This is Dennis McMahon, and welcome to Positively Vermont. And my guest is Greg Nano, the Communications and Events Director of the Catamount Trail Association. Welcome, Greg. How's it going? Good, excellent. And we're looking forward to hearing about you and your organization and some very exciting events coming up in the near future. First of all, tell our viewers a little bit about yourself. So as you mentioned, my name's Greg. I work for the Catamount Trail Association. I've been here for nine years now. And my job is to kind of like connect people with the trail, the Catamount Trail, which is a 300 mile long backcountry ski trail here in Vermont. And then create opportunities for people to kind of engage with the Catamount Trail and backcountry skiing here in Vermont. Tell us a little bit about the Catamount Trail Association, how it got started, what it does and some of the things that it's done in the past. Sure, yeah, so the Catamount Trail is a 300 mile long backcountry ski trail that runs from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian border. And that was established in 1984. And at that time, the Catamount Trail Association was established to kind of promote and protect this trail corridor. And so we've been around for, you know, 30, so almost 40 years now. And over that time, a lot of our life, the job, the association, the CTA, was to kind of work with landowners across the state to kind of make sure to kind of like, you know, keep the trail up to date, keep it open for people to use. And at the same time, like work with other agencies to kind of protect the corridor so that it would be available for future users here in Vermont and abroad. In the last 10 years, we've kind of expanded a little bit. We've created, we started working with chapters throughout Vermont, like smaller local organizations to manage backcountry ski zones. These are areas that have been kind of developed for so people can climb up and then ski down or splitboard down in these areas. And we have a growing number of chapters and zones throughout the state. And more recently, also in the last 10 years, we've really gotten highly involved in kind of youth learn to ski programs. And our youth learn to ski programs, you know, especially in the last three to four years have really kind of exploded. And, you know, we're seeing, we're serving well over a thousand youth of every winter now. Tell us a little bit about the configuration. I know it runs from Massachusetts to Canada. Just give us a bird's eye view and we're gonna have some photos of it, of course, but just give us a verbal picture of what it's like, the terrain, the obstacles, the challenges and things of that nature.  We like to think of it as the cooler version of the Long Trail, just in the sense that it does follow the spine of the Green Mountains. And so you tend to be, you know, either climbing or descending for a lot of the route. It's on gentler terrain and the, you know, the Green Mountain, it doesn't follow the ridge line. We stay a little bit below the ridge, but we try and maintain as high an elevation as possible so we have good snow. You are, there are river crossings and other things, you know, sometimes we do share terrain with snowmobile trails where necessary. And other times, and then when the trail was originally laid out, you know, we try to connect as many of Vermont's Nordic centers as possible. Those places provide like a nice reprieve place to grab a hot bite and something to drink. Sometimes, oftentimes there are ins you can take a, you can rest and stay overnight at, but they, but we're also utilizing their trails, their groomed trails as well. So the Catamount Trail experience is a real kind of menagerie of kind of surfaces from like dedicated backcountry ski trail that we maintain and have developed to kind of groom Nordic center trails and then occasionally groom snowmobile trails as well. That's great. The last time we spoke was well over a year ago, right in the middle of the pandemic. Maybe you could tell our viewers what's been going on since January of 2021. Yeah, actually it's been, it's surprisingly busy. You know, the pandemic is really, seems to have helped people rediscover the outdoors. And so it's really pushed people to kind of like look for new and different ways to kind of engage with the area around them. And so that's really led to, and also, you know, ski resorts these days are, you know, people who knows like they're busy right now, like for the same reason, a lot of people are getting outside and so there are more people at the resorts and you know, crowds or something that people, you know, have differing opinions about whether or not they wanna engage with places that have crowds. So that has also pushed a lot of people into the back country. So over the last, you know, during the pandemic we've been surprisingly busy, you know, there's a lot of interest in the trail, there's a lot of use to all of our zones. We're trying to manage and keep the trails open and the zones skiable. We're also trying to manage parking. Parking, as use has increased drastically, parking has become a real concern and making sure that, you know, people are informed of and know kind of like what the parking etiquette is and what happens if they show up in a parking lot is full. And just kind of managing all those, a lot of the stuff that comes with, you know, high levels of use. There's a lot of good stuff that comes with that. You know, people are engaged with us and our membership is up and our event attendance is up and that's really fun. On the flip side, there's also, you know, the overcrowding and other things that we're trying to manage and working with our partners to figure out if what we can do right now and also like long term thinking more about, you know, we imagine that this use isn't gonna decline anytime soon. Like once people discover something like back country skiing, most people really find that they love it and want to keep doing it. So we're looking long term to figure out, work with our partners in figuring out ways that we can kind of address use and make sure that these areas are accessible for everybody. And, you know, we don't have to start running into your capping or writing tickets or any of these other things, drastic measures that we really want to avoid. Well, tell us Craig, a little bit about, you know, the levels of skill that is needed to navigate this. Is it for amateurs, is it for professionals, is it for novices, is it for long time skiers? Just give us an idea as to what kind of challenges or no challenges that the trail presents or provides.  Like, I mean, you're skiing and kind of ungroomed snow or traveling through ungroomed snow. And so there's definitely a little bit of skill that is necessary for, you know, being out in the back country alone, kind of like independently, you need to be prepared for if you have equipment failure, if you're stuck out, you know, and you need to know like navigational, you know, skills to make sure that you're going in the right direction and can get back to your vehicle if necessary. But generally, we like to think of the Catamount Trail as being kind of available to just about everybody. You know, with the Catamount Trail itself with 300 miles of terrain, you can imagine it varies kind of pretty drastically. So if you're a beginner skier, like you don't have a lot of timeline skis or a lot of, you know, technical skill on the descents, there are plenty of sections that are flatter and don't require a lot of, like a high level of technical skill to kind of navigate. You know, we also work to try and make sure that the trails are well marked. We provide navigational resources on our website to make sure that you, you know, users know what they're getting into and have the resources available to them to make sure that they can, if they do get turned around or do get lost, that they have resources available to help them find out, you know, discover like where they are at and how to get back to, you know, a trailhead. And so, you know, it's, again, it varies. It depends on how you want to engage with the trail. You know, we have a number of people will try and, you know, not a through ski the trail. So they're going to ski from start at one end and ski to the other. Some, if those people are camping, you know, that's a relatively high level of like expertise is required to kind of like do that safely and do that efficiently.  