today. Just like you don't need to tell a central location this gift card has been used, we can all simultaneously agree. Yes, that car got sold. 10 minutes ago, the entire network agreed on that. We all committed electricity. Everybody agrees. That is the new truth. So this system suddenly becomes much more than just money. It's a way to make decisions and find truth and trust people you've never met on the internet to be fair, not because someone's watching, not because someone's in charge, but because if they cheat they lose money. Market-based economics applied to network-based decision-making. And this thing can happen across the globe. It doesn't matter which country they're in. Countries don't matter on the internet. It doesn't matter what the religion, gender, nationality, age of the other person is. It doesn't matter if their status as a living person even is. With blockchain systems you can do transactions between machines without people. You can have machines owning money and transferring money to each other. You can have machines owning other machines and transferring the ownership of other machines to each other. We can do all kinds of new things. So this technology that was created in 2009 is a system for agreeing on truth globally without anybody being able to cheat. And the first application is money. It's commerce. Because if you make it impossible to cheat, you can make commerce much more effective and much cheaper for everyone. You can give people access to the things they don't have access today. Billions of people don't have a bank account. Why do they not have a bank account? Many because they have no identity documents, because they don't have the ability to read or write or understand numbers. But you don't need an identity document on the blockchain because the blockchain doesn't care who you are.  The blockchain only cares if your transaction adds up. And that fundamental truth is in neutral. So you get this concept of neutrality. Now there's a few other little things that I find exciting because of my particular political interests which are the fact that because the system runs everywhere and is a participatory system with all of these computers which run around the world and you don't need to know where they are and you don't need to know who's running them because they have to tell the truth. You can't force them to do anything. So on this system no one can seize somebody else's money. No one can freeze an account. No one can say this transaction is allowed. This transaction is not allowed. A transaction only has two states. It's either correct or incorrect. There's no such thing as allowed or not allowed because no one's in charge. If the transaction is incorrect it will go through. And no one can stop it. There's no such thing as this person is allowed to access the network and this person is not allowed to access the network. You can't separate people by caste, religion, tribe, nationality. Everyone is allowed because they didn't ask for permission. They just download an app. In fact they don't even need to download an app. They can write the app themselves. With this book you could actually write a Bitcoin compatible wallet without downloading and just download a book, read it, understand it, program your own wallet. Now you have access to the Bitcoin system. No one can stop you from accessing and using this technology. So it opens up the possibility of seven and a half billion people becoming connected to each other in a way that allows them to trust the authenticity of the transactions they see on the blockchain to know whether someone voted, whether they bought a car. Not know who that person is but if they're presented with evidence they know they belong to that car. That car belongs to them. They know that they have voted. They know that they have made the payment, whatever that payment may be, a completely open system based on the internet with no borders, with no banks, with no governments, with no corporations, with no companies in between, just person to person. The same thing that the internet did for the flow of communication, for the ability of any human being anywhere who has even the slowest, most basic access to the internet to speak with the same voice as the biggest newspaper on the planet. Now anybody with even the slowest access to the most basic internet has the ability to transact with the power of the biggest bank in the world. Actually they have the power to do it faster, cheaper, and more securely. The internet just happened to banking and banking is going to completely transform and finance is going to be completely transformed and investments and funding for startups is already being completely transformed and next legal contracts and registration of land and registration of assets like vehicles are going to be completely transformed and no one can stop this because all it is is mathematics. You cannot prohibit the application of mathematics once people understand how it works. This is pure science and so this system is opening a new door. It's going to create historic change throughout the world and it's not just Bitcoin. It's this broader space. I call it the open public blockchain. It's all the systems like Bitcoin that are open for anyone to participate, that are public, that give free access to everyone where anyone can innovate without asking for permission. The systems that are completely neutral. They don't care who is the source or destination or even if it's a person. They only care if it validates by the rules. Systems that are completely borderless that do not even see borders anymore than the internet does and systems that are completely censorship resistant. You cannot shut them down.  You cannot stop them from operating. No one can. No one is in control except for mathematics. Thank you.


the attendance of police during a clash between police and Okada riders. Former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission at Tahirojaga gets set to unveil new political movement on October 1st. We'll be discussing how much of an opposition movement that can be. And also the Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination, NINAS gets set for its rally at the United Nations. Good morning and welcome to a Friday morning here on Clause TV Africa. It is the breakfast and I am Usaugi Ogmore. And I am Anette Felix welcoming you to the last edition of the breakfast for this week in September. Good morning to you as well again. Our first top trending story really brings sad memories of a history of clashes between the police, tax force, basically law enforcement agencies in Nigeria versus the people. And I say the people because whether it's Nigerians who are walking on the streets with dreadlocks, whether it's Nigerians who are driving in flashy cars, using iPhones, or just a bike man and Okada rider trying to earn a living, there always seems to be a clash between law enforcement agencies and the people. Whereas what we've seen other climes is, you know, synergy basically. The people calling on the police for rescue, for help. The police trying to make sure that, you know, everything is working for them. I mean, I have friends who lived in other parts of the country who said they lost their person, the train and the police basically came to knock on their door and gave it to them. So we've had, you know, clashes like this. And one of that is one of our top trending stories this morning. A clash between members of the Lagos state tax force and Okada riders in the Ajao area of Lagos state. Now, the story says that these law enforcement agencies had gone to that place to basically seize motorcycles. This is something I have seen firsthand, especially along the Ajao axis of Lagos. You know, you see them, they bring this big van and it just begins to impound motorcycles. But we must remember that the Lagos state government as a whole has actually banned the use of motorcycles. But it still is in use because obviously the means of transportation and all of that still comes into play. So they came to, you know, basically seize the motorcycles and these people who felt they've had it up to their necks, revolted, they protested and it became violent. We heard that lots of police officers were injured and reports say, it's unverified at the moment, but reports say one police officer has been killed and they basically say that he was a former DPU in charge of Ajao by the station. They also say that this policeman who was killed was CSP Kazim Abonde that he was the one who had led the operation and that he was in charge of a B Ops Lagos command before his death. I mean, we have a video of that situation. It passed by who just brought out his phone recording what has happened. We saw the police vehicle badly, badly damaged, vandalized by these people who had built up anger because of what the police had been doing and, you know, of course the ban on motorcycle riding by the Lagos state government. Well, so, rest in peace to the Chief Superintendent of Police. There's so much, you know, to unpack here, but I think it's really just another example of Nigeria can happen to you at any time, regardless of who you are. Nigeria can happen to you and that is with the, and I'm saying that with regards to dysfunctional society that we currently live in and exist in and we see as normal. That includes those people who argue that Nigeria is a much better place to live in than living in Canada and UK and all of that because, well, there's some level of lawlessness here that people get away with and we're comfortable in this level of dysfunction. But it's just