Hey everyone, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation featuring Sadi. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Today, excited to be joined by Suresh Mathew, Sadi's founder and CEO. Suresh, great to have you. Thank you for joining us today. Glad to be here, Lisa. Talk to us about Sadi. What are you guys all about? How do you help customers, target market, vision, mission? Give us that backstory. You're all right. Sadi is just an autonomous cloud management platform. That's all it is. Now, what comes out of that is the most interesting aspect. The number one thing is your cloud cost savings. You have seen customer saving up to 50% without doing anything. The second is your performance gains. We have seen an application running 99% faster, but that's not common. On an average, we'll save 60%. Number three is availability. That is a term called FCI, failed customer interaction. That's what companies generally measure. This company's FCI was at 3.8, and it was down to 0.02 with Sadi. And there are two other outcomes here, our byproducts here. The number one is innovation velocity. The second aspect is your compliance with Sadi. Everything is locked. Everything is now autonomous. Everything is by your rules that you have specified there. So now things are super compliant for your platform. Excellent. So you talked about cost, performance, availability, compliance. Give us the backstory on the catalyst to start the company. This happened back when you were at PayPal. Give me some of the things that you saw that were really missing in the market. Yeah, that's a very interesting story. So at PayPal, I was managing the largest open-stack fleet in the world, right? And one thing we saw is it is extremely hard to keep the reliability up or availability up and efficiency at the same level. So we started looking for platforms outside to realize that there is nothing outside that can really help with this autonomously. So the only option was to deploy people, but that is not going to scale up. That's when we started developing an autonomous platform and the results were illuminating. We had two million autonomous remediation in a year executed in PayPal's finance production. When you interact with PayPal, when you transact with PayPal, there is an autonomous system behind the scenes. And that is why we thought, you know what? This is hard for industry to really develop this. Instead, we will probably build a company outside. So that's how we started SIDI. I'm going to think about that. The next time I do a transaction on PayPal, which knowing me will probably be later today. With the growth of microservices, whether it's Kubernetes or serverless, people are talking about the cost and the complexity of managing and scaling modern applications. Why is that? And what's SIDI's approach to really help remove that complexity for your customers? So Lisa, there are two dimensions that are not in favor here. One, the number of services when it comes to microservices and the release velocity. Let's take a very simple example of a Kubernetes application that is, let's say 100 applications in a cluster with the VPHP and let's say three metrics on an application. You know, the number of constraints this team will have to manage in that month is around 18,000. It's impossible for your teams to manage it. So you have to have something that can help them manage it. The teams are supposed to do the high level task. The guardrails need to be established by the teams, by your SREs and DevOps and engineers. That's what they are super good at. They know they are smart enough to put the guardrails, but they don't have time to execute everything all the time. You need a system that can pick those guardrails and run with it. You don't want to call every day night saying something is down. You want a system, you want a front warrior who can take it up and execute on your behalf based on the guidance that you have given. That is why you see constantly people talking about inefficiency in cloud. Yeah, it sounds quite efficient and there's a lot of implications that can happen for businesses, whether it's customer churn, RAM reputation, the things that really plague organizations that don't get this right. But talk about why the opportunity is still persistent. Why haven't people figured this out another way yet? Let's accept the fact it is risky and painful to optimize something because something is running stable in production. You are really trying to really make it efficient, meaning now you take the responsibility of taking that service that was running smooth, looking at the inefficiency and making it efficient. If you look at the number of such services, it's a lot. That's why these alerting systems don't help here. That's why the opportunity is still there. Even the cloud providers themselves will show you where the inefficiency is. Executing on it itself is painful. That's what we make happen. So SEDA is approach is not to build that dashboard instead make that dashboard smaller. So we take those action items and execute on your behalf in production. And that is why this opportunity exists because there are alerting tools that are not a lot of tools that can execute and decide all by itself. An autonomous system is missing in other words. Got it. You talked a number of times already in our conversation today, Suresh, about the breadth of impact of the autonomous approach. Let's kind of double click on some of that so the audience understands really the impact that can be made there. How does that specifically help with cloud cost optimization, which is a huge challenge organizations in every industry we're dealing with? Sure. So cost for that matter is the wastage right now today is almost 40% based on all the data that we have. Now it can be divided roughly into three areas. One, the right sizing of your application, the resources that are allocated to your application. Is it the right vertical size and the horizontal size? Or for Kubernetes customers, it would be the HPA, VPA combination having the right config there. The second aspect is really what infrastructure are you using to deploy these applications into, right? It could be a C5 or an M5. What works best for your application? What is the right group to be deployed? The third is your purchase plans. Where to buy, what to buy, how to buy? Is it a savings plan? Is it an RI? Is it a SPOT instance? What is the tolerance of these kinds of applications on a SPOT can we use SPOT maybe for parts of this application and things of that nature? So these are the three steps where SEDAI make things autonomous except for the last which is a financial purchasing. The first two steps, which is right sizing your application and deploying it on the right infra become autonomous with SEDAI. So the savings achieve through a mix of engineering and financial optimizations. One of the things that we talk about too when we talk about performance and availability is that the way that businesses manage that affects revenue. That is very intriguing. Of course, every business is concerned with revenue, right? Can you expand on that in terms of the way performance and availability is managed and how it affects revenue for a company? Sure. So there are a few studies out here again. One that was executed, that was done by Amazon says one percent revenue would be a result of 100 millisecond delay. So if your website runs slower the way your customers transact and the amount of transactions to closure would be a lot lesser if your site is slow or experience is poor. And it really depends on the company as well and the amount of traffic that comes in. But on an average, there is a huge impact on your revenue based on the performance and experience on your site. And for us, it is most important to measure this in production itself. We figure out what is the right config for your application to perform the best at your peak and not so bad when it's not peak. So it manages your cost while giving the best experience for your customers. It's almost like deploying an SRE into production 24-7 is always keeping an eye on what's going on and adjusting it when it's needed. That's critical for the lifeblood of any organization as we talked about some of the challenges like businesses can incur rather churn, brand reputation, lost revenue, people, businesses, especially in today's dynamic market don't have time for that. So being able to really ensure that performance and availability is there is not just keeping revenue as you said, but it's really key for these businesses being alive. You also talked earlier, Suresh, about how SIDI helps accelerate innovation velocity. Talk to me about innovation velocity and how you guys help dial up the volume. Yeah, in the current market, without innovation velocity, I think it's hard to stay relevant. So for companies, it's super important to innovate fast. If you translate that from a business to engineering aspect, it gets to a similar term called release velocity. So when you want to innovate fast and give new features to your customers, it means your engineers will have to write code and release faster. Now with release, the biggest problem is 75% of issues are caused by changes, which means release is probably the primary culprit for this unavailability or instability in production. There is a whole industry handling it. So there are incident management solutions, root costs analysis solution. SIDI will try to really not get you into that incident. We'll try to prevent incidents from happening. When you release something, we have a smart gate there that will evaluate your release against the model that we have. It knows your application, how it behaves. It knows what is the cost of it. It also knows how your dependencies react when you release something new. And it'll measure it and give you a scorecard back to your engineers. So now your engineers can look at what they have released, keep track of what is released and even go back to them and analyze it if required. We call it release intelligence as a module name. A lot of efficiencies, a lot of productivity is there. I'd love to hear, when you're in customer conversations, and I see from your website that you're really talking, and you mentioned SREs, developers. When you're in customer conversations, Suresh, what are the key differentiators that you articulate that really shine a light on the value prop that SIDI is delivering to its customers? In fact, this is the part I enjoy the most. So my job is not just about building SIDIs, about building other companies as well as helping build other companies. For one customer, their NPS score, the tail end score for them was 60. And with SIDI, it went up to 68 and then to 70. So if the impact of SIDI, if you look at it, it's not about the infrared, it's about your customers interacting with you. That experience is getting better with SIDI. That is with first customer. Now I'll talk about another customer. So this was very interesting. I got a call at 6.30 PM at night in the evening. So this VP of Edge from my customer called me saying, her customer, the end customer called her and said, your shopping cart is running a lot faster, smoother today. So what changed? So she went back and checked with her engineering and nothing got released that day. So she was looking at what was the cost and she called me and asked, you know what, did you do something there? So I went back and checked, it was really SIDI. So it is not anymore about really helping just you, it's about helping your customers as well. So that was the second one. And the last one, this is one of the largest cybersecurity company, in fact, the largest. They saw a cost saving of 36% in the first two weeks without clicking a button. So they just had to deploy SIDI, it did its RL and learning. And what was given back to them is these are the things that you can save and that was 36%. There's just some great customer examples that really clearly demonstrate the value prop that you talked about. You talked a lot about cost optimization, about performance availability. But one of the things that you mentioned in the first customer example is the customer experience. And I think that's something, Suresh, that we've noticed in the last few years, people don't have patience for poor customer experience. It is so critical to the health of an organization as is, as you said, with one of them cost savings within a couple of weeks without touching anything. So I'm sure you have many more customer examples that you can share. But where do you want to point the audience to go to learn more about SIDI and where they can maybe even get their hands on it? Nothing. It is not about an if, it's about a when. And we are not alone thinking that way. Gartner released an article the start of the year and it's called predicts for 2023 optimization. And the only vendor out there for modern workload was SIDI. For serverless, Kubernetes and ECS, they recommend or they recommend the platform like SIDI, autonomous platform like SIDI. So we were in that, we were alone in that tutorial for modern workloads. And we are also an AWS partner as well. So if you were to adopt one, please check out our website, www.sidio.io. You can book a demo, you can even start for free. You can all, you can get to a point where you're onboarding everything. And if you have any questions you can schedule a meeting with us. SIDI in a league of its own, Suresh Matthew. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, giving us the overview of the company, the catalyst to start it. And the big impact that you're helping customers across a lot of industries make, we really appreciate you being part of this CUBE conversation. Thank you, Sarah, thank you for having me here, Sibliza. It was my pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here for more action on theCUBE.


