Hi my name is Nick McLean and I'm part of the language and learning support team here at Charles Darwin University and today I'm going to talk to you about understanding assignments and grading criteria in high-read courses. Welcome. Before we continue I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm working and where you're studying and pay my respect to elders both past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the lands. So what are we going to look at today? Well first of all we'll talk about understanding your assignments and think about the different types of assignments that you might encounter in your courses and we'll look at an example essay question and talk about how to unpack that. As well we'll look at the grading criteria or rubrics and how to use that to guide your drafts and assignment work and how lecturers use that to grade your work. Firstly you might like to begin by thinking about the different types of assignments you're likely to encounter at CDU and of course that's going to vary across the different faculties and areas of study that people are enrolled in but you might like to pause for a moment and think yeah what am I likely to encounter in my course. So of course there's lots of different assignment types you're going to encounter or students will encounter in their studies here at CDU. You know exams and quizzes usually online the quizzes essays are very common of course there's reports reflective writing if you sort of in the health and education studies in particular case studies lesson plans if you're doing education research proposals and there's a poster presentations lit reviews annotated bibliographies what's the difference between these two critical reviews lab reports if you're doing science degrees so these are the things as well as case notes and oral presentations that you need to start to think about and of course it's not a complete list but you know where do you fit on that list which ones are you likely to encounter. One place to begin as you are getting your handle on the expectations of lecturers with the different types of assignments that they're giving you is to go onto our study skills page and have a look at the assignment types that we've got up there and start to read about the different types and look at some examples and start to unpack what's involved with the different assignments here at CDU. So you want to know exactly what the assignments that you are needing to do for this semester where do you go and how do you find out of course the first place you need to go to is Learnline and find your units and open your units and start to navigate around the Learnline site and discover all the resources that your lecturers have uploaded on there and also of course the study plan and assignments that they've uploaded there as well. So start with Learnline of course. Okay so you've found Learnline, you've found your units, you've gone onto your units and seen your assessments and looked at the tasks and think wow I haven't done one of those in a long time or it's been maybe you've never done one before where do I begin. Of course you want to look at all of the information and notes and tutorials and lectures that your lecturers are uploading onto Learnline because that's often where they will unpack some of your assignments and scaffold and build you up towards the assessment work. However you also want to be able to unpack it a bit yourself and work it out. So let's look at an example of an essay question, very common assignment type essays and think about how you might unpack that to get a sense of what it is that your lecturer is asking you to do. What do you think the most common mistake students make when writing essays? You might like to pause for a moment and just have a think about that. One of the things lecturers often say is that students lose marks because they don't actually address the task or answer the question. So how do you unpack that question or task so that you can actually address what it is that you're all being asked to do and give yourself the best chance for good marks. Of course you need to unpack it and let's have a look at an example today. Okay before we begin and look at an example of an essay task maybe with a background first. Looking at this photo here what do you think some of the challenges this community might be facing? It's an island community of course. Well it's Kiribati and it's an island nation located in the Pacific and the nation consists of over 38 islands totaling 800 square kilometers and over the last 20 years sea levels have been rising in the Pacific Ocean causing rising tides around the Kiribati islands and these rising tides have resulted in many Kiribati islands being submerged thus displacing many people from their houses and placing them in danger. So of course climate change is a big threat to a community like this and there are lots of issues around climate change and Pacific Island nations. Okay so what's our task we've got an example of an essay task here. What are we being asked to do? Write an essay that identifies the issues of key stakeholders who are impacted by the effects of climate change in Kiribati. Analyze and compare two distinct policy options available to the Kiribati people and recommend the best course of action. So maybe you're studying environmental science and climate change is something you've been talking about in that course. All right you've got the essay task what would be the first thing you would do when you get this essay question? So you need to actually analyze the task one packet and we can think about three broad categories if you like when you're doing that you have to sort of look at the task words what are you actually being asked to do? And there's just content words what are the sort of particular topics or areas that you're being asked to talk about within the assignment and then there's sort of the scope or the boundaries that Elecra has given you that guide you in a particular direction and all of these together of course are providing you with a clear roadmap if you like for writing your assignment or completing your assignment. Okay so back to our example our essay topic and we think about the task words content words and scope what's our first task word there of course we're being asked to write an essay that's our first one content words what's our first content word there issues so we're writing about the issues or the problems associated with climate change in Kiribati and is there any scope in this task? Yeah we're already being asked just to talk about the key stakeholders the main ones so small players are not required in your essay in this example. Okay you might like to pause now and see if you can identify any more task words content words or scope within this example. How did you go? Well let's look at task words first being asked to write the essay you've got to identify it's you've actually got to find those issues and you're presumably you're talking about the the most important ones or the ones that impact on Kiribati the most but you're also being asked to analyze them as well so that's where some of your critical analysis is required by your lecturer and then your comparing so maybe you're looking at strengths and weaknesses or between the two policy options because you're also being asked to make a recommendation there presumably you have to justify it or you would have to justify that. Okay talking about the stakeholders so the people that are actually directly impacted the effects of climate change so you can't obviously talk about other issues that are impacting on Kiribati it's it is about climate change in this example. What else Kiribati? So you don't want to talk about the specific in general unless you're justifying it somehow in your recommendation and you're looking at policy options so you're not being asked to write the policy come up with your own you're actually looking at what already exists and then a best a course of action so in other words what is it with your recommendations and these policy options options can the Kiribati nation do to move forward and to address these problems? What about the scope? Well you're only being asked to talk about two aren't you two policy options so you don't need to do any more than that and what's available already so what exists so again you're not being asked to develop your own and it's the best course of action so just the one and there are the examples that we've just been talking about. Okay so you've unpacked the essay now you need to write it and of course you need to write your introduction first so that needs to be the first part of your essay and that's your first opportunity to demonstrate to your lecturer that you understand what you're being asked to do so let's look at an example of an introduction okay so let's have a look at an introduction you might like to pause here and read it first let's read it together over the last 20 years the island nation of Kiribati has seen a rapid increase in tidal activity caused by change in sea levels this increase is a key indicator of the impact of climate change on island communities and this essay will discuss how the key stakeholders in the remaining population of Kiribati may have some power to manage some changes caused by climate change firstly the key Kiribati stakeholders involved in dealing with climate change will be identified then the issues of reduced services and forced relocation will be discussed and finally two policy options main growth replanting and architectural changes will be analyzed and compared to recommend the best course of action so is this a good introduction would your lecturer be happy if they read this and feel like you're on the right track yeah probably they would so what is it in this introduction that the student has done to demonstrate that to answer that it might be good to think about the three parts in the introduction that the student has included there's a thesis and outline and background in the introduction and this is a really good way to start your essay a bit of background a thesis statement to guide your argument and then a bit of an outline as to where the essay is headed can you identify the three parts in this example well we can see in the first part there we've got our background really just talking about the situation in Kiribati and then we've got actually your thesis statement there and finally a little bit of a roadmap for the reader to guide them into the first part of your essay so your background thesis and outline great introduction it's clearly demonstrating to the lecturer that you are understanding what you're being asked to do and is guiding the reader in the right direction so you've unpacked your assignment you're starting to plan it you may be written your introduction just to sort of help you think about what is you're being asked to do one question you might have is you know well how many paragraphs do I need to write and of course that's going to depend on how many words that you are being asked to write and sort of generally I suppose you know two to three hundred words is a good kind of estimate for how many words you might like for each to include in each paragraph but of course if you've unpacked it as well that's going to give you some guidance as to how many paragraphs you might need to write for this particular essay so you written your introduction and now you're doing the body of the essay how many paragraphs might you need to write well you've got to obviously talk about the key Kiribati stakeholders involved in dealing with climate change and identify them and then you're talking about the issues in particular this case is reduced services and you know the forced relocation of people within those communities then you're looking at policy