Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation, refinancing. Get ready to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia. Is refinancing my mortgage a good idea? Which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Caroline Banton, updated August 11th, 2021. Is refinancing my mortgage a good idea? So typically when we're in the home purchasing or owning process, we normally can't put all the cash upfront, therefore need some kind of financing, some type of loan. And then of course, as time passes, questions come up as to whether it would be a good idea to refinance the loan or mortgage. The decision to refinance your home depends on many factors, including the length of time you plan to live there, current interest rates, and how long it will take to recoup your closing costs. So clearly to refinance a loan, it will cost to go through the refinancing process. So you wanna measure that or take that into consideration when making the decision. So in some cases, refinancing is a wise decision. In others, it may not be worth it financially. So meaning obviously you have to weigh the pros and cons of the costs of refinancing and the benefits that may come from it. And some of those pros and cons are gonna be estimates into the future, things that we don't know whether it's gonna happen into the future. So we'll have to make our best guess as of here and now, but an educated guess. Because you already own the property, refinancing is likely would be easier than securing a loan as a first time buyer. So you might be saying, man, I don't wanna go through the pain. Buying the house was very difficult, but you already own the home. So that should cut down a lot on some of the pain of the process. Refinancing hopefully would be a little bit easier to go through. Also, if you have owned your property or house for a long time and built up significant equity, that will make refinancing easier. So equity, you will recall is the difference between the loan amount and the home value, the fair value, the current value, the value, that gap, that equity can increase a couple of different ways. One, you could pay down the loan. When you pay down the loan, the amount that goes to interest just goes away because that's kinda like rent on the purchasing power, but the amount that goes to principal lowers the loan balance. And therefore, if the home stayed static, didn't go up or down in terms of fair market value and you paid down the loan, the gap, the equity, the difference between the asset and the liability would increase. Also, it could increase if, of course, the value of the home went up just simply due to market conditions. In that instance, it'll probably make it easier to go through a refinancing process because the bank, you'll recall, wants you to be somewhat invested in the home. They want like a 20% down oftentimes in the home so they feel that you are significantly invested in the home and so that if there was a foreclosure kind of situation that they would have sufficient recourse on the foreclosure to pay off the loan. So however, if tapping the equity or consolidating your debt is your reason for a refi, keep in mind that doing so can increase the number of years that you will owe on your mortgage. So clearly, if you're refinancing in order to tap into some of that cash flow, you're saying, hey, there's an increase in my equity. I wanna get some of that money in the equity as opposed to you're doing the refinance simply because there's a decrease in the rates in which case you're trying to lock in possibly a lower rate. If you're trying to get more money out of the equity situation, then that could lead to owning more money for a longer period of time, right? That's you're gonna refinance. So not the smartest of financial moves often times. So reasons to refi. Now, obviously you might need to do that if you're consolidating your debt and you have your debt, say in credit cards or in other things where the interest rate is quite high and you're deciding if I'm gonna have debt, where do I wanna have my debt? I don't want it in a credit card or something like that if the interest rates are very high and they're fluctuating all the time, maybe then it would be better to do the refinance in that kind of situation as a type of consolidation of the debt. But you'd have to compare that decision to the closing costs. You also wanna take into consideration tax consequences for how you might use the money during the refinancing process and see if there would be tax implications for deductibility of it. So reasons to refinance. So the general reason to refinance most of the time are when interest rates are going down. You possibly have a locked in interest rate that's higher than the current market rate. And so you want to basically refinance. At this point in time, the rates look like they're kind of trending up at this point in time. So you might have possibly gonna see less refinancing when interest rates are on the upward trend. You would expect generally you'd see a lot more refinancing when the interest rates are on the downward trend in general. So when does it make sense to refinance? The typical, should I refinance my mortgage rule of thumb is that if you can reduce your current interest rate by 1% or more, it might make sense because of the money you'll save. So if you're looking at the current market and you're saying, if I have a 30 year fix and I'm locked in and everything, but the current rates are a whole percent lower than what I'm currently locked in at, then it might be worth it to refinance even considering the closing costs and so on due to the reduction in the interest. So refinancing to a lower interest rate also allows you to build equity in your home more quickly. Now, obviously also if you have other kind of loans that are more exotic type of loans, maybe you had to take out multiple loans or something like that or an adjustable rate loan or something like that, just simply fixing the rate might be a reason to refinance it if you have an adjustable rate or something like that as well. So if interest rates have dropped low enough, it might be possible to refinance to shorten the loan term, say for my 30 year to 15 year fixed rate mortgage. So one thing you could do is say, I've got this long timeframe that I'm paying off the loan, which is great because I needed that in order to lower the payments that I'm making. But if the interest rates drop significantly, maybe I can make the same payments, for example, but paid off in 15 years instead of 30 years, which would lower the amount of interest that I would have to pay because I'd be paying it over a much shorter timeframe. So without changing the monthly payment by much. Similarly, falling interest rates could be a reason to convert from a fixed to an adjustable rate mortgage and arm as periodic adjustments on an arm should mean lower rates and smaller monthly payments. So if the rates are on the decrease, then you might be able to switch to the adjustable rate, but you gotta be really careful with the adjustable rates because clearly they will adjust based on the market. And again, it looks like right now the rates are going back up. So you're really kind of dependent on what's gonna happen with the market with the adjustable rate because the risk is transferring from the financial institution, the bank to you. The fact that the risk is transferring to you, you have more of the risk of the fluctuation going up and down on you as opposed to the bank means that you can often get more favorable rates that way, but you're also have more risk that you gotta balance out against it. So in a rising mortgage rate environment, this strategy makes less financial sense. That's probably the environment we're at right now. So indeed the periodic arm adjustments that increase the interest rate on your mortgage may make converting to a fixed rate loan a wise choice. So if you're thinking that the rates are gonna continue to increase, then you probably would like to have a fixed rate at this point in time so that you're not subject to the increases. And a lot of people are thinking the interest rates are still gonna go up, inflation's going up. Some people are having faith that they say, well, the Fed is gonna step in and take the interest rates back down. It's gonna be transitory after all, after all, but that's what you're gonna have to kind of gauge in terms of the market. And remember that the market usually has these longer cycles for the housing markets oftentimes. So we get into these like big 10 year cycles or something and we start to think that that's just the way it's always gonna be. And like I say with the Fed, we often think that the Fed has become so smart that they figured out interest rates and the interest rates will never go up again because we understand economics to that degree. But then you go through a period of flux and something happens and you see a bubble and then the faith goes down really, really low. And then interest rates in the same can happen with inflation. So if you're in a mindset and you've been in a market in either high interest rates or low interest rates for a long period of time, that doesn't mean that that period of time won't change. It just means that the cycle, in my opinion, is just longer. It doesn't generally mean that we figured it out. There's never gonna be a cycle anymore. But that's just my opinion. Consider closing costs. There are closing costs involved in all these scenarios. Your outlay may need to cover charges for title insurance, attorney's fee and appraisal taxes and transfer fees among others. These financing costs, which can be between 3% and 6% of the loan's principal are almost as high as the cost of an initial mortgage and can take years to recoup. So clearly you gotta make sure that the benefits you're getting will cover the closing costs. You can do a pretty quick kind of calculation to get an idea of that, taking the closing costs divided by the benefits or the lower in the payments, the decrease in the payments, for example, might give you a quick idea. If you are trying to reduce your monthly payments, beware of, quote, no closing costs and, quote, refinancing from lenders. So the no closing costs is kind of a deceptive term. It might be something that you would consider doing, but clearly there's no such thing as eliminating the closing costs. You can do some other stuff to it. You can roll the closing costs into the loan balance, which would increase the loan balance or possibly roll it into the interest rate, adjusting the interest rate, but then you would be paying it over time. If you increased the loan balance, you'd be paying interest on it as well. So it might be necessary for a cash flow purposes, but it also has its downsides because you're gonna pay interest on it. Although there may be no closing costs, they think likely will recoup those fees by giving you a higher interest rate, which would defeat your goal. So consider how long you plan to stay in your home. So in deciding whether or not to refinance, you'll want to calculate what your monthly savings will be when your finance is complete. So meaning you'll say, okay, if I refinance, what's my monthly savings? What's gonna be with a new amount that I'm going to be paying at that point in time? Let's say, for example, that you have a 30-year mortgage loan for 200,000. When you first assumed the loan, your interest rate was fixed at 6.5%. Your monthly payment was 1,257. If interest rates fall to 5.5%, fixed. This could reduce your monthly payment to 1,130, a savings of $127 per month. So that's gonna be a saving of 127 per month that you're gonna get. And you gotta balance that out against the fact that you got the closing costs that happen.  