bit more agile and the sort of implementation of an operational team inside of Atlassian for our Atlassian On Demand, our SaaS offering. But before I get on with that, who here has been watching the cricket? Yeah, excellent. Pretty dismal sort of effort by Australia, but hopefully we can pick it up in Hyderabad in a bit. So carrying on, I mentioned I am from Atlassian. So does anyone here actually use the Atlassian products day to day? Excellent. Pretty good showing. Yep, we've got sort of the major ones, Confluence Jira, Greenhopper, FishEye, those guys, all available from our Atlassian On Demand offering. But I'm not going to hype on too much about our products. I just want to tell you about the processes and changes we've made to sort of increase our efficiency in production. So before we go on, a little bit about me. Sorry, I might just move this one. There we go. A little bit about me. I'm a development team lead at Atlassian. So we've got a small team of guys working on our Atlassian On Demand offering. That's our SaaS offering. We currently have about 26,000 customers on this platform. That's about 18 months old. And we run about 70,000, just shy of 70,000 JVMs. So it's really cool. It's really high scale, which is something I really dig. We built, well my team built the current deployment infrastructure we use for that. So pushing new releases to production and we really sort of smooth that pipeline and increase the speed. We can push sort of new features to customers. And I'm always keen on improving the development pipeline. Also my Twitter handle is there. So if anyone wants to follow my work account on Twitter. So the things I want to cover today are operations at Atlassian, how we handle sort of ops. Granted, this platform we use for SaaS is only 18 months old. We did have a SaaS offering prior to that, but that was by a third party vendor. So this is the sort of first time we've done it completely in-house. And we've had this operations team relatively young, only 18 months old, so we're still learning. And I'll go over a few of the things we've learned from that. Our development cycle, how that's improved, sort of in relation to the hosted aspect. It used to be extremely brittle. And I'll go over it in more detail how it used to be. But sort of we've made a number of improvements there. How we actually handle deployments. I love talking about deployments. I love talking about pushing code out and getting these new features in front of customers. And I went half on too much about it today, but afterwards if anyone wants to talk to me about it, I'm more than keen to. And of course the feedback loop. And this is probably the most crucial part of it. It's taking what we learned during the deployment process and the development process and feeding that back into our teams, into our process to sort of remove any of the friction there, to remove any of the sharp edges we have for actually getting these features out to customers. So I've mentioned Atlassian on demand a little bit already. As I said, this is our SaaS offering. It's basically making the Atlassian applications available as a service in the cloud.  Does anyone here currently use an Atlassian on demand instance for work? So you're the guys that use Atlassian hosted themselves? Okay. So what we do is a simply basic SaaS model for a monthly charge. We provide the service. We look after it for you. We make sure it's always updated to the latest version. However, if you have ever administrated Atlassian applications, you will know they are large, monolithic, single-tenanted Java applications. So we had some very unique challenges in shoehorning this into a SaaS offering. And if you've ever administrated Gira, it can take potentially 10 minutes to start the application. So there's some unique challenges here for our deployments and upgrades in production there. So this is what it looks like. And we take these five applications, these five core Atlassian applications, and we push them to our cloud provider. Previously, this third party, it would take us three months from release of a product to get those features in front of a customer. Okay. Three months, that's 90 days. That is a long time. Okay. Considering Atlassian follows the model of using 98-day release cycles. So every 98 days, we push a new big feature, a new big version of the product. That three months at 90 days, if you consider our SaaS customers, they were perpetually almost a complete version behind what was currently the latest and greatest. The changes and sort of techniques I'll go over today and the feedback will show how we sort of reduce that from that three months down to six days. So we can cut a release of Gira or Confluence or any of those guys and have those new features in front of the customer, in front of 26,000 customers, in six days. And there is still a ton of room for improvement in there. Okay. We I think in there we've got about three days soak time and testing on our internal instances, but we can definitely improve that and it's definitely improvement over 90 days. So how do we handle operations at Atlassian? I mentioned earlier that the operations team is quite young. They're only 18 months old. And because of this, we've learned a few things. Let me just go over how we actually work there. The operations team at Atlassian is only seven people. Who here works in a company that has an operations team for production sort of systems? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A few of you. Okay. So as you might know, there's some very unique challenges for the opposite of things. We've got seven people worldwide and that's split up into three in Sydney, two in Amsterdam and two in San Francisco. They're the three major Atlassian offices we have. And these guys are responsible for maintaining that 24 seven coverage of our platform. So they I think they called it a follow the sun methodology of just constantly, you know, during the daylight hours of whoever's region is maintaining sort of uptime and incidents on that platform. These guys are also responsible for managing the, you know, nearly 70,000 JVMs we have running in production that that's only the production side of things that 70,000 as well as all of our logging monitoring and deployment infrastructure that we have. And on top of that, any incidents. So as you know, with an operational team, the biggest thing is sort of responding to the incidents, maintaining your SLA and keeping that uptime. That's also part of their job. But these guys, they're very good. Like being at Atlassian about 18 months. And they're extremely good at what they do. Three of the guys on the team are ex developers turned sys admins sort of operational engineers. So there's no sort of harm there jumping into the code and sort of finding out what's wrong. These guys work very closely with our infrastructure teams and our development teams. Go over that soon. So yeah. So the question was, is it 65,000 JVMs? And yes, it's actually a bit closer to 70,000 JVMs. And it's sort of increasing every single day as we sign up new customers. Sorry. We have 32 racks of equipment in a data center in Ashburn. I think that's in Virginia in the States. So 32 racks. And we have about 10 compute node 10 diskless compute nodes per rack. So 320 compute nodes all virtualized across them. So we can we can easily balance and shift customers and sort of do it for load. I'll go over it in a moment, but it's a completely sort of in-house built and designed sort of private cloud platform. So very much like EC2, you can just spin up a virtualized instance, get access to it and push latest releases of our software to it. Obviously, this one is tailored sort of explicitly to the Atlassian products so that we can get the best efficiency we can out of our hosting. So I'll cover it now. We have this cloud platform, this private cloud platform internally. And this hit team you can see here is our hosted infrastructure team. These are the guys responsible for designing and implementing this internal platform we have, and also the bug fixes, maintenance and all that. And so they work very, they will tightly