options and you need to look at two of those and then you're comparing them and making a recommendation all the all the while remembering the structure of a paragraph thinking about your topic sentences your supporting statements and you're concluding the sentence and of course the what you are using to support your arguments so one thing you might like to do after you've watched this video is just go back to your learn line units and find an assignment or an essay question and try and unpack it and think about how many sections the essay might have when we unpacked our example essay task we looked at the task words and here are a list of some other examples of task words you are likely to encounter not just in essays but in other assignments as well so it's really important to start to get you head around the different types of task words in assignments and of course some of them require critical analysis such as you know argue or examine analyse discuss assess and evaluate suggest and some of them are really you know describing or just asking you to extend on or demonstrate your knowledge such as you know illustrating or describing or summarising so really important to get you head around the different types of task words and again our website our study skills website has some more information about that but make sure you really understand what is your being asked to do finally I just briefly want to have a look at what it is that your lecturers are expecting from you and how it is you can go about finding that of course you can you need to stay in touch with your lecturers and ask them as often as you can if you're hearing barriers with your understanding about what the content of the course or what is your being asked to do but they apart from the assignments they give you and the content that they provide to you through their lecturers and lecturers and tutorials they should also provide you with some kind of grading criteria or rubrics to guide you let's look at an example so we're going on to our unit information on learn line and we're looking at the learning outcomes first and you can see a lot of the language is similar to those task words there that common language of academia and academic study and then we've got our assessments there there's four of them what are we being asked to do in this case is an online test there's an essay discussion boards and another end of semester tests and for at least that essay discussion boards hopefully you've been given some kind of grading criteria or rubrics to guide you let's look at an example using the example we're going to look at how the lecture is actually grades assignments so here's an example of a grading criteria or rubrics possibly for some kind of essay or research task what are we looking at first well there's criteria in this case we need to look at knowledge and content there's that critical analysis there's the use of literature and then your academic convention down the bottom there which is 10 percent then there's all your different descriptors that go with those which tell us the difference between high distinctions distinctions credits and fail and these are the things that the lecturer are using to guide them in terms of assessing your work so really important to find those read those get your head around those so we looked at the example of a rubrics or grading criteria in the slide before here's a chance for you to think about that in a bit more detail three questions for you to think about which criteria awaited the same what grade would you get if you demonstrated a good comprehension of text for resources and readings and what is the description for a fail and academic convention so going back to the slide before can you answer those three questions so criteria well knowledge content critical analysis and argument use of literature they're all weighted the same aren't they 30 percent and then to get at least a credit in your use of literature you need to demonstrate a good comprehension of text resources and readings and a poor grade or a fail in academic convention will lack clarity lots of spelling and punctuation errors poor referencing you know and well outside the word count which is generally sort of 10 percent above or below is the is a rule we tell students so you know academic convention if you don't put some time into that can you know sometimes be the difference between a credit and a distinction or distinction and a high distinction so even though it's 10 percent it's still really important that you spend some time on that so again you might like to go on to learn one and find your grading rubrics and think about how it's going to be applied to your assignments and if you can't find one get in touch with your lecturer so today we started to look at the different types of assignments you might encounter at cdu when we looked at the one example the essay but of course you're going to encounter lots of different types of assignments not just essays and you might need some additional help and our teams here to help of course so you can make individual appointments with us you can look at what units are being supported through the peer assisted study sessions we offer it might be one of the units you're enrolled in you can go back to the study skills page that I've shown you and of course we also run workshops and if you look at our workshop page you might like to join one of our workshops and get an opportunity to practice those skills with someone from our team and also we've got an email address there you can use feel free to get in touch with about anything good luck with your studies and see you around


Welcome everybody. Welcome to what are very fine open Compliance and testing production environments. Oh, sorry So I'm Robert. I'm a platform engineer at any nice. I'm Oliver I'm a part of the same team as Robert is so we are both part of the in-nines data service team and The daily basis more or less. We are working with the open service broker Open API sorry and we are here to share our experience in using and testing the open service broker API in production environments so Few years ago We have encountered cloud foundry and a few people in our company thought hey, this is awesome. This is cool This is a game changer. Let's use it. So for a few years now. We have a public pass offering based on cloud foundry called any night. So the same the name is our company name and In the in the in the early days our developers realized that using build packs and pushing Apps is really really cool But on the other hand when it comes to the begging services that came with cloud foundry in the early days It wasn't That great anymore So we saw an opportunity here to create data services that run that are production ready and we could ship to our customers So after a while we Put together some kind of mission statement Fully automating the entire lifecycle of a wide range of data services To run on cloud native platform platforms Across infrastructure at scale So pretty long mission statement that might sound pretty scary, but it's pretty awesome Okay So with this mission statement, we started with Postgres and MongoDB data services We created them and provided those service offerings and our public pass and Yeah, the the the open service Broker API is Is a rather lean interface to easily provide backing services to cloud foundry so Since a while now It's the open standard that has even been adopted by other technologies like kubernetes and kubernetes like distributions like shift for example and We had even a customer that Communicated with our service broker just using the open service broker API, which was pretty cool so Yeah, it allows the service provider so these open service broker API it allows the service providers to To provide their offerings in a self service fashion to application developers and So if you are a developer and you are interested for example the Postgres service You just just have a look at the poll at the CF marketplace and Hopefully you would somehow find a suitable Postgres database service. Maybe hopefully and this Data service data service is then rather easily to create right. You just need to create service You issue this command and it will automatically provision This service for you This request gets redirected to the service broker implemented by the service provider and Yeah provisioning in this context can mean many different things like for example Provisioning could mean hey create a container on a shared VM or create a database in a shared Database cluster or even create a dedicated cluster just for the on virtual machines just for the service Yeah, and there are many other endpoints that you just need to implement and once you implement all those API endpoints you are ready to integrate your service into the marketplace But at the first glance it might seem to be rather easy But we learned at any lines that there are yeah a lot of other non-functional Requirements that you need to fulfill in order to be somehow enterprise ready Yeah, while the service broker interface is really simple So there is a method for example to provision a service instance and there is a method to for example provision a credential debt And that's basically it so when looking at the specification you think oh, that's easy I going to write my own service broker and then you deploy it to production and then you learn a few hard things We learned a few years ago like for example That you want your production load to run on dedicated virtual machines or at least right now You want that because even if container are coming quite fast and are quite popular When it comes to run databases It's a good idea to run them in a virtual machine because the isolation is just better and especially larger enterprises They just feel better when this this kind of workload runs in an in a virtual machine isolated with technology that has been proven for many years And because you want to use virtual machines. You want to use an on-demand provisioning So this means you don't want to allocate resources in advance You want to allocate resources virtual machines whenever there's a request to provision a new virtual machine When it comes to testing that gets quite hard because provisioning a virtual machine Takes some time. So five minutes. It depends on the infrastructure. They're infrastructure. It takes ten minutes. So You have when when writing tests you have to be very carefully wet when provisioning a machine and one not Another requirement that we learned is important and that makes testing very very hard and ensuring that it works is that we want our services to be installable by the customer side on-premise and We want this We would we want this to be possible by using Bosch or by using the pivotal ops manager, for example and another thing we want is that We want that our Solution works at many infrastructure. So wherever cloud found he runs there should it should be possible to install the data Services there so as you can imagine there There are a lot of different environments where we want our data services to work and to function Yes, robot already explained we all also want these Services to consume by multiple platforms not only cloud found we want them to be consumed for example by Kubernetes Another functionality that or requirement that we have is that we want our services to be highly available Not only the service brokers which actually manage the service provisioning But also the service instances like we want to have a post-quest cluster set when that when one node fails There are two other nodes taking over the workload Of course we want backups of our data services We want to have a configurable backup schedule and we want that Provide we want these backup functionalities to be provided to the end user by an API