If your costs amount to approximately 2,300, you can divide that figure by your savings to determine your breakeven point. So in other words, if we thought that out, we'd be doing something like this. We'd say, dude, it's been, it's like the interest rates are like a whole point lower. If I refinanced, my payments would be from 1,257. I'm paying now minus 1,130. That's a $127 savings. But I have to put down up front to get this thing done, $2,300. So if I save 127 a month, 2,300 divided by 127, then it's gonna take me like 18 months in order to save. Which is like, if I divide that by 12 months in a year, that'd be like one point, take me like a year and a half, which is not bad right there actually. So it'll take you that time to kind of recoup the closing cost. So clearly it's gonna take some time. So the longer you stay in the property, the better it would be. If you're gonna move in like three months, then it probably might not be the best idea. So if you plan to, so you can divide that figure by your savings to determine your break-even point. In this case, the home for two years or longer, refinancing would make sense. One and a half years in the home is the calculation. So if you plan to stay in the home for two years or longer, refinancing would make sense. If you want to refinance it with less than a 1% reduction, say 0.5% of the picture changes. Using the same example, your monthly payments would be reduced to $1,194, a savings of only $63 per month, or 757 annually. So if we took the 2,300 divided by the 756, we get three. So you would have to stay in the home for three years in that case. If your closing costs were higher, say 4,000, that period would jump to nearly five and a half years. So consider private mortgage insurance, the PMI, during periods when home values decline, many homes are appraised for much less than they had been appraised in the past. So if there's a decrease in the market, that's gonna affect your ability to refinance because the lender wants the equity in the home as the backup or support for the loan. So if this is the case when you are considering refinancing the lower valuation of your home, may mean that you now lack sufficient equity to satisfy 20% down payment on the new mortgage. And they want that 20% down payment because that means you're locked into the home. That means that if you stop making your payments, they could sell the home and still be able to recoup in terms of the sales price. They don't want the loan being equal to the home because that's too risky to refinance. You will be required to provide a larger cash deposit than you had expected or you may need to carry a PMI which will ultimately increase your monthly payments because then you're gonna have to pay for the insurance which messes the whole thing up.  I had a plan and this stupid... So it could mean that even with a drop in interest rates your real savings might not amount too much. Conversely, a refinance that will remove your PMI would save you money and might be worth doing for that reason alone. In other words, if you had to get the insurance and now you're in a situation where equity has increased and you're saying now I wanna get rid of the insurance I don't need it anymore because I've got 20% value in the home then you might refinance just to get rid of the insurance payment which could be beneficial. If your house has 20% or more equity you will not need to pay PMI unless you have an FHA mortgage different rules for the FHA mortgage that's where the government's kind of interplaying in here loan or you considered a high risk borrower. So if you currently pay PMI have at least 20% equity and your current lender will not remove the PMI that's another reason that you could refinance you're like whatever if you're not gonna take it out you're gonna so you're gonna ask the lender and if they would remove it because you got the 20% and you would think they would because you got the 20% but if they don't then you're like whatever I'll just refinance and that could be another reason that why you might take that road.


Before we start, I just wanted to read out just a few instructions which the Lord gives people of Israel. It's interesting because it's actually typically for parents. It's more of an instruction for parenting, I guess. But anyway, let's look at that. Deuteronomy 6 and verses 4 to 9. Deuteronomy 6 and verse 4 onwards says, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.  And these words, which I command you today, shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  Okay, so here we see some very important pertinent instructions from the Lord to the people of Israel. And it actually, it's for the family, right? So it starts with the Lord saying, you know, who he is, and the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. You know, that's what it starts with.  Okay, so how do I identify with this God who is one, the Lord, my God? How do I interact with him, or how do I relate to him? It's a relationship of love, right? It's a close, intimate relationship of love, of wholehearted love, right?  And it says, from there, it goes on to say, okay, these words, which I command you today, shall be in your heart, you know, in a most being, in your heart. It's not just intellectual understanding of it or acknowledgement of it, or even, you know, admiration of instruction. You know, sometimes we can do that. You can say, wow, that's beautiful. I think every ideal home should be like this. We can intellectually acknowledge the thing, but it need not be in our heart. We need not really hold it as treasures in our heart. Like Prabhupada says, you know, treasure these commandments in your heart. So these words, these commandments shall be in your heart. And then it goes on to say, you shall teach them, okay? You shall teach them diligently to your children. So it's from that place of relationship. It's that place of, you know, us treasuring God's commandments, God's word, and us keeping God's word in our heart. From that place, the overflow is this, that we teach our children diligently. So teaching would mean maybe a formal setting.  I said, you should teach them diligently these commands, these words, right? And you shall talk of them, okay? So it talks about conversation. It talks about informal settings.  So you see the different settings. It's like an informal thing.  Why don't you look at this verse, et cetera?  So in all the mundane routine things that you do, it could be, you know, cooking, it could be cleaning, it could be washing stuff, it could be, maybe at leisure, you're just, you know, sitting around and chatting around, you know, about, around the dinner table or whatever, you know, I said, you shall talk of them. So make this conversation about God's word, about who He is, make it a normal thing. You know, it doesn't have to be super spiritual, right? It doesn't have to be something that is relegated to one particular day, you know, or one particular, you know, only in this place we talk about it.  And then it talks about every external thing, that you shall bind them, you shall, you know, put them as display and write them on the dopo's and all that. So this is a very important instruction and the thing is if this is established in our homes, right? If we establish this in our homes, our homes can be a thriving place spiritually, you know. It need not be, you know, something ritualistic and parents and the children need not, you know, be in a place where they find everything about God or they find everything about the word, something boring, something, you know, uninteresting. It's part of their lives and as parents, we can actually do this, right? And the home would be a place where the children learn. The home would be a place where faith and faith in God and encounter and the supernatural becomes so normal, right? And so their responsibility is on parents. And I just thought we should look at that even as we look at marriage, right? And later, when we look at parenting, you know, we see that this is one of our responsibilities. So, well, as married people also, you know, as husband and wife, so let this be so, let this be normal. And I'm actually because in our home, when we, when I grew up, it was never like this, like, you know, when we went to church, we, on Sundays, we came back, but we never, now we did have times of Bible reading and prayer, et cetera. But never discussed, never spoke, never had questions answered, right? And that's a very important part, so which I missed out, which we missed out when we were growing up. So it need not be so in our homes. OK, so let's pray. Let's, let's ask the Lord to make this a reality, like in the homes that we established and homes that we are in right now, right? OK, let's pray. Father, we thank you, Lord, for this day. We, even as we looked at your word, God, we thank you for these instructions. Lord, we know that you are the builder of our lives.  We are the designer of marriage and family. And so, God, we take every word that proceeds from your mouth, Lord, seriously. And we treasure, Lord, these instructions and commands in our hearts, God, not just to hear, but also to do, Father, God, we thank you, Lord, that you instructed us to teach you and so that you instructed us to, Lord, have casual conversations, Father, God, in every aspect of practical aspects of our lives, God, and so that, Lord, your ways, O God, and who you are and encounters with you, Lord, and the power encounters, God, and Lord, supernatural, Lord, it becomes a part of our everyday lives, Father, God, even as we proclaim truth, even as we discuss the truth and even as Lord, lies are replaced and as your truth, the truth of your word becomes rooted and embedded in our hearts. Master, we thank you. We pray that this will be a reality, Lord, in our lives, in the homes that we establish and just pray for those of us who are already married and have children and just pray, God, that this will be a reality, Father, God. And yes, Master, may this be the model for those of us who are looking forward to getting married and establishing homes. May this be the model, the example of our homes, God. We thank you. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. Okay. So last class, we started with communication, communication and how important communication is. I remember watching a tennis match and those days between it was a doubles match. I forget who, I think it was a Davis Cup match. Leander Pays and Mahesh Bhupati, Indian tennis players. And, you know, they had a fallout, but those days when they were really doing well, I think they even won the Wimbledon doubles at some point, I'm not very sure, but they won one of the grand slams. So anyway, so the communication between them, even during the games, even between points was amazing. Like they will always be communicating with each other, always high-flying each other, always, you know, there'll be some kind of communication happening between each other. And that's something that you'll notice immediately, you know, when you watch the game and they were highly successful in and what happened was something happened, some miscommunication, some misunderstanding, some kind of an ego thing happened. And then there was a breakdown of communication, breakdown of relationship.  