an example of how Nigeria can happen to you. Either you're waking up in the morning telling your wife goodbye as the Chief Superintendent of Police and she's expecting you back later in the evening after a long day at work of police in Lagos state and eventually you get killed by Okada riders or you're driving your way to work or business here in Lagos and a truck container falls on your vehicle and family members are lost and some of all of that. So it's just a perfect example of how Nigeria can happen to anybody at any time if we don't fix the challenges with our society from the Okada riders to the policing system to the way that we enforce laws here because yes, you mentioned the Lagos state government has of course banned Okada riders on major roads you can still see them on minor streets here and there but on major roads I think they've been banned and so there's that law but at the same time it's the enforcement that is a challenge and the fact that there's really no better ways to enforce these there's a lot better ways to enforce these things but we never get to use those means we instead send police officers out there some of them walk on that cover on bikes also and then corner some of those bikes and they absolutely sometimes jump out and pull them out of the bike I entered a bike once in Lagos and guess what? I eventually found that this was a police officer because he was wearing his uniform then a musty on it and I want to believe that thinking he's a police officer I would have assumed that oh, you're trying to help a citizen not any entitlement anything but you won't believe that this man charged me and even much more than I would usually take I would usually pay for a bike from point A to point B so even these police guys who go and seize motorcycles you have bikes that they use for personal business so really you can see the hypocrisy there so with that as long as he's doing it within what the Lagos state government has created you can be a police officer and be an Okada rider the people who have two jobs you can be working in an office and then on your way home doing Uber, yes and be a part of the car hailing services so you have your own bikes and you go out and seize other people's bikes well I don't know if that pass club hasn't carried you he was not on a major road sweetheart that's the same thing I'm saying let's take a look at this my point really is that I'm not going to hit on or push aside that man for carrying you on his bike if he decides that after his police work in the afternoon he wants to be an Okada rider in the evening so there is that I want to link that into cases of the point I'm trying to make is Nigeria and the dysfunction that we live in can definitely affect you any day these Okada riders, yes maybe we might argue have had it up to here because they've continuously been oppressed by these same police officers and my Lagos state tax force even those who are selling corn at the roadside the ones outside the office here you see them every now and then trying to carry their corn and run into a corn so those things aren't seized the enforcement has always been a challenge because a lot of people say that it's unfair simply because there's no other options nobody needed to die yesterday for any reason whatsoever either on the Okada rider side or on the police side but he needed to die and unfortunately at Jawa estate now it's going to be a very tense area because of course you expect the Nigerian police officers to want to revenge every other person might become a victim for this something like that and just to really buttress on the point of the hypocritical nature of our law enforcement you see just like what you mentioned you see people who sell food and corn you know snacks basically by the roadside and you see these law enforcement agencies the tax force they come and seize their stuff but guess what you still see those people on their break time go to patronize those people when they want to eat they do not have enough salaries to afford going to the high end restaurants they actually go to those roadside and buy food from them when their break time is over they come back and they basically impound they are good so really does that make sense well let's take a look at the video that we were talking about at Jawa estate yesterday I beg you if you are around they come to Jawa I beg you no pass to Jawa this night you have to go back now they don't keep police inside Jawa almost see the van tax force tax force versus other people what do you think of that Pantami picture you see see what they do police over here at Jawa estate and I heard they killed the police man I heard they killed the police man that's of course a video that was made at the scene of the incident yesterday at Jawa estate once again recent piece of that chief superintendent of police and we hope that some of these things somehow some way are better enforced and there is really no need for violence a lot of people also bring the fact that a lot of these Okada riders many of them are even Nigerians by the way hmm so our next uptrending story is this we have found disparities in the offer letter and the acceptance letter that was exchanged between minister of communications and digital digital economy Doctor Issa Pantami and the Ferjo University of Technology Oere in Imo State now these letters were exchanged back and forth and when we took a closer look we found this inconsistencies in the dates that the letter was given and received now in the offer letter which will come on your screen in a few seconds it was dated August 20th now but Pantami acceptance letter was dated March 30th and that's five months earlier from the dates that he received a formal offer from the university to take up a professorship role in the Department of Cyber Security at FUTU now when we take a closer look again you'll see that that notice of the offer letter that was dated August 5th said that Pantami had to resume with effects from March so we can see that back date again so Nigerians really have been thinking about a lot of things they've been speculating that the offer letter was possibly made verbally and Pantami accepted that in writing or that someone maybe inside or outside the university connived with Issa Pantami to put up this professorship thing and that the registrar needed to sign later on to just validate everything that he'd done but it really is interesting to note that a minister who just came out of a scandal regarding his links with terrorism and being a terrorist sympathiser all of that is getting into another one regarding the professorship of cyber security at the Federal University of Technology who we're in emo state so even when you look at the letter of acceptance Pantami co-audits who we're in state not even emo state he went on to say that he had the permission of President Mohammed Buhari to go ahead and accept this role and that he would also continue to teach cyber security in the university without receiving any payment that is going to be as part of his civic responsibility it just seems like a mess right now I don't know what Pantami has gotten involved in but we can't wait to see how he gets out so the awful letter you know state that he's going to be paid by 5 million plus annually so I don't know what he's talking about when he says that he's going to be doing it for free which doesn't add up in any way and of course I'm not sure if you can be a minister and earn as a minister and at the same time earn salary from a university in Foto he has the dates and the disparity with the dates has already been pointed out which also makes absolutely no sense and it looks more like somebody tried to cover a face a knee-jerk reaction quickly went to go and write a letter to cover up for the controversy that this had brought up a few weeks ago I would also quickly mention that personally I feel like of all the challenges in Nigeria today if you write the next 100 challenges that Nigeria currently has I don't think this should even make the list this is just for me another distraction from what Nigeria currently should be focused on if he decides to be a professor decides to work in the kitchen department in Foto decides to work in the security department whatever department he chooses to work that's his personal problem and personal business the law would be able to determine whether he would be able to receive salary both as minister and as professor there's still of course the controversy whether he really can be dashed professorship because you have to be an associate professor you have to earn it you do not wake up one morning and somebody likes your face and decides the school said they waived some rights do you remember the statement this morning that they waived some rights to make phantomie professors but I don't think you can just do that you can't just wake any day and decide to dash somebody in professorship there's people who try to cover this up and say oh that he was an associate professor failing to recognize that in earlier letters and you know online details earlier that phantomie himself had put out he was assistant professor in madina university I believe you know so these are just people trying to cover up here and there but still failing at it and I don't know how you as a university can fail so woefully are trying to cover up these little details here and there that you know that people have pointed out but once again it's really not any of the biggest challenges what I also would point out here is how people have forgotten that president Muhammad Ibarra was appointed or was elected