or by a dashboard so the end user should be able to create backups and restore them and of course we want monitoring and Capacity upgrade that is actually a feature that is covered by the open service broker API Yeah, in in terminology of open service broker API. It's called plan updates So if you monitor your service instance, and you recognize, okay, I'm running out of this I want to add more disk to my service instance You do a plan update Yeah, all these things That are things we learned we have to pay attention when implementing this broker API and which we already somehow want to test To implement these we came up with a microservice architecture From the top view it looks like there are 10 microservices playing together to fulfill this this requirements If we scale in we see that there are more than 40 components Included and played together to to actually make that happen When we have a look at the Good practice how to structure our tests we see a common common pattern what which is called test pyramid So it's actually says that we should have different kind of tests We should have unit tests which provides you very fast feedback cycles. They are executed on the code level So whenever a developer works on it on a code base to to implement a new feature He executes the unit test suite and he gets feedback that he broke something and And the Apple level we have integration tests. So these tests usually take longer than the unit tests So it takes longer that we get feedback that we broke something But they are more robust they test more because they test how our components interact with each other And and the end we have these end-to-end tests or manual tests These are tests from the user perspective very consume the functionality from the user perspective as the user does And in the early days, let's say three years ago when we started developing those data services We followed that test pyramid. We had a large set of unit tests We had a large set of integration tests not that much that unit test, but we had them But still in in production deployments we encountered some issues So we ended up in testing and testing more and more manuals manual steps So we ended up in having a test protocol whenever we ship a new we release We we click through the UI and we we say CF create service because We just lose lost trust in our our integration test because there are so many moving components that we have to somehow yes still make a test from the end user perspective and That was very hard to release new features and to release new releases of those data services. So what we did is we automated those end-to-end test and When it comes to integrating new data services, we have another requirement in our Service framework that is we want to use our existing components and integrate new services into the marketplace very fast Yeah, and When we for example integrate a new test into the test suite, we want this test to be available for each existing service and Another requirement we have because we are deploying those data services in a in Many many environments which are not not the same. We want these tests to be executable by the customer So the customer can verify by themselves whether this release works like intended To make the the customer able to execute those tests we came up with a with a Bosch release errand So we are deploying the services with a Bosch with Bosch So that was a natural fit to to use a Bosch errand So once you have configured a Bosch and once you have deployed the product with Bosch You can run this errand with one command and then it verifies everything whether whether the main features from the user perspective work as expected You can see that you can actually configure which types of services should be tested So you can configure that a MongoDB 3.6 and the MongoDB 3.4 should be tested And you also can configure which plans should be tested for every plan you configure The smoke test or the test suite will actually create a service instance and perform some actions on that Because that takes a while we have the possibility to paralyze that so at the top you see How how many many tests you want to run in parallel? We also have feature flex for those tests so this means not every service supports every every feature and So you can disable these these flex for for different services and Sometimes you don't want to execute all of the tests you want to have a faster feedback But test less and then you can actually turn off those features Another thing you see here is that because we are testing that from the user perspective, right? We are specifying a Cloud Foundry endpoint. So at the end the test suite will actually talk to Cloud Foundry and Actually create services and use them from the Cloud Foundry perspective So that is quite important because and there's some Cloud Foundry features within those services like for example Automatically creating application security groups By using the Cloud Foundry setup to verify that everything works Yeah, we actually also implicitly test whether security groups works and and so on also important is that for example You missed one change in the open server broker API specification Which has been implemented in Cloud Foundry and then that test suite will tells you okay that That version of Cloud Foundry is not compatible anymore with with that service broker API So please go and fix that This these tests suite or this errand then performs a couple of test cases like for example the service instance creation So we create a service instance and we test that these service instance can be accessed by an application deployed to that Cloud Foundry setup We test that the bindings work and that the bindings can be used that apps can access The service instance using these bindings That the deletion of the bindings works and that when a binding has been deleted the credential of that binding is not usable anymore That arbitrary parameters or custom user parameters works that plan update works like expected and that the backup and restore works To two and cups. Yeah, the goal was to to actually minimize the effort to introduce new new services into a marketplace so we somehow had to come up came up with a Generalized testing framework as well so we have a framework for integrating new services into the marketplace and We came up with a framework to integrate new tests into into this test framework Our first attempt was called the service binding checker. That was a small application that has been deployed to Cloud Foundry It has an interface that allows you to access the database in a generic way So it doesn't matter whether it's a postgres whether it's a rebutt mq or read this we always use the same interface So we don't distinguish years between different service types The application reads credentials from the VCAP services, you probably know the VCAP services environment variable So whenever you bind an application or in service to an application Cloud Foundry will expose the credentials to that service to the VCAP service variable So the service binding checker read the environment variable and tries to connect to that service instance There's some other endpoints To make some other actions, but that's basically it. We will talk about the the API of that that application later Yeah, and we try to make use of the service through that a generic API which encapsulate all service specific implementations That first attempt it was written in Ruby and because we run a lot of tests in parallel So currently we have implemented seven different data service types and we test a lot of service plans for each For each data service. So it ended up in in a massive amount of parallel test runs and deploying This Ruby application for each test run was some kind of memory consuming So we re-wrote that and go and we now call that Binding Go, which is something like binding checker app and go And it actually has that interface. It's as I said, it's a generic interface It allows you to test the service instance through that application by using that generic interface For example, we have a status endpoint which for the implementation of Postgres creates a database creates a table within the database inserts a record and then Deletes that record and deletes that table from the database For rabbit MQ it looks a bit different, but it's the same interface for rabbit MQ We create a rabbit MQ queue and then we insert a message We consume that message and then we delete the queue and then it's the same for for Redis We just insert a key value store and delete the key value store that that happens when we call this status endpoint You see a more specific example in the bottom. So the only thing that is specific here is the name We say we want we want to test that Postgres instance and then that is everything that has been different To yeah different to all the other tests if you want to test if you bind the Redis there We say an S Redis and then we test the Redis instance So this abstraction or the encapsulation of every service specific thing into this API gives us the possibility to actually Automate these test cases we want to test in a in a generic way So everything else is now generic and can be reused across different data service types So let's go through these test cases and and see how we perform these test cases by using this Bindingo API So the first test case would be to have To simply just check the service access whether the application can access the service so We deploy or recreate the service instance of a service we want to test then we push the Bindingo application That is actually that is actually the logic which the errand Executes when you say please execute the the smoke tests Yeah, we push an instance of that Bindingo application and we wait until the service is ready And we wait until the application is ready so Deploying the application and creating the service that is something that takes some minutes and that's why it's executed in parallel But once both is finished we bind that service to service instance And we bind that service to the Bindingo application we restart the Bindingo application and then we Call this endpoint the status endpoint of the Bindingo application We just deployed and then the Bindingo app writes a data record in the database and say Status code 200 everything went fine or there was something wrong Maybe check whether the cloud found the application security groups has been created Another test case we execute is we check that each service binding gets its dedicated credentials So how does this work? So again, we create a service instance. We push a Bindingo application and we push a second Bindingo application Then we wait until everything is finished. So the service is ready and both both Bindingo applications are running and Then we bind both applications to the same service instance We we bind both applications to the same service instance We have to restart both applications and And then we check the status of both application and we expect both requests to succeed next step We unbind the first thing the first application. We restart the first application and Again, we execute the status endpoint and we expect this and we execute the status endpoint of the second one and what we expect now is that the first request fails with a status code 500 and The second request succeeds So that way we ensure that Once we delete a service binding this credential that is not usable anymore But all the other credentials that can still be used And last but not least we unbind the second one. We restart the second one and we expect both calls to fail Another interesting test case is how we use that Bindingo API to test the backups and the restores So we use the service instance from the previous test case Usually we do that because provisioning