They would have gone on to win many tournaments. Actually, they're highly skilled players, both of them experience everything, but because of the breakdown of the relationship, they didn't actually continue to play further. So similarly, in marriage, which is a relationship between two people, covenant relationship, it could be sometimes two very unlikely people, two very different people, communication is very, very important. Just to review a few things that we looked at last class, let me just share that PowerPoint with you. Okay, so, you know, so communication skills are required for marriage. And this is very different from general social communication or business professional communication, communication with acquaintances, you know, where you there, where is there is just exchange of facts exchange of information. So we see different levels. It could be casual, professional, like we friendship and internet, you know, as you go further down the list, you see that there is a sharing, not only of information, but also of expressing feelings, expressing fears, expressing likes and dislikes and so on. Right. So we are being more and more transparent. We are becoming less and less informal, or less and less formal, sorry, more and more transparent with each other. Right. So making ourselves more and more vulnerable also in the process. Right. So, the piece of meaningful or established strong communication needs time because we need to invest time. It cannot happen in an instant. We need to be able to set aside time. Okay. So always remember that. And that time should be a meaningful time in times.  And also we saw that it needs to be at a time when we are energetic, you know, our energy level is high. Okay. So, well, there could be certain things that we are discussing about, okay, how to do things. What are those things to be bought? What are those things to be done?  But from that place, we need to move on to talk about what's happening with oneself, our challenges, our joy and our struggles, maybe, you know, expressing feelings emotions, what is happening in our lives, you know. So that needs to take place. And so we need to make this happen, okay. It cannot happen automatically. So we need to make these things happen, be intentional about set-aside time to do this and also plan for, you know, extended times even, like maybe a vacation, maybe weekends, where you can set aside time, you know. People live very busy lives, especially in the city and even otherwise, you know, very busy lives. And like I know of a couple that at a certain at a point in their lives, like they were working in two different shifts, both were working in BPO's. So, so the husband would work probably like six in the morning till, you know, some some time in the evening, the wife will work, you know, that kind of a day shift, the husband was working, you know, evening, he starts in the evening and then so there was very little common time, you know, one was leaving the house, the other one was coming in and it was like that. So it was for a season. So, so I remember that they would be intentional, you know, they realize the challenge of, you know, if they let things slip, they could just go on, you know, for months without even sometimes seeing each other, right, in an alert state. So they had to make time to be with each other, make time to for, you know, meaningful conversation and so on. So it's very important. The second one we see is trust, where one grows in trust. Now, I'm sure that when we get married or prepare ourselves for getting married, we grow in trust. We learn to have confidence in the other person and grow in trust. And sometimes when trust is broken, it takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of time to rebuild that trust, where there is unfaithfulness or where there is commitment that is not kept for whatever reason and repeatedly, if it happens over a period of time, trust is broken. So trust is, it has to be earned. It has to be given. It has to be, you know, it has to be honest, right? And nothing fake about it. So if there is no trust, then it's going to be very, very difficult for the marriage to be strong. There is no trust, because if there is no trust, if I do not trust you and, you know, whatever things you say, I will always be second guessing, right? In the sense, I will always be thinking, you know, are you are you saying the right thing?  Really in saying these things into me, in, sorry, in communicating these things, you know, what is your agenda? So I'm going to be constantly thinking that way, right? So trust has to be built and certain mistakes that we can make when we are building trust is when something is shared in confidence. OK, let's say something's about our past, some mistakes we did. OK, so the husband shares with the wife or the wife shares with the husband. And in that moment, maybe it's, you know, vulnerable, quiet moment and we hear it, we know it's something difficult and all that, but then we receive it. What happens is in a moment of conflict, if there is a time of misunderstanding, if there is a conflict, maybe, you know, there's an argument and a heated argument, maybe, and the temptation is to bring out this, you know, you made this mistake in the past.  There is a tendency to bring that out and speak that out and hurt the other person, maybe to win an argument, maybe to win that, you know, that fight, that quarrel. So there is a tendency to bring that out and use it as a weapon. OK, so if that is done, then again, why should I trust you to share more about my life? When I know that you are going to use it as a bullet, you're going to use it as a weapon against me in future, right? So I will not be able to trust you. So whenever something is said in confidence and whenever someone shares some, you know, very vulnerable information, though there is a temptation to bring it out and, you know, put that out there, we need to be careful not to, you know, break down that element of trust. The third thing we saw was transparency, right? As we move down from casual to professional to friendship to intimate, there is always a greater level of transparency, right? You know, there's nothing hidden, right? And there is great joy and great freedom when you move to that place. And that also comes with time and trust, right? It comes with time and trust where you're able to where I open my heart and say, OK, you can look into my life. Now, this is who I am. Can look into my life. I'm not going to hide anything. Or if you ask me any questions, I'm not going to stone wall you and, you know, block things from from your from you. I'm going to be open and honest, right? Right. OK. So. I am trust transparency. OK. So this exercise, we're not going to go through, but you have it in your notes and, you know, it's a it's a good thing to go through if you're a married person. Maybe you can do it with your spouse and you can, you know, do those scores, you can put the scores there and and count them up and see where you actually stand regarding as a couple regarding communication, right? At a good time for meaningful conversations, you know, if you're going to say it's always true or if it's the other end of the spectrum is OK, never, never, we don't never we do. We have meaningful conversations during the week. You know, that's now that's not a good thing. And so that needs to change, obviously, you know, well, the challenge would be one person feels that, oh, yeah, we have been having great meaningful conversation and the other person feels no, you have it, right? And which means that person's need for meaningful conversations has not been met. So, you know, it's time to take stock time to change. So over the week, over the weekend, I feel free to express feel my spouse pays attention when I'm speaking. I feel I'm being understood. I'm not afraid that my speaking will lead into an argument. We understand each other's perspectives and frames of reference. I can talk at the level of friendship and intimacy. I feel safe and secure in sharing secrets, weaknesses and challenges feel my spouse trust what I say and so on. So it's a good exercise to do as a couple. Is the good exercise to do as, you know, maybe even as during the courtship days. OK, now courtship days, it may not really fully apply.  And so, so this would apply to people who are married. OK, but just to let us know that, you know, that these are factors that these are elements there in communication. And when you break it down and you ask these questions or address this, this will really help in communication or building communication. OK, let's look at why communication is important or why would communication be an important building block for a strong marriage? OK, so we see that with communication, you know when you have good communication, you know and understand each other, OK, because you're scared. I mean, you're sharing your heart and the other person is also free to share his or her heart, right? They are also coming forward to share. And because of which, you're getting to know the person. If there's stuff that is shared more about you, then you get to know and understand, OK, this is what my spouse is like. This is what my spouse understands. Oh, this is what my spouse likes. This is what my spouse dislikes. So communication is very important and it helps to know and understand. So in a marriage, you know, we are growing in knowing each other. We are growing in understanding one another. Right. So maybe we start at a place, you know, early days of marriage where we do not understand each other as much. But then we need to continue to grow in knowing one another and understanding one another, because it helps build a healthy and strong marriage. Right. The second thing is to work as a team. Right. You know, if you I'm sure when we looked at leadership, you know, we we would learn that they need to be communication in a team. You know, what happens if in a team that one does not talk to the other? Do you have a team of, let's say, five people, ten people? And they're not talking to one another. They're not communicating to one another. You know, if you look at a game also, you know, like football or cricket, if they're not communicating strategies, if they're not communicating, you know, how what our plan is going to be, how we're going to play. If they're not communicating to one another, then we see that there's it's not a healthy team. Right. If they're going to think within themselves and think that, OK, the other person will understand or, you know, there's going to be it will not happen. Right. So to work together, to function together as a team, as husband and wife, there needs to be communication. Right. And healthy communication. OK. Third one is to support each other. Right. To communicate and say, I need help. I need help in this area. Or can you help me in this or to encourage one another? There needs to be, you know, you need to be able to express and you need to be able to say, OK, I need help or or or speak encouraging words and to think you're doing a good job. You're doing a great job, you know. And so to nurture one another, you know, we saw that in Efficiency Five that husbands, you know, nourish, cherish all those words. So to nurture one another, we need to be able to use nurturing words and words of life, speaking words of life. Maybe the one of the one of the spous is going through a very, very difficult time. Maybe they lost their, you know, loved one could be a parent relative grandparent or whatever. So to be able to encourage or maybe they're having a tough time at work, tough challenges with, you know, even with in-laws and so on. To be able to ask questions, to be able to encourage and share. It's it's very important to support one another. To resolve issues, you know, we're going to look at resolving conflicts. But, you know, to resolve things, meaning to solve the problem, we need to be able to communicate. OK, just imagine, like many times we think, OK, you need to understand, you need to know, you know, just because two people are married, we cannot take into, you know, we cannot assume that they will understand each other perfectly, right? To be able to resolve conflicts, we need to be able to share and communicate.  