We run coast between 60 and 80 day tours throughout the course of the winter. Other people will sign up for one of the day tours on the Cadmium Trail and they'll go out with someone to show them, you know, help facilitate shuttles and help show them where to go and set the pace and make sure that, you know, provide some of that resources and facilitate that experience a little bit more. And the same thing is kind of true about the zones that our chapters manage. I mean, there's backcountry skiing in the sense that you just kind of like look at a map, kind of like you can read that map and like, oh, here it looks like, this looks like a slope that could be skiable. Let's go check it out, you know, to like some of the zones that we have, the zones that are maps, there's trailheads, there's parking areas, the uphill tracks are marked. So it's a little bit of a facilitated experience compared to kind of like full on backcountry skiing with no resource, no additional resources like that. So it's a kind of a stepping stone. If you think of like how people get into backcountry skiing, oftentimes they'll start uphilling at a resort, you know, they'll go to a friendly resort that will allow them to skin up and ski down. And then from there, they need to kind of like, that next step is oftentimes one of these zones that has additional resources to help people kind of like, ensure they have a good experience. And at the same time, they can find the goods and get back to their car safely. And then from there, they can jump on to bigger and, you know, adventures further abroad into the kind of more unknown and exploratory backcountry experiences. That's great. And I take it you have markers and signage around to help people, is that what you have? Definitely, yeah. I mean, on the Catamount Trail, the Catamount Trail is marked with blue blazes. We have, the trailheads are marked, you know, if you go to our visitor website, Avery, the trail itself is broken up into 31 sections that are reasonable day skis. And then each of those sections has a map and a written description and shovel directions. We have an interactive map on our website to help people with planning that indicates where all the parking areas are and additional resources like inns and places to eat. And then we have on our website, there's also a staying found page which has additional navigational resources that will help people while they're actually in the field. And we have paper maps and most of our zones that are chapter manager zones also have the maps as well. Tell us about these chapters. How many people are involved in that? Where do you have them? Well, yeah, we have chapters all throughout the state. You know, there's the Southern Vermont Trails Association down in Southern Vermont and the Dutch Hill Association of Skiers and Hikers. We have the Madden River Valley Backcountry Coalition, the Northeast Kingdom Backcountry Coalition up North. There's the Grateful Shreds. And we have, I mean, we have quite a few chapters and they manage. There's the Ridgeline Outdoor Collective which is in Rochester and Randolph areas. They were one of our, they were our first chapter actually and they kind of, they created the Brandon Gap and Braintree Mountain Forest Backcountry Zones. Those are kind of some of the kind of premier areas here in Vermont. And they kind of like establish the template for which these other chapters are working off of. And so every year we're trying to kind of, we're working with the through the chapters and with the land managers to kind of identify new areas that can be developed for this type of endeavor so that more and more people will have access to this experience and don't have to necessarily drive two or three or four hours to get to it. That's great. Well, tell us about this event that's coming up. The first ever CAT that Charity Ski for. So tell us what that stands for. I understand it's CAT amount brand ultimate tour. That's what it stands for. Yeah, we just, we wanted to, we wanted something short, a name that was short and sweet. I don't know if people know, but we also run the Northeast Delta Dental race to the top of Vermont in the, that happens in August at in Stowe. And, you know, after however many years of running in that and having to say that whole mouthful, we were just like, hey, we need something short and sweet. So it's easy to communicate with people. So yeah, we came up with CAT amount grand ultimate tour or CAT get. It's a little quirky, I think it's a little bit fun. And the idea of this, the idea of this event is that it's, it's a non competitive Nordic skiing event. You know, I think a lot of people look to the Nordic skiing world, especially here just after the Olympics, they see all the racers and the athleticism. There's so much more, you know, there's so much more to cross country skiing and racing. And we wanted to create an event that was not competitive. It was that would be a fundraiser for the cat amount trail association. And that was kind of open, you know, to everybody to come out and like have a good time, you know, a lot of people that are kind of like participating in the backcountry skiing or Nordic skiing are probably familiar with kind of gravel cycling. And it's like the dirt road riding and that happens in the, and like that sport has really exploded. And there are so many like really fun events that really kind of focus on bringing the community together and having a good time. And again, they're not that competitive. And this is kind of our attempt to kind of bring some of that community togetherness and that fun of just like spending time outdoors with like friends and other people to kind of the Nordic skiing and backcountry skiing worlds. That's great. Now I understand that schedule for March 13th, which is pretty near. Tell us what happened on March 13th. Sure, March 13th. So we're, this event is happening at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, Northern Vermont. They are one of the premier Nordic centers in the New England. They've got great conditions, amazing trails. And so what we're gonna be doing on the 13th is gathering for, and then there's gonna, the tour, to go for kind of a longish tour. We have a short course that's about 11 kilometers long. And we have a long course that's 20, around 28 kilometers long. And so we'll start in the morning and people will go off and we're working with untapped Naples out of Richmond there. They're gonna be providing some kind of treats for us at the aid stations. And then REI out of Wilston's gonna be hosting an aid station for us. Word has it, they're gonna have a fire and a s'mores bar and some fun stuff while you're coming through. And then Sterling College is gonna be helping hosting an aid station as well. And they've got a whole slew of activities planned for hand-free donut eating and hot drinks and tree identification and interactive art. They're gonna have, so it's a race. We want people to go out and have fun touring around and exploring and seeing the area. But we also wanna have people to kind of like engage with each other and kind of like, connect with one another and like have that community. Feel like they're part of a community, something larger. It's not just about them getting in the woods, but it's about this like bigger thing that's happening. Tell us, is there a registration for this or any pre-event necessities that people will need to know about? For sure, yeah, I mean, most people, I mean, you could, people could show up day of and sign up. It's the registration fee is $50. People can learn more about the event at catgutvt.com.  So one of the things that, one of the other things that's happening is if you do fundraise, when you sign up to, when you register for the event, you, a fundraising page is created for you. And if you raise $100 or more, you will be entered for every $100 you raise, you will be entered to win a prize from one of our, we have these awesome prizes from our partners that include things like we have a package that is a three night in the in ski package on the Catamount Trail that includes lodging and dinner at the Trap Family Lodge, the Edson Hill Manor and Bolton Valley Resort. We have a hot to hot ski pack a package on the Catamount Trail from the Vermont Huts Association that includes three nights and huts. We have skis from Fisher's Skis. We have a $500 gift card to the outdoor gear exchange in Burlington. VIP Tire and Service is giving away a free set of tires like all season or winter tires. We also have, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. The Blueberry Hill Inn has an adventure weekend planned that they've donated. Bolton Valley Resort is also giving away a guided tour. So there's a lot, some really great prizes that you could win if you fundraise. So people can sign up, it's 50 bucks or if they do a little bit of fundraising to get to that $100 mark, they could be entered to win any of these prizes. And they would be helping out the CTA in our work kind of like managing backcountry ski terrain here in Burma and supporting our programs. That's great. So people can like have sponsors sponsor them. Is that what that's about? Yeah, the way, I mean, the way it works is like your typical social fundraiser where, again, when you register you'll have a fundraising page will be created for you. And then you can just share that page on social media or via email with your friends, family and colleagues to, and then ask them to kind of support you in this effort. We will also be keeping fundraising open through the end of the day and the third will come and participate in the event. They can also, they can take pictures of them actually doing the thing that they signed up for and then use that to kind of ask for funds for support. That's great. Now, today is February 21 and we've spoken about the March 13th event. Tell us what's gonna be happening in March and later on with the Catamount Trail Association and its associates. For sure, yeah, I mean, we have between now and the end of the season we still have a bunch of different tours that are happening, tours like tours on the Catamount Trail, tours that are chapter managed zones, multi-day tours and single-day tours. We actually on March 5th, which is next Saturday we actually are coming up. We have the Splitboard Vermont Splitboard Festival that we host in conjunction with Splitboard Vermont and that's gonna be happening at the Middlebury Snow Bowl. That's 100% free event. Anybody that's interested in Splitboarding can show up and we have, I believe we have 12 or 13 different vendors that are gonna be on site. There'll be Splitboard demos, don't hold 100% free clinics and other things. So people can just, it's one of those ways we just wanna, we're working to help connect