a service takes long. So we try to may reuse instances as much as possible We again we bind the Bindingo application to the instance We check whether the binding works just to be sure and then we use the put endpoint to insert To insert a record and then the put endpoint actually expects a body Which contains a test a key value pair? And then that one in case because it's a postgres instance The test will actually create a table within the database and insert That that data into the table and then we check with the exists endpoint whether this this right request from the previous put request has been successfully inserted and once this has been verified we trigger a backup and Then we wait until the backup is successfully created. So in that case it only takes a few seconds because it's a quite small database Once a backup has been created successfully. We delete that data record from from the database again Here we are using postgres. It could also be in Redis or or a MongoDB The logic is then the same Once the record is deleted we verify that it's really gone as so we expect this get record get request to fail and Then we restore the backup and Then we wait until the backup is the restores successfully created and Then we check again whether the key is back again And we expect that check to to succeed because we restore to backup and expect the backup to have the data Another test case is the plan update Again, we used the service instance from the previous test case We ensure the binding is still present and then we ensure the binding still works and Then we insert the data again Then we check the data has been inserted successfully then we trigger a backup even we doing a plan update We're triggering a backup now We wait until the backup is succeeded Then then we make a plan update We wait until the plan update is succeeded We check that the service instance still works the data can be written into the instance We check that the data that has been inserted before the plan update is still in the instance after the plan update We delete the test record We ensure the record that has been deleted and to restore the backup and After that we ensure that the backup that has been done with the old instance can still be restored on the new instance These are the basic tests which are executed by the smoke test. So whenever a customer runs Wash run Aaron, please test this the service installation. These are the test cases that are executed It turned out that we can use the spinning go application to even test more things like for example We have deployed our data services in version one to the customer and now we want to update the whole setup to a new version So we can use this this this test logic to test that update and how that works is we deploy the one version of the data service solution then Yes service services deployed in version X then we create a service instance Then again, we push the binding application. We wait until everything is ready Then we put a test record into the database We trigger a backup We wait until the backup is succeeded And then we update the management components to the new version management components is meant the service broker itself Or did the those 10 micro services that are involved in managing the service instances itself? Once these management components are updated to the new version we update the service instances to the new version Once the update is finished we check that all service instances that we have provisioned Before the update are still working by calling the status endpoint and again the status endpoint will then insert some data into the services and Maybe insert a message if it's a rabbit MQ or something like that And we check that That the data is still in the in the database that we have Inserted before the update Then we delete the data record Then we ensure it's deleted and then we restore the backup again So we ensure that the backup that has been created with the old version of the data Data service version can be restored on the new version another thing this Bindingo API can be used for is load tests actually When you implement those for endpoints, I've showed you previously you get a load a simple load tests I'm for free. So actually you then have that API and you can actually say please run a run a load test load test on That service instance bound to that application and you can specify for how long the load test should run 1200 seconds in that example how many insert operations should be done per seconds And how how large the the data should be that is gets inserted into the service instance The result of that request is a report. So You send that request and you immediately get back one Report and this report contains an ID which identifies the load test Which is currently run and using that ID you can check what's the current status of the load tests What are the current statistic and? There's also a flag which indicates whether the load test is still running or whether it's finished Let's talk about the future plans we have With these test test framework currently we're using the CF CLI to to actually talk to Cloud Foundry and Yeah, test the things from the user perspective a colleague of us came up with a service broker CLI and the idea of that service broker a Service broker CLI is to mimic DCF CLI so that in theory we can just replace the CLI within our tests and then That's it. We then don't test We are Cloud Foundry anymore. We then test the service broker API directly which might gain us some some speed when it comes to feedback cycles, so tests should run faster than It should run faster because we don't have to deploy the Binding Applications every time we run a test Another kind of tests we have is We we have Integration tests or what we call Bosch release tests So because we deploying our data services with Bosch we for example have a Bosch release for Postgres for RabbitMQ and for every service we offer and We have a massive test suite that actually Runs against that Bosch release and it works like that it provisions that Bosch release without using a broker or anything else It provisions a Bosch release and it checks that for example this Postgres cluster is working like expected even in failure scenarios so it manipulates the IP table rules on the VMs and Simulates a split-brain situation for example and checks that the cluster Doesn't end up in a split-brain situation and that that when resolving this split-brain situation The cluster again still joins and repairs itself. It also checks what happens if the master dies So it crushes the master and ensures that that the failover happens and that the new master can accept data and that the data is replicated to the remaining slaves Currently building a new data service building this kind of test is It's quite hard and it's the major major task. We have to do when for example integrating a new data service into the marketplace Yeah, that is that is the the kind of work we struggle most with or we invest most work into and the idea is to have to use the spending of application and To have a generic Bosch release test So we just have to specify a few parameters for example In in case of a split-brain scenario a postgres cluster should behave like that and that And the couch to be cluster should behave like that and that Yeah, that's it the idea with the Bosch release tests and how we can make use of How we can make use of the Bindinger API and testing the Bosch releases itself in failure scenarios Yeah, that's pretty much it any questions in retrospective. How much sense did it make? To have this one generic app with all the test cases in besides having the test cases in the service brokers Or the services themselves and just calling them from there because I think it's It's very specific to the service what you actually want to test I mean you'd only talked about data services made that that Gives a smaller context or a smaller scope But we for example we have a lot of different services starting from logging to messaging to databases to Think about a spring cloud suite or whatever. Yeah, so There's a trade-off between how generic is it and how how practicable is it? We also have applied that test suite to an Elk stack So we have a Elk stack as a service and we already learned that that API Doesn't yeah, it's hard to you to abstract the log messaging thing into that API So there might be some limitations But I guess for the use cases we have or for the use cases we aim for in the next few years I guess that can save us a lot of time Sure, there can be some services or some some kind of software is that that doesn't fit into that abstraction We came up with within that API Yeah, so but Another idea is that instead I mean of using of testing or this errand with cloud from before example We can switch cloud from we could beneath us for example, so It allows us to really test against a real system, right? It's not only like faking something, but you can actually test against cloud foundry switch it to kubernetes and so on so This makes it possible and if you just use the broker test for example It's fine, but It will not work in the long run because you need to verify that works of cloud for the kubernetes Another question I have two questions one was regarding your smoke test during You provision this app bind this app right Create some internet entries in the database and so on and later on at the end You delete it the first app and then you test it if this first up is really not accessible to the instance and I Didn't got it why you do this even you have two instances running all right It is one is not inaccessible to the database What why so that's not clear to me. That's the first one and the other one is Could you at the end of this test send somewhere the results or where do you proceed with this to? Was able to do the first question put it somewhere with rest or something else. Yeah, the first question is Wasn't this dedicated a credential test and why we do create deployed two apps and why we do create two bindings The idea is that when you bind an application to a to a service that this application gets a credential set to access the service And we have the requirements for most of our services that we bind the same service to a different application, right? We somehow want to have a different credential set So we have two two credentials for each of the applications and the idea is that we When we delete one credential set by unbinding the application, right? We want this credential set to be not used anymore It can be that for example one application that make use of your service Has been attacked by a bind hacker or something like that and the credentials has been exposed to that hacker And then you want this credential set to be unusable. So you unbind your application and then you we just ensure that's really Implemented in a way that you can't use make use of these credentials anymore once it has been unbound Right, right and the second question is The foot for the first question we could sometimes also optimize of course that we don't push two or three instances of this Finding go app because currently we are reading V caps levels for example this environment variables, but you could also pass credentials via User a URL parameters for example in the future so we can just use one binding go app for different scenarios Where we would normally push three or four binding go apps So we okay, and the second question is We we put the results of the smoke test into the log directory of the smoke test off the smoke test aren't and Then we stream them to a zeus lock endpoint, and then we can analyze them there I don't think we have time for other questions, but you can't find us at the booth So we are rounded our booth if you have any questions or want to discuss something just come over there and grab some free t-shirts or something like that Thanks