day 34. It's nearly five weeks. Today I've got a day off work so we're going to vlog. I've got a massage planned. I definitely need it. My body is feeling absolutely broken right now. I did a big leg session last night so I made sure that I had at least something for her to work on. So I'm definitely going to get her to work on my quads, a little bit of shoulder pain that I've been having lately as well as my back. So that's a plan for three o'clock. It's about nine o'clock in the morning now. I'm going to make my first meal which as you guys know is always a shake at the moment. It's something really easily digestible, easy to take with me, easy to make. You know if I've only got two minutes to go until I need to leave for work I can still make up a good shake with exactly what I need for the day. So with that said, 100 grams of oats, a cup of egg whites. I shouldn't be forgetting this. I do that every day. A cup of egg whites, one scoop of protein powder, 100 grams of oats, one banana and that's it. And some almond milk. Although I have been using soy milk lately. I actually really like the taste of soy milk.  I actually really like it. I think it tastes, I think it tastes kind of nutty and especially on cereals and things like that. It just makes for another like added taste. I really like it. So anyway with that said I'm going to get on to the shake now and I'll see you guys when I'm finished.  These cost me from five to six dollars per container. What I've found is egg whites to come in a litre container. Now honestly like as far as the price goes these are probably these are like ten dollars for a kg. These are about six dollars for half kg. So as far as price goes is pretty much the same but as far as convenience goes these are an absolute winner. They sit flat on the ground, come frozen so you can keep them frozen or defrost them like I do and they've got a little spout at the top.  I'm telling you guys. Alright guys so as you can see the shake has been consumed and we're just here editing up another one of these episodes guys. I really really hope you're enjoying them.  I just think I just think it's got to be in there but yeah I really gotta work on getting these times down.  Bit of real talk, bit of real talk right now.  I've literally slept like another two hours so I don't know what that means man. I felt sick, felt sleepy, I felt sick, I felt lethargic and I just had to crawl back upstairs and then fall back into bed so anyways I feel slightly better now. I had that meal obviously so I'm gonna have a coffee now. That's another thing man I really need to concentrate on cutting down my caffeine. You know I relied heavily, heavily on caffeine for you know the best part of the last two years because I was trying to cut my body fat and caffeine was definitely something I turned to to sort of give me that energy that I'd normally get from food so with that said you know I'm eating enough now I'm in a surplus there is no problem with that so I definitely need to cut down the caffeine. In fact if I could go caffeine free you know that'd be amazing but I can't see that happening yet so I say that and then the next thing I'm gonna do is go downstairs and make a coffee straight away but anyways we've got a nice day here let's have a look. Got some blue sky, got some cloud, cloud action but this is this is my balcony guys this is my upstairs balcony that's my bedroom and the balcony goes around here too that's the office there so it's pretty sick you know if I get someone around I've got my bedroom there it's pretty big bring them out the balcony at night have a few drinks you know how it is right so yeah anyways very happy here at the moment my flatmate is downstairs currently making a carrot cake that's what I'm talking about but anyways I'm gonna head into town get this coffee head into town go to the post office I know you guys have seen me go to the post office a lot lately well I got most of my shit I got most of my stuff but I haven't got it all so there's still some things coming and I need them to turn up so I can wear them so let us go and see what Santa has brought for me today all right so we finally made it in the car fuck I don't even know what's been wrong with me this morning hey but my let's just say my coffee went cold I went and lay down again after I made that last clip and procrastination is at an all-time high today man I don't know what the fuck's going on I know that I got to get to the gym but I just could not get my fucking my head in it to be honest but anyways it's like lunchtime now so I've wasted the entire morning which pisses me off but I yeah I don't know you just feel like that sometimes I guess the trick is not letting it ruin the entire day I realized I was feeling like that I went back to bed I mean I just did not feel like doing anything and I've I have literally scrolled through Facebook's so shit right now guys do you think that Facebook shit I do I reckon Instagram snapchat and YouTube are the three platforms that have it going on I think Facebook is losing it it's all it's all fucking bullshit I don't see anything from my actual friends all I see is sponsored ads videos and you know viral things I mean I don't fucking see any any pictures that mean anything you know Facebook's lost it so I've just spent the last like four hours scrolling through the same things over and over and over and over and over again on Facebook and it's just fucked me right off so I'm finally in the car right now coffee went cold so we're going with the monster I haven't had any caffeine today maybe that's why maybe that's why I'm feeling like shit I know but I think I'm I actually think I'm getting a cold to be honest so let's get this arms workout in the books before I start feeling like absolute shit so that at least I get a workout in now usually well I'm basically a caffeine addict so caffeine makes me feel better every single day so I can tell that after one of these I'm gonna feel better but if I am actually getting sick then it's not gonna really help at all anyways I'm going to the post office then we're going to the gym and I'll see you there here we are guys outside Lasseter's Hotel Casino I'm actually coming down here today I'm gonna change it up I've been out back for probably the last couple of weeks straight if not three weeks so it's quite a nice place down here there's a massive pool there's a sauna there's a huge cardio room it's pretty good weight set up and yeah it's just good to change it up you know so we've got the rest of the monster we've got one scoop of cardboard what is it cardboard no it's not cardboard it's glycogect glycogect one scoop of glycogect she's 25 grams of carbs and I'm feeling a little better but I'm sure I'm gonna be feeling better once I got a good pump it's arms day can't go wrong with that so we're gonna go smash it alright guys so we're almost finished and like I'm feeling alright guys we're about two thirds of the way through the workout biceps and triceps I'm feeling fucking pumped as fuck right now I'm feeling really good yeah using my new wrist straps for the tricep exercises to give me a little bit more support on my wrists but yeah biceps just absolutely smashed them I'm about to go out there and finish the workout and I'll see you guys when I'm done alright guys post workout the guns are indeed pumped I'm feeling fucking amazing to be honest a lot better than I felt before so we've got about an hour to go until my massage but it's gonna make me feel even better really glad I booked that in today especially the way I was feeling this morning man I don't know what came over me to be honest but like I said before I know myself and I know that once I get in the gym get a bit of caffeine in me like I said I feel a lot better so this is the end result we did biceps first basically just a lot of reps a lot of sets a lot of different exercises for biceps probably spent about 45 minutes on them just blasted the shit out of them after that we did triceps first exercise was a was a compound