president to be president for Nigerian Nigerians to lead to you know be the leader of the country to direct and stare the ship of Nigeria he's not in any way anybody's spiritual or educational father that you know that people can quickly lean to and say exactly mentor and say oh you know he asked me to go ahead and take it photo could have given the same person who wants you to go ahead and professorship they did it so you know I the president has made these things happen he has I keep talking about body language he has made some of all these things continue to happen and that's why we cannot have a better functioning society we can have systems that work because people would quickly lean on to and say oh my spiritual father or my my political godfather told me to go ahead and take it so so it's not a problem when we should be always and always pushing for the right things to be done the president should never let him his name to be used for this type of things as a president who really believes in standing for the right thing you shouldn't let anybody use your name as an excuse for the wrong things but the president has made these things continue to happen and that's why I want some of these incidents in Nigeria a lot of people already just know how it will end a lot of people already knew that Abercarie was not going to be extradited a lot of people knew how Panthenis issue was going to end initially when there was controversy over his statements towards terror and all of that but that is really how the president has positioned himself the way that he has made Nigeria currently to run which is very very very very sad so those are the points that I would make concern in this him saying that president Mamadibwari asked him to go ahead and take it it's very very sad and also whoever it is that is in Foto that feels like they need to honor a pandemic but once again this is really not any of Nigeria's problems currently we have too many issues to be dealing with that are concerned with that Panthenis professorship is not even top 100 our next top trending story this morning it's a video that has gone viral online and it's become a major talking point because it shows offices, naval offices writing an examination and basically why this is such an issue is the way they were so widely spaced on that field so basically people have been joking about this saying this space is just worse than social distancing this is the definition of on your own if you're not intelligent don't come into the navy so it's just really interesting to see how much how far they have gone to make sure that people there's basically some form of integrity in this examination let's take a listen to what that evidence is saying there examination as you can see the spacing very proper the ones that are writing CAPEX the navy you need to be intelligent you need to be very intelligent I'm telling you this my customers are very ready we are very ready in the navy if you want to come to the navy please be very intelligent examination as you can see the spacing very proper yes I don't know if that is the normal way that navy carries out their examinations but maybe that's a facility that they have you would expect that it would be an examination in a hall if that's what they have because of the spacing that they need that's fine but I think it's a good thing because of the importance of having the best foot forward every time the importance once again of having people who really know their onions get to that level and not just having any random person through examination or practice or any other means pass those examinations and become a burden in the Nigerian navy so it's one of the most pristine I believe with security agencies Nigeria has so yes if you are not smart enough then go home, go join the police and agree with everything you said but my own question really and this is something that has been on my mind for a while is what sort of questions have they been asked and they have been asked questions of the 1999 history or things that are relevant when it comes to tackling security in today's society in the 21st century I ask this because I've done exams both for local exams for schools abroad and all of that courses and when I compare the quality of questions I get questions asked about what's happening now you need to write essays about the relevance of setting issues that are going on now contemporary issues but when you have to write exams for example University of Lagos they'll ask you questions like when was NTA founded and I'm like how does this move me forward how does the year that NTA was founded help me be a better journalist the quality of the questions really is something that we need to you don't need to know current affairs it's important but I'm saying that the quality of the questions are they contemporary are they things that put you up to are they things that actually test for your knowledge of today's world and security as that case is that just really is my own cup of tea what is the quality of the questions that have been asked I don't think we know much about what Navy examinations are like what their syllabus is what it contains I think what you're referring to is an improvement on the syllabus for teaching Nigerian students from the 80s to the 90s and to where we currently are there's a lot of schools who still have the same marking scheme or the same syllabus that they've been using since the school started in 1990 in Nigeria which hasn't been improved on science has improved art has improved technology has improved mathematics I believe has also improved so there's many of all these things that should have the syllabus should have been improving with the time that hasn't changed but with the current that video we showed we have no idea what the Navy question is like or what the examinations are like my point once again is that whatever it is even if they're asking you the number of grains of rice in the bag the most important thing is that for you to be able to make it to that to the next stage in every level of being a Navy officer you must be the best and you should be able to the best in knowing how many grains of rice are in the bag yes the number of grains of beans how many days it took for this Yam Tuber to be like this you know random those type of questions but you have to they have to always put their best foot forward and their best students every single time nobody who oh my god alright that's where we draw the curtains on top trending this morning let's improve our school curriculum and the quality of the question we ask our students shouldn't we let's take a break here and we'll be back bye


We are going to place some compounds around this metal plate and then we're going to heat them up. What your task is in this activity is to observe what happens and record the things that melt first and any other changes that you see. Now, earlier we talked about three types of compounds, metallic, ionic and covalent. We're going to look at two ionic compounds, sodium chloride, just put a little here, copper sulfate pentahydrate, a nice, pretty blue. These are two ionic compounds. The third one we're going to put is tin, which is a relatively soft metal. And then we have three covalent compounds. We have naphthalene that we looked at before, sucrose, which is sugar, table sugar. And we have silicon dioxide, better known as sand.  Notice right here the naphthalene is beginning to melt. It looks like a liquid, but observe what happens. As soon as it becomes a liquid, it evaporates. Something that's happening to the sucrose, do you see the smoke coming off the sucrose? Also, notice what's happening to the copper sulfate over on this side. That pretty blue color, the blue's going away and leaving us with a white powder. The sucrose is melting and it's changing colors. Can you see that it's becoming a caramel brown color? Now it's bubbling, see how it's bubbling and it's smoking. So what's happening to the sucrose is that the bonds that make it sugar are actually breaking. It's not evaporating, it's breaking apart and it's becoming carbon dioxide and water vapor. See that smoke coming off? So we're decomposing that sucrose. So the intermolecular forces in this case are stronger than the intramolecular that keeps it as a sugar compound. Here you can see on my toothpick that caramel color. What's happening here to our copper sulfate pentahydrate is the heat is driving the water molecules away. And copper sulfate and hydrous is white. So when all of this, when the heat drives away all the water, we're left with copper sulfate, which is an ionic compound like the sodium chloride we have here. We have sodium chloride and it doesn't seem like it's doing anything. The silicon dioxide, the sand is not melting at all. It's not changing. And the tin doesn't look like much is happening, but if we sort of stir it around you can see that it's actually beginning to melt. Metals have a wide range of melting points. So tin has a very low melting point compared to some metals. And of course our stainless steel tray that we're putting doing all this experiment in is metal and it's not melting. So we can tell the difference between the molecular compounds, the covalent molecular, the ionic have high melting points, the molecular have low melting points, metals have a variety of melting points from a very high melting point to a relatively low melting point like this. Silicon dioxide is a special kind of covalent compound called network covalent. So from this you should see some of the physical properties of covalent, ionic and metallic compounds.