coupled to this platform, this team, work very closely with it. Sort of conversely, we have the product team, which sits on top of this, as well as that hosted development teams. So these hosted development teams are generally engineers from all of the product teams that we have that work together to give it a specific sort of hosted twist, the Sastar twist that we need for developers on these teams. And of course the jam in the middle here is the hosted operations team. These guys are the ones that keep everything running when they break. So I mentioned earlier these three teams work very closely together, and that's true that we do some comments, we do virtual teams, we do sort of sharing of resources depending what the work is to get things done. And the next point is something that is not necessarily unique to Atlassian, but it's something I absolutely love about them, is that no code base inside of Atlassian is off limits. So we do have code ownership by teams, but there's nothing stopping an operational guy come along, check out the JIRA code base and send a pull request to fix something up to make it a little bit more efficient on the platform. One of our core values at Atlassian is sort of be the change you seek, and we really want to empower the guys to be able to go ahead and make the changes there that they need in production. Conversely, if there are changes that need to be made in the platform, we really push to allow the product developers and the host of dev guys to make those changes and get them in there. Then I know this may be a bit controversial, but nothing is better, well I have not found anything better than the physical sitting close, the physical proximity to these guys. Our hosted infrastructure team, our hosted operations team, and our hosted development teams all sit in the same area, but that includes our product owners, our product managers, and the business unit owners for that. We're all very close together and there's nothing that I've found yet that beats sitting close together. So we've learned a few things from this, and this first point may come as a surprise, but you really should have an operations team. Does anyone here run production code, customer facing production code, and not have an operational team? I've certainly been in companies that have done that. It's just a couple of devs, Joe Blogs there, if something breaks, make sure you go and fix it. So I've been in places where that, and in the last 18 months, we've only implemented this operational team in the last 18 months, when we moved to this new cloud platform. So that is a definite plus for us, and it's a definite learning point. No code is off limits. Again, we want to empower the guys to make changes. We don't want to put up artificial barriers between the projects to stop people not only making the changes they need for production, but also to hinder cross-skilling and learning what the code bases do. That sort of leads on to the third point, which is to really enable the cross-skilling of developers. At last, you're not a Java developer. You're not a Python developer. You're not an operational engineer. You're just an engineer, and you can get picked up and moved around as resources to better sort of improve your scaling and as the projects dictate. So we have operational guys that work very closely with the development teams on secondments to build features, and that is an absolute bonus because it provides that operational perspective when you're developing code that you just can't really get if it's just, you know, developers locked away in a room by themselves. So let's talk about the development cycle. What I want to cover here is how it was in it with our previous sort of cloud provider, how it was very siloed very much, I'm sure you've heard the expression just tossing it over the fence. That's how we were in this previous development cycle. We would have, as you generally do, a product development team build a release of the software. In our case here, it was the the binary you get when you go to downloads.atlasian.com. It was the binary you get if you're going to host it yourself on your own hardware, on your own service. So what we did then is, well what these product teams did then is they tossed this binary over the fence, a war file, a web archive if you're familiar with the Java terms, tossed it over the fence to this hosted development team. And these were these were sad guys. They weren't having a good time because their role was to explode the archive, explode it out, run a series of patch files against this. I'm not kidding here, run a series of patch files against it. Compress the archive back up and run it and see what broke. If something broke, they go through manually fix it, regenerate the patch files for next time. You can imagine this process. It's extremely brittle, it's extremely slow, and it's extremely manual. It's not something that scales and it's not something we can do quickly. And then to further make this worse, these guys then through this release, this new hosted archive they developed over the fence to deploy into production for these SaaS customers, which was done by a third party. I'll cover that in the deployment phase a bit more. But again, the problem here is there's no sort of feedback. It's very much once it's out of their hands, there's no care. Just do what it do what takes over there. Sure. Yes. So I'll bring this up again. So the question was were the guys applying the patches in the center there part of Atlassian? Yes, they were, but they were situated very far away or not very relatively far away in the building and in a completely different sort of reporting structure. The idea was that they would, they just existed there to apply these patches and generate this new artifact. In the, sorry, in the new cycle, we actually got rid of that and I'll talk about that in a moment. Yes, there was a definite effort and that was part of the changes we made for this was to push the responsibility for generating these on demand specific artifacts back to the product team. So was there a question over here? Okay. So we went ahead and we improved this and this is just a sort of quick diagram on how we improve that. The product teams still maintain their own internal development loop that inner development loop, you know, the build test QA sort of thing, that cycle. The advantage here was all of these stages in build test and QA we made available for them to be able to push those artifacts to our new cloud platform. That means that when you have a release, you say, um, say you're working on a feature branch of Jira to add some new feature, you can then run the command to push that actual branch, so you haven't even released it yet, push that branch up to our infrastructure and see it running in our hosted infrastructure there. So those are really good saving there and we sort of really integrated with the hosted aspect of it from day dot. Then we have the hosted development and the operational teams were brought in from the very start and once we have some sort of release and these are generally done nightly or sometimes, depending on the product team, up to every single commit, we push to our dog food environments. Does anyone know what I mean by dog fooding? Okay, I was worried this wouldn't sort of translate. Okay, so it follows the concept of eating your own dog food. Yeah, I see a few nods. Okay, so Atlassian is extremely big on eating your own dog food and what that means is using our products that we build, really in anger so that we're hopefully the first ones to find out what issues we have there. If we have issues operating a feature or how something looks or the usability of the product or finding bugs, if we can't operate it correctly, how can we expect our customers to be able to do it when us as the developers can't even do it? So what we have internally to Atlassian, we have a number of dog fooding instances and these are for all intents and purposes production systems because marketing use and HR use and finance, all the non-technical teams rely on these instances to be up every single day. So the way