people with the sport and give them the opportunity to try out some of the equipment, stuff that's like hard to get your hands on. And it's hard to know if you really wanna make, pull the trigger on one of these large investments if you don't get to try it. So this Splitboard Festival is that for us. We also run a Schimo series at Bolton Valley that happens on Tuesday nights. And so we have three more races left this season for that. And again, every night it's as competitive as you want it to be. You can come out and race hard if you want to or you can come out and just have fun skiing and the evening with us. Afterwards, we gather and have a raffle with prizes provided by the Derby Gear Exchange, Fisher Skis and Deena Fit. So there's still quite a bit left going on between now and once the snow melts, depending on, assuming the mother nature gives us a little bit more snow. That's great. Well, I know it's for the CATCUT event that you need volunteers, but tell us what types of things people can volunteer for for that event and for other activities that you've done. For sure, yeah. People at the CATCUT specifically, we're looking for people to help with registration, aid stations and to help out with the grill team. We have a grill afterwards, we'll be providing food for everybody that finishes. So we're looking for a handful of people to help out run the grill. So, and then otherwise, I mean, we could be, if people want to get involved with the CTA, like right now, I think we're pretty set for a lot of volunteer needs, but come the spring, summer and fall, things don't get shut down here. We actually, things get a little bit busier. If we start to, we start, stop focusing on more on events and kind of getting people out on the trail and we start looking at, we would start working on planning and all the maintenance and other stuff that has to happen between during the warmer months to make sure that winter can happen. So if anybody is interested in getting involved, there's always trail projects that are happening all throughout the state. So no matter where anybody is, there's usually some way, something nearby that they can pitch in with if they want to get out in the woods and kind of get their hands dirty. So if anybody is interested in volunteering and doing trail work, they can always contact us and we can connect them with a local trail chief that can, would be happy to have their support. Do you have any needs for any particular expertise as volunteers? Are you looking for someone special right now or just, this is open to any of them? Yeah, just kind of open. We have generally the, sometimes where we need some expertise is in with chainsaws. We don't just let anybody run a chainsaw. So they have to be certified by the state, by the US Forest Service to run it depending on whose land we're on as well. But we prefer to have people that have some experience and have those certifications. But we tend to have a pretty, we tend to keep our existing kind of trail chiefs. We have people that have adopted certain section of the trail. We try to make sure those people are up there kind of like are up to date on those things. That's great. Now, tell us one of the things we'd like to do when positively Vermont is give the organization an opportunity to say, what are your needs? Do you have any particular needs, any issues that are coming up or any financial matters or legislative needs that you have? What anything specific or in addition to financial, tell us what you would like the public to do with respect to your organization if they're in a position to do so. For sure. I mean, we're a membership based organization. So all the funds that we've received that kind of like allow us to do what we do come through membership and through charitable contributions. So I would encourage anybody to one, visit our website, learn a little bit more about the organization and the different opportunities that are out there, to get out there in the woods and like, check it out, like go for a ski somewhere or jump on your splitboard and explore one of our zones.  You can affiliate with the Catamount Trail Association or as a CTA member, you can affiliate with a chapter by affiliated with a chapter. A portion of your membership dollars goes directly to that chapter to support their efforts. And then, yeah, and then make a, consider making a charitable donation. This spring will be launching our Trail Fund raising campaign, which is a kind of a charitable donor campaign in the spring to kind of support our trail work efforts. And so that'll be happening. That'll be going live sometime in April. And so right now we're, there's always a 300 miles of trail. You'd think that at one point in time, the trees would stop falling, but there's always new ones ready to go. So it takes us all summer to kind of, make sure the trail is clear. There are bridges that are getting built that, in the winter, like we'll see how the spring goes, but when everything dies, like bridges get washed out and need to be replaced or picked up and relocated, it takes us, there's a quite a bit of work that happens between, April and November. So. That's great. And you have all this material on your website and you can get more information on that. And you have gear, do you have gear that's? We did, yeah. We have a, we have a small store. You can get Catamot Trail hats. We have buffs. And some of our chapters, some of our chapters also have gear that we sell through our store as well. So if you want to support any of our chapters directly, you can go into the Catamot Trail store and see those products as well. That's great. Well, thanks very much, Greg. And you Dennis. We look forward to bringing you back on occasion and hearing more progress about this wonderful activity you have. And just a good luck with everything that's going to be going on. And I want to thank you for appearing on Positively Vermont. My guest today has been Greg Meno, the Communications and Events Director of the Catamot Trail Association. Thank you. Thank you, Dennis. Thank you. Thank you all for watching.


Chapter 20 of Camp Fire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Camp Fire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains by Stella M. Francis Chapter 20 – 12 Girls in the Mountains Ethel Zimmerman and Ernestine Johnson fainted. All of the rest of the 12 girls who had been decoyed into the Buckholz House by the sympathetic Mrs. Eddie were thrown into a panic, and the terror at the situation was not mollified in the least by the sudden appearance on the scene of five men. Where the men came from so suddenly was not at all clear. Undoubtedly they had been hidden somewhere, but that place could not be determined, for none of the girls remembered from what direction they had made their appearance, north, south, east, west, up or down. They were just there, and that was all there was to it. The men did not look like ruffians exactly, although they were not clad in gentlemen's clothes. The girls were huddled together in the dark, scantily furnished front room, which at some time probably had served the purpose of a combined parlor and reception room. The next apartment, probably designed as a living room, was lighted by a single gas jet turned low. Ethel and Ernestine fainted in the midst of the address of warning and command from the spokesman of the plotters. This was a signal for a rally to their aid on the part of the other campfire girls, best gifted with presence of mind. Marion led this move and was quickly assisted by Ruth Hazelton, Juliette Hyde and Marie Crismore. No objection was offered by the men to this proceeding, as they were intelligent enough to realise that the success of their plot depended largely on a careful guard against a noisy panic that would attract attention from without. Somebody get some water quick, Marion directed, as she proceeded to go through the reviving formula in which all of them had been thoroughly drilled. I'll get some, Mrs. Eddie volunteered, indicating by her offer and actions that she was an efficient ally of the kidnappers. She hastened into the kitchen and soon returned with a large dipper of water. Marion took it from her and sprinkled some of the liquid on the faces of the unconscious girls. The latter quickly recovered and sat up. But meanwhile the five men were not idle. The leader addressed the girls again with more gentle words and manner, realising as only an intelligent criminal may do that a confidence man's method is the best method for producing a desired illegal effect. In a degree he was successful, attempting to reassure the captives in the following manner. Now girls, you have nothing to fear from us if you obey orders. We don't wish to harm a hair on any of your heads. We are merely determined to get what we have set out for and we are going to use you to help us get it. If you try to balk our purpose you must take the consequences. Otherwise you will suffer only such inconveniences as go naturally with the experience of being kidnapped. And try to realise this, that being kidnapped isn't such a terrible thing if you are in the custody of gentlemen kidnappers. That's what we are, gentlemen kidnappers. All we ask of you is that you prove yourselves to be what gentlemen kidnappers prefer above all others, namely real lady like prisoners. Now he added after a pause during which he surveyed his audience as if to determine the effect of his words. As soon as the two young ladies who were so unfortunate as to make the mistake of connecting a tragic prospect would disappear have fully recovered we will proceed. That fellow is