Yes, I want to talk about going faster. Don't stand there. I want to talk about going faster. A lot of this, you know, first a little bit about me. One that says I'm really old, so that's all fine. But this is kind of the really more important thing. And that is I tend to be on the bleeding edge of technology. Early implementations of new technology is kind of my specialty. So one of the things I'm talking about today are things I've actually done in various engagements with various clients and companies I've worked for. But don't feel strange if you're not ready for this yet, because that's typical of what I tend to work on. I'm a very early adopter of technology. So if some of these things look a little strange, don't worry about it. You'll be there in four or five years at least. What's probably more interesting about me is this is what I really am. I'm really a change agent or disruptor. A disruptor is actually a formal title now in business schools. They talk about this role in the executive team, which goes in there and basically just breaks things and rebuilds them together. It's not necessarily a guy you want to have around a lot. In fact, this was actually my job description when I went to work for the Daily Mail. I was described to their CTO as the guy who's going to basically be at hand grenade in development. By the way, if you ever get this job description, you should take it because it's a lot of fun. There are no rules. I go to a lot of conferences, anywhere from 15 to 20 a year sort of thing. I hear a lot of different topics. I talk a lot about microservices in particular. That's one of my specialty. I'll talk about that tomorrow, in fact. I hear a lot of other things about various technologies like the cloud and NoSQL. We just had a nice lecture about NoSQL from Promote right before lunch. There's obviously conferences on Docker and Cassandra and things like this. There's also all these, like us, we're here today about Agile. I have a version of Agile called Programming Anarchy I talk about, which is basically a more managerless process. Eric Myers now has the same sort of thing. He calls it one hacker way. So there's a lot of process stuff you're seeing about in these conferences as well. And then you see basically the business guys doing the same thing. They have their own version of all this stuff, Lean Startups and MVP and things like that. And we have new roles popping up, like DevOps and we have entire conferences associated with DevOps. I think we had a presentation earlier today about DevOps as well. Full stack developers becoming a vote topic again. I recognize as an underlying theme to all of these things. And playing with these ideas and moving their organization in these ways is in order to go faster. They're trying to go from that requirement to deployment just somewhat faster. Get there because their competitors are doing it as well. And the reason they're having to worry about this is the competition is coming. And a couple of things are going on here. They're kind of interesting. First of all, from a technology perspective, there's great tech out there. No longer do you have to go out and buy an Oracle license and mortgage your house, get an Oracle license, go hire yourself 5 or 10 or 100 programmers for several years to build yourself a system. You can buy this stuff. You can just pull this up from an open source. You can get computing power right from an Amazon. And use whatever you need. And as you grow and make money, use more. So those barriers are gone. There used to be very powerful barriers for big companies. They're gone. And in corresponding on the business side, the same thing is going on. Used to be you had to have a sales force. You had to get a reputation. You had to put some TV advertisements out there.  You can go off a European market. And you can find your customers through social networks. You get something on a slash dot. You know, get something in some various other blogs. You got Google doing this for you, basically advertising for you, just by doing searches against your content. All of a sudden, you can find clients.  So that's going on as well. And so either you're aware of these things and you're reacting to these things, or you've got a competitor who's going to be doing this to you.  The other thing is we're actually trying to solve different problems today. The problems I used to solve back in the 70s and 80s, we were trying to get payroll to run successfully. You know, get away from the paper process and moving to an automated process. And this is best described with this Geneffin framework from a guy named Dave Snowden. If you haven't had a chance to listen to some Dave Snowden's YouTube videos, they're really worthwhile. He's Welch. He's very sarcastic. By the way, with a name like Dave Snowden, he doesn't get any page one hits anymore. He used to get some page one hits. He doesn't get them anymore. It doesn't really impact his brilliance on this stuff. He basically says he can classify problems in various ways. And the idea is a simple problem is one where the cause and effect relationship is very straightforward. You know, if I step this way, if I step too far that way, the microphone will go crazy. If I step back this way, it's fine. Simple problem. Complicated problems are where the cause and effect relationship exist but it's much more convoluted. This is the domain of the expert. The people who really want to try to understand how to do this. But he doesn't stop there. He says there are also these problems he would call complex. Where the cause and effect relationship doesn't exist. Yes, if this happens today, you'll probably figure out why it happened. But it doesn't help me predict the future. Your financial markets are this sort of thing. And he says it's chaotic. We have no idea what's going on. You're just struggling to figure out what's going on. It turns out that, listen to Dave talk about, most of the time you don't know what type of problem you're working on. You're in the state of what he calls disorder. And you need to figure out what type of problem you're watching yet. But he says it's unfortunately a prejudice we have as individuals. We like certain segments. We want to be in certain segments. We feel comfortable in certain segments. And no matter what the problem really is, we will drag it to our segment and try to solve it that way. If you're Donald Trump, you could just build a wall between us and Mexico and we'll fix it. Or raise the taxable order. You just fix it. Of course it's a complex problem. It's not going to fix anything. Complicated. That's the world of the experts. Insultants. And you're an expert in the field. This is where you make a lot of money.  It turns out complex doesn't solve so easily. One of the things about complex is because there is no concept of cause and effect, there are no experts. And what happens if you think in there as experts, if you're still building your organization along complicated lines, which is traditionally managers and architects and designers and hierarchy of expertise, if that's your organization, you're solving a complex problem, you're going to have a lot of problems. Partly because you think you're going to have an expert and the expert's going to say this is how it works. It doesn't work that way. So you fire him. You hire another expert. He says it. He fire him. He doesn't work. You don't understand, but all these people claim they're experts, they're lying because they have no idea how to solve a complex problem. So it turns out roles and managers and simple is you're supposed to train your people how to do it the best way. This is best practices. This is an area of good practices. There's more than one way to do this. And again, the expert will tell you what to do and you leverage the expert by building yourself a team to implement his recommendations. Again, think about your typical, say, model of outsourcing for India. This is the architects and designers, the chief programmers and the like. But you get over here, no experts. There's nothing really for the manager to tell you to do. Because he doesn't know either. And he can't predict your success. There's nothing really you can measure against. And so in this area, it turns out you want to work differently. And it turns out this is where you make money these days. We've done the payroll applications. We've done the bank statements out. We can make airline reservations. All that stuff works. That's all complicated. We're now working about recommendations. Should I loan you money? What book do you want to read next? What book do you want to read next? These are the sort of complex problems that we can make real money at now. And it does, these organization structures don't work. For myself, I tend to like the sort of the cowboy sort of atmosphere. I definitely love working in complex domains. I've probably worked in complex domains the last decade. And almost all of the stuff I'm talking about today is going to be around solving complex problems. Techniques that work very well for solving those. So the question comes up, how fast can you really go? How fast can you really go? So I was working with if you look at some sort of project delivery cycles, how long it takes to get code out of the door. I'm going to draw several of these charts because I'm old and we like to reminisce about these things. This one starts in 1980. Log chart on the side here. So basically, back in that time frame I was working at IBM and three, five years to put a project out is probably typical. In fact, in that time frame I worked on a project that had 1,000 programmers. We worked for three years and delivered on time. Don't feel sorry for us. We made a billion dollars on that software.  