Yeah, science at SOEST. I'm Jay Fidel. It's the one o'clock clock on a given Tuesday, and I am joined, or I join, Pete McGinnis-Mark, who is a professor at SOEST, the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, HIGP, more specifically, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. He has been a host on and off on ThinkTech for a long time, and we're starting an actual course today, which Pete is going to teach. Well, every Tuesday at one o'clock, this is very exciting stuff, and we are so happy to be in this relationship with UH and SOEST and HIGP. Welcome to your show, Pete. Thank you, Pete. I'm really pleased to be here on my show, but seriously, Jay, thank you and ThinkTech as well. This is a really exciting opportunity. I want to take this afternoon, this show today, to basically outline some of the goals and objectives of my new series, which I hope will be running on ThinkTech, well, for who knows how long, but certainly for this semester, which started yesterday. And it really is quite an exciting opportunity because what we will be trying to do is to attract our new graduate students as well as postdocs and give them a lot of experience in talking live to the general public and to make the point that their research is relevant both to the state as well as get some idea of what their career objectives are. Now, most of these students have not actually appeared live on television before, and so ThinkTech is a really friendly environment for which to do this. And in the world of Zoom after COVID, for example, more and more of our students are actually talking to their colleagues on the mainland or internationally over Zoom, but they haven't really been interviewed. Typically, students will go to a conference either virtually or in person and will present a science paper for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. And if they're lucky, they won't be asked too many hard questions, but what we want to try and do with this ThinkTech series is actually to bring them up to speed in how do they talk to the general public. It's kind of like what we want them to do is present a 10 or 15 minute elevator speech. You know the phrase where you might have 30 seconds in an elevator to persuade your next door neighbor or the governor or whomever that what you're doing is relevant not only in terms of the costs involved but also why it's important to the people of Hawaii. Well, we're extending that 30 second elevator speech to something like 10 to 15 minutes. And of course, you know, Jay, that you don't just appear live on the TV show for half an hour without some preparation. So behind the scenes, part of the course which I'll be teaching is to provide the students with some of the background information, you know, like slide preparation, what other topics which they think are most important that the general public would like to hear. So this is a little different from typical ThinkTech shows. It's going to be different because many of the guests, this might be their first time on television and certainly the first time they've been interviewed or resumed on their material. But also trying to evaluate how they are performing as far as the material which they're presenting, even the graphics is going to be a challenge for some of them because clearly we can't show a detailed plot of data and allow the audience to really understand it. So simplifying the work which they're doing for an audience who may never have heard anything about the kind of work that they're doing is something really new. And at Soast, Margaret McAnnes and Dave Carl and a few others, the department chairs really got excited about this concept wherein, you know, the students themselves start to get the experience of presenting their material online. So we were excited about it, delighted that ThinkTech thinks this is a good thing for our community to hear about. So I'm going to stop and let you, if you've got any questions and then I'll go into more of my post-amble. Well, Pete, you know, I'm really about this. We've been doing talk shows for almost 20 years, radio and video like this, screaming. This is really special to have a relationship with Soast and University and to have the crucible of what you do there come in into our content, into our stream, so to speak and to share that with not only the university but with the public. This is so valuable on all ends of it. You know, we made a movie last year about climate change. Chip Fletcher was in the movie and it was the relationship of climate change and the environment to COVID and how they feed off to each other. And one of the things that we learned from a number of the, I call them faculty that were in this movie was that science has changed and I would like your thought about this. Science used to be all sort of within the science, within the scientific community, but now it appears, and this is especially clear in the context of COVID itself, that scientists also must get out there. They must talk to the public. They must educate the public. For my purpose, it's a matter of part of the training of a scientist these days. If you want to be a scientist, you also have to be able to speak to the public, educate the community, agree with me? Yes, indeed. Yeah, and with all the issues over fake news and who do you believe over COVID or climate change or whatever? But Jay, maybe I can just direct the conversation in a little different direction because we've talked about SOAST and I'm betting that most of the audience really don't know what SOAST is. So Eric, if you can put up the first slide, I think it's actually worth just telling people a little bit, SOAST stands for the School of Ocean Earth Science and Technology. It's one of the units at University of Hawaii at Manila. But I've put on some of the basic background information, like there's over 240 people who work at SOAST. In addition, there's over 570 professional and technical staff. We've got nearly 190 graduate students, some of whom are working on their master's degrees. Many, however, are working on their PhDs. In terms of the budget that we bring in, this is about $120 million a year endeavor. So we bring in, SOAST brings in about a third of all of the federal dollars to the University of Hawaii. So this is a big initiative and trying to convey to the general public what exactly SOAST contributes to the state of Hawaii and scientific knowledge in general is one of the objectives of this particular course. And having our graduate students actually take the lead and I'll be quizzing them both before the show on why it's important as well as what exactly their contributions are gonna be. That's the kind of thing which I hope to get out of this series. And Eric, can we go on to the second slide please? Which basically just gives you some idea of the breadth of the studies which are conducted at SOAST. And you mentioned Chip Fletcher, who is our new interim dean. Brian Taylor has retired. So there's aspects of climate change. But if you just look at the diagram, we've got oceanographers, we've got marine biologists, we've got atmospheric scientists. We worry a lot about climate change but also geology, natural hazards. For example, Hawaii has numerous natural hazards be they tsunamis or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or whatever. There's also a very vibrant space program. We launched our own satellite from the space station back in 2020. We're sending another one up later this year. Our former graduate students fly spacecraft or instruments around the moon or driving across Mars. So SOAST as a unit is incredibly successful. We're ranked somewhere in the top 20 worldwide for some aspects of the work which is conducted. And I don't feel that the community, the people in Hawaii actually realize what a gem SOAST is here in our home state. So that's one of the things which we really need to figure out. Yeah, this communication, we're talking about the communication of science, it's not only important to the, as I said, the scientific community and the public. It's important to the legislature. It's important to policymakers. It's important to granting agencies everywhere in the country and for that matter of the world. It's important for the global scientific community so that they know who you are, who SOAST is. It's really a fabulous idea. The other thing I was gonna say is that, back in the old days, scientists would go out and they would look and search and research for their science when you're talking about the earth. The things that SOAST specializes in. But now you don't have to go out, it comes to you. Climate change brings it to you and we are going to have more issues of more public interest going forward than we have ever had before. And scientists need to tell us what is going on, connect the dots and actually predict what will happen next. That's the problem about science and climate change. And let's, Eric, move on to slide three because Jay's prompted the next issue on some of the relevance. All right, and here's just four examples where we're looking at, say, the ocean as a food source or we're looking at climate change. I drove round to Kahuku over the weekend and the amount of beach erosion, which is taking place just north of Kaniyori Bay. Now we're gonna deal with the degradation of the coral reefs, the loss of the infrastructure for the road system. We look at things like ocean debris in terms of how that affects some of the marine mammals. As well as, say, I mentioned some of the natural hazards, the diagram at bottom right shows the distribution of earthquakes, which can generate tsunamis, but we've got people in our ocean research engineering department, for example, who are trying to implement new methods of predicting when tsunamis are actually gonna be dangerous. We know when the earthquake occurs, but we've got perhaps only a few hours before a warning would be issued, say, by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, even the heavy rain which we had here in Hawaii over the last month, the climate modelers, the atmosphere scientists, they all contribute to things which are directly relevant to you and I and it behooves both the professors at UH as well as their students to get out and tell the general public that we're doing great things and you're gonna need our help even more as the years go by. Yes, I predict you'll be talking to the public more and more, so this is a great program to sort of get into that, but you know, it's a course and I would like to spend a few minutes with you about the nature of a course here on Think Tech and at SOAS and I know that you're a kind and gentle, avuncular professor, Pete, but how will it work from your end and should the students out there who are called upon to present, should they be intimidated? No, I don't work by intimidation. I cajole and try and pressure the students. The way that the whole course, as you describe it, will work out. It's probably not gonna be given for credit, at least not this semester. We only started planning this about a week ago, so trying to give the students actual credit is unlikely, but it will take the form of a weekly seminar and the students are very familiar with seminars and the key difference between a regular seminar that perhaps the faculty as well as the students would join in would be that I would spend perhaps an hour before each one of the shows talking to a particular student if she's the first time on the air. Clearly there's the preparation work. So we've had courses before at the university on public speaking, but they have been focused almost entirely on how do you go to a science conference and put your research in the best possible format for other research scientists to appreciate. Here