disguised, declared Marian in a whisper to the girls nearest her. In fact all of them are. Observe that every one of them wears a beard, mustache or short side whiskers. Watch their eyes and mouths and every expression on their faces so that we may be able to identify them if we are ever called upon to do so. Now girls, said the spokesman with well simulated gentleness, no more of that. We don't want to be unduly rude with you but if there is any more whispering we'll have to resort to measures that will make it impossible. Now I think you are all ready so just follow the leader and some of us will bring up the rear. We will proceed first into the basement. Trembling the twelve campfire girls followed two of the men down the cellar steps. It was evident to them that resistance would be worse than useless. A single blow from the fist of one of those powerful men would stun any of the girls if it did not knock her unconscious. In fact their captors could make quick work of them if necessary and cooped up as they were in this isolated prison. They could scarcely hope to send forth an effective cry of distress before they were rendered physically incapable of sounding further alarm. All of the gentlemen kidnappers were supplied with electric flashlights with which they illuminated the cellar and revealed to their captives a hole three feet in diameter in the ground floor and seemingly a flight of steps leading downward. Don't be scared young ladies, advised the gentlemanly leader of the gentlemen kidnappers softly.  We will conduct you through the mine to the other end which is concealed from public view at a distance and there we will find four automobiles waiting for you. Lead the way comrade kidnappers. The two head men descended into the hole and the girls followed Indian file. The spokesman and one other man descended last as a rear guard. One of the men remained in the cellar with Mrs. Eddy and together they hurriedly replaced the old door over the mouth of the mine. Shoveled some loose earth over this and then covered the earth with eight or ten thicknesses of scrap lumber loosely tossed in a heap. Meanwhile the girls guided by the lights ahead and aided by the two lights behind which were directed helpfully along their path made their way laboriously down the slope and along the many angled gallery to the opening at the other side of Holy Hill as the high rounded elevation on and around which the city was built was called. Under different circumstances undoubtedly they would have been much interested in this experience as a subterranean exploration and they had all the time they might need for such exploration for the dusk of evening had not yet developed into darkness and they had to wait in the mine over an hour before it was deemed safe to venture out with the captives. Near the opening at the foot of the bluff behind the abandoned flour mill gags were tied tightly over the girls' mouths and their hands were bound in front of them and they were assisted one by one down a gradual but rough incline and into the waiting machines. Snow falling in millions of huge flakes a fact that evidently caused the kidnappers more worry than the possibility of detection by persons in the vicinity. For remarks escaped some of them relative to the importance of haste before the roads became impossible to automobiles but the storm served them one good purpose if it menaced them in another respect. It rendered the darkness of the night more impenetrable and kept the streets almost free of pedestrians. Moreover the plotters were well supplied with means and methods of guarding against escape or rescue. The gags and cloth manacles were so well made that one might have expected them at being products of a manual training school at burglar's vibes. During the passage from the mine to the automobiles each of the girls were ashore thrown over her head and pinned close in the front thus concealing both the gags and the manacle condition of their hands. At last they were all in the machines each of which was in charge of a driver. Three of the girls were put into each automobile and one of the men got in with them to see that their conduct was as per schedule program. Then the start was made. On, on they went out into the country and along a road that Marion knew led into the heart of the mountains. She could see the dim shadowy form of high peak in the distance. Meanwhile as she peered out eagerly into the darkness with the irrational longing for rescue from some miraculous source, for this was the only kind of rescue that seemed possible under the circumstances. She kept working at the bonds about her wrists and the gag in her mouth slowly and without obvious effort until with joy she realized that she was at least partly successful. I am certain I could shove that thing right out of my mouth and give the most piercing scream ever heard if anybody would only come along and hear me, she told herself. The snow kept on falling heavily, much to the alarm of the kidnappers and the joy of the kidnapped, but the automobiles reached the mountains before there was any serious delay. It looked indeed as if the trip would be successful from the point of view of the captors of the campfire girls, but at last the snow became so deep that the girls could feel that the automobiles were laboring under almost insurmountable difficulties. Marion heard several curses uttered by the chauffeur and the man inside the car echoed them once or twice. Finally the automobile came to a full stop and the driver could force it along no further. A consultation with all three of the men taking part was held. In the midst of their debate something happened that changed the aspect of things almost as completely as might have been accomplished if Marion's dream of a miraculous rescue had been realized. Other persons were on the scene and they were talking to the driver, inquiring if they could be of any assistance. We're a patrol of Boy Scouts, one of the new arrivals said. We've lost our way, but that doesn't need hinder our helping you out of your scrape. Maybe you can direct us how to find our way back. Marion never felt a more intense thrill in her life than she felt at the sound of that voice. She looked out the window and saw a group of eight or ten boys, each of them carrying a gun close to the automobile. With an effort that had behind it all of the power of the most joyous impulse of her life, she swung her bound clinch fists right through the pain of glass, pushed the gag from her mouth and shouted, Clifford, Clifford, this is Marion. All of us girls are being kidnapped by these men. Shoot these rascals and shoot to kill. End of Chapter 20. Chapter 21 of Camp Fire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Camp Fire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains by Stella M. Francis. Chapter 21. Thirteen Girls in the Mountains. Marion's plea for aid did not reach Clifford and the other boys' scouts to whom it was addressed without interruption. The latter half of it came in jerked and disjointed phrases, and the tone of utterance was one of extreme fear and distress. Clifford, an Ernie Hunter, the leader of the patrol, although amazed beyond description, realised that this appeal for assistance was no idle one, and it was up to them to do something quickly, or action on their part might soon be too late. You boys take care of the men in front, and Clifford and I will settle this affair back here. Ernie shouted, don't let them escape. With these words, the patrol leader seized the latch at the nearest auto door and pressed down on it. As he did this, the door flew open with a heavy swing, and Ernie jumped aside just in time to ward off a body lunge blow from the fist of a man who sprung out of the machine like a beast leaping with all force. In less time than it takes to tell it, two of the men had broken through the cordon of boys' scouts around the automobile and disappeared in the darkness. The third, Mr. Stanock's chauffeur, was not so desperately courageous. The menace of two or three gun muzzles held within a few feet of his face was more than he cared to oppose, so he remained a prisoner. Look out boys, called out Hazel Edwards. There are three more automobiles coming along behind with desperate men in them. Each of those autos has three girl prisoners in charge of two men, one of them the driver. Miles, Ewen Howell and Jerry stay here and guard the prisoner and protect the girls against those rascals if they return. Ernie directed. The rest of us will run back a short distance and meet the next machine before they suspect something wrong. As he finished speaking, Ernie led the way, followed by four other boys, back through the snow twenty or thirty yards, and then stopped and listened. A short distance further, they heard a sound the cause of which could not be mistaken. It was the rapid pulsating chug-chug of an automobile engine. They waited a few minutes, but it appeared to be coming no nearer. The snow has stopped this one too, said Clifford. Come on and we'll give them a surprise. A few paces farther brought the boys in view of the machine with the engine running idle and no driver visible in front. Naturally, this made them suspicious and a halt was called for a little circumspection. Then carefully, cautiously, they advanced toward the automobile, keeping nervous watch on all sides to avoid a surprise. They reached the machine which they had been able to locate by the noise of the engine and found it also deserted, saved for the three prisoners bound and gagged in the car. While the other four in the party of rescuers kept watch against a