And we... Moving to IBM, and I kept saying with IBM about until 1990, I started writing more and more projects. I got it down like six months, sometimes five months between releases. I left IBM and started using a little more like oriented techniques, still in a waterfall sort of process. Still a little faster but nothing spectacular. But this is a straight line on a log chart. So this is good. This is good progress. And then I got into Agile and, you know, I got a little faster but we're still talking about, you know, releases every two or three months to actually real production customers. And then a strange thing happened. We started trying a few other things and we just kind of just felt the chart. This is a hockey stick on a hockey stick chart. This is wickedly fast. So how fast were we able to go? This day is actually several years old now from this company. This is working in a company in London. So we basically were shipping something new to production every three and a half minutes. Every three and a half minutes. If you're not going this fast, you can go this fast. Especially for complex problems. And it turned out we had competitive advantage by going fast. We were a company that got up to 50 employees at one point. We made 50 million pounds revenue that year with 50 employees. We were printing money because we were so good at how fast we could work. And we did slow down. So we're going to talk more about that as well. But this is how fast you can go. If you're not going this fast, you can go that fast. Alright, so what keeps us from doing this? I'm going to talk about three things that keep us from doing three classes of problems. First will be technology, which we're kind of comfortable with. Process, we're okay with that one. And organizational issues that cause us problems. And things we have to change in our organization to make this work. The first thing is, especially with big companies, you cannot be afraid of this valley tech. Valley tech is what basically the CEOs, especially in the U.S., talk about. They want to be like Google. They want to be like Amazon. They want to be like Facebook. It's like, what can I do to be like these companies? They don't like to say like the answers they hear. Because from a technology perspective, it's like, don't worry about some of these things. Use the cloud. Oh, we can't use the cloud. Oh, yes. Use the cloud. Specialized databases. Like Promote talked about with the NoSQL databases. Use new programming languages to do more things. These are things that they resist enormous resistance to. But if you're not doing these things, your competitors are, and they're going to, you know, basically take your customers. So you can't be afraid of that valley technology. You also want to look at hardware lead time. So this is another graph, you know, a historic graph. I'll go back to only 19 years ago. So this is another graph, you know, a historic graph. I'll go back to only 1990 in this case. And the sort of question is, how long does it take you to get a piece of hardware to run your programs on? And watch what's going on with this chart.  And it would take you like three, four, five months sometimes to get a machine in between. You can figure it, get it in, get it established, put it on the raised floor, put all the wires together, check it out, all this other stuff. And that's kind of a lie, because it really was you had to allocate the money for it the year before and the capital equipment budget. And so really, the lead time was somewhere around 12 to 18 months to get a piece of hardware in. And you better be sure you needed it, because they would yell at you really if you didn't use it. The nice thing is, along came virtual machines and we were able to buy that hardware but carve it up differently to sort of our needs as we need them. And that was some flexibility that was very powerful for us. And so the need to do this kind of reduced the time to get these things to a couple of weeks sometimes. I was with a client only a few years ago and tried to get a virtual machine within their enterprise and it took them three weeks to give me a virtual machine. And they broke the rules to do it. By the way, they've been acquired. And guess why? And then of course, the cloud comes along, Amazon sort of raises the roof and basically says for us, oh now it only takes a few minutes to get you one. Once you get used to this stuff and the tools get better and better. And then you thought that was like, now we're talking about seconds. I have some colleagues I work with in Las Vegas. One of the things they're doing is they're bringing it up and running banking transactions in a darker container, running one transaction and throwing it away. They don't worry about memory leaks. It's only going to last five seconds. You can't leak memory very fast in five seconds. So they're completely cavalier about a lot of things about how they write software because of this sort of phenomenon. Now if this is going on and you're not paying attention, this has impact to you and should have impact to you. The first thing is this whole need of capacity planning, this whole exercise we go through late every year about how much machines we need and how much money we spend and how much capital we need to allocate. Can we afford it? That should go away completely. Now the people whose job is that's their sole job. They don't want to go away, but they should go away. They have no job anymore. The second thing is this whole concept of ops teams to get this hardware up and running, I don't need them anymore. These are all micro services. Hence the DevOps movement. So basically if you're not doing these things or you're thinking about the traditional way, you're spending a lot of money and a lot of effort for things that are completely unnecessary. You get rid of that to go faster. Now this whole chart right here is the thing that's driven the movement to micro services. The ability to go out and get a lightweight machine when they need it on demand is driven to micro services. And so I draw this chart. Just get that head around that log log chart. And it says how big is how much code there is associated with how many of these little code things do you have? So I start with this is the one big giant application. One giant application anywhere from 100,000 to 10 million lines of code. This was the SOA movement. So back in the maybe 10 to 12 years ago SOA started raising its head. Credit Swiss was very popular in this space right at that point. And the idea was let's take our several million lines of code and break it up into maybe 50,000 lines of code segments along the lines of business and do things like that. This is where the micro services is. This is kind of where I like to draw it. Much, much, much smaller, much more numerous than what we're seeing in SOA. In fact, I worked on a project almost a decade ago now when I was working in India. There was one giant application. I will never do that again. Life is too short. This is not something you want to do for your life. I run a workshop that talks about micro services. We basically build about 15 micro services. There are less than 50 lines of code each. It does a really interesting application that's actually quite powerful. This was a company I worked with in London that did all these really fast things. This is where they were. And here's Netflix. You know, 800 or 900 services about a thousand lines of Java each. They're doing it all in Java, which is kind of curious itself, but they're doing it all in Java. But yeah, this is the micro services world. These are the guys that are playing with that. You can start packing Uber in here. You can lift in here. There's lots of guys you can plop in here. They all go in the green. They're all in the green. So that's what's happening. Now, when you have this sort of architecture, you have new things happening. So the next thing that's happening is the operational data store. If you think about your database structure, you have the operational database, and then you have your reporting database. We have two of these because we want to organize them and index them differently. In most of the cases in California now, especially Silicon Valley, you're seeing the operational database is gone. It's being replaced by an event buses. So the idea that this is the data, this is your email address, you change your email address, these are both valid data points. You don't want to lose that other one. You just want to save the current state. The whole concept of change is actually quite interesting, particularly for complex problems. So the event bus is emerging. When you have the event bus coming out, now you start building architectures differently. I'm a big fan of the Kafka bus. It's basically the bus behind LinkedIn. They've opened sources in an Apache project. It's quite a mature Apache project at this point. You can even go to Heroku now and get yourself a Kafka bus straight off Heroku. So it's moving very mainstream.  This is not the enterprise service buses of 10 years ago.  But because they're dumb, they're very, very, very fast. So the Kafka bus can handle about a quarter of a million messages a second. And the problem is, I tend to solve, that's a lot. That's a lot. And that's not enough. You can put several of them together. You can go up if you want to. Now, it turns out these guys, it turns out if I write a message once and read it 10 times, that counts for 11 of the messages. You're like, whoa, dude, that sounds like it should be one. No, it's 11. So you don't want to hang 100 guys off of here because now you're back at enterprise service bus levels.  So you try to minimize the number of these things you hang off your bus.  