You know, we're just driving back from after finishing church service. We're going back home and and three of us, me, my wife and daughter, and it happened a couple of times. So, you know, just stays fresh in our minds. So it's coming back home.  And it's already like we're all all hungry. And I'm thinking maybe I should, you know, we should stop by a nice Chinese place and sit and have Chinese food.  All three of us are thinking different things and we haven't shared that.  Let's stop by here and let's have and suddenly everybody's like, oh, I thought we were going here. I thought we were stopping by here. I don't really feel like eating this, you know, I think we should. So everybody's like, you know, disappointed.  And we're hungry, you know, hungry, irritable, disappointed. They don't we're not that somehow we know not all of us are going to be eating our favorite food and it's results in a lot of, you know, tension there. So communication is important to share your needs and also to resolve conflicts. You know, at that point to be able to share and say, OK, fine. So then we came upon, you know, tactic. We said, OK, you know, one Sunday, one person will have their way. OK, so this Sunday, this person's desire, OK, they decide. And maybe certain Sundays we have food at home. So no stopping anywhere. We are going straight home and we're going to, you know, have food at home. No stopping in any. So to be able to resolve, to be able to come to a consensus, you know, it's just common understanding that one needs to be able to talk and communicate, OK, grow together spiritually. Now, you know, we just saw the passage that we read this morning. Deuteronomy 6 talks about how we need to teach, how we need to talk, right? We're talking about spiritual matters. We're talking about the Word of God. We're talking about, you know, we're sharing testimonies. So to grow spiritually together, we need to. Share, speak into each other's lives, ask questions, give space and permission for people to ask questions and not really have an unhealthy communication of, oh, you didn't know this or how can you ask questions about this? Well, the person might have some very strong reasons, you know, and and all that. So growing spiritually together, we also need to guard our marriages. OK, the marriage relationship needs to be guarded. Why? Because there's a real enemy.  And many times we open the doors for the enemy to step in, right? And one of the one of the. Doors that we open is the door of a marriage relationship, the door. We open the door for the enemy to step in. So we need to guard our marriage. OK, so when it comes to guard, guarding our marriage to have a healthy and close relationship with their spouse is, is something that helps guard. Marriage helps guard that intimacy in marriage. OK, when I say intimacy, it's not just physical intimacy, but emotional intimacy. And what would happen if the spouse feels that way? I can't share these things. My, my, you know, my spouse will never understand. So these deep things, these deep maybe hurts and fears and all these emotional things, the spouse begins to share with someone else. OK, of maybe some other of an opposite gender. Then it becomes an emotional tie. It becomes an emotional attachment, becomes an emotional affair. Right. And leads to all other unwanted, unnecessary things. And the reason is this. We've not guarded the relationship at the intimacy, the emotional intimacy. It's very, very important because we can live under the same roof and be thousands and thousands of miles away from each other emotionally. And we don't want that to happen. So how do we bridge that distance? It's only through healthy communication because it's a bridge. We speak words. It's a bridge. We resolve things. It's a bridge, bringing people closer together. When we, when we encourage one another, that's a bridge, right? So guarding our marriage, very important, nurturing children. Like we saw in nurture, we encourage with good communication, healthy communication. And we learn more about that in parenting, cherishing memories and talking about the good times and everything. We see that it involves a communication. So communication does not mean that you just keep talking, talking, talking, talking. You know, sometimes you might have a wrong idea of that. Just come on, one person is just going on and on and on. That's not communication. Communication is being able to convey, express and it's a two-way street where you're receiving, right? You're receiving, understanding what the other person is saying as well. OK, which brings us to the next one, which is meaningful. It involves a genuine expression or expressing our heart, but it also involves listening attentively. OK, listening attentively. So the thing is this many times people do not think about listening as an important aspect of communication. And we just focused on sharing, speaking, where we are not really thinking about understanding the person through attentive listening, listening to them attentively. This is really an important part of it. Let's look at these two scriptures, James chapter one verse 19. Remember this, my dear friends, everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, right? Quick to listen, quick to receive, quick to hear and understand, slow to speak, slow to become angry, slow to anger.   So when it comes to attentive listening, it's different from just hearing. Because physically, I mean, of course, if our hearing is OK, we can hear, we can hear a lot of things. We can hear words, we can hear songs, we can hear the other person, right? Say, what did the other person say? This person said this, this, this, this, but when we are listening, that means we are trying to understand the person. OK, first of all, understand what they are saying. We're trying to understand what they are feeling, right? OK, sometimes people use that word, I hear what they're saying. OK, meaning, OK, I'm hearing that, but are you really understanding what I'm feeling, all the emotions that they're going through? Maybe it's anger, maybe it's irritation, maybe it's fear, you know, maybe it's sorrow. Are you understanding it? Because when you're listening, we are also trying to understand what they are feeling, OK, and what they are expressing. Even without words, right? Because we express a lot of things, we might say a lot of things, but when you look at the words and we look at our expression, when you look at our body language, right? It could be two different things, right? Suppose you ask somebody, how are you doing? And I'm OK, right? If you take the words, what did they say? They said, I'm OK, right? But if you if you consider the tone of their voice and the expression of their face, when you consider that, that's attentive listening, right? And the person says, I'm OK. And you say, go great, fantastic. That's good, you know, let's get going. We're actually missed out. We missed out. We just heard the words, but we didn't really hear the emotions behind the words, right? We didn't really attentively perceive the emotion or we heard the words, but we didn't see the body language where they looked down and they were, you know, they were weary when they said, I'm OK. They said, I'm OK, but actually they were not, right? So things like that, the body language. So when we say listening, we are listening to understand the person, OK? Not just to understand the information that they are that they are conveying, OK? We are listening to understand the person and more so and typically in marriage, OK? OK, we're going to look at, OK, how to be, you know, good listeners and some keys to good listening. And and so before that, I just wanted to ask any any questions here so far on communication on. On whatever we have shared so far, anything at all? Anybody, any questions? OK, so. So the question is, you know, is everybody great at expressing themselves? OK, that's a question that we need to ask ourselves, you know, am I good? Or, you know. Or maybe we can ask ourselves, you know, what is it that? You know, what is it that prevents me from communicating or expressing myself? Sometimes we, you know, you want to say hold back, right? So or you don't feel like saying you don't feel like talking, right? So it's good to think about those moments and say, OK, is it just tiredness, plain weary, you know, or is there something that is holding me back from from really, you know, talking, sharing? Or maybe as a as a person, you know, we're not used to those things, right? We are very private, right? Yeah, OK, I think success has a question. Oh, also, yeah, yeah, success, go ahead, please. Yeah, I want to ask a question. If you look at the rate of divorce today in the world, can we say that it's actually a lack of communication across this divorce? Or something? Yeah, I think it's a mix of expectation. It could also be, I mean, many factors, like I'm just guessing here. It could also be expectation, wrong expectation coming from a wrong understanding of what marriage is. You know, that's that's a big one because many times we see that people have wrong understanding of marriage itself. So. So which means that expectations are different.   That's why I got married. Why are you getting married?  And, you know, I know you hear all these kinds of things. So the expectation is different and and and also, you know, we human beings at the core, you know, our self-centered looking for how I can please myself. What other person can do to help, you know, please me. And so it's a it could be a wrong understanding. Also, you know, lack of commitment, right? It could be lack of commitment, faith, being unfaithful because of that lack of commitment, not really guarding or not really knowing that, you know, being emotionally close to a person who's not your spouse can actually lead to a lot of other things. Right. So not having our guards up, you know, just saying, oh, that's the best friend. This is the best friend. That's the best friend. And how's your order? What about your spouse? Oh, I don't know.  