movement I did tricep dips I've never done weighted tricep dips and I think I'm finally at this at the point where I could possibly put a belt around my my waist and add maybe 10 kilo or something because I've never been able to do you know consistent sets of 10 to 12 reps but today I did so I did five working sets of 12 good good quality reps on the tricep dip and then I did some cable extensions with a rope supersetted with push downs with a rope and then my final exercise was a close grip bench press which I did on the machine so yeah pretty good workout man I'm happy with how I'm looking so I weighed in this morning guys I weighed in at 95.5 kilos in the morning it's been pretty consistent with around about a kg per week we are coming into the fifth with the well sorry we've just finished the fifth week we're coming into the sixth week of this bulk and I'm up you know five kilo so it's about a kg a week something like that so so I'll see you guys want to get to my massage because that is the next thing on the agenda and I cannot wait I'm telling you damn it's hot in this car I did get a package from the post office guys just thought I mentioned that and it was socks so there is one more package that I'm waiting for from all the shit that I ordered that day on eBay and it's probably my favorite thing so once again I'll tell you guys when I get it I was just about to leave for the massage and would you look would you look at that look what's waiting for me at home a carrot cake freshly baked by the housemate you can't go wrong with that so I'll be digging into that when I get home that's for sure but for now post-workout meal was a shake pretty much the same thing I had this morning something easy because I've got five minutes until I need to fucking get to this massage so leg up where to how long you going for yeah 12 months living analysis all right guys we're home now and I'm just finishing off my first piece of carrot cake and there's gonna be plenty more up to that but some before I head around to my sisters I'm gonna go around there later on I'm gonna do some editing I'm going to get a couple more episodes in the books so I'll sit down there and crank out a little bit of editing for the next couple hours so should be good and heading to my sisters tonight I think she's gonna cook me dinner so that's good because there's definitely no saying no to anything now carrot cake fucking morning teas you know any dinner that's gonna get cooked for me I'm gonna eat it we're definitely on the game train at the moment 4,000 calories plus per day so whoever I can get food from I'm gonna take it because food's expensive you know food's definitely one of my biggest bills throughout the week so always looking for free food just like this carrot cake which is fucking good all right guys I am as tired as I probably look right now but I am gonna call it a night and say farewell for tonight we weighed in today at 95.5 kgs in the morning that is where we're at five weeks in like I said at the start of the series I had been bulking officially for probably a week before that so officially you know I have been bulking for six weeks now six sevens 42 42 days of bulking and I have no regrets so far so I'm feeling really good so far feeling good in the gym feeling strong feeling full I'm setting you know I'm setting PB's it's it's a great feeling and I knew it was gonna come I I knew that I had to change my mindset finally from cutting into bulking so it's a beautiful night absolutely beautiful night it's raining I love it when it rains in other springs yeah it's it makes it so much more special when you only have like 20 days of rain per year you really appreciate it so I'm gonna just enjoy that I've probably spent about five hours editing it's like midnight right now I went around to my sisters had a good night we had some dinner and I've spent yeah probably about four or five hours editing editing right up to this point actually so all of the episodes are done I've probably got about seven in the bank to release over the next two weeks so I'm gonna take a little break it's gonna be nice a nice break because I have been thinking a lot about YouTube lately it's been consuming my thoughts a little bit too much maybe so it'll be good to have a break and I will be back to the camera before I know it I'm sure but it is a nice feeling having a few vlogs in the bank to release of the next few days so we've got the mr. Olympia this weekend I'll have to vlog this weekend when the Olympia is on because that is gonna be amazing I cannot wait oh my I can't wait to see Kevin Laverne out there as well as all the other guys it's gonna be a great show so I advise you to watch it if you're into bodybuilding of course if you're not maybe not it's a bit of a freak show but if you are into body building obviously you can appreciate all the hard work and discipline that's gone into building a physique like that it's not that I'd actually want to look like that but as far as actually appreciating what goes into building a physique it's pretty amazing so anyways I'm gonna stop talking I'll catch you guys in the next one have a great day train hard eat well I hope you guys are enjoying the vlogs more to come


Okay, so we've been talking about sediment transport in terms of the flow characteristics and the boundary layer, the base of flows, and the Bernoulli effect, which less grains off the bottom, and the difference between bed load and suspended load transport. So now we're going to get a little bit more quantitative by using this Holstrom diagram. So it plots grain size along the x-axis and flow velocity, which is u in our Reynolds number equation, on the vertical axis. And both of these are log scale, so you have a one millimeter grains here, the next line represents 2, 3, 4 on up to 10, and the same thing along the flow velocity axis here. And what this diagram shows is the flow speeds at which different grains are transported or deposited, plus the way that they are transported. So the way you read this diagram is we'll start at grain size of one millimeter. And if the flow speed is 0.1 centimeters per second, it's in this deposition zone here, that means it's not actually going to be transported. If the flow speed increases up to this point here, you start getting a transport of that grain. It becomes possible. So that transport is possible at 4, 5, almost 6 centimeters per second. So we look at this spot here. We can basically read this line as at 6 centimeter per second flow, a one millimeter grain might move. I say might because it does depend on the characteristics of the bed and how far it's sticking up into the flow. As the flow speed gets even faster, it's more and more likely to be transported as bed load. And so in the zone all the way from here up to this next line, it's moving along the bed as a combination of saltating and rolling grains. By the time you get to here, you get to the erosion zone. And that looks like it's about 10, 20, 30, 40, at about 40 centimeters per second. We're getting into the speed where it mostly erodes. So at 40 centimeters per second, one millimeter grains are usually eroded. And the difference is that at this bottom end, the grains might move a little bit. But as you go faster and faster, the flow gets faster and faster, and the boundary layer shear gets greater and greater, the grains are more likely to be lifted by the Brunnerly effect and washed downstream. And that means that you often do not get those grains deposited and they wouldn't be left in the rock record. So we can look at it a different way, and I will choose this orange color here. We can look at it in terms of a specific flow speed. So let's choose a flow speed of 10 here, and we can ask which grain sizes will actually be transported by that flow speed. So if we trace this along here, we get all the way over to this grain size, which is about two millimeter size grains. So everything that's smaller than that size, it can actually be moved by a flow that's at 10 centimeters per second.