it's gonna be different. It's, yeah, we're not interested in the eighth decimal point of your measurements or what you're coding your computer programs in is primarily to be a generalist. And I found in the past, like when I did the previous shows on ThinkTech, that probably the most helpful for the participant was the preparatory work. So you sit down with an individual and say this is how a 30 minute show should be put together. And then after the show, you sort of have an individual debrief. What I'm hoping is that as with the normal university seminars as this becomes better known on campus, we will have many other students logging on and they will be able to not only watch the shows but also provide their own colleagues with critiques during real time. So that's just like a regular seminar that we would have on campus. As we get started, it's obviously we're bootstrapping the way that the course of this endeavor is put together. It might well be that say for the first two or three weeks, we'll only have one of the students giving a presentation and I'll be quizzing them on the relevance. But as say we enter into February, what I'm really hoping is that we will have less of the student giving the talk, but then we'll have online comments, hopefully constructive comments about, I didn't understand this or tell me more about why your work on say water on the moon is relevant to people of Hawaii or something like that. Yeah, it's a learning process even for you and I, Jay, that we don't quite know how this is going to work out. I think it's a really exciting concept. It's the sort of thing which the students will benefit from even if we fail, it will be something that in the past they have not heard. And with all of the social distancing over COVID, for example, we're not giving the students enough opportunities to interact either with their peer group or with the faculty. This is a new way. They're much more comfortable than you and I working with Zoom, so we'll see how it goes. It could be great. We're treating it on our end as a webinar. It's a 30-minute webinar every week, which means that you can take questions easily and the questions are reported on a special chat page for you and you can then pose as the host, you can pose those questions to the students who are presenting, so it's very open and you can rewrite the questions, extend the questions, modify the questions in any way, but you can have a regular exchange with the public or anyone who is permitted or who is registered on the webinar. That's the one thing. And the other thing I wanted to mention is we will put this out there. ThinkTek has eight platforms of various kinds and with descriptions. And when we take a webinar like this, we'll put it out there so that it is into the community. It goes not only to UH, but to the public and to that matter to the world. What's more is it's catalogable. That means if somebody wants to find out about a given subject that you have discussed on the show, they just need a keyword and they'll find it. So it is a scientific resource in many ways to the public, not only here but elsewhere. And finally, I wanted to ask you this, Pete. What does a viewer hope to achieve here? What do you see as the takeaway, the content value to a viewer who comes on and watches one of these shows? A member of the public. Is it gonna be at his level? Yes, the intent is certainly to make the information understandable to the layperson. Now I'm not quite sure if we'll hit the mark every time, but certainly it's not gonna be a detailed scientific description, but that's not my goal and in meeting with the students beforehand to prepare their material. That's one of the first things I'm gonna impress on that you cannot just present a science talk. You have to show relevance. But what the layperson might get out of it? First of all, recognition that SOAST is a world-class institution that brings in not only an awful lot of money to the state, but also provides immense amount of technical information to either state legislatures, some of the advisory boards and that sort of thing. So I doubt very much if most people in Hawaii recognize the sort of work which is done at SOAST. From a general point of view, I think SOAST and the university has not done a very good job in the past at reaching out to the general public at their level of understanding or interest. So I hope that the whole series will actually make it much more relevant. I actually put slide number six, Eric. Well, if we can just put on the last slide and I'll talk over that. Basically, what are the goals for this series? Well, yeah, I'm gonna interview a student each week and that's gonna give them experience in public speaking. I want to hear about their research and also hopefully hear about the excitement they have about research. Why commit to a four year PhD if you're not excited about it? But they have to explain the relevance of their work to the general public. That's the key thing. And basically, Eric, I can't read my own slide right now if you can go, thank you. Students should also have some idea of what their career goals are. Why are they doing this? Apart from having lots of fun now, hopefully we can convince the viewer that our students are gonna get good jobs but hopefully stay in Hawaii and high paid jobs. And finally, the general public needs to learn much more about activities at Manoa so that when the ledge decides that they're gonna cut Manoa's budget again, everybody will stand up and say, well, no, because we want to know about climate change. We want to worry about earthquakes and look at all of the exciting things which are being done for the benefit of our local kids as well as kids from the mainland. Or I say kids, but young scientists more than anything else. So, we're not sure how this is gonna work.  I will be here. But it's a general effort. And I'm also hoping, Jay, you mentioned that this is an interactive zoomathon or whatever. When I gave the other series on think tech research at Manoa, there wasn't any interaction between the audience and the presenters. I think that's a really exciting development for think tech to actually utilize the internet or zoom so that you can gauge the reaction from people. And I too will be sort of promoting the links for this show in the hope that many people will tune in. Some will be from the university. Some I hope will be lay people who are just generally interested. And that's how you engage our community with what we're doing. So try and see. I was thinking for myself and the staff at think tech we want this to work and we'll make every effort to have it work. Not only because this is what we do but because so is this a special organization for us. We've been dealing with it. We admire it for years and years and we admire its faculty and its work. And it's more and more relevant, more and more important. But at the same time though it seems to me that the university could do more of this. And if this works and I'm knocking wood that it does I believe that it will. I would make every effort to have that happen but this could be useful for other departments other parts of the university, other campuses other faculty, other students, other programs. And I would like to see it go beyond that. Don't you think? I thought that you say that, Jay because I've already had discussions with the director of our Sea Grant College which has supported students not only within SOAST but in a variety of other departments across campus. And yes, this is a test program in the literal sense but I'm hoping it would actually be expanded to other departments across campus. Believe me, I'm going to be trying to push this as much as you. So hopefully it will succeed. Yeah, I mean a few years ago there was all this rage about MOOCs, remember those large online courses massive, massive online courses. They were emanating from various places on the mainland. I don't think Hawaii got into it very deeply. We thought that if Hawaii's going to do it, Hawaii has to do it in its own way, its own style the Aloha style, call it. And I think this is exactly what this is or could be a MOOC where ultimately people on the mainland watch it. Right, well it's different from a MOOC because hopefully you've got a live presenter quizzing the students but doing online classes in this manner it may not work for a 600 level volcanology course for example, but this communications aspect we teach classes on writing proposals, presenting material at conferences. This is the same kind of deal. So trying new methods for our students benefit I think is a really good idea. Yeah, so let's turn to you for a minute Pete. You have been a fixture at SOS for about 200 years now. At least, yeah. At least, yeah. And I wonder what motivates you? What gives you the passion here? What are you seeking and why? Well, first of all, I'm a lifelong supporter of SOS. I think it's a wonderful organization and it has given me a great career doing what I enjoy, which is studying volcanoes on Mars but the more general aspects of it. I just feel this is what a faculty member should be doing. You can't just present the same material in the same manner every year and expect the students to be excited. Times are changing with COVID in particular we have to think of new ways of helping the students broaden their get a better experience. So it's, you know, it's in my DNA. I'm excited about my own research and I'm excited to find out why students are excited whether it's a marine biologist or it's a atmospheric scientist or an engineer. Yeah, it's neat. Find out as much as you can. So that's what fires me up.  It's an important combination. I think that's you. Can you also talk for a minute about the founding group that put this together? You mentioned Dave Carlson, a name a little while ago and there are others too. Can you talk about the way it came together, the seminal group, the seminal organizational arrangements? A simple answer would be no because it was an idea hatched by the department chairs. We have four different departments within SOAS. They recognize the need for, in essence, a school-wide seminar series. And they decided that I would be an appropriate person. You know, Dave Carl, of course, is a long-term association with Think Tech and I think he had something to do with me being encouraged to do this. I do not know why the department chairs in atmospheric sciences, ocean research engineering, earth sciences and oceanography, they all decided this is a good thing to do. I was not in that discussion. Well, we're just about out of time, Pete, but I wanted to ask you one last question. To the extent that people look at this introductory show and try to get the flavor of what you're about to do and maybe consider, you know, watching it on a regular basis or for that matter, become a student, participate in the show itself and in any event, become more aware of SOAS. What is your message to them? What would you like them to think about as a takeaway from our discussion about this great possibility, this great adventure we are embarking on? Yeah, it is a great opportunity. It's a great opportunity to learn at a more basic level what is done within SOAS. It's cross-discipline. That's the intent. So you will have oceanographers hearing about geology or an atmospheric scientist wants to know about building a widget to go in a submarine or something like that. So it's going to be broad-based. It's going to be focused on the students and we're trying new techniques to basically enhance the educational experience that you're watching now. That's great. That's really an important statement. Thank you so much, Pete McGinnis-Mark. It's so great to talk to you. My pleasure. And to have you on the show. Thank you very much, Jake. It's going to be great. Thank you. Yeah. Okay.