surprise, Clifford cut the bonds on the wrists of the girls and removed the gags from their mouths. Where did the villains in charge of this car go was the first question he put to the released prisoners. They skipped, replied Violet Monday. Two men who had been in the machine ahead came back and said the game was up, that they were discovered by a force of Boy Scouts armed with guns and they couldn't afford to put up a fight. For even if they won, the whole country would be aroused and they couldn't hope to carry out their original plans. They went back to warn the other men, no doubt you'll find the other machines abandoned too. All right, said Ernie, you girls stay here in the car and keep warm. We'll be back as soon as we can find the others. The boys found the other two automobiles also abandoned and released six more campfire prisoners. Now let's return and get the head auto started back first, Ernie proposed. This plan was adopted. Arrived at the machine in which Marion, Hazel and Julieta had been prisoned passengers, they found an important development in affairs. Jake, the chauffeur, had confessed. He had offered to conduct the boys to Helen's place of detention and effect her release if the boys would let him go. It was less than half a mile away. The boys agreed. Clifford suggested that the girls remain in the automobile while the Scouts made the proposed raid, but they objected strenuously. In a short time the rest of the girls were brought forward, informed of the plan and the start was made. All of the girls insisted on taking part in the expedition. In less than half an hour they were at the door of Helen's prison where Jake gave the open sesame knock. An uncouth woman opened the door. Behind her stood a man who proved to be her husband. Jake pushed the astonished pair aside and went directly to the side of the room opposite the entrance and lifted a bar across a door opening into another department. As he opened this door Marion rushed forward and was first agreed a slender, pale-faced girl who stepped out eagerly toward her rescuers. Helen cried the girls in a chorus. Jake slipped out and was seen no more. End of Chapter 21 Chapter 22 of Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains by Stella M. Francis Chapter 22 A Slay Ride Home That was a meeting not soon to be forgotten. It was a signal for the casting away of every element of secrecy and Helen told her story. She told the story of her brother, of his sickness when a child of the resultant distortion of his character into that of a man of strange and incongruous genius and weakness and of the embarrassment he had caused her and her mother. He, it was, she said, who had written the skull and crossbones letter. Who wrote the other anonymous letter that you received at the Institute? Hazel Edwards inquired. I don't know. Helen replied with a faint smile. Perhaps these boys can answer that question. I must plead guilty to that. Announced clippard advancing with a bow. But what's the surprise you were going to spring? Inquired Ruth Hazel to the mischief easily. Is this it? Now never you mind, said clippard. Things didn't go just right. This kidnapping affair interfered with our plans and they are hereby called off. We didn't want you to know we were here. Two of the boys had been dispatched as messengers to Holy Hill for vehicles to take the girls back to Marianne's home. About two o'clock in the morning Mr. Stanlock, several of his neighbours and three policemen, led by the two scout messengers, burst into the room and announced that they had brought three bob sleds to give them all a sleigh ride. And a glorious sleigh ride home it was for all except the two prisoners whom the police took him to custody. The story of the campfire girls in the mountains is told, all but the subtitle. A Christmas success against odds. There was a real success in store for them. The police made a raid but found that the criminal element that had gained a throttle hold on the labour organisation in the mines had cleared out so clean that not a living vestige of them could be discovered. The way was now clear and the campfire girls carried out their original plans successfully and much to the benefit of the poverty-stricken families of the strikers. But the history of Flamingo Campfire is by no means complete with this narrative. It seemed to be a peculiar lot of these girls to become associated or in touch with events of novel, interesting and sometimes thrilling character and those who would follow their further experiences along these lines should read the second volume of this series entitled Campfire Girls in the Country or The Secret Aunt Hannah Forgot End of Chapter 22 End of Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains or A Christmas Success Against Odds by Stella M. Francis


Hi, I'm Ray Mavis. I love Navy football and I'm disappointed Ray Mavis because I root for Army. Navy has won America's game 13 years in a row. Army has played in a football game for the last 13 years. Navy's won 14 commander chiefs trophies. I once had a dream about Army winning a trophy. Don't be like this me. You'll just be disappointed for the 14th year in a row. Go Navy. Beat Army.


Hey there friends, thanks for checking in today. We're looking at the Springfield Hellcat introduced September 2019 it's a subcompact 9 millimeter handgun that has the most magazine capacity than any other Handgun in the industry of that size. So here you have an 11 round magazine over here is a 13 round magazine and a small Little subcompact gun like that. It's a big-time bonus for CCW here. We have an unloaded pistol and I've owned it since September. It's performed very well Okay, very lightweight small carries well and this is the nine OSP model Okay, not optic ready. It does have the serrations that go all throughout It has a three inch barrel a tritium front dot at you in the back It's been accurate for me. It has the adaptive grip texturing a five pound trigger That's flat face the accessory rail. It's just an impressive handgun, but now what they came out with Can you see the difference? Flat dark earth finish And I think it looks super cool. Now. This is the OSP model optical sight pistol and it has a shield smsc stands for Shield mini sight compact and it's a red dot model And so i'm gonna check that out. You know, it's a it's a cool red dot It's it's polymer housed. It has a polymer lens in there. The dot is auto dimming It's a four MOA means that the dot will cover four inches at a hundred yards But I've taken it throughout my house. It feels pretty well aligned up You know when I when I pointed an object in the house, I could see Where that dot's pointing I could look through the sights and it looks pretty Pretty clear right out of the box. I mean or shall I say aligned pretty well? I'll be interested to to shoot this and see how many adjustments I have to make to the red dot But it's the same pistol So nothing has changed as far as the handgun is concerned same adaptive grip texturing that is a nice stipple It feels great and everywhere the hand touches your you have that that texturing there Even on the memory bumps here for the weak side thumb the finger over here And even on the magazine now, this is the 13 round magazine and if you go with this model you're going to get a a soft case the 11 round mag and the 13 round mag You also get Or you'll have the choice of getting the or shall I say installing the extended base plate in the 11 round mag or the flat base plate In the exact same Magazine but the 13 round mag in my opinion is the way to go for ccw and you're looking at about 550 for the gun All right, if you get it with the optic you're looking at about 750. I've seen it for less But who knows, you know during this time Same Trigger pull all right. We'll take a look at that.  So you're looking at a five pound trigger with a reset Right there It's a it's an accurate little shooter for this little subcompact gun very very much pleased with this in the past No, seven eight months since I've had it now Let's go ahead and get this on the scale because I want to show you why It's a big hit for ccw Let's take a look at the unloaded weight with the 13 round mag We're looking at one pound two and one eighth ounces 18 and one eighth ounce. So if we take a 13 round mag that is loaded All right, I just grabbed this from the other one You'll see that it's weighing in at 23 and three quarters ounces. Let's take a carry round there And you're looking at 24 and a quarter ounces. So under 25 ounces with 14 rounds I think that is excellent for ccw. But if you want to have 11 round mag All right, you can do that And here we're looking at 22 and five eighths. Here's your carry round 23 ounces even so I I don't know. I just think that that's a very lightweight and Pretty high capacity for a gun this size. I shouldn't say pretty high capacity the highest capacity In the industry, let's go ahead and lock the slide back and we'll take a look at The internals and pull the trigger here and see that there is your polymer Frame a dual recoil spring speaking of which that dual recoil spring Cuts down on the recoil nine millimeter doesn't offer much In terms of recoil, but I I feel this is a very comfortable shooter and I like that flat dark earth. I think they did a great job I'm a fan of beautiful guns I think you are too, aren't you Something about beautiful guns. Just you know, it's it's eye catching and I'm a bigger fan of guns that perform well, but if you could combine both beauty and function Then you're doing pretty well, and I think that's what springfield accomplished here. They they have this Flat dark earth model many people just like the black You know, you got the osp model You've got the standard and then if you don't want the dot you could take that off It has a plate it has a plate that they offer right here You can put that in and take the dot off and it's got the hardware and Hex wrenches and everything else in the back. So it does offer options And I appreciate that you have the magazine options. You now have the color options You have the osp or the standard options and this Weight that it has with 14 rounds and 24 and a quarter ounce is very light makes for a very nice CCW gun it performs great shoots outstanding. So I'm going to get this to the range. I'm going to Check out that that red dot. It seems to be Aligned very well in my aging eyes have been Especially the last couple years the major astigmatism Left eye dominant. I'm thinking that this could be The solution for me. I'm going to check it out. I'm going to shoot them side by side and see if I can Have a more success with that red dot. I'm certainly looking forward to it. It is beautiful And I think springfield did an excellent job with this flat darker finish Yeah, if you like videos like this, please subscribe and share I always appreciate thumbs up button. Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