So so it's a combination of all this, I would say a success and definitely communication also, you know, because of all this communication breaks down, right? You're just information. You're just good morning, good evening, or even that is not there. There's silence, you know, if, if not for children, they won't be the house will be very silent in some homes, right? And some people say, OK, you go tell your father that this thing is ready.  You know, what's happening there? You know, it's like somebody's a mediator, right? So big communication breaks down. Yeah. OK, I hope that helps success. We have one more question from John. OK, any practical tips to reduce church matter discussions at home and to improve personal communication?  In fact, this coming Saturday, we have a management workshop here in Bangalore and so those of you who are probably in and around Bangalore, you're most welcome to register, be part of it. So it's called nurturing missional families, right? Where both husband and wife are in ministry. Maybe you're working in the same ministry. Maybe you were two different ministries, you know, you and especially I think I can understand John Paul's question because, you know, that's the same case here for my wife and I work for the church. So a lot of conversation happens about church, about the service, about church, about getting ready for the service. You know, a lot of things happen that way. So so any practical tips to reduce, I think it's just you decide when you're going to talk about this and when not to talk about it. And it's a and it'll come with with practice. So where you say, OK, at home, let's not, you know, let's not certain things are very, very, very crucial, right? There could be an emergency and you can't not talk about it, but generally, you know, you just say, OK, we won't discuss solving these things. Let's let's set aside some time, you know, maybe in the morning, maybe in the evening, whatever, we'll discuss those things where you know, formally, we're talking about church things. Church things. I think that will help, John. Yes, thank you. Right. OK. So. So see, one thing I realized was early days of getting married. So like, I don't consider myself to be an introvert. For me, it's like normally I'm OK, talking to strangers, talking to the thing. I'm fine. But there are times when I'd like to be quiet. You know, whereas sometimes when I don't want to be with people, I just want to recharge my batteries, you know, socially. I just want to, you know, it's like that. And also when I was working for these organizations, different sales organizations, where the most of the day was meeting people, talking to people, meeting people and whatever words I had. Actually, I've used up. So when I came back home and to my wife, like talking was the last thing that I had in mind. I don't want to talk. I just want to sit quietly. And so the early days of marriage, it it was difficult, where I didn't want to talk. Whereas my wife was just waiting to talk, because she was not working at the time. She was at home alone the whole day, and she was just waiting for me to come back home so she could just talk to me, find out what's happening and share about what was happening in her life. So so it was a little bit of a struggle. So then I realized that, hey, I can't just go with the flow like that. So so I would just I was OK, asking questions, waiting, you know, just listening to her talk and I just maybe over a cup of tea, you know, just listen and just recharge. And after a while, I'll be fine to talk about my day and talk about what happened, et cetera, but not immediately. So so that was something which didn't come naturally to me. And definitely not communicating, you know, at that point. So so you just understand, you know, you just come to that. OK, at this point, at this time of the day, I'm not a great communicator at the same of day.  The spouse can just barely manage monosyllables at that time of the day. You're just raring to talk and discussing different concepts and sunrise and all that. Whereas your spouse has one word, two words, you know, they just not started yet. The day. So to understand that and say, OK, this is not the best time of the day to have a discussion on spiritual matters. I had to talk about it in times and all this is not the best time.  OK, so we'll stop here, take a break and we'll come back at 10. OK.


I don't know, my mic's not on, or is it? I think it is. Oh, it is now, okay, good. Well, welcome, and thank you guys for coming to our talk, AT&T's Upstream Journey, Open Source Within a Fortune 10. So my name's Darla Ailert, and this is Steve Wilkerson. We work for AT&T as part of AT&T's OpenStack community team. We're both applications developers on our team. And we've actually just started AT&T in June of 2015. So just a little bit over a year ago, we were hired onto AT&T as part of our college hire program. This program is actually a really cool program because it allows you to potentially work in many different areas of the business. And we had the opportunity to start working on AT&T's Integrated Cloud, or AIC, in July of 2015, just shortly after we started with the company. And as you can imagine, AIC uses OpenStack as its cloud platform. So whenever we first started on AIC, we started to look into the different teams that they had. They had a lot of different scrum teams that were focused on different areas of OpenStack. And we couldn't seem to quite fit into any of those for some reason. And it ended up being a really good thing that we didn't, because then we were able to actually create our own team. It was a very small team that was just focused on getting the idea of Open Source out to our company, out to our leadership, fellow employees. We wanted to just change the way that employees thought about Open Source, and we wanted to change the way that leadership was thinking about Open Source and get them to back us up with what we wanted to do in the future. So this eventually turned into what I just said was the AT&T OpenStack community team. We presented in Austin actually just a brown bag session. Very quickly we were able to talk about why our team exists and what's important to us and all of that. So just to recap really quickly, it's really important for AIC to start catching up to the community. Or at least get as close as possible, because as of right now, we're a couple releases behind. And we've also created a lot of technical debt. So each new release, we have to carry that technical debt into every new release, I should say. So each release, we're pushing new features that we've created in our own internal code base into the new release. And as you can imagine, this takes a ton of time and a ton of effort. And then the amount that we have to push into each new release only continues to grow because we keep making new features. So we needed to change this. We needed to start using features that were already built within OpenStack instead of just bringing that down into our own internal code base and editing it from internally. So one goal behind our team is to reduce the technical debt as much as possible. And that way it's easier and easier to upgrade with each new release. So we wanna do this by either finding preexisting features that accomplish what we need them to, or even taking some of the features that we've created if the community wants them, pushing them out to the community and really start contributing back. So we know that if we really want to change to an open source mindset, we have to do just this. We have to contribute back. We can't just be the company that takes everything without giving something back. So that's what we've been working on. Our team is 100% focused on contributing to the community. We do have a focus around some high level areas like containerization, upgrading, scalability, hardening the platform, those sorts of things that we're focusing on. But we do want to just help the community and contribute back to the community as much as we possibly can. So just to kind of give you an idea of where we came from and where we're at. In August of 2015 is when our team was officially started. There were just three of us. It was myself, Steve, and then a coworker, Darren Shaw, who unfortunately wasn't able to make the trip. But we wanted to build this team. We wanted to build it with fresh minds, people that would be excited to work in the open source world, people that would realize how awesome of an opportunity this is because it doesn't happen very often, that especially at big companies that you get to go out and work in an open source community for your company or on behalf of your company. So we thought, who better than people like ourselves? People fresh out of college, the ones that haven't been in any sort of big business or big company, they're getting in, they're excited to work in general. And then whenever we say open source, they get even more excited, those types of mindsets. So AIC paired with the college hire program that Steve and I are in, and we are able to continue to build our team up over the past year or so. As of right now, we have about 35 team members total, 30 total developers, 18 of which are first year developers. So over half of our developers are fresh out of college. We also have five leadership type positions like associate director, scrum masters, things like that, which are actually really important to engineers like us because those are the roles that keep us focused on development work while they deal with all the other stuff that we don't really care about, which is nice. So the end goal of our team is to obviously contribute to the community first. We have some people that are currently working on AIC scrum teams, because right now it's two separate teams. So we have AIC and then the community team. So we have people working in AIC scrum teams that are essentially paving the way for where we want our team to go. And we're working very closely with them because they're contributing everything to the community first and then bringing it back into the AIC code base. And this is exactly what we want. We want to be those type of developers that put everything into the community and then bring it back to where we need it. So eventually we want to be one big blended team. So like I said, we're two right now but our goal in goal is to just be one big AIC team that contributes to the community first and then back to AIC as I said before. So along with that we have a lot of others outside of our team that are also contributing to OpenStack. And kind of another goal behind our team is to be able to help coach people, show them the different ways of an open source world, get them in the open source mindset, teach them how to contribute. Anything we can do to basically help our entire company, not just our team, become open source contributors, we want to help with that. So of course I have to throw some metrics up here, right? These are contributions that we've made over the past few releases. And I grabbed these beginning of last week so I'm sure if you looked at Stack Letters right now it would be a little bit different because I'm sure we have really hard working team members back at home just contributing as much as they can. But so just a quick side note, this is just our team. So even if you went out on the same day that I grabbed these metrics from and looked at AT&T it's going to