Well, welcome to the full day of so excited to have all of you here. We'll talk a little bit about that later. We had a great turnout yesterday for the half day, but we're going to go ahead and run through some things, announcements, et cetera, that we covered yesterday. We don't want some of these folks here today. First of all, super excited. The registration is at 102. Huge turnout. We're really glad to have you all here. Second, I want to mention and reiterate, we have the code of conduct, any harassment and any discrimination policy up on the website. You can go. It's at this link. It's linked from the home page. We can review that. We can buy, buy it. I want everyone to have an enjoyable time at a professional conference. And related to that and everything else that you might question, you might have, et cetera, the folks in red shirts, there's one over there. He's in a different red shirt. Don't talk to him. But they say staff, come on the back of them. There's another one over here. We can answer your questions. I'll probably be wearing one later on today. And answer your questions if you have anything you need to report, if you want to know where you can make a phone call, all these different kinds of things folks in red shirts can help. The Wi-Fi, that's the SSID and key. They're down here at the bottom of the next week's slides and he's just still trying to pipe. The main thing I would mention again is just that there's limited capacity there. So maybe hold it to one device on the Wi-Fi. And if you're like updating, pulling in some Starcraft updates or something, maybe do that on the other end. These are our social tabs. So the main conference, Twitter handle, which you can mention. And then the hashtag that we're using for the conference. So as you tweet about this, as you talk about it, please do. We really want to grow this community. We want to put on an even bigger conference next year and do this again. And we need to get the word out. It's been difficult. It's been challenging, I think, to gather this community together. And we want to do more of this. And it's been really fun to be with our people yesterday and looking forward to it again today. There's a call workspace. It's actually called the Ballroom. It's out here. And you can ask folks in the red shirts where that is. But it's a nice quiet space off of the lobby. You can use it if you need to sit down and work on your laptop and make a call. And there's the social again. Is it going the wrong way? I also want to mention this door. It's a little awkward to go in and out of. There's another door up there with stairs down to the lobby. And actually the elevator also is up there. So if you want to internize it through there, you can also come down here. We won't judge you. That's totally fine. But if you want to make the street entrance and exits, there's an entrance exit up in the back. We are having the sessions recorded. We really want to sell people that beforehand because we wanted them to come. But we are going to get them up there. And they're going to be on conference. And they're the sort of standard creative comments reporting license that conference uses. And if we're starting to get them up there, we will let you know when they go live. And then the agenda is up on the website. Quick rundown on Bunch. It's at the pit restaurant. For those of you that went to happy hour last night, it's about, you can basically see the pit from our office. So it's about close exactly the same direction. It is about the same distance. We had, it's about a 10 minute walk. We encourage you to walk. It should be beautiful today. But we also have lift codes for anyone that needs them. And for going there and coming back. And we'll have folks with signs up there who can both direct you and groups walking over there. And also some of the sign if you want to take a lift. And finally, for announcements, I just want to thank our sponsors again. We talked about them in depth yesterday, but ED&T local bank is still doing actually some unique things in the payment space. They're just down in Wilson, North Carolina. We've been enjoying interacting with them. And they were kind enough to sponsor the conference. Google Pay, as we mentioned yesterday, our support for, extremely support for Google Pay is now going into private data. So if you want to get on that list, help us test it out. Definitely let us know. Sickage is our PCI USS QSA. And we're super excited to have them here. We've referred them out to some of our different customers and heard good things back from them as well. So definitely chat with Sickage. There are people too. They get all of this stuff and deal with it regularly when they're running audits. And then, of course, Spreatly, we have been super excited and super glad that we can sponsor and put on this first year of the conference. So I've been giving you all these announcements. It's probably going to be good to introduce myself. My name is Nathaniel Talbot. I am the CTO and one of the original co-founders of Spreatly. And I wanted to take a few minutes here before we get started with the talks that you all came to see and just talk a little bit about why I'm excited to put on this conference. Why I'm so excited that Spreatly has kind of gotten to the point where we can go and put this on. And a little bit of the history behind that. Before we do that, though, I want to send a thank you and a shout out to two people that have really helped make this possible. One is Helen. And you will see her out there. She has been tireless. The whole team has contributed, but these two people, especially Helen, has been tireless in coordinating this, making sure we're all fed, making sure we're all in the right place at the right time, and all this stuff gets where it needs to go. We want her to be willing to do this again next year. So if you enjoy the conference, please stop by and let her know that you enjoyed it and appreciated it. I know that she will appreciate hearing that from me. And I also want to send a shout out to Peter. We keep joining just back in February. We said, we've got this conference thing we're working on, and we don't actually have anyone signed up for it yet. And we're kind of hoping you, as our first sort of marketing person, that you will be able to help us get attendees and registrants. And we even gave him the option of, if you want, you can just push it back a year and we can wait. If he was super excited and he was super game, and most of you, almost all of you, are here directly or indirectly because of his efforts. As he said yesterday, he's the guy who emailed you. And he emailed you again. But I wanted you to comment, I want as many people here as possible, and Peter made so much of that happen. So I want to thank you.  So Sumeria was this very early civilization in the area of modern day Iraq. And some really interesting things rose out of the Sumerian civilization. If you were a Sumerian shepherd, say you were a really successful one. As a matter of fact, you kind of had sheep coming out of your ears. You had more sheep than you knew what to do with.  And over the hill, there was another farmer who was growing meat. And you knew you could get bush with a meat. And you wanted to do a business deal. You're an entrepreneur trying to, you need wheat. He needs sheep. So let's, this sounds kind of like a game at the time. But he, you want to figure out how to do this deal. But the wheat's not ripe yet. You need to finish raising the sheep. But you want to go ahead and agree. So you need a record of this. So you both go down to the local town and you talk to the Clay Artisan there. And the Clay Artisan helps you out and actually goes and helps you out with these, craft some of these clay tokens. So each token, you would have tokens to represent the different commodities. So you would have specific tokens for wheat and for sheep. And they would have been in different denominations. So one that represented one sheep, one that represented five, one that represented 10.  