So when you're going to service to this structure, you basically hang the service off one of these secondary tiers, but you always publish everything back to the top. And this is one of the tricks we picked up from Google, frankly. We picked up from Google, but you may have got it from somewhere else. But the idea is, if you're doing something interesting, publish it to the world. Don't worry about who needs it today or who has a requirement for it. Do it anyway. Do it anyway. So we always publish to where everybody can get to it. We're not trying to eliminate ourselves and publish only to our little subgroup. We're not that smart. Now this sort of architecture leads to some new architectural patterns that are very powerful. So this is one we call the need pattern. It's basically done because what a service does express a need on the bus, it says, I need something. I need an advertisement I can put on the page. I need to know Charlonio Money. And there are other services that are sitting there and basically expressing their opinions. Giving you an answer or a suggested answer. And you pick up these answers and put them together again. Now it looks very lightweight. The first thing you have to do is you have to design this a little differently because it may be you get no answers. So you've got to handle that case. If you can handle that case, then guess what? I can turn on blue service version two and put it on the same bus and I don't have to turn on blue service version number one. He can compete right there. If he gets more of the business, I can turn the open off. So guess what? A.B. testing is free. Or maybe the green service goes down. That's okay. Blue service is still suggesting answers. And again, this is a fuzzy problem. These are some of the complex problems. So yeah, man, I give you the absolute best advertisement. But I don't really know you that well anyway. I'm grouping you into groups anyway. So this turns out to be a very powerful pattern. And it makes it very easy to have variations and the system which does not go down because these services are still up still working them still providing value. Different architectural pattern. Very much like the impact it had when the map reduced algorithms hit us. Different style of algorithm solving problems in very different ways. This is one of those instances as well. This is an example of how this works. Now with this sort of architecture, you can build incremental applications. By incremental application, I mean one that we can roll out probably in the first week and start improving it after that forever. So every time we do an iteration of what your current cycle is with the agile space, you're pushing it to production. Why not? Maybe you have a better answer. And so you wind up... I have actually an animation that goes through this but it's a car rental example. I got some space on the page and I want to put some advertising. I want to sell you more. So I want to sell you a better car.  So basically I can put the system together. I got a legacy system that does this so I put myself a message bus, some little surrogate to talk to the message bus and every time I put a page up and need ads on, I put a message on the bus saying, give me some ads. Then I'll write something at the corporate level that says, yeah, here are the sort of ads I want to show you. This is a corporate level program. But every car rental location has their own surplus of vehicles. They can have their own deals on those vehicles. So they're sitting in their own little service. They're also bidding for your attention. They don't know about each other and that's okay. They don't have any coordinate. That's okay. And then I can make that a little better by adding membership information. If you remember my freaking rental club, I want to know about that. If I look at your usage pattern and find out you rent between Monday and Thursday, chances are you don't pay for your car. It's a company car. So a discount is not very interesting for you. So turn off the discount offers. Again, a little refinement, a little better application, make a little more money. By the way, we built one of these systems for one of our clients when I was in California, we built them $6 million to build this. It's not that hard to build, by the way. They made 40 million additional revenue in the first six months. They were happy. We were happy. Everybody was happy. This is not a very sophisticated sort of architecture, but you built them very powerful systems around it. Databases. As much as we kind of love the daily basis, the question is, it's sort of the holy grail. Do you want to get one of these things or not? Again, working with another hotel chain, went into their chief architect's office the first day. I'm a troublemaker. I know this. So I was asking sort of the leading question. It says, well, how many operational databases do you have? He said, well, we have three. We're trying to get down to two. We're kind of embarrassed by that. So that's really interesting because the right answer is 300. It's the last conversation we ever had, which was okay because it actually was going to his vendor that afternoon and tell them about his new waterfall process. It's like, dude, I don't want to talk to you either. So what you really are going to move is you're moving to this event bus. It's the new sort of persistent store for the operation. It's actually the events themselves. Don't try to fill it with them. They're all there. And you want to put a little data. If a microservice needs a database, it should have one. Whatever type makes sense for it. And if you have multiple databases, that's perfectly okay because the event bus is kind of the authority here. It turns out very few of these databases in my practice so far have been writable databases. They were read and used for your reference for making decisions. And only about 10% of the 10% are actually transaction-oriented, which is a very powerful thing. It's just because you need transactions for your particular service, doesn't mean all the rest of the stuff are stuck with SQL Server or Oracle. We can put it in the right database for us. See, I wind up going back to this example. If you open up this little piece of code here, it's actually running in four different containers. I got something that's publishing and I got somebody collecting the answers, sticking it in the right database running its own little container. And then periodically, this responder is going to pluck out what the best answer is so far and send it back to the user. I would call that one service because it's sitting around one little data store. But it's four containers. Somebody can go in the membership service and look at what's going on there. Let's look at what's on the bus and say, do we know this person? You just need a little key value source and then overnight, once a night, I'm going to run an ETL process that goes to the data warehouse and pulls out their latest status, builds a new key value store. Three containers, one service. The other thing is, of course, we have some open source. If you're afraid of open source, you're a dinosaur. Netflix. Netflix has done some amazing stuff. Huge kudos after those guys because they have really done an amazing job. Not only the service they provide, but the architecture behind it is stunning. So there are over 40 open source programs that came out of Netflix. They open source the entire stack. 40 of them. Adrian Cockroff, who is the CTO behind this, would tell you that there's almost more than you could possibly understand by yourself. So don't worry about trying to understand them all. There's just too many of them. But the U.S. Department of Defense is using this to build their new systems. If you told me I was going to build one of these gigantic multi-million line of code systems again, this is probably where I'd start. And of course, there's actually Docker and they have their own conferences now and of course everybody understands containers are here to stay. But if you're afraid of this sort of stuff, again, you missed the point. We also have some disruptive curing languages, particularly functional programming languages. So it's interesting enough, if you look at something like Kafka, it's actually written in Scala. Not Java, not C++. It's written in Scala. And Erlang is used in Rabbit and Keele, and it's solid. And so they're writing industrial pieces of code in these other languages. What languages are you using for your code? So just in case today I was at the Mail Online. Mail Online is the largest online newspaper in the world. We were just rendering the pages, the entire pages for all of the online newspaper.  Replace that with 4,000 lines of closure. 130 down to 4. There are certain problems that functional programming is silver bullet for. If it's not in your repertoire, it's in your competitors. They'll be using it. All right, so that's kind of the talking about the technology stuff, things we're probably more comfortable with. Let's talk about the process inhibitors. First thing you gotta worry about is, first of all, what type of problem are you trying to solve? If you have an organization and now they say, well, I need to decide whether I want to loan people money and you're trying to use this organization, it's not going to work. But if this is the type of problem you have to solve, I'm not sure I'd ever throw you into microservices, because I think we've got good technology, good organizations for solving this type of problem. It just doesn't work for these. So the first thing I usually ask my clients is what type of problem are we really trying to solve here? Before I get involved in using my new techniques and processes, make sure we're solving the same type of problem. We have to change our idea about what we are to build. Basically, requirements were in stone tablets. To some degree, in fact, we're in stone tablets is a bit my fault, well, not personally me, but my generation. When I started out programming, I talked to customers because a big program was 2000 lines of code. That was a monster. I can keep that in my head. That's easy. When it got to be 60,000 lines of code, the bigger we had to have a team and the more we had teams, the more we told the customer, tell us what you want to go away. So stone tablets. And they're used to this. The whole generation has been brought up and said we build requirements, we tell you what to do when we walk away. Turns out that's not the model that works in complex. What works in complex is how fast can you try on an idea? How fast can you try an idea out? At the forward, we have the concept of experimentation drives innovation. I love that because experimentation implies we're going to try things and they will fail. My role in the company is often when something fails and somebody starts yelling about it, especially the customer, I tell them to shut up. We're not going to slow down just because we made a mistake. We're going to just keep going fast.  