look different because we have a script that the third presenter Darren Shaw actually wrote that uses the Stack Analytics APIs to grab information that we need like specific people. So of course we have people all over AT&T contributing to OpenStack but we want to be able to look at just our team members and also see how our team is doing outside of the entire AT&T Stack Analytics. So this is for like I said, this was grabbed with just our team members but you can see that there's a general upward trend obviously minus Okada. But a couple of important things that I think are really cool, Liberty. We had one commit and 98 reviews and then by Newton we've gotten up to 267 commits and 692 reviews. So this is exactly what we want to see. We want to see ourselves contributing more and more as time goes on. And then the same on the right hand side are our drafted and completed blueprints. So we had six drafted blueprints and three completed blueprints and Newton when in Liberty we had absolutely no blueprint contributions in any way. So these are the types of things that we want to see. We're really happy with the progress that we've made so far. We think we've done a good job at easing ourselves into the community especially having all junior developers some of which who had never even had open source experience before, let alone OpenStack. I don't think anybody on our team had OpenStack experience prior to joining our team. So there's a very steep learning curve whenever all of these developers joined our team. So just to point out the blueprints that we did complete or helped complete in Newton, we have Keystone, Heat and Cola. So in Keystone we helped with the honoring schema validation everywhere blueprint. Basically the schema validation was only enforced for the V3 API and it wasn't enforced for legacy Keystone or V2. So this blueprint enforces it in those areas. With the heat we were able to draft and develop the blueprint that enhances heat orchestration over glance metadata. Basically just adds additional tags in the metadata which allows for more fine-grained control at the orchestration layer. And then in Cola we drafted and developed a blueprint which was a VMTP container. So VMTP is a small Python application that runs in network testing and it can also run diagnostics on your cloud's network activity. So these are all three features that we were able to contribute to and we're really excited about being able to actually start on blueprints because we started mostly on small commits and reviews prior and we wanna start making really good contributions and not just the low hanging fruit type of contributions. So over the last year we faced a lot of challenges throughout this journey of ours. Changing the culture of a Fortune 10 company is no easy task. We want to change the entire mindset of our entire company, not just our team. So getting leadership to back us up was easy in some cases but very difficult in some others as you can imagine. And then once we were finally able to get their approval we ran into a lot of more roadblocks like company standards, funding, things like this. And Steve's actually gonna tell you a little bit more about those. Yeah so the way I wanna approach this is kinda give you an idea of where we started and then look at where we're at now and look to where we're going because all three time periods there are very important because it gives you an idea of kind of where we've been and the growing pains we might have felt and look at opportunities. And this is something that we like to reach out to other people, whether it's individuals or other large corporations or even small companies that are involved in the community and try to get those lessons learned too because there might be a lot of similarities and there might be some aspects there that we can look at that maybe we hadn't considered. So those are all very important. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is some of the company culture stuff. Darla touched on this a bit like she said, changing the culture of a company, especially a large one, isn't going to happen overnight and it might not happen even over the course of a year. You know, it's something that's, you know, a common theme I've heard is that a lot of these larger corporations kind of feel these same growing pains so I'm not really surprised looking back that this is kind of what we're experiencing but that's a good thing. So the first thing I'd like to touch on a little bit is our Chief Strategy Officer, John Donovan, laid out this ambitious goal for the company to start adopting and contributing back to open source projects. The theme in Austin was that OpenStack is extremely disruptive and that's a good thing because it's changing how the industry's working, it's changing the technology and we really wanna be a part of that. We can't not be a part of it just because if we're not involved and we're not contributing and we're not staying in tune with the community, we're going to get left behind and with a huge technology that's as disruptive as OpenStack, we really wanna be there and I'm really excited to be a part of a team that's really on that path right now because it's a lot of the other, my peers that I graduated with who are in similar programs, I explained to them what our team's doing and what I've been able to do and participate in as part of this team even over the course of a year, just blows them away and it blows them away even more when they kinda look at it and they're like, what, I never thought AT&T would really participate in something like that, how did that happen? And kinda laying all this out, it really, it's fantastic seeing people's reaction. So where we're at now with that is our team in particular is really focused on open source first. So if we identify a problem with our team whether it's metrics gathering, how we're wanting to approach a problem, how our team's communicating, we're always looking for open source solutions because that helps reinforce the mindset of how we're working. And we don't want to be a team that's working on open source projects and trying to participate in a community if we're not really looking there first. So it's really kind of a habit and culture thing at the individual level as well and our team's doing a fantastic job with that. As far as the AIC scrum teams, at least when I started, it seemed that a lot of those teams were more like component or area focused, which is why it was kind of difficult for me in particular to find a home whenever we were considering joining internal AIC scrum teams because I couldn't, I didn't know enough about each of the components to really figure out where I wanted to be in the future. And when you're asking a new developer who's coming on, they're like, okay, you have all these options, which one would you like? It's like, well, I don't know. This might take a while because me personally, I need to look at each one and kind of identify where my interest is. So where we're at now, the scrum teams within AIC are, it's not just those silos anymore, they're cross-functional teams. So you've got people who are looking at a particular problem from various different angles and identifying how the features that we're looking at or what we're wanting to adopt affects the platform as a whole, which is fantastic because I'm not a huge fan of knowledge silos. And whether it's something like AIC or any other team, I feel like knowledge silos are very detrimental because it kind of compartmentalizes that knowledge within a subset of people. And whenever those people leave or you're trying to consider a new way of approaching a problem, it can be very disruptive in a bad way to your organization. The last point for company culture, this one, for me, I always get a good laugh out of and I put it on here hoping that some others might feel the same way as, you know, this is not just an AT&T thing, right? Like a lot of these companies are going out with all these buzzwords, like open source, collaboration, agile, you're doing all these things. That's great because that stuff drives change, but how are we acting on that? Like how is this changing our culture as a company because it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? Like smaller startups might look at how they collaborate and approach co-location issues or agile issues in a different way than a large company, especially telecom, like AT&T. And our team has actively been trying to drive that change, not only within our team, but our college hire program and some of the other teams that are peers in this college hire program are a part of, so it's not just our organization and AIC's organization, it's these other organizations across the company. For example, one of these, like I love agile processes, like huge process nerd, favorite process is Kanban. And I know some people like, you know, everyone's got their favorite and the Kanban one speaks to me, you know, a lot of the shops I interned at and worked in before AT&T were Kanban shops, but some of our fellow AT&T college hires talking with them that like, yeah, could you tell me a little more about this? So like sit down and talk with them and I get really geeked out about it and they've actually taken it to their teams and they come back to me, they're like, yeah, we're gonna try it, like really excited to see how it turns out and it's really awesome being part of a team that's driving that change, you know, not just within our organization but across the company. All right, so I wanted to talk about leadership support and this one's a big one for me because without support from your leaders whether they're directly or at the executive level, you're not going to get very far and it makes driving these changes that I mentioned even more difficult. So where we started, we actually had passionate backing from our immediate supervisors and AIC. So that's our director, Andrew Lisik, that's our executive director, Ryan Van Wick, very passionate about this community program because they saw the value in driving these changes and getting involved in the community because without doing this, in terms of our long-term goals, this is where we needed to be and they had that clarity and they're like, this is where we're at now, this is where we need to get, we'll figure out how to get there. So where we're at now, we actually have executive backing and buying for the goals for our team and that goes, you know, our assistant vice president, Greg Stiegler, we've got our senior vice president, Sorb Saksiner are all, they are passionate about this team and they're helping drive this team forward not only in the ways that we're approaching our work and how we're changing the way we work but also laying out the goals in the roadmap for our team. So it's not just, hey, we're going to unleash you in the community and you're gonna do whatever you want. You know, they are actually guiding us to where, you know, we need to end up as a company but also where we need to end up as individuals because, you know, a lot of first year developers, we're not going to have the foresight to really understand the business value of why we're doing this down the road but thankfully with all of those people tied in together, whether it's our immediate supervisors or, you know, our executive leaders, like they are helping, it is, like I said, I'm so geeked to be part of this team and this is just another reason why because we have people who understand it and are helping us mature as a team and driving us towards our goals. And here, full disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, so, but I do want to kind of touch on some of the legal funding and standards concerns that were brought up with this team when we started and where we're at now. I remember when I started, one of the big issues that was kind of being floated around was how do we handle contributing changes upstream, whether it's something that we're doing that's a new feature or if it's something that's already been developed and that we want to try to release upstream to the community. Because that does present a challenge because traditionally a lot of people can probably know where I'm coming from. It's, if you're working on something at work with work materials on work time, traditionally it's the intellectual property of whatever organization or company you're working for and that's completely understandable. But how does that fit with open source software and a team that's dedicated solely to working on open source software? So that was kind of, there was that framework that was started whenever we started there, so there's things like the CCLAs that you have to sign for open source projects if you're contributing on behalf of a corporation. But it seemed like that wasn't enough from my perception. It seemed like there needed to be some further hashing out on the legal side with that. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really speak. I might be off base, but I think that's the way that this was approached. Where we're at now with that is that we actually have approval to contribute not only to OpenStack, but there are other open source projects that we can contribute to. So for example, recently, I think it was a week even before we came here to Barcelona, we were actually approved to start working on Kubernetes. And it's been a very common theme of the summit, Kubernetes is another very disruptive open source project that's really gonna shape the way that not only OpenStack runs, but also how applications in the future are going to run. So it's really exciting that that framework's there to approve our open source developers to actually contribute to that as well as some of the other projects. So that's fantastic. From the funding aspect of that, I know this was changed recently and I'm not super in tune with the funding aspect, so I don't wanna touch on this too much and maybe explain something the wrong way, but I know that there was an issue with how the open source development that we were doing was approached from a funding perspective. So with a large company, the financial stuff is a huge part of that. And I totally understand that. I totally understand that the way, some of, I don't wanna say roadblocks, but some of the issues that came up whenever we were working, I'll just say that I'm happy that they were revisited because it seems that the way we're going now in terms of how that's looked at is actually going to be beneficial for our team in the long run and not just our team. It's any open source development that's occurring within AT&T, which is fantastic because that aligns with the vision that I mentioned earlier with John Donovan laying out our path going forward that we need to start contributing and utilizing open source software more. And finally, I wanted to touch on standards a bit because standards are always a thing that corporations and companies are considering. And sometimes maybe your corporate standards, the way your approach development doesn't necessarily align with the community. There might be some common themes there, but you can't always expect them to line up perfectly. And especially with OpenStack because each project is gonna have different ways that it approaches how you're doing your development standards, your testing standards, how the tests are run. So it's kind of a, I don't wanna say a challenge, but it's a learning experience trying to figure out how we can apply our standards at AT&T to the community standards. And that's a good thing because it's helping us see the bigger picture and maybe trying to identify opportunities where we can maybe drive some change in the community or the community can drive some change into the way that we approach standards internally. And finally, this slide is very near and dear to my heart and I know growing pains at a glance seems like, it might be a negative connotation, but it's growing for a reason, right? So I'm a firm believer that if your team's not feeling these growing pains, you're not given the drive to change because if everything's working just fine and you're not experiencing any difficulties or these growing pains, then why change, right? The first one, balancing business needs and engineer preference for projects. This is huge with OpenStack because there's so many projects within this ecosystem. There's, we have people who are interested in Trove. We have people who are interested in the networking aspect. I personally, I'm very interested in the COLA project and infrastructure in general. We have people who are interested in Keystone, Nova. We had people who were interested in Minasca. So how do we balance all these personal interest of our engineers with the business, the goals and strategy for the business? And this was something that originally we kind of had a growing pain with because of course, whenever you're working with something really cool and all-encompassing like OpenStack, you're gonna be drawn to what interests you because that's what's going to motivate you to succeed and kind of, yeah, that might also present opportunities for you to take those lessons learned and what you're really passionate about and try to drive it back into our platform internally. So where we're at now with that is we kind of, we found a way to balance that. So instead of approaching this from, we really need these goals in this one specific project, we kind of have these overarching concepts like Darla mentioned. So we have security, hardening of the platform, there's upgrades, there's deployment, scalability and we can kind of tie in aspects of a few projects under one of those umbrellas, which is fantastic because it allows our engineers some flexibility while still helping drive those strategic goals for the business. Giving leadership insight into work without being disruptive and I don't mean this in the way that our leadership was being disruptive and trying to gain insight into the work we're doing. I'm saying that our engineers originally were responsible for kind of speaking on the message of what they were working on which is to be expected but once we started growing our team and started working on more projects that could become a little cumbersome which is why we started including some of the leadership roles in our team. This also comes into the metrics gathering and this is something that Darla touched on a little bit with the original way we gathered metrics was we would run a simple bash script that was using PyStackalytics, which is just a Python wrapper for the Stackalytics API and running this manually which was an improvement over what we did initially which was going through Stackalytics and finding people's name that worked on our team and writing the tally on a window above my desk because that's how people could look at a glance and be like, okay, that's where you guys are at that's fantastic. I see you guys are actually driving forward, you're making some change but we needed something more to tell that story. The solution past the Python script was actually creating an internal dashboard that would pull those metrics and create almost like an internal Stackalytics for our team but I'll freely admit I was one of the people who was skeptical of this approach because like Darla mentioned, the purpose of our team was to reduce technical debt among other things but creating an internal Stackalytics dashboard was creating technical debt to show we're working to reduce technical debt and after a while I was like, yeah, this might not be the best approach, it's better than a Python script that we're running manually but there's gotta be something better. So fast forward to, I guess this is about seven weeks ago we just, well one of my team members, Brandon Joseph, discovered keen.io and it's actually really cool, it's almost like analytics is a service, you can create these events that are triggered, you can trigger them manually, you can set up web hooks and GitHub repositories and that was actually great because we could just feed this information to Keen and you can set up, it will set up a dashboard for you that you can just take a glance at and you can set it up however you want so you can put whatever information that's meaningful at a glance without being too disruptive and requiring too much additional work from the team and this is great for those times that people are like, oh hey, how are we looking since the last time I approached you about a week ago, are we improving, are we stalled on something and this simple dashboard, they can just take a look at it and it'll show these metrics over time, you can show PyGraphs, you can show just a flat box with a number showing that you've increased and it's like, this is great because now this reduces the disruption not only on our developers but also our leadership roles so they can actually get this information in a timely manner and focus on selling our message and kind of relaying that information instead of how they need to get that information. I'll touch on the scrum process here, as I mentioned, huge process nerd, love Kanban. After a while we kind of realized that maybe scrum wasn't the best fit for our team and that's AT&T's a scrum shop so we assumed that that would be the process we would use but the more we looked at it, it really didn't fit because we could still divide up the work into chunks but in terms of time-boxing that work it was kind of difficult because we're not focused to our developers' work anymore, we are focused on how are we interacting with the community, what's required to drive these changes forward, do we need to go through this and review it and code review again? So we figured Kanban would be a better fit here because we're still dividing up that work in meaningful chunks but instead we're not going to time-box it, we're going to order it by priority which scrum also orders by priority but we felt Kanban, like I said, would be a better fit because then we weren't forced to time-box things and we could focus solely on prioritizing our work and also identifying how we could move that work forward if we noticed it was getting stuck and that was fantastic it's actually been a huge help for our team and I'm really happy to have been a part of that I brought in one of my fellow team members, Larry Rinsing on that, he was also very instrumental in that because he came from another company that was a huge Kanban shop and it was very successful for them and they felt a lot of the same process pains that we were feeling so it was fantastic and that's like one of my favorite accomplishments that I've had on this team also how to mitigate the effects of budgetary constraints you know