st these guards yeah asking luc that so long as you appear to be the spine even if a bit or more ornate you should be fine there are a few odd members with those same uniforms albeit they are not sent out anymore you should be ok there you are well are these older higher ranking members are they going to be ones that need to be mindful of the people who give that body of names hmm I myself are not familiar to them they are simply known as higher lieutenants we usually speak their title but not their name I see you and do not recognize you you may be in a bit of trouble so I suggest you make sure they do not see you alright feel enough well now let's see if this actually works I'm going to walk up to this big bone golem mm-hmm put your hand on your face cover your eyes it does so but it has no it just like puts its bony hand up to its face although it looks like you could easily see through but uh covers it sockets as best as it can when you do that would I be able to look back at our do you think you can figure out just to change this thing what the bone golem mm-hmm they've been doing weird things before that's all perhaps I can try and conjure up something I'll see what I can find thank you she looks it over and Nathaniel what else are you doing with this bone golem uh nothing my hope is that when somebody next sees this golem they announce loudly something akin to who did this it's just a prank bro something that regularly happens in the spine of death I'm going to be angry this is my ward system for right now yeah that's fair Korra finishes her conjuring and she speaks up it appears that they have attempted to imbue magical capabilities into their summons albeit at a cost a few of them seem to have some sort of drawback either frailty or difficulty in function but they are capable of casting magics like you or me I don't like that they all rather frail to see if you can see what exactly they're casting or what effects they're bringing I don't know it's not super important I can take these things down regardless yes it seems a few common necromancies but more or less nothing spectacular I assume Laszlo wanted to start small so as to not put too much pressure on this body I assume larger magics will require more trade-off see in a way I know how to do it's a ward a very straightforward way of dealing with things don't you it's gotten us this far don't knock it the only way I was told I'm afraid well far beard for me to complain your friend is right I've made it this far she continues off what are you guys doing what are you guys doing with the archers they're smarter than the other ones that we saw or if they're just dressed fancier they're basically dressed fancier they're scanning the room they have very simple orders do they have bows and arrows I want you to patch your head then lob your stomach it does not follow those orders does it have a bow and arrow or a crossbow that's very cool show me where you keep your bolts it simply just turns its hip without turning the rest of its body you can see attached there is a kind of quiver full of a bunch of bolts do you have a bolt loaded in right now it simply lifts it's while looking at it you can see it is it is loaded oh very good give me all of the bolts that aren't loaded it simply turns its hip back away from you I'll take these no it takes it away from you oh away from me don't mind oh I was going to say you do far better with a dead audience I did not expect that dead creatures would be so sassy luke walks up they they are under the command of prod style himself he did not want to take any chances so he wanted his own personal summons to keep guard of this storage room that's very smart can he be alerted by these summons of weird activity he has not imbued that function on them he has only given them the minimum required function in order to keep this place safe besides and he just kind of like has the slightest smile why would any enemies come to this pocket dimension I know that's also fair but you know security security is important skeleton how far is blotstride I assume he's above us they will not answer for you any information you try to clean they will not be able to respond they are not alive they are no more than automatons well they are going to let us through right I he steps through alright fuck how to roll what if you'd like to go searching around you may but it could lead to further complications yeah I mean we have we have we have shit to do you know we have mirth to save right now yeah walking towards you simply just ice that other room while walking towards you the stairs do we need to keep an eye on you too what do you see nothing right now well I don't trust you yeah I don't want to I don't want to do it too but that was sussy honestly I trust Kara implicitly god god damn it she's gonna incite you back and she notices that you are all trying to to you're all raised from Enoch who's just like laser focused on mirth she she sighs I'm not going to go rogue I'm simply wondering if a few of my research papers are down here who knows what else they've stolen from me that might be in this place if we survive and everything turns out all okay we can come back down and check because then no one will give a clap very well I certainly this place simply doesn't sit well with me what also if you do have your notes here and we are able to clue this place out is it not better than that dog practice remains in a dead world yes or destroyed I intend to burn my papers we're able to collect them all we can do a come do a come over here before we leave thank you so you guys going up the stairs yeah I'll just share for Renee and Nathaniel to go first since you know she probably have the head honchos up first I ascend you going up you going up and I ascend you going up and as you do you enter into the Athenium the second floor of Vertheim where you see a long hallway full of spine of death necromancers please tell me we don't recognize any of them you'll have to find that out on the next session because that is what we're going to call it today


Hello everybody, welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Of course, my name is Bryce This is just a very quick video of myself going through the Sun salutations or Surya namaskar a and Surya namaskar B as I say in this video There are nine vinyasas and Surya namaskar a and there are 17 Vinyasas and Surya namaskar B. I count the vinyasas in Sanskrit in this video I have also done a more modified variation of the Sun salutations in the fact that I am not going to be jumping in this video jumping into Chaturanga or Jumping forward from the downward-facing dog position. I know that a lot of yoga teachers out there will put up videos that it's more like a Demonstration will they'll do the full extent of the transition. So for myself, I thought for you guys Since I've gotten so many people asking about modifications and variations that I would show you how to properly step back and step forward I also want to comment on Chaturanga If you are Chaturanga is weak lowering All I want you to do is just hold the plank and then move into upward-facing dog from the plank position Remember that these these these things take time to a whole life practice You're not going to learn to do it smoothly in one day it's going to take a lot of a falling and Slipping and being messy on your mat before things start to come together and the body starts to find its own alignment in this Transition once again, I want to remind everybody Sun salutations do not mean Sun worship The Prana are the upward moving energy of the body is shown by the symbol of the Sun Just as the Upana are the downward flowing energy of the body is shown by the symbol of the moon Surya Namaskar the Sun Namaskar Salutations that's a greeting. So what you're doing in the Sun salutations is you are warming your body up, basically You are creating heat in the body.   Where is the blood flowing? Okay, good luck. And if you have any more questions, please ask me down in the comment section below Good morning, everybody. It is about five o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, December I believe it's the sixth today I'm gonna be doing Surya Namaskar and Surya Namaskar B But before I ever start my Sun salutations as I've told you guys before I always do a little bit of warm up I bring my right foot forward Lining my knee and my ankle in one straight line and dropping the hips This causes like a sizzling sensation in the left hip flexor to open up the lower back here I'm going into a half Hada Manasana a little bit later in the practice. I'll do a full Hada Manasana, which is a split posture This is just to start to wake up the hamstring as well as my stomach pulling my stomach in as you can see my right Extended foot is always flexed that is because we do not want to passively stretch We passively stretch we get injured and so by flexing we're activating into the right big toe Which is bringing an activation up the inner thigh now I've changed sides with the left leg leading the knee and the ankle are of course and in alignment as I dropping down into the Right hip again creating that sizzling sensation now in the right hip flexor That's what a back been as basically it's opening that hip flexor and that so as muscle and now I'm stretching into the left leg Flexing my left foot. So look at my right left toe It's flexed and so into my inner thigh and up into my perineum is now being activated Which is super important for mullabunda even though mullabunda is found in your perineum or your crotch It is activated by the big toe and in the inner thigh And now I think I'm just gonna push back into a down dog just my first down dog of the practice just to wake things up Pressing into my hands. I'm not hot and sweaty yet. I will be trust me by the end of this I will be hot and sweaty So I'm just starting to let that lymphatic system flow and activate get the blood flow now in the sun Salutations I am going to do them modified which I said in the beginning So I'm going to be opting to step forwards and backwards and not jump just so you can see what that looked like egg I'm inhale my arms are up our eyes to my thumbs and do a exhale. I'm forward folding hands by my feet Trini inhale. I'm going to lift my head up lengthen my spine and Then chatwadi exhale.   I'm coming into downward facing dog six vinyasa here I am for five breaths so while I'm in here as you can see I walk walked my feet in a little bit That's traditional for traditional yoga the downward facing dog is going to be a little bit more narrow That's because I'm warming up my serratus interior in my upper back for the jump backs and jump back and jump throughs to come Pressing into my feet pressing into my heels pressing into my fingers pushing the floor away from me Portracting my shoulders pulling my belly and tucking my chin in looking towards the navel and then sub to inhale I'm coming forward with my head up lengthen the spine Ashtow exhale forward fold Now by inhale arms up eyes to the thumbs looking towards my thumbs exhale hands by my side back to point zero positions on the CTE a Come inhale arms up eyes to the thumbs first vinyasa Dwaye exhale forward fold second vinyasa Trini inhale head up lengthen my spine third vinyasa Chat Wadi exhale jumper step back lower down fourth vinyasa punch it inhale upward facing dog fifth vinyasa Shut exhale downward facing dog sixth vinyasa.  It's a very linear movement forwards and backwards But when we get into Surin on the scar B that's next we're going to get into the feminine energy the reciprocal energy the energy That moves in cycles where we get deeper into the movement of the hips Which isn't going to spring us into more of a deeper understanding of mulabanda and of course both men and women carry both energies Sub to inhale come forward head up lengthen your spine Ashtow exhale fold Now by inhale arms up eyes to the thumbs look towards your thumbs exhale hands by your side some the city point zero position Surin on the scar B three times Nine vinyasas in Surin on the scar a 17 and Surin on the scar B a come inhale bend your knees arms up eyes to the thumbs Keep your legs together Dwaye exhale take a forward fold Trini inhale head up lengthen your spine Chat Wadi exhale jumper step back lower down Punch it inhale upward facing dog Shut exhale downward facing dog now sub to inhale step the right foot forward back hill grounds down arms up eyes to the thumbs There of a drossin a digging into the hips Ashtow exhale hands to the mat step back and lower Now by inhale up dog Da shy exhale down dog a kind of shy inhale left foot forward right hill grounds down arms up eyes to the thumbs Do a shy exhale hands to the mat step back and lower Try a little shy inhale up dog Just do it a shy exhale down dog once again five breaths here.  This is the best posture to find your bundas pull the belly in The belly goes back towards the spine and up towards the solar plexus as the perineum the crotch pulls up as well inner thighs are active And here we go punch it a shot inhale come forward head up 15th vinyasa Short shy exhale fold 16th vinyasa Supta Dasha Benjani's arms up eyes to the thumb 17th vinyasa exhale some as DT One more time point zero position and some as DT he egg and inhale arms up eyes to the thumbs Dway exhale forward fold Trini inhale head up length in the spine Jut Dwadi exhale jumper step back lower down Punch I inhale upward facing dog Shucked exhale downward facing dogs up to inhale right foot forward back. He'll grounds down arms up eyes to the thumbs Ash now exhale fold or lower down rather Nah by inhale up dog Dasha I exhale down dog. It cut a shot. He'll left foot forward right.