We're not going to slow down. That's how we make the money. So this is a different way of thinking. We want to re-engage the customer and talk to them constantly the same way I did back in 1975. We want to talk to them all the time. We want them to teach us about it. In fact, if you sort of rethink our interaction with the customer, we're all about stories. All the agile processes have something about stories in them. We break stories into tasks. Pretty standard way of thinking about it. A colleague of mine many years ago drew this triangle and basically said, okay, but stories are part of something called features. Features are something called projects. Projects are initiatives. You can tie everything back to the business. It's quite lovely, actually. Most of the time, your agile process, we measure stories, we estimate stories, we do everything on a story basis. In practice, though, I walk into a lot of establishments. Frankly, I walk into ones that have trouble. And you see stand-ups talking about what tasks did you work on? How long did this task take? What's the task going to do tomorrow? And I see a completely unmotivated set of programmers. They just said, can't wait to go home today because it's just miserable. What we wind up doing when we worked in the complex problems is we moved up and we interacted at this level with our customer. We said, customer, tell me what you're trying to solve. What's your problem? Teach me your domain. And they get out of my way. I'm a programmer. I do algorithms. I'm really good at figuring out clever ways to do things, wherever it is. I can figure that out. Get out of my way. Your job is to teach me your domain and bring me your KPIs. That ties into this. Let's measure what really matters. I can tell you, I've been measuring about everything under the sun you can imagine. The lines of code you write today. I can fix that metric. I can get that easy. How many classes did you do? How many function points did you finish? How many test cases did you write? I mean, all these metrics. It turned out almost by accident we started doing metrics like, how much money do we make? What's our page retention time? How many clicks do we get? And guess what? Programmers use that for their metrics. This is the game they start playing. Oh, can I make more money than you did today? And the business guy is saying, what did you guys do? We made more money today. Oh, yeah, we tried something else at work.  I don't know. We're algorithm. That's what we do. We're programmers. We come up with ideas. We're good at this stuff. So measure what really matters. All right. So that's the process stuff. Let's talk about the organization.  It doesn't support the concept of complex problem solutions. First of all, we tend to over-specialize. And this goes back to the Industrial Revolution and go back to 1930s and stuff like that when they started doing this nonsense. And the theory is, of course, specialists are more productive, so we want to make sure specialists are always doing what they're good at. But, of course, we completely... I have undervalued. This is what Justin Time and, therefore, Agile taught us. We've completely undervalued the value of being able to...the communication overhead. How much time it takes to pass these things off from person to person. Now, working on a three-year IBM project, we have plenty of time to waste-pass things off. If I'm working on a project where we're shipping every three and a half minutes, I don't have time to hand things off. The other thing is, of course, we have imbalance of workloads. I guess people are sitting idle. They're going to make work for themselves. So they have balances. So we completely undervalued these things. And, of course, how do we get these specializations? We get people titles. So it turns out the biggest problem with it is we give people titles associated with their specialties. So another case study here. This guy actually is a Daily Mail as well. So I showed up to Daily Mail. Again, I'm the hand grenade here. There are 50 IT professionals in the group. I found 25 or more titles for the 50 people. And I found zero people who knew what was going on. Zero. The poor scrum master was standing at the wall every morning trying to figure out if his project was going to work or not. It wasn't her skill set. She had no idea what was going to work. I can never say this, and they're not talking to each other directly. Zero people. So that's the problem we wanted to fix. So we're going to fix the titles. Oh, yeah. So, in fact, why don't we define it what our key competencies were? So, first of all, I like this master German apprentice model. You can use Dan Norris, Shuhari. You can have four levels, five levels. They're really mad. Just have one. In my world, this is competence. I can use this technology effectively. This is not competent. And a master is kind of magical creatures, and you can't really describe them. If you can describe it, it's no journeyman. Magical guys. And then we identified what we thought our strategic technologies were. Ruby, I brought Ruby in. Java was our old language. I couldn't get it thrown away if I could, but they wouldn't let me throw it away. We're mobile platforms, database expertise, both SQL and non-SQL, very important. Testing, I tried to throw testing away as well. The CTO wouldn't let me do that, but those testing is implicit part of the agile process. It's not a separate skill. Oh, design, both sprinting and back in JavaScript. So we identified about 10 or 12 technologies, and that was the biggest list we were going to get. We'll throw something away before. And we basically went through all the programmers and said, basically using the masters of these skills to identify the criteria. Are you a journeyman, apprentice, or master of these skills? Now, based upon that, we actually made new titles. So the new titles for the new projects, so if you want to work on the new project, this is your title. If you don't want to work on the new project, you can keep your old title and work on the old systems. Your choice. This is how you get away with easy EU regulations. So we call them developer. You're competent in one of our technologies.   Now, why would I hire you? You can't do Java. You can't do CSS. You can't do anything. Why would I hire you? We put it on the chart, so we put it on the chart. Senior developer. He's the expert. He's the master. Okay, this is very traditional. This is where we did something different. We created another title called system developer. This guy was competent in five different technologies. Competent. Not expert, competent. These are the guys you can hand a problem to and say, solve this problem. Here's a feature. Implement it. Oh, this part's for me front end. Back end, this sort of database I need. He can make these sort of decisions. He can call up a master when he needs some help. But he can solve problems. He can implement features. He's not one of these super specialists. And we created something called master developer. He's an expert in five to three to five technologies. Just something to be... By the way, we pay these guys the same pay scales. That's why they're the same level. Same pay scales. And you have a choice. You pick your choice. You want to go this way. You want to go this way. We don't care. We encourage people... If people say they want to be an assistant developer, we would drop them into a team. I want to be an assistant developer. I want to get some iOS skills. Join an iOS team. We'll invest in you to get you competent in that technology. Because we're going to win the long run. So I took this to the human resources of the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is 125 years old. It's run by Lord Rothamir. The fourth world Rothamir of his title. What do you think a human resource has said when they saw this nonsense? Actually, they loved it.  And arguing endlessly when every programmer walks in about what level they are. They want to get out of that game. I said, you can get out of this game. They said, fine. Sign me up. There's nothing called manager in this tier. They're gone. Then they called Java Tech Lead. They're gone. And it worked really well. And after this, this was the only title we had. They were good programmers. They didn't need titles to justify themselves. But this is the title structure we put in place. The other thing we did, and this is actually a picture from my days in Bangalore, is you fix the furniture. This is what Kit Back said in his first book. First thing you do in the first day is you fix your furniture. So we basically, at Daily Mail, we ripped out all the cubes and put in tables.  