it generally works is every night on a nightly green build we'll push these deployments out to all of our dog fooding instances. We have some product teams that are able to do it a lot quicker, such as the Confluence team, they can deploy a new release of the product, a snapshot release of the product for every single commit and do it without any downtime for the customers, but they're probably the most advanced along here. The remainder of the deployment cycle, so the development cycle is sort of the standard with anything if you're pushing it out to production, we go through our staging, we go through our canarying and we go out to production, but at every stage these are closely tracked by our hosted development team and actually run by our hosted operations team as well with the integration from those product team guys. Yeah, okay sorry, let me too far. So what was the question? Yeah it's coming. So the idea here with the test and QA was we build in the pushing it to our hosted platform a lot sooner. The issue before was with testing and QA was that we couldn't actually test in the production environment, we couldn't test in an environment that was even remotely similar to what it was going to be like in production. So if you remember the first slide where we had this third party hosted provider out on the side, it was up to them, they were the ones maintaining all the hardware the infrastructure, the everything set up there, we couldn't actually push out there for our offer feature branch or anything like that. We could get releases out there a lot, well we could get dog food releases out there but it was a much slower process and I'll cover that in the deployment side of things. But the difference here was that during our testing and QA everything is actually done on the infrastructure that production runs. We have a special, we call them zones, we have a special zone dedicated for test instances that we can spin up and down at will and push feature branches or push issues or just push a particular hash of the product out to that so that we can test it. Then of course we have all our automated testing and unit sort of all our CI stuff pointed at these instances out in our hosted infrastructure. Okay, so these are sort of terms we use inside. The question is what's the difference between testing and QA? Testings really are our automated testing, our unit test, functional testing, acceptance testing, those sorts of things that we've been able to automate or written as part of the feature. The QA side of things is again almost probably on the manual side of things it's the validation of the feature. We use a technique called DOT which is developer on test which we have QA engineers but all their role is to sort of advise how we can best utilize and best do QA and then we have different developers that go through and actually do the QA of features. So the number of things we learn from actually changing our development cycle were eating your own dog food. I know it's not possible in a lot of places but if it is, if you work in a place where it's possible to eat your own dog food you should definitely go ahead and do that. This is sort of the apart from all our automated testing it's excellent for usability testing and having people actually use the features you're writing before it gets to in front of the customer. Okay, so you can actually find these things out a lot sooner. The feedback, the feedback's extremely important and I've got a whole section dedicated to the techniques we use for feedback but we need to get that back to the development teams, to the product managers, to the product owners as soon as possible because we always want to fail fast, okay? We don't want to go through the entire cycle to the end get a feature out to production and find issues with it so that we'll the last thing we want is for a customer to find issues with it and report it through support. We want to be able to find these as soon as possible and then fix them up before they even get in front of a customer. So how do we handle our deployments at Alasin? Well, there are a number of things. This is how we used to do it and it literally was well, not literally it was a can of worms, okay? All of this was handed off to this third party to handle deployments for us and all of the feedback only came when something broke and again that was at the end of the cycle, okay? There was no developer involvement at all for any of these deployments it was done by this third party it was literally posting them off the artifact and getting them to deploy it. It's an extremely manual process they used I don't know if you've ever deployed things at a large scale but the last thing you want is a manual process you want an automated process you can easily repeat and because of that in this case well in this old system we had it would take five days to deploy to 3,000 instances so 3,000 customers it took five days if you extrapolate that out to where we are today with 26,000 active customers I think it works it's about 40 days it equals to if it scales linearly which I doubt it does we can trust that to how we currently do deployments and we can deploy to our 26,000 instances in two and a half hours so that's pushing new versions of all of the applications So with this these deployments that required us to come up with a plan, okay? We had this completely new platform and we were going to start taking over all of these deployments so bringing everything in-house okay? So for that we had to come up and define a new process for how we're actually going to do deployments So the first thing that is paramount is automating your releases who here does not have does have an automated release process who here does not have a process where they can just click a single button and cut a new release of their software like I know again I've definitely worked in places like that I've definitely worked in places where there was a single person who knew the magic incantations and you know if they were on leave or something he couldn't release the software and again that's something that just doesn't pass the bus test Sorry, anyone understand what I mean by the bus test? Blank faces, yes or no? Yeah, okay, I'll get one, yes Anyway, the bus test basically means if this fella is a bit gruesome this person is hit by a bus on the way to work can he still function? Okay, and with a single person managing releases and knowing all these magical incantations you can't really say you passed the bus test So automating the releases is a big thing Atlassian has been huge in automating all of their releases for behind the firewall software for the stuff you download but not for our hosted stuff So what we did is went through the process we I think the question was earlier about the patch files and things we actually pulled that responsibility from that hosted development team they're no longer responsible for patching releases what they would do is hand all that code we had all these patch files off to the development team and told the development teams it's now your responsibility to produce us an artifact that works in on-demand Not too much pushback on that because on-demand was a big growing platform a big advantage for these product teams so they were pretty cool about that it also meant that all of these changes for on-demand get into their unit tests and acceptance tests all that run against it on every commit so we were able to fail a lot faster and find out what was wrong on these builds as they were going so first one's automate the releases the second one is automate the deployments so again a bit trickier but we had a huge advantage in that we had just built this internal platform and had complete ownership over how our deployments worked I know again I've worked in places if you've got a manual release process you've probably got a manual deployment process so what we've done for both release and deployments is hooked it up to bamboo our CI server but it doesn't really matter what you use we use bamboo because we eat our own dog food you can hook it up to Team City Jenkins or it doesn't even have to be of