Okay, thank you very much for coming along today. Don't get into the light. My name is Peter Brown Elm. I work with one of the co-founders of Code Positive, a Drupal agency based in London. And, yeah, I'm here to help you learn about saying no. A small disclaimer on this fact is I don't think I'm very good at saying no. I think it's one of those characteristics that I have very slowly had to develop. And so this talk today is as much my learnings over my time as a developer and manager as it is any practical understanding. I don't claim to be an expert at this, but I am actively trying. And most of what I plan to cover today is related to work that we've done for various clients, some of it more successfully than others. So I hope you're better with me. You're welcome to ask questions as we go, although I've made a rather ambitious talk for myself now, so hopefully we'll get to some proper questions at the end. And then, you know, I'm around until Saturday morning. We've got lots of time for questions if we need to. So there we go. Yes. I've been a developer for about 30 years, professionally for 20. I helped found the UK Drupal community more than 10 years ago. I've been part of a few startups over the years with various degrees of success. I've tried to give up being a programmer and focus on the organizational process to actually, you know, design software and get good software design, well, good software planning done in the first place. I still get around to doing a fair bit of programming now and then. My company is Code Positive. I'm one of the directors, Robert, my co-founder is in the audience over there with his camera. We've been working for a long time in various fields from London. We've worked with many charities, including Greenpeace and Save the Children and Christian Aid. We worked with government and a number of enterprise clients like SagePay and WorldPay. And WorldPay is one of our current clients. It was the largest IPO in the UK in the last year. So they're not an easy client and we've learned a lot from them. One of the specialities of us as a team is that we build things at last. We've built things a lot for a long time. And building Drupal sites at most last in practice for about seven years has meant that we had to work quite hard at this idea of saying no. And we've now realized that the whole process of saying no and building good things at last requires that we get involved and change the organizations rather than just designing the software. Over the years I've done a lot of training. When it comes down to it, pretty much all the training we've done to help anyone understand software has only had one important fact. And that is say no. That's it. Summarize my guidance to anyone wanting to build some technology. It's always been just say no. That makes life much easier. But there's more to it than that. But I will get some backup. So your job really, if you're going to build good software, especially good software that lasts, is saying no. And you have to say it over and over again. It really is the most important thing you need to learn how to do. And Steve Jobs has said that many times and it was for him one of the foundations of Apple's success. Apple says no. And you say yes only when you have to. There's a problem with saying no. And I was reading about this while planning for my talk. Humans don't like it. We are psychologically, perhaps even physically biased against no. When approached with different options, some negative, some positive, with the same level of intensity, humans are afraid of no. Our brains focus on the negative. It means that if you have to say no a thousand times, you've got a lot of work to do to help yourself not be seen as a blocker, to not be seen as the one who gets in the way. And you have to try somehow to not be negative. Saying no and being negative are quite different things. And so perhaps that's the art. And that's the process of saying no with the second half of the title of the talk, which was without saying no that much. And really you've got to do some sleight of hand. You have to follow the process of saying, you know, pick any card, but then making sure they choose the card you've chosen for them.  The last time I practiced my sleight of hand magic was when I was about 10. I would have embarrassed myself. But I did spend some time practicing card tricks. I have decided to, you know, take a different route. So if you're not going to bother with the rest of my talk, I'll give you my summary now. Although we can learn to say no as a personality trait and just say no straight to someone directly, really in practice saying no is a gem. You have to start with yourself, start with the tech team, and then slowly move out through the entire organization. So we have to say no because people are asking for the wrong things.  To slowly reduce the amount of no you have to say is to start changing the way in which your clients and your organization thinks about technology and thinks about what it wants to achieve with technology. It's quite a long process. But there are a few steps to it. Each one feeds into the next and each one feeds back into the previous one. But you said in my story today, I'll take you through the various steps that we have to go through to achieve a level of reducing the amount of no that we have to say as technologists in some form. So I had planned when I originally presented this talk and when I proposed this talk again here to have a rather technical presentation. I had a number of graphs. I had some pyramids of decision making structures and that sort of thing. But in thinking about Steve Jobs as a thousand no's and realizing and saying our negativity bias, I realized that the process of saying no is a universal one. It's not just about tech. It's about any endeavor, anything we want to achieve that is big and requires focus, requires this art of saying no. Staying no pisses people off. It always will. It will make you enemies. It will make you opponents. And you have to really work at that and you have to accept that that is going to happen. So when you are the doombringer, the naysayer, the one who says you can't have that shiny thing on top of your website. The one who says no, we have to actually stick to the patterns and stick to the rules. People will get frustrated. So I realized that you need more than just a plan. You have to actually be a hero. You have to take a whole hero's journey that's far more than just a few actions, a few techniques you have to learn. It requires consistent persistence to get success. Perhaps like Dries' keynote. I'm going to rephrase Dries' keynote as the hero's journey. So one of my favorite books was Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is an amazing story about how, well, published in 1949. It's not really a story. It's a story about the stories. It's the mono myth, the fact that if you look at all the major myths in society, you can possibly boil them down to a single story that begins and goes through a series of events that ends. And you find the same story in many religions and many myths and most famously in Star Wars, which is very explicitly based on the hero's journey. So I have done a number of talks with the Star Wars theme. I'm not going to stick with Star Wars for long on this one. I'll move on. So here we go. I'm going to change my talk. The story of my talk, the title of my talk is no longer How to Say No, but becomes The Hero of Thousand Knows.  Instead of giving you a nice set of triangles and practical, technical analysis of why no works, I'm going to now tell you a bit of a legend and a story about some characters and a good adventure story. I am immediately breaking my Joseph Campbell journey of the hero and mixing my archetypes. And I'm going to jump and use a lot of tarot archetypes in this one as well because it also tells an archetypical journey. I've fitted more into my talk for today. So here we go. You have the great evil in software, in technology, in any big endeavor, in any great story. You must have the grand villain. We shall not even say our villain's name. The villain is there. This is the villain we must fight and so you defeat. This villain rules our world today, especially in a technological environment. So, yes, bear it in mind, we have to defeat the villain. And we begin in the wasteland. This wasteland is the place we're ruled by the grand villain. When we have a technological environment where the villain is the one in charge, where everything is possible and we just continue to add new things in and we randomly change our scope and we randomly add pieces to our spec, we end up with this incredible wasteland. We end up with ruins and half-complete things and traps and dangers and trying to fix something means you break something else.   Come on, it's easy. You said it was easy and now you release it and you broke all those things. That's what happens if you just allow the great evil to win. Technically, that technological state is known as the big ball of mud. If you add great evil word after great evil word on top of your plans and you keep evolving, you simply get a great big tangled mess and you can't fix it, you can't adjust it, you add more to it, you can paint it, you can make it look pretty, you can put some facades up, you can add some shiny trinkets and maybe some, you know, whizziness here and there. But it's a big ball of mud and it gets you nowhere. So we have to fight the great evil and our hero's journey begins. We have to understand the power of no. And we begin with our hero, someone, a lone person in the tech team deciding to face the great evil, to head out and change the way the world works. And so this is the hero who has to now not be seen as negative, but take charge and say no. And there's a process for establishing credibility and a process for saying no, is that first of all you have to have your own power. And if you represent the tech team, if you represent a project manager, you've got to go out and be able to say no, because this is how we do things. You have to start the beginning process of establishing some kind of credibility, establishing some trust, because a lot of the time when people fight you and people are asking for these random things, they don't really trust the techies. They don't really trust that the developers are already able to get what they want. They just think that they're in charge and they're going to tell you what to do. And you have to do it. You have no power. You have no ability to actually manage your project. You have no skill for doing it. And so the first step to saying no is establishing your own power. The tech team, project managers, whoever is in charge of some tech project must be able to very clearly say these are our tools