Felly, ydych chi'n edrych, mi gweithio'r wybodaeth cerddordeb yn ddechrau'r deltaeth, a'r cerddordeb yn ddechrau'n gweithio'r cyflonddau. Felly, rydyn ni'n cael ei fath oherwydd wedi'i wneud yn gweithio arall, ym mwyn fmouth a'r cyflodd yn y dda'r ddechrau cyflodd. A'r cyflodd yn dda'r dda'r cyflodd? Roedden i'n bwysig i mewn gwahanol. Roedden i'n bwysig i bwysig i gydag prosesodd gyda own gan mynd yn dweud y dy wybodaeth. Felly, mae'n cael rhaid o'r sixi wahanol sy'n ei wneud o'r periwyr o'r ymddangos dwy fyrdiadau a'r etoedd yma yn ei bod yn gweithio'r dynosor, oedd yna'r ysgol yn ymddangos i'r baratau yn ymddangos, dyfodol ddweud bod wrth gael ychydig, ond mae'n rhaid o'r hyn o'r ysgol. Felly, mae'n gweithio'n oedd unrhyw ar y baratau mewn Arsa P yw'r unrhyw i'r ysgol, mae'n gallu i'r eisiau gweld arna i ddefnyddio'r pryd, ien oedd y ddechrau Fyryddio. Mae rhai gallai Majesty-ddedig yma ar y dda'r newydd yma, yma'r ymgyrch, ymgyrch, i eich mwyaf ar y ddechrau Gwymorol, a ymgyrch. Mae rhai gwneud yn ymgyrch, yn gwybod wedi'i ddweud y cwrtog ymlaen, cyrnyddu drwy adroddau, cyrnyddu 60,000, mae'r grwrs cyd-degwydd yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch ar gyfer gyda'r trofynu'r cyd-degwydd, yn ymgyrch ar gyfer, dyn ni'n gwybod i gael gweithio'r gweithio'r gwaith i gael gweithio'r sap a'r ddif yn gweithio'r gweithio'r disoedd. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn y cyflech sydd o'r ddweud y gweithio, yna'n rhan oedd yn 40 yma, mae'r sefydliadau eich gydigiaeth. Mae'r debyg yma wedi'u ddweud y gweithio'r ddweud. The database schema for that is more than 30,000 tables. That was a shock to me in my software career, to come across a piece of software that was completely beyond the possibility of one person to comprehend. You have to divide and conquer this stuff. Our vision is to help the world run better. One of the ways we're helping to achieve that is our customers produce, as it says, a large proportion of the world's chocolate and beer. I'm not going to talk about SAP as a whole and the entire business suite side, I'm going to talk about my little corner where I work in SAP's IT division. I'm part of the group that's responsible for putting out a lot of our websites, especially the more collaborative websites where people register. A ffew years ago, we found ourselves working on a platform delivering software using a version of Java that had gone out of support two years earlier. This big proprietary application server where just performing a restart took maybe 20 minutes to see if any code had worked. We weren't entirely bad. We thought we were agile. We had monthly release, for example, which isn't too bad for back then. Obviously, it's a lot better now. For example, we were working with physical hardware. If we wanted to do a new project, you're talking about lead time for hardware of several months of talking to vendors, getting the infrastructure team to plug it in, the operating system team to install an operating system, and so on. It just took a long time. Also, on each and monthly release, someone would write a release script that says you need to deploy these artifacts here, then tweak these configuration parameters. It took most of a day to do a deployment and obviously it's prone to errors as well. We had a mostly manual QA cycle. Within that monthly cycle, we'd be writing code. On paper, it said we were writing code for a month. In practice, we were handing the code over to QA after two weeks. In theory, we would start on the next month cycle. What really happened, of course, is in those two weeks, QA would be finding bugs, handing them back to developers. It actually turned into two weeks of development and two weeks of bug fixing. Perhaps one of the more damaging things from a continuous delivery point of view is that the developers, the ops guys doing the actual deployment of the artifacts, and the guys who were responsible for keeping the lights on, were in three completely different business units. Obviously, in a large organisation, you try not to have politics, but some of it's inevitable. There's a bit of a not-invented here syndrome and elements of that did affect us having to basically throw things over organisational boundaries to get things done. We got to a point where in 2010, our units of about 100 people, that equates to about 20,000 person days of available effort in one year. We found ourselves handed a portfolio that when we stuck the estimates on it, showed it was going to take three times as much effort as we had available to deliver that portfolio. We had to really rapidly find a way of eliminating a large amount of waste from our process. That took us into the next stage where we had a new project starting off and that's the project that I work on. Again, a little bit of background on that. SAP, the big enterprise resource software, part of the idea of that is it does everything from human resources, invoising, purchasing, everything in the back end of a company. The point of that is there's one version of the truth in this big system. There's just one database backing everything. At the same time, if you went to our website on the marketing side, you could create an account for that. If you were a developer wanting to do extensions, there was another developer website and you could register for that. Between all of the various websites we had in this big enterprise, some people perhaps needed to create ten different accounts to register and talk to this company that was selling them the concept of one version of the truth. It was a little bit embarrassing. The project I work on, the ID service, was set up to unify all of those. The business still had the agility where it could do lots of different websites. We had a common user database so people signed up once and they could use those account credentials to get into any part of the system. It then looks a lot more like one SAP to the outside world. Putting all of the existing systems together gave us about four million users. Then, of course, we've acquired a couple of companies in the last few years that are cloud-based companies. That's given us another 20 million or so. The CEOs have given us a helpful target of 2015 when you have a billion users in that system. That's the challenge within our project as well. We've got a scale to almost Facebook scale within that period of time. We've done that. We've gone the agile way. We've got a cross-functional team. All the usual roles. Unusually, the company standard is when we're doing scrum-type stuff to try and have co-located teams. For historical reasons within IT, because of all the various acquisitions and combining IT departments from the acquisitions, we have people all around. Our particular team is composed of people from five countries in Germany, Bulgaria, UK, Russia and Israel. We do have that challenge, although the one helpful thing that mitigates that is we're all within two hours of each other time zone-wise. That's one thing that we found very helpful compared to other outsourcing-type things I've done in the past. Having more or less the same office hours is very helpful indeed. For this new project, we decided not to use the big monolithic application server, because SAP, starting to get into the cloud game, developed a much lighter weights server based on Tomcat and RSGI. We called it the Lean Java server internally and you can restart that in a minute or two. We decided to use that to try and decrease our cycle time for development. Otherwise, we carried on using our existing toolkits, so Jira and Bamboo for issues and continuous integration, perforce, version control, eclipse and all that kind of thing. That was our starting point. We just really changed the platform to make it a bit quicker. Also, a developer could run their own Tomcat server rather than having a shared server, which is what we had before. Really, we still had a lot of waste to get rid of. That maybe took care of about 10-15% of our waste. Faced with still a large task to get all of this portfolio delivered, my boss, the chief architect in our group, he'd read Jesse's book. He promoted these principles to the team that everything has to be automated. We have to do automated testing. Everything has to be in version control. In fact, all of his team, he put it in our performance