that as long as you've got a repeatable process there to be able to do this so automating the deployments fantastic just make sure we've got something we can repeat the third one we started doing and again this is more for when our process was starting out as our process matured a bit we could actually drop this restriction and use a wiki page or something like that but it was having a pre-deployment stand up when we have five products changing in a release so at the moment we release every single Monday to production if we have five products changing in that that's potentially quite a lot of feature changes or changes that are coming in so what we require is guys, the stakeholders for those feature changes to come down and have a stand up with our operational guys to say these are the new features going in these are the potential risks with those features these are the failure modes of it and this is how we sort of roll it back and what we do is we go around and then we have a coordinator for the release who then goes through if we do fail this is how much time we're giving you to fix it this is the remainder of the window and this is how we're rolling back so they're an excellent technique for when we're excuse me getting started here and then of course when you do the actual deployment we absolutely require the stakeholders to be present this is not negotiable for us and we took this from a document that was written about the Facebook deployment process I don't know if anyone's read about that but basically what it said was when Facebook are deploying to production everyone needs to be in this chat room to be there to support your feature when it goes there if you're not available in the chat room your change sets don't get merged into the release branch and your features don't go out to production so unfortunately we can't take such a stand on that given the nature of our sort of monolithic applications but so we just require the guys to be present there so that if something does fail we can easily sort of recover from that or at least go forward or we have someone there that knows what the issue is with it and the last thing we started doing was that once all of this is complete we come up with a just a post deployment report card so how the deployment went for each product and it doesn't have to be fancy it can be the simplest thing in the world we use just a wiki page a few details about the deployment and we just give it a red green yellow for how the deployment went for each product you can see there we have three greens and Jira was the only product with one which had a JVM startup bug for 14 instances and a link to the issue and just the issue says we encountered this again and this is another mechanism we use for feeding back those info into the product teams so that they can know where to help us reduce the friction in our deployment process so this leads on nicely to our feedback loop yes so the question was when I say release our deployment or automate our release or deployment was there any specific tool that we use was that correct okay so for our releases we use bamboo internally a lot of our projects are maven projects and we it's simply assume around running the unit test and then running a maven release prepare release perform if you're familiar with that but it really doesn't matter on the tool you use for that as long as you have some automated repeatable and reproducible sort of way of doing it prior to that if we don't have a build set up we actually have a server we call build box which has a known build environment which we can go in and generally for smaller projects manually run a release on this under this known configuration because there have been a number of instances where we have had unknown configurations or someone's you know manually tweaked their maven repo on their local dev machine and then run a release with it and you get these weird artifacts packaged up so you know they are incredibly hard to diagnose so it's great to have this because you know you're just wasting time they're trying to diagnose these issues in terms of deployments I think our situation was reasonably unique in that we had to deploy to this very custom infrastructure for our products we analyze things like fabric, capistrano and collective and puppet run deck all those sorts of things but none of them really fit our build we actually built an internal tool for that and you know I'm always keen to talk about that but I won't cover it in this presentation but afterwards over a coffee or a beer I'm more than happy to go into all the details with you Does that answer the question? Excellent, thank you Excuse me Okay I'm going to pick it up a bit because I'm afraid I'm going to go over time So the feedback loop Why do we want to have a feedback loop? Okay, why do we want to provide feedback? And I think the number one reason we want to provide feedback is to avoid repeating mistakes we've made in the past Okay, it's perfectly fine to make a mistake Okay, making mistakes is human yet we do it The problem occurs when we start making that same mistake two, three, four times Okay, we don't want to repeat those we want to try and stop repeating those mistakes Obviously the feedback is going to help us improve the card process any friction along the way we want to sort of, you know, remove we want to polish the sharp edges we want to sort of sand those down so we can get the smoothest process we want to take the least amount of time for a developer completing a feature to getting that feature in front of customers Obviously, I've said this a few times tonight we want to fail fast if we don't have that feedback loop in place how can we fail fast? If we don't know about it, how can we fix it? And then all of this is in the name of shipping quality features faster as I said earlier we want to reduce the time it takes to get it completed and out into production in front of customers So how do we go about doing this?  It's yeah, awesome, awesome That's good It's basically, it's a flashy term for dashboards Okay, have dashboards around your workplace Information radiators much like a radiator heater sort of radiates that information out to everyone that passes Obviously all the synchronous chat mechanisms IMIC hip chat really great for pushing this feedback in We've hooked up a lot of our automated stuff our monitoring and learning that is hooked into our IRC, IM and hip chat rooms So when anything happens you get about 50 notifications if something's bad's happening but that's excellent there Mentioned the learning and monitoring and of course analytics really good for seeing what the uptake is and features is a feature working, is it not if there's a sudden decline in that feature usage is there a problem there? Worth investigation Just on the information radiators we have a whole bunch of these around Atlassian I think on Mindful we have about 20 or 30 of these TVs there's just heaps of them and every couple of desks you'll see this TV with different information on it relevant to that team We can see here this is a support dashboard probably can't see it but it's a support dashboard trust me Got other ones This is a dashboard from our deployment tooling We can see here you can see the numbers up the top they add up to about 20,000 instances that some were running a deployment out to production and then of course you've got your typical things like your burn down charts and all that more specifically for the development teams and of course after the iteration we have again the standard mechanisms issues, bugs, support cases those sorts of things that are getting raised from external parties our daily stand-ups and our pre-deployment stand-ups and then of course those deployment report cards we have So I just want to reiterate what I said earlier like the sooner we know about a bug or a potential issue like the sooner we can fix it if we don't like it's very simple you know I think everyone will be over here that's extremely simple but if we don't know about an issue how can we be expected to fix it so part of this feedback loop and the whole fail fast idea is that