and this is how we work. If you can back up your no with practical reasons that say, well, yes, we're going to work in this way. We're going to make sure it goes to the development environment. Then we're going to test it. Then we're going to release it. We have a testing process. Here you can see our backlog. We've got analytics. We can watch what's going on. You can first establish a level of competence. And people need to see that the tech team is competent. And too many times I'm going to bring it up again because I thought I could give up on it. And every time I go visit organizations, I keep finding this reason's head. The first thing that a tech team needs to do, programmers need to use get. Use some form of source control. And unfortunately, I keep discovering programming teams and companies where no one actually manages their source. And so I'm going to bring it up again because it's a major peeve. And the fact that these basic tools are often not there. And there's no way you can establish any kind of credibility if people don't trust that you can deliver anything. And if you don't use the basics, you're never going to get there. The next challenge that a tech team needs to face is you have to not be the grumpy techie that sits there and says, ah, can't do it. Give me a proper spec. It's not clear. You have to manage the interface saying no cannot be this frustrated technical response. So if possible, you need someone who can understand both the business and the tech and the users to be able to act as an interface. You've got to have a clear way to communicate and make sure that you're not responding with pure negativity. When someone comes along and says, can you do this? They generally personally believe that's important. It's something that they already want and they feel will benefit the company, the project, whatever.   You'll be fired, you'll be replaced. Something will happen. You cannot exist in that environment where you are defending everything against an organization in a negative way. So you have to understand the basic empathy of saying no. And the first step that if it's your responsibility to handle this interface is you need to understand how to respond. Simply first empathize. First say, yes, I understand. I see why you need that. I'm sure someone may find that beneficial. But it's not going to happen right now. We'll add it to our backlog. You have to be able to manage some kind of de-escalation and keep away from confrontation whenever possible. And so there is a bit of a magic that happens when someone takes on this task and they're new. And the magician is about being able to begin, well, the magician in the tarot, is about beginning something new. And the power of actually entering an organization without any knowledge of the complexities of what's there and just saying, no, we're not going to do that. It's obvious. And if you're not new and you're still trying to take control, it really makes a difference if you can actually tell people in some nicely written email with a clear proposition, things are going to change. We need to do this. It's going to help us achieve our goals. I need you to start following these steps now if you want to start interacting with the tech team and adding new features to our software. It's just a basic assertion. As long as you have your team in order, it will allow you to make a very big step and change the culture with a bit of an initial push. But that only lasts for a little while. You can fake it. A lot of that beginning might just be pretending that you can do it, pretending your confidence, faking it to make it. Because there's no way you can get your tech team house in order in an instant. And the only way you can actually get your team in order is by having the space to actually think about things and actually do things right. And if you're in a situation where you have this great big ball of mud and all sorts of requests coming in all the time, there is no time to think.  You're constantly responding. Everything just perpetuates itself. You buy a little bit of time by now saying, we're going to change this. Here's a new process. But I'm not going to last that long. People slip back in the old ways. So you have to get your defense in first. You've got to actually dive in there and start planning for the future. And so our magician, our hero, has to go and find the priestess. And the priestess has the gift of foresight. She can see the future. And one of the key tools you need to be able to manage the no process and by not saying it by sleight of hand is the roadmap. There's lots of time we talk about agile, not medium roadmap. We're just working with backlog. We're going sprint by sprint. But if you just have a backlog, especially if you're working in an environment where people and the organization you're working with doesn't quite understand what they're asking and you're shoving everyone's request into a backlog.  And what I've seen and what I've done many times is a kind of January the first day back of work, find all those tasks, you never go around to doing last year and delete them.  So it's the nuclear option. A roadmap is a different story. A roadmap helps you see the future. It helps you get people thinking and get their ideas out, make them feel that they're being listened to and you collect their ideas. It can be as simple as getting people in a room, post-it notes on a wall. It can be more advanced. You can use the story mapping. You can have some techniques to it. But really, in practice, your job is to sit down and to listen, to understand the state of your organization or your client, to understand what their vision is and to show them that things take time. We are generally promoting agile methodologies and time matters. We're going to release and evolve and update. If you just have a ball of mud and you're never going to update it, you can just paint it. It doesn't really matter. No one's going to look any closer. The facade is fine. But if anything needs to last, you need to be able to take time into, well, yes, to actually plan for time. So ask why, collect ideas, get down to the reasons, layouts, a thematic roadmap if you can, group ideas together and say, ah, well, we can think about this and this and this. And let people see that they've been listened to, make your roadmap visible to the organization, and then have a very clear process by which ideas come in from someone who's quite excited about something and they say, ah, yeah, wouldn't it be great? I saw our clients had this or our competitors had this and let's add this. And you have to guide them carefully to understanding time, scope, and the effects on the business and all the other consequences. And so being able to clarify a request process makes a big difference. And we found that we're using product management software now. We sort of teach our clients to say, think about your website as a product. It's something that actually does for your business. We separate our tech backlog from the client's ideas list. My little QR codes that I've scattered throughout my talk, if you want to try them out, we'll take you to various locations. There are a number of different product management tools you find online. We use one called ProdPad. There may be others that are better. And they just help keep the conversation about new ideas and possibilities out of your backlog. And so we can talk about things that really welcome ideas and slowly evolve them over time. We don't have to go to a separate breathing room, so we don't constantly have to fight back and push all the time. The basics of metrics get very become important. We talk a lot and people have lots of ideas about what metrics and analytics should do and that sort of thing. But really, if you're starting from scratch and an organization doesn't understand it, it's very hard. It takes a long time to establish a culture where you can measure things and get beyond bounce rates and hits and that sort of thing. But when you can start getting people to show, to say, okay, this feature is going to be measured by the number of sign ups, by the number of things over, the number of people clicking this button, you can start to actually get people thinking about how they will affect their, well, how your metrics will affect their plans and how their plans will affect the business. And that's a very important process to buy yourself time. So in our hero's journey, the magician works with the high priestess and the two of them use their powers to now start taking on the outside world. And the first thing they have to work with is they need to get a major ally. And the first ally they need to work with in the great myth is the Empress or the representative of the natural world. And if you're running a project, a website, particularly one that must last, you've got to start managing the no process, managing the resistance by limiting the options. In the natural world, which the Empress represents, there is constant change. There are always new things, but there is also consistency. So your job is to start establishing consistent foundations and allowing the process of no management to be constrained so that people aren't asking for every possibility. They're asking for realistic possibilities that you know you can cater for. So you can take them through that pick a card, any card process that reduce the number of possible options they have. So the first step that we found we need to tell people to do is to think about their users. They're coming to you with all these ideas because they're thinking about features. And that's where you always have to counter things with saying no. So turn it around, get them to stop thinking about features, start thinking about what their users are going to need to do. And so start teaching the people you're working with to follow a user-centered process because that means you can ask the kind of question that's saying, that's nice, who's going to use it, why do they need it, how important it is to them. Lots of organizations seem to be afraid of personas, they think that they have to hire an agency that's going to charge them thousands of pounds to come up with these personas and they can have posters on the wall and do market research and stuff. Maybe that's a very valid process for creating personas for some kind of organizations but in practice to start with just sit down and write down a few notes about the people who would be using a website or any other bit of software. I don't quite get why we've made personas such a hardcore, scary thing that almost every client I've dealt with seems afraid of. You just got to make it something simple and say, let's get them done. Once you have personas, then you need to start working on a style guide. You've