review objectives that we had to read Jesse's book, which is really good for Jesse's royalties. My project was adopted as the pilot project for putting all of this into practice. At the same time, his boss trusted him to do that. That's one of the things that was critical. We didn't do a big top-down enterprise agile thing. This was done almost as a guerrilla thing. With the lower two levels of management, one guy actually driving the vision and the guy above him providing air cover that enabled us just to get on and do what we needed to do. How that was done was essentially within all of that, 10% of any given sub-project budget was given over to putting continuous delivery technology in place. A lot of the tools you'll see in the rest of the talk were done by people on this 10% time. It wasn't really a Google-like Friday working. It was more like the 10% of the people who were really into doing this sort of thing formed a bit of a Black Ops team and put it all into practice. The first phase of that was really making sure that we got rid of this lead time for getting a hold of hardware. The one hardware purchase we did was for a big ESX server that gave us the ability to have lots of virtual instances. That finally gave the ability for each developer to have their own server to run everything on, to be able to run all of the tests and everything else. That meant that if you wanted a server to run a project on, at the time you emailed one of the Ops team, they ran a bit of a script. They allocated something in ESX server, told you the DNS to go into, gave you credentials and they installed the chef client on it. Is everyone here familiar with Chef? Yep. The idea there is we set up a Chef server in our IT area and that had all of the recipes on. Any given developer just said, I need MySQL, I need Java, I need Tomcat, install these recipes. You can see there there's a sample bit of Chef Ruby dialect. It's just a DSL that says I want to install these packages. I might put some conditional logic in to say, depending on the platform, do it differently. The idea is abstracting something that could be done with a simple shell script, but it's done in such a way that it can work across multiple platforms and it's repeatable. From the developer's point of view, some developers were into the Ruby level and creating recipes, but for those that weren't into that level, they were just able to drag and drop things. They went on to the overall Chef server, they clicked on their node and then they can just drag and drop roles and recipes.  That was the automation of one layer of actually getting rid of the waste of waiting to provision hardware. Then we needed to be able to automate the testing. Half of our effort was going into manual testing. We had no culture of developer-created tests at all, JUnit, all that sort of thing. We all knew about it, we all wanted to do it. We didn't feel before that we'd have the space in which to create that kind of thing. The QA team had created some automated tests, but that was using some of the very expensive seat license tools that were available at the time. It just wasn't economically possible to give developers access to that level of technology. Even so, those automated tests were just run as part of this monthly cycle. It was causing us a lot of trouble. We discovered Selenium, and that's one of the early tools that helped us along a lot. It's just being able to record scripts in a browser and play them back, and developers having access to be able to do that made things a lot quicker. Developers got instant feedback. We didn't have to wait for that monthly cycle. The only thing we did have to do, of course, is create test scripts. Going from zero to covering everything was a challenge. The strategy we adopted for doing that was just to say, well, the only thing we really need to cover first is the happy path. For everything we're doing in our system, let's just look at the way it's meant to work, put a quick recording together for saying, if you click A, B and C, it comes out with the right screen at the end. Let's not worry too much about the error cases or the edge cases. Just make sure the basics are covered. Then what we did is, as we gradually went along, a manual testing may find a particular burger or an edge case that we haven't covered, then we'd do that on a, you know, creating a test on a failure basis. A sort of on-demand test creation that meant over time we evolved to a situation where all of those edge cases got covered. By this point, we've done a fairly good job. We've noticed that although we've got rid of a lot of the previous waste, we've still got manual processes here to operate these new tools. You have to email an ops guy to get him to create you a VMware server. Chef Client has to be installed. One of our bright guys actually pulled all of this stuff together and automated that into a script that we called Cocktail. That really gave us our first level of automation where it turned from maybe a couple of hours of emailing people and them doing things fairly quickly into just running a script to achieve the same job. Then we decided to ramp up a notch more. We had some test coverage but it was all very internal focused on the team, very technical level. We decided to move towards Cucumber because this is where we started getting a bit more agile and more able to talk to the business. At the same time, I'll talk about it a bit more later, we've got heavily into scrum. The product owner now can start talking in terms of these guirkin scripts which are just in English language. They're a little bit technical. We're trying to do what Matt Winn says as much as possible and make them business focused, but that's one of our areas of continuing to improve. As you can see, it's fairly straightforward. They've got a scenario description given when then. Now we've defined our definition of done. When we actually want to complete a user story, just having the code there isn't enough. It won't actually count as done unless there's a test. For every JIRA ticket we create for a story now, we actually create a sub-ticket for the Cucumber test. Then the JIRA is set up so that the master ticket can't actually be set to done unless the sub-ticket is completed. From a developer's point of view, Cucumber is really nice because it's very easy to map Cucumber steps onto Java code to perform the testing. As you can see there, that one line when I'm using my valid credentials easily maps onto some code that says get me a username, get me a password and try and do a login. At the same time, something we've developed recently that's also making a big difference is on each story within Cucumber we've got this annotation at user story and that contains the JIRA ID of the actual user story itself. We've written a reporting tool now that you can see on the bottom right there gives us a report that tells us all about the test coverage so Product Owner now can see not only here's the user story that I wrote but here are all of the automated tests that cover it that I can look at in Gherkin in plain language and also I can see when they're running how long they take to run so we're getting a bit of an overview of performance as well. From an audit point of view we can see if you've only got one test for a particular user story that's okay but maybe it's better to have three or four covering some different edge cases. So then we decided to ramp up our continuous delivery technology in another stage. So from the cocktail tool where we were able to run some basic scripts but we've got the central chef's server the problem we had with the central chef's server is we had by then six or seven projects all using this chef's server with this one combined set of recipes. So someone on one team decides that the recipe for installing Tomcat needs a bit of a tweak for their project but they don't really think about the impact on all the other projects of that tweak. So in fact having one chef's server works okay within a team but not so well across multiple teams. So we need to now set up one chef's server for every project. Also we want developer self-service it's nice sending an email and something comes back a couple of hours later but what would be really good is to get a distant virtual machine created. And we want everything under version control. We automate everything everything's under version control. If you're having to email people to set things up that's not very versiony. So we developed a next level tool called BarKeeper which manages all of this. And that gives us this YAML text file that describes an entire project. So you can see though we've got the project description ID of the git repository and then towards the bottom half you can see in this case test and prod it's a sample of a file as other for dev and private developer stuff but in each case we're actually describing here are the servers we need here are the initial recipes to run and so an entire project its entire landscape is captured in one text file that's now under version control. And that text file is read by the BarKeeper tool so now the there's a web UI on top of that reading all of the files of all of the projects and a developer who wants to work on a new project just goes to the list on the left says that's all of the project that BarKeeper is managing clicks on one of them clicks create me a virtual machine and it will just go off and within a few minutes that developer then has all of the servers he needs to work on that project. So with that tool and its ability to be automated via REST as well this is now how our bamboo pipeline