we get that information back to the developers and the product managers as soon as possible so that it can be fixed before it goes in front of the customers I did have a story but yeah I think I'm running over time so during coffee I'm happy to tell this story it's just a little anecdotal story where we didn't follow our process exactly and we ended up conducting a DDoS on both GitHub and Bitbucket or sometimes but I'm happy to talk about that about anyone so the key things I'd like to cover off in this one were that you know eat your own dog food it's extremely important if you can to use the software you produce like if you don't have an understanding of the software how can you expect the customers to be able to the no-curd is off limits again I know it's going to be dependent on the organization you work in but if you can start breaking down those barriers between the teams and encourage the cross-skilling and the sort of I guess fixing what you need and being the change you really seek inside the organization then you know that is an absolute huge advantage avoid repeating mistakes you know I'm I think everyone's going to be with me here you know you don't want to repeat the same mistake over and over again once is fine let's not let it happen twice obviously fail fast again we can't um we don't want to see a feature all the way out to in front of the customer before we find out some critical issue with it and you know it happens all the time it happens with us constantly like um well not constantly but it does happen with us as well and of course that feedback is sort of imperative to to getting that fail fast and that the sort of reducing the friction in deploying to production so all of these things you know they're beta they're like um a Google app they're in perpetual beta all of this we're trying to improve and all of this we're always looking at how we can improve it how we can make it better and so these are just some of the things that helped us along the way and you know I'm really keen to talk to all you guys to see you know what techniques you guys have used and how you guys have improved your process and you know learn from each other so thank you very much today and um also I put a plug in we're also hiring if anyone's interested cheers guys


I wrote the script for this video on a Monday morning. Yesterday, being Sunday at about 7pm in the evening, I entered my office to think about a few things and then pen down about 5 things I would do today. Immediately after writing on my phone the things I wished to accomplish today, I felt an unusual excitement. So much that I actually started working, even though working wasn't the reason why I came to the office. Because of the excitement I had, I was able to forego many interesting YouTube videos or even late night talks with other people. I just wanted to see the next day with great energy.  I repeat the above rituals at 4-6 times every week and that's why I achieve in weeks what most people can achieve in a year. Here's the thing, every successful person finishes their day before they start it while everyone else thinks the day will be fine anyway. Your life is a target. Look around you, starting from social media. Look at billions of advertisements, flying around. Look at your friends. Look at your family. The interest in TV shows, YouTube videos and even your boss at work. Everyone wants your time for their own good.  The only way to escape being prey is to finish your day before you start it. Yes, we all need to work some job but we also need some time for ourselves and our personal progress and development. The problem about starting your day like everyone else is that you tend to be so vulnerable to other people's attempt at stealing your time. If your day is not finished on paper, social media will still more hours from you than it should. If your day is not completed on paper, you'll have plenty of time to give two advertisers whose primary aim is your attention. If you don't finish your day before you start it, you might end up having no single hour of your own. Take for instance, most people simply wake up, rush to work, come back at night, watch TV and sleep. These people think they are busy and have no time for personal development or even meaningful relationships. Still, if these people would schedule 30 minutes in the day to read, they will find out that they can actually find that 30 minutes. If they would schedule 30 minutes to be with whoever matters in their lives, they will find out that they can actually log out of social media to do that. If they will schedule 30 minutes to learn a new skill that will make them more valuable in the future, they can actually turn off the TV or avoid office gossips to do that. If you finish your day on paper before you start it, you can achieve in a few months what most people can't in years.  I am not a psychologist nor a neurosurgeon, but I know that our brain loves specifics. What most people would do is to jump to their day and hope to achieve something significant in the day. This way, you'll end up doing whatever seems urgent and other people will have a good number of your hours for their own good. Instead, condition your brain to have three specific things you want to accomplish in the day. By knowing the specific things you want to accomplish, your brain focuses on those and it won't have to feel bad at the end of the day. Forget yearly goals or new year resolution. Most people make goals every year and almost everyone has some kind of new year resolution. Well, it's a waste of time. To concentrate on a 12-month calendar year, one year isn't real. It's your daily productivity that counts. Even if you set a billion goals on January 1st, if you don't know how to win one day at a time, you'll achieve nothing. If you focus on getting the best out of today and every day, you'll end up getting the best out of the year. Today, each day is what matters to your success in life, so concentrate on each day and you'll win. Put guilt on yourself. One reason why most people avoid setting a schedule for the days that not accomplishing what they aim to accomplish at the end of the day makes them feel guilty. But that precisely is what you need. You really need to feel guilty for wasting time because life is short. You only have a few years to leave and the only way to accomplish something significant is to win your day-to-day battles against distractions. The good thing about feeling guilty for not accomplishing your day's goal is that you don't want to feel the same way tomorrow. So, you really need to destroy tomorrow and if you make it your habit to finish your day on paper every day, even though you won't ever be 100% perfect, your 70% perfection makes you the top 10% in the world. 3. It's a good number. You really can't and shouldn't attempt to do many things in a day. You only need to focus on things that really matter to your big progress in life. And since those are usually very tedious, you might do well to solely focus on 2-3 things every day. I rarely schedule more than 3 things for my day. I need to do a few things very well each day instead of doing 10 things half-heartedly. So, just a few minutes before you go to bed today, pull out your phone's note and type in 3 things you want to accomplish tomorrow. I prefer to do this at night but you might prefer to do it first than in the morning. In any way you like to do it, always make sure you finish your day on paper before you start it. This helps you accomplish your goals faster than most people because your brain has specific goals to accomplish each day and it doesn't want to feel guilty at the end of the day for not achieving what you set out to accomplish. Thank you so much for watching our videos. We Love You