it's no secret and this is, you know, across the industry is that companies from time to time are going to feel they're going to have to revisit their budget and for us that could mean we might not get as many developers as we had planned on it means things like attending the summit and mid-cycles might be a little difficult and those are huge in, you know, working in this community and driving these features and contributing and everything else thankfully our team has been able to strategically determine how to work with what we have and get the most value out of it so instead of focusing on well this is unfortunate because we can't go to the Barcelona summit and meet with the community and drive these changes forward instead we're always trying to find ways outside of the box so that's whether, you know, traditional IRC stuff we've recorded a lot of the sessions for our team members we've kept them in the loop at the end of the day kind of, you know, for example some of the COLA stuff some of the neutron stuff any project that we have engineers working in we're trying to send that message back home so there's not that latency of us being here wrapping everything up, going back home presenting to them and then worrying about it we actually have people looking forward and this is, you know, it's been very successful for us so I mentioned I wanted to talk a little bit about where we're going I know I've been talking a long time I haven't even looked at the time, I'm sorry but this is kind of lays out where we started where we'd like to be and further down the road we really want to go so first whenever we onboard individuals and whenever our team first started it's, we call it housekeeping issues and I, our housekeeping I don't want to say issues but housekeeping I don't, yeah housekeeping and this was getting people familiar with the projects that they would like to work on that align with our strategic goals by you know, contributing via low-hanging fruit items on the project that's a great way for individuals to get started with the project and be able to contribute something to that project without feeling like they're in over their head we also look to try to collaborate on existing blueprints as much as possible a lot of projects out there have a lot of work especially this time as the summit's wrapping up all the projects are kind of aligning on their items for their road map before the P-release so this is a great place for us to try to get involved with some blueprints and then also just building the foundation for contributions so that's building those relationships the biggest takeaway I've had from Austin and this summit is that the connections that you build with people are like one of the most important drivers in this community and it's not I don't mean that in the way of driving features upstream but just being able to participate in this community you can't I mentioned before that I don't like silos and you can't be a a silo as an individual in this community because then if you're not communicating with people and you're not putting yourself out there and you're not volunteering for taking on these tasks whether it's bugs, reviews, or blueprints or whatever like you can't you're not gonna have much success so that's really something we try to instill in our engineers early on following that really the end goal is to just get these people in these projects and help them build that expertise and build those relationships because that's how you become a more active member in these communities that we're part of it's really difficult to say it's really difficult to I don't like to say gain influence but it's really difficult for your voice to be heard if you're not actively contributing you know we don't want to just throw people in there and say well we really want to see this happen with the project and then have them ghost away like this is an investment for our engineers and they really need to own that and finally we really you know not only as AT&T but as individuals we really want to help drive this platform forward simply because we've seen how disruptive it is and we want to be a part of that like I said we don't want to not be on this this path forward with OpenStack because if we're not we're gonna get left behind and that's not what we want as individuals and that's not what we want at the company level so it's very important for us to be involved in these projects in the long term and that's all we have we have our contact information here if you have any other questions I'm not sure we have seven minutes if anyone has any questions I think there's a mic thank you for the presentation it was really awesome to hear that going upstream can be so fast my question is that if you find some bug in your system which is really really affecting your production how do you handle that? you want to fix it there but you also want to follow the upstream first strategy so how do you solve this issue? so if it's affecting production I would imagine since our team focuses solely on the upstream work so it's a little difficult for me to answer that but I'll answer it the best the way that I would approach it so if it's something that is actively affecting production it needs to be fixed however that being said if we notice that it's affecting production in a way that's extremely disruptive it's also important to take that to the community because maybe that's something that another company's feeling so a lot of these problems that individuals and operators see in OpenStack is not relegated probably entirely to their organization, their company and their way of operating OpenStack so for example being a telco maybe some of the other telcos that we are actively in contact with or who we might not even be aware who are involved with OpenStack yet we can take it to the community and say hey, this is something we've noticed this is how it affected us and here's how we think is a good way to mitigate that and that's part of being a great community contributor is not just taking that knowledge and that lesson learned and keeping it internally because that's very detrimental to driving OpenStack as a platform forward Just one technical question that you create an upstream solution for that but you maintain your downstream until it gets merged and get to the next version, right? Yeah Okay, thanks I don't exactly have a question but I want to congratulate you when I started at AT&T out of the new hire program we had some workstations on the desktops and one of the first things I did was try and convince people we should put Linux in place of these some workstations and there was no acceptance whatsoever of open source in any way, shape or form it was going nowhere and we've made tremendous strides and then when I was at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit I can't tell you how many times I spoke to people saying look, we want to contribute but I have no developers I'm an architect, I know how to do code I don't have time to do code we're trying to figure out how to get people to do these things but right now I'm just telling you what AT&T needs we don't have the resources so I gotta thank Andrew and Ryan and Greg for their support and you for starting this team and really driving it forward because now I can have conversations with people and I don't have to be constantly apologizing for the fact that we've got this long list of requirements and we have no resources and now we have those resources and that is a terrific improvement over the time since Vancouver Awesome, thank you Thank you, this was very enlightening especially hearing that you started up this new small kind of nucleus of a team I'm curious to know is your primary purpose to serve as kind of an incubator and a sounding board for other parts of the business or do you have specific projects that you're developing that again you keep looking back to the strategy the business and the focus from your chief strategy officer so I'm just curious kind of what your principal role is and is it mostly kind of evangelizing OpenStack and assisting other teams to achieve their goals Do you want to take that one? I think right now I think our sole focus is OpenStack or at least our main focus but as Steve's mentioned we just got approval to start working Kubernetes and I think that that process is going to continue I think that we're going to continue to add more and more open source projects to that list of projects we're allowed to contribute to and I know that we do want to be advocates for open source in general right now of course, like I said our focus is OpenStack because that's what we're working on but we want to be able to go out to the entire company and just promote open source in general Does that answer your question? Thank you You guys did a fantastic job I know you were both at the last summit Did you go and see the purple squirrel chasing purple squirrels? We were not We're taking it a little too literally here, I think, Stephen but we did find a bunch of our purple squirrels which has been great Can you speak to maybe the contingency here about how we've approached different models of growing talent? We've started with, as you said, STEM talent right out of college with no mentors We've introduced mentoring in different regions and then we've, with depth of OpenStack and we've introduced mentors with just general engineering backgrounds and Steve and Darla, I know you both can speak to this because you've both done both Yes, so I mean, like you said we originally started our team based solely on STEM talent We do, we realized in the process that we need more senior developers to help us, right? And we were able to go out to other aspects of the business For example, Steve mentioned Brandon Joseph He's an awesome guy He was in a different part of AT&T but we were able to grab him and snatch him and bring him on our team and he's been a huge asset to our team and I know that we're going to continue to do this We want to get more senior developers more senior engineers, architects just reaching out to anybody within AT&T and even outside of AT&T that can help us grow as individuals and as a team Yeah, the mentoring aspect is very important So I believe it was in Austin Rackspace had a presentation on how they approached their training program for community engineers and one of the things that really stood out to me is they have this solar system model where they consider their son to be a more senior experienced OpenStack developer In a particular project, it might be multiple projects but then they align new community developers around them So the idea is that is they're working with these individuals they're kind of growing that talent themselves and not only learning more about OpenStack itself but developing the engineering practices that allow them to be successful in the community whether that's the soft skills or the harder engineering skills and I think that's fantastic I think that's one route we're starting to go on this team as we get more senior people on the team and even just in the few months that we've had those more senior individuals on the team I feel like the team as a whole has really kind of gotten a better idea of where they need to go forward in developing that talent Looks like we're out of time Thank you all so much for joining our session