limited the kind of feature request and the practical functionality you're trying to build by telling people to focus on their users. You're trying patterns and limitations visually because when you have people coming along and saying, I want this new page or I want this new feature, most of the time they're thinking in terms of pictures. If you're not a techie, if you're not a programmer, if you haven't worked much with websites, you're still thinking in terms of something visual. So a style guide gives you the ability to constrain the design process and to work with someone in a way that they understand. This is hard work. We've only half managed to get them done for lots of our clients, but they still make a big difference. And the more complex one you'll find a few talks on here is Pattern Lab, which talks about atomic design, which if you can get right, allows you to take your designs from tiny little pieces up into ever more complex elements so that when someone says, I want this new page on the website and you feature, you don't ever go back to a designer. You just pull together pieces of a puzzle. You have all the pieces. You just assemble them. And so someone says, I want this. You say, great, choose a page layout. Good. Choose the design styles that you want for your teasers. Choose this, choose that. Often if you've got a style guide with semantic rules, they don't even have those options. They can just say, we're going to, you want to do this, you're linking to these things. You have rules that say, our website will always link to this kind of content in this way. Then they have all the options they want, but they only have one or two, really. You can very quickly constrain the kinds of options people have, and they can very happily feel that they have some kind of power and control. Sometimes they'll be grumpy and say, ah, but I want this and that. But really with a little bit of practice and people realize that you are really empowering them to design pages without you, especially if you give someone a style guide in a format that they can play with. Our clients can go and they design the pages themselves, come back to us, and there's no designer work. It's all done from the pre-designed pieces and the puzzle set that we have given them. So style guides are very important. Having consistent building patterns. When you display a listing of a certain type of content, when you display a certain kind of teaser or a relationship with things, why do you want to reinvent the wheel? You want to just have a standard set of patterns? Say, alright, that's called directory. A directory works like this. We're going to have a new kind of content. We're going to have a listing. We're going to have relationships with them in these ways. So standard patterns work pretty well. The way that we found has made sense for us to start building patterns as we've learned to the team to use BAHAT and other forms of testing is we found that specification, by example, is a way of bringing your testing into a human language upfront and slowly writing out our build patterns at a technical level as a series of assertions that we can then build automatic tests from. So it's a long process, but it has been very powerful for the team to slowly start being very consistent and having your testing done upfront in a language that's understandable to the client. So BAHAT is very useful. Specification, by example, is one of the more complex or the higher level implementations of something like BAHAT or any kind of behavioural testing. Once you get to this point and if we've established some metrics before, we can begin to optimise the patterns and style guides. You then have the ability to actually measure whether a change in the layout of some page will have a positive or negative effect and you can adjust your style guides accordingly. So you can slowly evolve and optimise a project. Even if you've spent your time getting yourself aligned with a natural order of things and you've put all your effort into style guides and good processes and patterns and you have the impress on your side, you're still going to have to deal with Hippo. So if you don't know what Hippo stands for, Hippo is this incredible decision-making system used by most organisations called Highest Paid Persons' Opinion. And that's how most decisions within a software project get done within a large organisation. And when Hippo's rule, you as the tech team at the bottom are going to have no way to say no. You can't say no. The boss has said, we're going to do this. We're going to launch on Friday afternoon with this whole new feature that we were only told about two days ago. The boss says it, no matter how much we complain, it's going to happen. So you have to get past the Hippos. No matter what you do technically, the Hippos will take you down. So your job now is to get the Hippos on your side. You've got to go and start talking some management speak. You've got to talk to the emperor. He's over here. And the emperor likes to make rules. And the emperor feels powerful because he's in charge of the rules. So you have to start working with those who might be the managers, who might be the bosses, who might like working with the rules, and tell them that now they have the authority to make some new rules and to really start achieving some return on investment and some major technical achievements. But they can only do it and if we establish some rules, and they're the ones who should lead that charge and help you with some processes. This is generally another task of manipulating egos. But often you'll find that people really do want to build good software. They just don't know what it means. And your job, as you slowly evolve outwards from solving technical problems to dealing with aesthetics, now becomes dealing with the way in which the organization as a whole chooses what they want to do with their software. How do they make decisions? How do you say this idea goes in? This one's more important than that. And so you have to look at decision-making processes. And then you can say, great, I like your idea. We have this nice process that helps you flesh it out and the boss has said you must follow this process. Within a large organization you need to get these processes in place for any kind of asset that must last. You've got the governance of the images that an organization will upload into its repository on your site. It really should be in place. Otherwise, in a year or two's time you have this giant mess of digital assets that no one can properly manage. And so data management and data governance is something that you'll find referenced all over the place. Lots of people will talk about it. It's very easy to talk to your clients about governance. Actually getting them to introduce and adhere to governance is much harder. So we are definitely expecting our hero to be much stronger and far bolder to be able to take on the hippos. A very useful tool. And in fact, many of the tools and books I'm referring to now have been advanced and pioneered by a man in the UK called Paul Bogue. And he has been one of the people behind the UK government's digital service manual. And I admit to being a bit of an anarchist and having spent a lot of my life fighting against the powers that be. But in the last few years I have generally been recommending the UK government's documentation on how to build agile software as the best I've found and the best way to deal with your clients. So the digital service manual is, well in this case, a process whereby you sit down with your organization, with your client, and you write down what the website's going to do, who the team is in charge of it, how they're going to work. And you produce a manual and a guide that will establish your organizational boundaries as a tech team. And you go and you say, all right, when you want something to happen, these are the people you're going to speak to. Just be clear, really start working within an organizational framework and establish this policy, make it written down, make sure any managers know about it and get them to buy into it. If they see you as an authority around the website, you are then able to say no and start working with management in terms of peers. They feel that they've helped establish a center of power and then it's much easier for you to stand up to them because they have ratified and approved the various rules that you've put in place. They've seen your guide, your manual, and the company starts to know that this is the way in which things get done. Again, I've stuck my, I've tried to be clever and stick all my links in this talk and work into my QR codes on the bottom. I may have failed because I did realize that my attempts to use my camera to photograph something with two QR codes meant that I didn't get anything working anyway. I have a link in one of my QR codes there to Paul Bogues guide for creating a service manual if you want to try to find it. The next thing that you have to work on, and this is something that we ourselves are now actively trying to learn, is how do you convince an organization? How do you allow an organization to understand what testing and optimization really means? Because although people will go and say, yes, we want to test it, yes, we should optimize that, if the management doesn't buy into that process, the management still feels that they can just make a choice and it'll happen no matter who decides what, no matter what your evidence says, you're not really getting anywhere, you're not really able to establish any kind of real optimization process. Well, yes. So working with management and working with the tech team, creating some kind of alignment that allows you to go back to people who have these ideas, going back to management and saying, let's test that idea and see. When they say, I think a pink banner will work better, they say, hmm, let's come up with an experiment, let's see if it works. Testing can be trickier if you have, you know, low traffic websites, these kind of tricks work better if you have more and more traffic and that's the thing. But there still are ways to try things out and there still are cultural changes that you can put in place. They allow people to see things as hypotheses and experiments so that you're not randomly making decisions and that you don't have to go and tell them no all the time. You can have a process that allows them to come up with ideas through a limited style guide driven process ideally and pushes them towards actually optimizing things. We've been looking at Optimizely's testing toolkit. If you Google for that one, they've got a handy set of guides that say, you know, he has how to make an experiment, he has to formulate your experiment. Little tools that you don't have to use Optimizely for, but the process of being, of experimentation and coming up with AB testing and optimization is something that requires education and if you can get an organization to understand that, you've got a long way to managing the nose. So, the next step, once we've managed to get processes and policies in place, we've dealt with the emperor. We now have to deal with the high priest and the high priest is the powers that be those who are in charge and are connected with the underlying values and the morals of society or just the CEO and the board. And if an organization's main management of the CEO and the head of sales and head of marketing, wherever they are, don't actually care about what you're doing and they feel that the website is simply something that sits outside of their actual business and is, you know, it's a marketing thing but isn't really tied to the core of the business. You're never really going to, you know, solve this problem. They will still come along and come up with conflicting requests.  