Good morning. So I'm gonna get into my story later, of course Later on when I speak, but I've been in real estate for 17 years. I've been number one in Alabama three times Won the Diamond Award several times making over a million dollars a year as a single agent So that's pretty much my background and and kind of my my awards and then things that I've won Really wanted it really bad group roofing houses worked really hard that translated into real estate and I Made a million dollars by the time I'm 23. I lose it all by 25 And that's when I learned everything that I'm gonna talk to you about today in my speech But at the end of the day You know, I just believe that hard work Is the number one thing you got to believe like Sean said earlier?  It won't work You have to believe and be fully committed and then put the work in Once you put the work in then you have to learn how to adapt Try new things figure out what works and what doesn't work Okay, and then when you put all that together and and you're working hard and you're believing and you're adapting Now it's time to put all that together and then start being patient Because you see most people Believe they can do it a lot of people believe they can do it but out of those people who believe very few also work hard and Out of the few people that believe that work hard even fewer also adapt Adapt to the new world. There's always things changing Coming down to Brazil has been a real eye-opener for me you guys are behind us and There's gonna be a lot of changes coming to Brazil technology-wise social media-wise And you guys have to learn to adapt and use these tools as they become available So better your businesses and to produce more and it will help you be more efficient and More effective and more productive But the key to all of it is to be patient because everybody wants it right now and The truth is nothing happens overnight if you put the work in You can it's almost like you can predict where you're gonna be next year and the year after in the year after Right and your business becomes predictable over time based on the output that you're doing today And I think it is something that maybe I was born with that I From day one wanted to be the best at whatever I was gonna do So anything I did as a kid growing up in high school when I got everything that I did I wanted to be the best and I would give it everything I had I would focus completely on Whatever it was until I accomplished whatever the goal was so I've always been very goal oriented production oriented So I think it I think some people are born with it and some people aren't the people that aren't can you Can you can you still find it? Can you still learn how to Have this mentality and I believe yes Okay, I'm tired of this way of life and I want this now and I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get there And that's really what it takes That's really what the DNA of being a top producer really is I think with remax and the DNA of a remix agent is Someone who believes that it doesn't necessarily matter where you work what company you work for you're gonna be successful regardless of where you are However, when you combine that mentality of no one's gonna stop me from being successful And you combine that with the number one brand of real estate in the world remax Now you have now now we're in trouble. This is dangerous When you combine the work ethic and the mentality that no one's gonna stop you with with the most powerful brand in the world That's when you're gonna see exponential growth when you use the brand But don't don't lean on the brand that it's gonna carry you there Remember you have to use it you have to put the work in behind it and then use it as a tool because everybody knows remax The general public knows that remax is number one. There's no doubt So when you're out there talking to your clients and customers and you tell them you're with remax, it means something So that's what I think that the DNA is of a remix agent I think it's obvious for me that it works with what I've achieved. I wouldn't have been able to achieve this I definitely would not I Don't believe in my heart if I wouldn't have moved to remax when I did and started applying The things that I did at the time that I would be here right now number one, but number two be Or hit and hit hit diamond You know in the remax system is is very It creates a little bit of competition, you know, and we have the levels executive, you know platinum chairman all the way up to diamond and It makes you want to achieve these things Whereas other companies don't necessarily have this culture of Achievement and production and it pushes you and it drives you and on the back end. They're educating you There's so much education. We're here now How many companies in Brazil are doing conferences like this and putting forth the effort to Educate you and to help you become better agents. I Don't know but I would probably say none. They want to help you So I think without remax, I wouldn't be where I am today. I know I wouldn't be where I am today So I think remax for that My best piece of advice for you guys is I think that you guys have incredible leadership You know from prosciutto or natto all the way down to Carlos and and Moses I spent some time with Carlos and Moses and I'm here to tell you that these guys They have it down. They have the whole real estate game completely figured out. They're not chasing money They're they're chasing people. They're chasing relationships And what I think you should do and it's what I did in the beginning of my career. I Took a little bit from this agent. I took a little bit from that agent I took a little bit from this broker I took a little bit from this person and this person and that person and I learned a little bit from everyone and it took bits and pieces and Over time I developed my own systems and I think that's what you guys should do because The way remax is growing in Brazil. You guys are are developing some serious leadership roles with your your your top producing agents and I think that Carlos and Moses would Happily talk to any of you answer any questions, and I think that's something you should take advantage of and just just start to Develop your own systems based on what the other top producers are doing you don't have to copy them exactly You can if you want to But you don't have to you can take a little bit from here a little bit from there and just could just always improve If I could say anything it would be every day Just to get a little bit better If you just get 1% 2% better half a percent 0.0001% just get a little bit better Every single day and over time those little small increases And in you becoming a better agent little by little will add up to be so big Nobody saw me coming Everybody was sleeping on me Nobody I said I'm gonna be the best agent down here. I'm gonna be number one in my area. I Was just talking about my area not the state. I didn't know that was gonna happen But nobody Saw it coming That's the way you have to be behind the scenes putting the work in when nobody's looking When nobody's watching Right, and you always catch up with the top producers When they're on vacation when they're going to Christmas parties when they're You know when something when the seasons slow down and they start to Slack off you need to be pushing harder during those times to catch up to the top producers So I hope that helps you guys Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you