Whatever your team you're working on. In fact, we called the teams, we're called tables. That was the name of the team. They had tables. They were called tables. The other thing we took advantage of is there's no concept of dedicated leadership. There's leadership needs to morph over time. I got this a bit out of this book. You know, God's Terms and Steel. In this book, it basically says, villagers didn't have dedicated leaders until they had at least 100 villagers. That's what you needed to dedicate a leader. Now look at it. There's five guys in a manager. Like, well, where's the other 95 guys who should be managing? Otherwise, you should be working in the field with everybody else. And so basically, we got rid of the concept of having dedicated managers for teams of that size. So they were gone. And finally, it was very important, basically, to bring work to the team. One of the things that's very important is that every time you form a team, it takes a while for them to get used to each other. Even if they're all really smart and you even have standards, it takes a while to get used to each other. So you want to move into the model where you bring the work to the team. Once you have a team that works well together, bring them new work. Bring a customer in to sit down and explain to the domain, let him start solving the problems for you. So don't play musical chairs with your team. Don't get your spreadsheets out and build yourself a new team. That's a waste of effort. You're going to kill your productivity, especially when your average project length, it's got to the point where the average project size was one person and the average project length is four hours. That was a project. So if you do all these things, you will actually wind up going faster. So it's not just about doing microservices or just doing scrum, or pick your favorite topic up here. You need to do a concert of these and really accomplish what you're looking for. Because it wasn't until we had a concert of these that we had that amazing hockey stick created that if you really get this stuff right, then you're going to go from this sort of really nice delivery cycle to oh my goodness, the bottom has fell out and we're incredibly fast. This is what you're really at. If you're not here, this is where your competitors are going to be. I think that's pretty close to my time. He says yes back there. Any time for questions? I have five minutes left over. You cheated with your cards. I got a few minutes left over. I will definitely hang around as well for any other questions. Anybody have questions? Everybody? Oh, yes, sir. We don't. What we do is we are measuring our KPIs. One of the things about event bus, you can put a KPI monitor on that easily. Whether it's clicks, sales, whatever it is, you can monitor it very aggressively. If you're doing Google advertising, you know within 20 minutes whether you did a good thing or a bad thing. So we'll have an indication we may have done something really good, but it may not be our fault. It may be actually goes really far down because of another tsunami hit Japan. So you don't really know, but that's the nature of the complex problems. You're not going to know. You're going to have indicators. Down again, it's like, hey, I did it. This is me. Same thing goes down.  It stays down. It's not your fault. So you have indicators of that, but it's going to be business level indicators because it's complex problems. But the KPIs are vital to making this stuff work. A nice thing event bus, easy to build. No other questions. Wow. This is an easy audience. Is this just Singapore? Yes, sir. How do you decide which direction to go? Or try out anything? To some direction, the team is basically motivated by bringing in features to the team. So you bring a feature to a team saying this is what the business wants to accomplish. And there's so much money they have to spend and they want you to go work on this stuff. And you start working on it. And maybe you'll figure out, I can't make the business happy. In which case I should stop working on it because I can't double your click rates. I can't figure out any way to do that. Let's stop spending money on it. Let's spend money somewhere else. So to some degree, it's all about trial and error. It's about trying ideas out how aggressive you can be in that. And the faster you try ideas out, the more money you make. Yes. Something new in production. Yes. Generally, most programmers were probably going to production twice a day themselves. So basically, they'd have some idea, some slight modification. We're using a lot of microservices that were very small, you know, 15 to 100 line of code range. They would take some existing 50 or 100 line of code thing, tweak to it, try a slightly different algorithm. Maybe we're going to try a different ad-word strategy for a particular client. Maybe try misspellings, for example. So we try a whole range of misspellings. We're going to see what the impact that has. So we write a service that does the misspellings, generates those, drop that into the hopper, deploy that. We basically posted a GitHub, and it would get deployed to Amazon automatically at that point. This is pre-containers. And we see if we make any money with that. A nice thing about everything we worked in in the world. If you don't have fast feedbacks like in the real world, testing becomes more important. By the way, we went from notebook to production. There's no testing environment, no staging environment. Notebook to production. I'm talking about testing, too. I want to get into all of these things, but yes. Well, yes, because we would never let a graduate develop the right code. He's pairing. In fact, you always tend to pair in this environment because pairing teaches skills. If you want to become poly-skilled, you don't know something you don't know. So you want to become one of these full stack developers, put a front-end guy with a back-end guy. Front-end guy is going to teach the back-end guy what JavaScript is all about in CSS, and the back-end guy is going to say, here's how you build services. And at the end of the day, I have two smarter programmers. You do that every day for months. You get some monster programmers. You get full stack developers that are absolutely stunning what they can accomplish. So I can basically bring a person on board and have them productive within the first three days just by pairing them up with somebody. And they become basically the smart keyboard. The guy would tell them what to type, and he's at the keyboard. But he learns the system as he goes. But it's not a three-month training period, or I don't have to lock people into long contracts for this stuff, you're parallel. Because that's how you build full stack developers. Yes, sir. Do you let team learn in production or you allow some slack for them to learn new stuff? To some degree, we always allow the slack and they never use it. This is too much fun. This is where they have the fun. If they want to try to write a new service in Haskell instead of writing it in Java, go find it. Write a new service in Haskell. The worst thing that happens is that in Haskell they don't throw it away and write Java instead. But there's very little risk when you're doing microservices of letting people try things. Because the amount of effort in Hunterline's Code is not a huge investment. And so the ability to try things out in this environment is extremely aggressive. What we do not do is basically we're trying to get the feature done. And the team itself would tend to enforce productivity among themselves.  You didn't get anything done. What are you going to do better today? The team's going to call you out on it. No manager is necessary. Yes, ma'am. So with the deployment every so often, how long is the feedback cycle so it's going directly into production? One of the problems we were selling into is it comes back within the first 5 to 15 minutes. And how did that work? Basically, we had a huge array of monitors in various rooms monitoring our various systems. And we actually could flip them over into different skills or whatever, but we had at least 16 in every room. And basically, if you did a deployment on maybe a different algorithm to use in Japan for AdWords advertising, we'd watch the Japan numbers after we deployed. And if they start going down, they're going down overall. But you sort of hang around as a programmer if you did that deployment for the next 15 to 20 minutes to see if it looked like it was good or not. If all the numbers went down immediately, you went back and back to down. I never remember actually ever backing anything out. We always rolled forward. We always fixed it and rolled it forward because we were that fast at making changes. I'm sure we did, but I never saw an instance of it. Yes, sir. I have pairing roles.  The best they're going to not hurt you today. That's the best you can hope for. And they don't feel good about it. So my rule is my masters and my journey have to outdo them on my apprentices. I want at least 10% of my staff to probably be those masters. About 10%. And that's a pretty high ratio. I tend to get that in my projects because I go find them and recruit them. But one of the things that pairing does is it creates more masters. So you can't become a master unless you study under masters. Everybody's like PhDs. You get a PhD by studying under another PhD and there's another committee of PhDs that decide you're now a PhD. Master programs are pretty much the same way. Masters seem to know masters. And they can look at you and say, you're not a master. You're not, why? Well, they can't give you the list because they're masters. But you can study under these guys and get it. And I think, Dan North, there's a nice job when we talk about Shu Ha Ri, that the highest level, unless you can prove you can teach. And so the teaching of others is a very fundamental part of this. And so I think that's the job of my master program is to make more masters. Not write code. Make more masters. And I have a little sign that says it's really the end this time. Be sure now. It's another five minutes you scrolled away somewhere. Thank you very much. Thank you for the interesting talk.