And so here what we have to do is start helping people see that the business itself is now being influenced by your methodologies. Agile is one of those, well, the Agile methodologies and the way they do things is contagious. If you start building your tech and your tech team works in an agile manner and it starts being effective, the organization then starts to benefit from this and sees how it works, you start training the organization and they start responding and understanding how you need to do things. So at a business level, the startup guides, there's startup philosophies are very valuable here. Lean startup lean startup process, the movement of using optimization and theoretical experiments to design your business is very valuable. We've learned a lot from strategizer.com and their books on business model generation and value proposition design, really taking the tech ideas and now fitting them deeply into the business and what the business is going to need to do. We've had some success with clients and helping them and the charities, this one's a bit easier because charities often have a real mission statement and they spend a lot of time writing down what it is they want to achieve and if you have a kind of client that has a good mission statement, getting them to write the digital version of that statement that says how they will apply their mission statement in a digital manner is very effective and had a significant impact on the organizations that we were working with. The idea here is that you've got to get people to see the website and the digital ambitions of you've got to get the digital ambitions of your client or whatever organization you're working with to align with its business ambitions. Only when you bring them together can you really get to the point where first of all you start getting real return on investment. The company starts understanding our investment in our digital platforms is something that really means something to the business. They understand time, they understand the details and the deeper value of it and you start getting a website and the software which is a real platform. It's something that influences the business. They'll change the platform, solve real business needs by adding new functionality to the platform and then that will change the business and you'll have this really energizing loop and it'll go around. Once you get to that point once you get an organization to align its business with a digital process and to see digital as being part of the business then suddenly the great evil isn't there anymore. You can say yes because you're not fighting a system that's constantly trying to undermine the quality and the value of what the tech is trying to bring. So we now have the card that follows the hero fan or the high priest is the lovers and you're now able to combine the ambitions of the digital and the practical and you can bring all these different areas together and you can start really building an organization that works with but not against its tech. You are building a symbiotic technological system that changes the business but then changes the technology and that process really starts accelerating the way in which the business works and changes. There's some great work that Paul Berg has done here a very handy book that we recommend and make all our clients read it's called Digital Adaptation and it's actually aimed at tech people who have to convince management and other parts of the organization what they have to do to change an organization to deal with technology and to use technology effectively. So when you can work at this level when you can get to the level your story can get rid of that great evil and you're able to see this process of saying no actually being one of building up to a bigger and bigger yes then you have an organization that can actually become agile that can really welcome change which is our agile manifesto line number two it's welcome to change and really work with it and yes then the organization can start really asking the right questions and your need to say no starts to fade and once we've done that we move on to the next level in Tarot the next car is the chariot and the chariot is this ride into the unknown because once you've transformed an organization and you have an organization aligned with this digital strategy and it's moving forward suddenly those old power structures start to struggle and you can't have this command and control hierarchy because it can't adapt fast enough and so we now have the arrival of new forms of running the organization new forms of decision making if you look at the book of reinventing organizations by Frederick Lailou he's brought out this concept which you'll find a number of talks here today on this conference on teal organizations and how do we really take the idea of these decentralized agile organizations and make them very effective and very powerful and the interesting thing here is that when you start dealing with decentralized organizations all this process of fighting against the system which we've had to do to this point starts fading away and teal organizations really have to start dealing with personal change and personal transformation and so the idea of us actually not wanting to be in a situation where we're in control of our lives and able to properly work in a self-managed, self-organized way is the main thing that gets in the way of these organizations that try to get rid of their management which is kind of what you feel you have to do when you really want to start using technology and real agile says Scrum Master is not the boss Scrum Master is that servant leader or someone who just appears that's helped to clear things out of the way and then the entire organization gets rid of its bosses and who knows where you end up and this really rapid energized organization that's transforming all the time really is taking us into that so-called fourth industrial revolution which was Andres' keynote last year about the real social changes that are coming about from these organizations that are able to transform themselves to really work with a digital environment in an effective manner alright I'm approaching the end of my time so I'm going to go back tell you what I've told you the story of this hero of the Thousand Nose doesn't end here unfortunately it's just the beginning it keeps going it just becomes something far more different the middle part the trilogy gets much darker the next phase once you reach the end of part one means you've got it well yes it comes another time but for now let's stick well with a happy ending of part one where we realize that no is about boundaries about having clear scope about having vision and understanding priorities so you can start getting things out of the way and not focus on being negative Thousand Nose really is about saying yes and it's really about innovation and really focusing on what matters quick summary of my process so far is that you can't say no if your team doesn't know what it's doing if your team is not feeling competent and not seen as competent you're not going to get anywhere if people just undermine all your decisions because they think literally in some organizations one of the companies I worked with the development team was called the Monkeys our first job was changing the terminology used so that people started respecting their decisions a bit better people within the organization must feel that you share their vision and they must share yours road mapping and that process of listening is very valuable consistency within software at every level at your design level, your build level is vital and consistency is a tool to fend off those random requests Governance, no organization can really manage its tech without proper governance and those governance and decision making rules will remove a huge amount of that organizational friction that tries to push you to do things that have no business value they just seem like they're nice to have eventually the organization that you're working with needs to see digital as one of the if not the first thing it does a very key part of its actual agenda as an organization there are very few organizations that can operate in the coming let's say decade that do not really approach that can survive without taking on a digital first approach they must say how do we sell this online and how do we do this using tech tools first and that will mean that they care about the quality of your work and they care about the quality of website and the need to say no should vanish because by that point your organization has adapted to the digital age it's able to really take on the right systems and solve them in the right way and then you can begin the second part of the adventure there's a big library that has gone into the various ideas around this there are a few of them there some more technical than others then some word from our sponsor the slides that we need to put in sprints on Friday get to know them feedback thank you for coming, I appreciate any feedback the first talk I've done Drupalcon that hasn't mentioned Drupal which is an interesting change for me having done Drupalcon for 10 years so any feedback on my random esoteric meanderings will be useful and if you are interested in any other conversations I'm available the QR code may work I don't know if they've worked no, it didn't, fine I thought I'd try, there are various Easter eggs in the talk but if the QR codes aren't working then I'll try again some other way thank you yeah, good we have 10 minutes I can take some questions now in public or just hang around afterwards yeah, good, alright side with the books okay, I'm going to quickly get back there there you go