Next question is from Matthew Garcia. How long should I supplement with Ashwagandha for? You know what's funny about Ashwagandha? It is now becoming, because of the studies that they're doing on Ashwagandha, it's becoming one of the most popular health and wellness and athletic performance herbs that you'll find anywhere. There's no drawbacks of doing every day, right? Well, drawbacks potentially. Could you down-regulate and like not be? No, no. What I mean by that is you could have an intolerance to nightshade vegetables, so you might have an issue. It also changes your body's relationship with cortisol. So, yeah, it could, one of the reasons, and in fact it lowers cortisol, right? Because I guess your body becomes more efficient using cortisol. So that's why it's a good stress hormone, or excuse me, a stress supplement or what they would call an adaptogen. But the challenge with stuff like that is it may mask other stuff. So you may just allow yourself to keep messing your body up more and more. Oh, interesting. But that being said, it improves recovery, strength, it gives people better sleep, raises testosterone, and men, it's a remarkable herb and supplement. I personally do not see effects past 60 days. After two months, I go off, it does nothing for me anymore. Oh, interesting. And I noticed that with any herb or supplement. So give me an example of somebody who you would for sure recommend, like, oh, that type of person should take this. And then what person would you say would avoid, you would say avoid it? Yeah, so the person I would give it to, they already have a good diet, they're exercising well, good sleep, right? So everything else, all the big stuff is taken care of. And they want a little extra performance, they want better recovery. Then I may recommend, hey, let's try Ashwagandha. A lot of people seem to feel real good on it. So let's give that a shot. The person I wouldn't would be the person who we're dealing with, you know, HPA access dysfunction. Now, typically functional medicine practitioners will use Ashwagandha to help people with HPA access dysfunction. But because I'm not an expert in treating that, I wouldn't do it because what I'm afraid of doing is giving them something that makes them feel better, but then doesn't address the root issues. So like, it allows them to keep going on the bad, the wrong path. So like the cortisol junkie we talked about on the show the other day, you would avoid giving it to that client because you would hold them to masks. Temporarily they would feel better and they would probably cause more damage. Might even start ramping it up. Totally, right? So, and you know, a functional medicine practitioner would look at all the other stuff first before, or all together. But other than that, I mean, it's a great, I tell you, most people if they take Ashwagandha within a few weeks will notice energy libido and athletic performance enhancement. So really it's just like you get adapted to it at some point, which then it probably loses a bit of its effectiveness overall. Yeah, and I have yet to find any product that doesn't do that. Yeah, right. Well, so the green juice organifies, they have what, 600 milligrams of it inside there, inside of it, is that considered a reasonable dose? Is that, okay. Yeah, that's a good dose. You could go higher if you're like, you know, super intense, lots of stress. The way I would use it, as I'd say, okay, I'm gonna go through six weeks of really intense workouts, or I'm gonna add extra volume because I'm trying to cut or something like that. Then I would throw it in and it moves the overtraining line a little further. So now I can add more volume, more training and I'm not so at risk. Because here's what I noticed with Ashwagandha. I don't get a sore and a stiff and I seem to be able to handle a lot more volume when I'm taking it. But again, it's one of the few supplements you'll actually notice. Most people will notice a difference. Not as profound as creatine and creatine is something you can take, you take all the time. It's not something you go off and I'll just take it all the time and you continue to reap the health benefits from it. I wonder if that's one of the major things that people do report back about the green juice, why it makes them feel so good. I 100% think so. Oh wow. 100% think so. I think the Ashwagandha makes that big of a difference, so it's good stuff. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here. And be sure to subscribe.


Naturally, Oprah Winfrey just hosted the most talked about interview with her new neighbors Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, where the couple spilled the tea for the first time since stepping back from the royal family. The Duke and Duchess purchased their first mansion together in Montecito last summer where Oprah also has her main 70-acre estate dubbed the Promised Land. But there isn't just one Oprah house as you might imagine. She owns about eight properties all over the United States from California to Hawaii and even Orcas Island, so let's take a look. In these videos, we don't reveal any addresses and even though I've done a house tour of my own place, please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Oprah is known for many things like being the talk show and TV queen, the giver of gifts and simply an icon. Though her childhood was full of poverty and abuse, she was able to overcome adversity, beat the odds and amass herself a net worth of $2.6 billion dollars, can you believe it? Oprah considered to be one of the most famous, influential and wealthiest women in the universe so it's no surprise she was able to easily snag a tell-all interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who are notoriously private. Just so Oprah escaped her impoverished life in rural Mississippi, it took her time, effort and her natural charisma to become friends with the Duke and Duchess. She first called Meghan to propose an interview back in 2018 and when Oprah found herself in London, the two men pursed in with Meghan inviting her to Kensington Palace. Oprah also got an invite to Prince Harry and Meghan's Royal Wedding and more recently, the couple ended up moving so close to Oprah's mega estate in Montecito that they could be neighbors. Aside from Oprah's iconic Montecito home where she spends most of her time, her real estate portfolio was always growing with properties all over the United States and even a getaway in Hawaii.  Be sure to hit that subscribe button and ring that bell we post a new video every day. Since everyone's talking about Oprah's tell all interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle I figured it was time for an updated look at where Oprah calls home including her longtime estate in Montecito rumored to be worth $100 million. Her mansion is when you don't want to miss. As always don't forget to follow me on Instagram to chat and now let's get into this video. Hey back in 2001 Oprah was invited to a party at a dreamy estate in the picture of the estate in Montecito near Santa Barbara and the rest was history. She fell in love with the peaceful 42 acre property so much that she persuaded the owners Robert and Marlene Villas to sell the place even though it wasn't on the market. Oprah wrote up a check for about $52 million and began making this place now called the Promised Land her very own. She named the property this to symbolize her journey from rags to riches as it's taken from a biblical reference for an African American woman living in paradise whose ancestors were slaves. Oprah's home is decidedly paradise estimated to be worth about $100 million these days after several additions. The main mansion was built in 1912 originally but underwent extensive renovations to make it its current size of 23,000 square feet and to suit Oprah's specific tastes. There are more than 6 beds and 14 baths throughout as well as 10 cozy fireplaces. While Oprah bought the main property back in 2001 later in 2016 she purchased a piece of land known as Seamer Farms spanning over 23 acres directly beside it for over $28 million. This additional property boasts a 5,000 square foot ranch style home, a pool, horse stables, caretaker cabin, equestrian ring, and even orchards. Furthermore, Oprah bought another 44 acre preserve on the other side of her property to get ultimate privacy. These days the Promised Landsman's over 70 acres near the beaches and the mountains. Oprah's main home is designed in a classic neo-Georgian style and the main entryway has a whining staircase and high ceilings personalized with photos of loved ones so the star can see them upon first walking in. In fact, as her forever home, Promised Land is where Oprah and her long term partner Steadman Graham love to spend time and have decorated the place full of mementos, books, and artwork. The home has been thoughtfully put together over the years and Oprah runs her business empire from the property too. When she's unwinding, sometimes she even posts pics hanging with her dogs here on Instagram. The kitchen is the heart of Oprah's mansion and it's a spot where she and her loved ones can get together and