looks so we've got an initial actual compiling the code step that's installed onto the development server and then we have all of the test suites running the reason there's so many suites there is because bamboo runs all of the stages in a particular group in parallel so they all run at the same time once all of the tests are complete then we know it's okay to install onto the QA and test landscapes where we do a quick smoke test and then run another test suite and then also you'll see we've got the blue-green deployment there so once it's into QA we check that it's basically okay and then deploy it to blue and green so it's available to everyone and the reason is that it's semi-productive in the sense of the project that we're building is used by other projects for their sign-on so what for us is our QA system is also the system other projects use to do their development so for them it's productive if there's a big problem in QA they can't develop anymore so we have blue-green even at the QA level and then as you can see there the grayed out section on the right is for production so every build doesn't yet go to production but it's very simple if we want to do a release to production then bamboo just enable those steps click build and that's a deployment to production completed so that gives us some lessons the major one of which is the cycle time is critical the amount of time from a developer hitting commit to getting feedback is one of the main bottlenecks in doing development so as you can see from the graph on the right that's from bamboo showing the build duration and you can see it's gradually increasing here so we've just added an extra five minutes and then it drops down again and that's because we've got a rule that when we see that starting to creep up beyond a certain threshold you saw all of the test suites on the previous page running in parallel each of those is composed of lots of steps and scenarios as you can see we have over 700 scenarios at the moment so every time we see one of those steps creeping over three minutes or if you see the overall build creeping over 15 minutes for that stage then we look and go in and split up so we get even more parallelism and then it drops down again and so those are our current targets is for the actual test stages to complete we want that done within 15 minutes we want the overall build and deploy to QA done within 40 minutes so that the impact of a red build is minimised as well so we know about a red build in under an hour and if that's not fixed within 30 minutes or if a developer hasn't said I've got the fix ready to deploy in 30 minutes then they know that it's time to issue a revert commit to get it back to green as you can see very recently there was a build that took almost two hours that was just a normally infrastructure problem that's making the graph look weird so a quick recap on what we've got so far that's mostly technology stuff a bit of culture but we've gone from monthly releases and now we release to production on average twice a week the QA cycle is now well under a day essentially the manual QA portion is now is looking at the tickets for that sprint and just quickly going through making sure the developers didn't miss any corner cases the regression is taking care of from the automated test suite before in our old system if there's any kind of production error it was the classic logging in at 2am and that's really not the best frame of mind to be fixing a bug especially when there's a stress of it being an important bug now because I have blue-green deployment in QA and in production if there's any kind of problem like that all we do is just switch back to the other release when it was working fine and then go and get some good sleep and then come in the next morning think about it properly, fix it properly and there's no panic before it took six months to get a new idea into live production because of ordering the hardware and that actually stifled innovation when you've got a six month cycle time just to see something live there's a lot of ideas that just don't even get done whereas now with the barkeeper someone writes a text file you can create all of your servers in dev QA production write some code, deploy it, have the tests if you can write the code quickly enough to have a new project live in production in a week and that's mostly for internal stuff but that's created some interesting internal applications that people have written and as a result the business is obviously a lot happier with what we're doing even more so with SAPs doing more in the cloud area of things what we've found is these techniques and technologies that we've been developing within IT we're now actually working with the development side of the company to make them part of our cloud product so it's great it's one of the big revolutions we've had in SAP in IT in the last few years is rather than being a cost to the business we're now a net benefit to the business through working on technology and also being through our own reference customer we're trying to use our own software wherever possible and then we can help the sales guy sell it as a result but that is technology and there's still a lot more about the team and really what enabled us to build the technology was the transformation that we had as a team and I've already spoken about the initial part of that which was around the management cover and the vision of the chief architect so we decided to do Scrum at quite an early point in time but what we decided to do was the Scrum that we'd read about by reading web pages and articles so that ended up as a daily stand-up pretty much all it was in fact it turned into a daily argument it was just the argument of the day so we did get some better communication out of that but not a huge amount of extra productivity what really made the difference is deciding to invest in Scrum training and it was actually not just from a Scrum training company but from an agile coaching company as well so we spent an entire week we got the whole distributed team together in Berlin which is where most of the team members were and we had deep learning about Agile and Scrum so actually doing the hands-on exercises together experiencing what waste felt like with Lego blocks and post-its really learning how it went to work but also because this was agile coaching the coaches themselves adapted to our unique situation of being distributed so in fact one of the guys on the team couldn't make it from London to Berlin his passport was running out and he couldn't make the flight so he was left back in London so we did the whole coaching with him we were all round a desk in a workshop in Berlin we had a laptop with Skype and he was on the camera on the laptop as a virtual member of the team and that actually helped us work in our distributed mode as well so in some of the exercises where I needed someone to be a product owner we decided that he would be the product owner so we had this sort of head on a screen telling us what he wanted to do for that exercise and similarly for the pair programming tasks in how we learnt we didn't just sit round a desk together and pair because we're a distributed team we can't do that so within the building we actually sent some developers to other offices in the building and we did the exercises over phone on the extension we had sets on or with remote video so we actually really worked with what we had and as a result we really managed to make being a distributed team work very well for us so we've got this culture now where we're always trying to improve what we do ourselves and we try new things all of the time we had to introduce code review for example now being an ID service we need to make sure no one's bringing in any security problems so initially the code review was just to ensure that security problems weren't there but what we found was that using Garrett for code review was another way that enabled pair programming in a distributed way so when you want to swap the keyboard what we found was all you need to do in eclipse is to click push to Garrett and the other person does fetch from Garrett in 10 seconds they've got all the latest code updates and that's working just off a patch together so it's not even committed to the main code base so the two people can collaborate on a patch using Garrett and it makes it very easy just to swap over the keyboard similarly we've been working with Pomodoro Technique a little bit that one didn't work out so well but it was a cheap experiment to do and the latest one we're doing is something we're calling products so as you saw on the continuous integration pipeline the production part was greyed out and there's a bit of permission control around that so only the ops guys can actually send it to production and at the moment the product owner sends an email to the ops guy as you can see there can you send this deployment to production now we've figured out that actually because this was being done in bamboo and bamboo has a REST API this can be automated so this is what we're working on at the moment we've got a physical device which the product owner has and all the product owner does is he can use the buttons to select the right build number that he wants to say to production inserts the key, unlocks it, flips up the switch and presses the button and that just uses a raspberry pi inside the box to call the REST API and actually perform as a production deployment but you have to have the key to be able to do that so I'm out of time, slightly over time in fact so thank you very much for listening I hope it was useful