kick back. The TV icon had the fireplace and pizza oven removed to create more space here but left the rest as is. Altogether her mansion boasts several living rooms, a library, kitchen, two movie theaters, an office, and a wine cellar. Also on Oprah's property, she has a fully redecorated and elegant guest house as well as a tea house. Her tea house is set right in the middle of the garden and was originally built as a place to cut flowers but she changed her mind and made it a space for herself. She also says she comes to the tea house to read and meditate and enjoy a cup of tea. The grounds of Oprah's mansion are truly a sanctuary with perfectly manicured lawns, gardens with roses and lilies, and amazing views of the ocean and mountaintops. On one of the combined properties, Oprah also has a large pool surrounded by palm trees, a gorgeous patio and nearby a koi pond, all creating the perfect space to entertain or relax. In 2018, Oprah decided to purchase another peaceful and picturesque property. Tucked between Seattle and Vancouver, there are the San Juan Islands made up of four main islands accessible by Washington State Fairies. One of these is Orcas Island where Oprah decided to buy a 43 acre compound called the Madron Eagle Estates. The San Juan Islands are a much-loved destination for many nearby city dwellers and for the passionate residents who call the islands home, now including Oprah when she fancies a vacation. Oprah's getaway here is completely private with two waterfront pieces of land and 3,000 feet of shoreline. It costs her $8.2 million for this expansive property and inside the residence measures in it over 7,300 square feet with four beds, three full baths, and two half baths. The main residence is three floors and made with stone accents and natural woods used throughout which create the all-American luxury cabin feel. The floors were even installed from the old Sears building in Chicago and refinished for the home. As you enter, you're greeted by a massive hanging art piece that frames the entry way and sets the stage for what's to come. The main level is home to the kitchen with pizza oven and skylights, living room, dining area, and bedrooms. Oprah's master suite features a stone wall with wood accents and a marble spolic on suite. There's also a library corner in the home with Florida ceiling bookshelves which I'm sure is a feature book-loving Oprah takes advantage of. Also on the lower level, there's a home office complex, wine cellar, and a tasting room. A custom built staircase leads to the upper level where there's a huge bonus room or family room, as well as a fully stocked games room. Outside is as lush as you might expect with native trees and plants manicured perfectly. Stone paths weave through the gardens which completes the peaceful, earthy landscape. And that's not all. Of course, Oprah also needs room for her traveling entourage, which the gallery house is perfect for. The contemporary guest house on the property is just under 3,000 square feet and has four beds and three baths, all set on a high cliff perched above a private beach. The pictures on her Orca's Island property include a tea house underneath the trees and overlooking the water, a huge barn with woodworking studio up top, and a gym and yoga studio on the lower level. Elsewhere, there's a sauna, a garden, pond and stream, private hiking trails, and private beach. So now we've taken a look at Oprah's properties, well two of her more notable ones, and I think I'll bring this house to her to an end. After checking out her sprawling monocidal compound known as the Promised Land, as well as her Orca's Island estate, which would you choose to live at? I think they're both breathtaking and with all of her properties, that's only the tip of the iceberg. But I like her Orca's Island place best. Something about that forest atmosphere I really love. Be sure to tell me what you liked or didn't like about Oprah's properties in the comments down below. And if you want to see the nearby Monocito mansion Prince Harry and Meghan Markle move to, we just reported on that too and we'll link it after this. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram and I will see you all in the next video. Bye!


So John wanted to show me this fridge because I think I've been actually pronouncing the name of this water ron all along So how what would you what would you call this drink? So I would have called this la croix, but I heard that actually it's pronounced How's it actually pronounced John? It's actually pronounced la crocs La crocs John's been saying that the entire day and no one's corrected it. I'm just gonna open up a la crocs here There we go So I've just arrived at the Udacity offices. I'm really excited to take a look around We're shooting a little bit more of the design sprint now in degree program But I have a secret plan to take a look around and really scope out the situation while we're doing this. So let's go All right Take a look around Obviously makes sense since they're an education system, but I really like that they keep the theme throughout Hey, John. How's it going? It's going good. Um, are you messing up a lot? I'm not messing up as much now like doing the brazilian stuff was pretty hard But now it's going pretty fluidly. I would say what do you what's the brazilian stuff? So we're doing we're doing a couple of videos for the brazilian students of the of the course So we're doing it fans in brazil fans in brazil. Just gotta fix that hair. Yeah, let's check it out Yeah, we've got a couple of fans. This would be a good, um a thumbnail this one if you just stop for one second That's pretty good. Yeah Not alcohol, but I saw some alcohol in there too. Just saying just saying Snack on things a lot So John hey, Brittany. How are you doing? Good actually? Yeah, yeah, we're just leaving uh, udacity Which is one of the biggest online education Platform it is. Yeah, it's one of the biggest. I think it's the Let's just say it's the biggest it's the biggest but this is really interesting because it's kind of been a hot topic around around these parts So basically it's been a bit of a hot topic the whole education thing Self right like should you go to university? Should you not go to the university? Udacity does all of these like very short programs where you can like learn very technical things very quickly What's your take on John? What do you think? Oh also a little tidbit of information our intern Jacob just quit product design school Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean maybe I can take that I think that if you really want to Learn very specific things like tech related things, you know design whatever it is I guess a lot of people are watching this who want to study design You're not going to learn a lot about that in college probably not So what I said to Jacob is if you have to pay for college like you do in the u.s. It's maybe You know not worth going into debt to learn those things when you can learn a lot of it online And I think the best way to learn is also just like getting the experience and trying to do some internships and stuff Like that so I'd rather do I would personally prefer to do a free internship and you know lose money that way then paying You know 50k or so or a lot more for a course that then puts me in debt for years and years and years But it's also teaching me outdated So it's a great answer There is another thing for me the best part of you know Studying actually it's just meeting people right so I think that's the part that you may miss then Is the ability to just like have this time off and meet people and find yourself and all of that kind of stuff Yeah, I totally agree. I think that one thing for me when I went to the university I really didn't feel like I got that Much out of it like as far as like tangible stuff that that I now use in my career But what I do know is that I met a lot of cool people doing a lot of cool things made some connections Learned from them as well and also just like learned about like real life in a lot of ways. I think how do you like that? Pretty is making a vlog I think I'm vlogging