And you kind of get your pile of tokens that represents the deal. So say it's 35 sheep for 28 bushels a week. You need to get piles of tokens that represent those amounts. And while you're doing that, the Clay Artisan is out there crafting a hollow clay ball. And when you've got your deal done, maybe you craft two of them and one for each of you. He actually in the outside of the clay ball, he goes in and marks the terms of the deal. And then there's a hole in the top of this clay ball and you each take your representation of the amount that you agree to and you pour it into the top of your clay ball. He seals it off and he fires that clay ball. Now you have a representation of the deal. And if there's any kind of dispute later on when the meat brightens or when the lambs are mature, you can break those open if you need to and compare notes and someone else can arbitrate that dispute. So the fascinating thing is that this is actually one of the earliest examples we have with payments technology. These are the prototypical payments engineers trying to figure out how to solve problems that they've had in their businesses and their lives. And the things that stop them, right? So those tokens, those clay tokens, they eventually became coinage and these are shackles. And but we're all super familiar with coins. Here's the thing that we use every day in our life and we can trace them back to these clay tokens. And that clay ball, that actually became what we think of as a seal or sort of the modern representation. That would be a signature. Hey, I agree to this. This is, I put my name on this and you can use this as a future record of the deal that was done. So these are like things that we take for granted. But it actually goes even further than that. Hit this. So the clay tokens have these representations of like different amounts of commodities. That then becomes this ability and folks take that and they start making records of counts and accounting in clay. And then you have these numeric systems and so you get sort of the first passive numeric systems. That then becomes written language and cuneiform. And so out of payments technology, you end up with writing. You end up with civilization. And it comes from this desire to be able to do commerce and to do it efficiently and to do it well. So I take two sort of conclusions from this. The first one is that payments technology and payments engineering, it actually matters. It matters for the world. It matters for history. It matters for civilization. Commerce is one of the fundamental ways that we interact with each other. Two people with things of value that they've created. Being able to change that to mutual benefit is huge. And it underlies our ability to relate to, to have lots of wonderful things and food and other things to be able to produce in specialized ways and then exchange that production. And payments engineering is actually, and payments technology is a key part of that. And it has the potential to impact the world like on an ongoing basis in ways beyond just payments and commerce. So I'm super excited to be gathered here talking about it as a thing in its own right because I want to be mindful of it. I want us all mindful of it. I want us to be able to talk about it and communicate about it and say this is something important that we're doing. The second conclusion that I kind of draw from this is people don't get into payments engineering and payments technology on purpose. We just have some shepherds who wanted to like, a shepherd who wanted to trade some sheep. He wasn't trying to create new payments technology. He wasn't trying to be payments engineering. And when we started screening, we were trying to do payments technology and we just wanted to make subscription management better. We just wanted to be able to charge 40 bucks a month for software as a service. That was our only goal. And so we went, we did that for three or four years and had some success. Also had plenty of struggles and we accidentally created payments technology inside of that. We stumbled into it. We started doing it and eventually we pulled that out and said, oh, maybe other people will want this. Maybe we can pull this out and we pivoted the company and focused it in on payments technology, but that's not where we started. We didn't do it on purpose. I mean, not that smart. And the challenging thing was when we started doing payments technology, especially since we didn't do it on purpose, we had no clue how to learn about these things. Where do we get information? Where's the community? Where are the other people who like us have stumbled into doing payments technology and payments engineering and payments product? How do we find them? Where are they? Where's the community? And I want to take a little diversion here and talk a little bit about my journey to the programming language Ruby. So this is a back in Ruby comp shirt. I had this shirt. This is not a picture of my shirt. I don't have the dinosaur stickers, but back in 2001, I had just started getting into Ruby. It was actually in late 2000. And I was super excited about it. The first English language book about Ruby, the Ruby program language was in publish. And I found the mailing list and the English language mailing list, even the creator of the language was Japanese. He would get on there and he would talk about the language. He would answer questions. The folks who wrote the book would be on there. It was an amazing community. I learned so much and then eventually we decided to put a conference on. And we gathered lots of people from all over the place into that conference. It was amazing. We even managed to pull the creator of the language over from Japan. That was one of the reasons we put the conference on and hang out with him. And after we continued on, I went to the first governor of both Ruby Confidences consecutive. I was a little bit of a fanboy, okay? But it changed the course of my career and changed sometimes the course of my life. And I learned so many things from that community. And when I started doing payments, I couldn't find the same thing. And so I think part of the reason for that is that we don't get into this on purpose.  Why don't you realize we're doing it? And so we have a common community around it. And one of the goals of Payments.Pan is to really bootstrap that community. We want to gather folks in and we want to start building a community of people doing payment technology, payments engineering and payments product. And my request to you is that as you go through the conference, as you hear the great content that our speakers have prepared, as you spend time networking with your peers, maybe this is the first time you've been able to be in a room talking about your job and you don't have to explain the difference between a payment gateway and an emergency account. That's kind of amazing because, and you talk about like payment networks and the other person doesn't play to it. These are people and I want to figure out how, I want you to help us figure out how, what's next? How do we build a community out of this? Is it a slap? Is it a podcast? Is it webinars? No, it's not webinars because there's no way. Pardon me, maybe it's only like a webinar but we're not calling it that. But what is, how can we build this community? Is it a mailing list? Do people even do mailing lists anymore? I don't know, but we want to discover that. We want you to interact and tell us like what we can do that would be helpful. Is it local meetups? Can we find enough payment people in local areas to work together and build a community that can drive local meetups? Maybe if we spread the word and find them and we tell them, well actually you're doing payments engineering. You should come hang out with us because you can learn things from us and we can learn things from you. So in summary, just my two conclusions. First of all, this stuff matters and we can have an impact for good and we can have an impact for ill. We need to be mindful of what we're building of the longer term impact of the things that we're doing and thinking about that and thinking about the kinds of impacts that we're having as we're doing payments engineering and it's great to be able to gather and talk about these things. And then secondly, help us build this community. Help us figure out what's next. Help us fill in the details of how this community flashes out over the next year and over the coming years. So now I want to welcome John Duff up onto the stage. He's gonna get set up and speaking of community, one of the, I think the best examples of open source payments technology that we've had to date has been active purchase and that was a huge impact for us at Screeblead. So I'm really psyched to have John come up and talk about the early days of payments at shop.ly.


Okay, this is James P. Madonna of the Facebook group Everything is Food and I'm here at the Royal Hibachi Supreme Buffet and on Route 46 West and south of New Jersey. And I'm about to have what I usually have at the end of my lunch buffet, which is sushi sashimi. Here I have tuna, as you can see, with salmon sashimi. And I picked two nice sized unagi sashimis. Unagi is roasted eel. You really can't eat raw eel because eel lives in fresh to brackish water which has a higher bacterial content in that water. So it has to be cooked, but it's very good just the same. I'm going to show you what I do, which might be different than what others do, but what I do is more practical. Alright, here's some two very nice chopsticks which I will be taking home. Very a multi-purpose item. Okay, I will take the wasabi, the horseradish, right? And I will place it in the soy sauce. Alright, you got that, your broonies? Alright, then I will stir it up. For dipping or sometimes I'll just pour this mixture over the sushi. Alright, I'm trying not to spill anything because as you can see I keep a very clean table for the staff here. Got my lemonade going. I put half a dozen lemon wedges squeezed in there. Okay, I like to say greetings to my dear Natalia. Okay, speaking of lemonade, I know she loves freshly made lemonade. Alright, so anyway, back to the... So you stir it up until it's well mixed. I know I'm going, oh, I spilled it, I have to clean that up. I am a very meticulous, meticulously neat and clean person. And I will... No, a little comedy here for the video, right? Little comedy, but I will clean that up. Anyway, you get the gist. And then what I'll do is... The problem is I put too much wasabi in the soy sauce. Alright, that's the problem. But nevertheless, I will... Well, I could dip it. But if I dip it, it will make everything dark. You won't be able to appreciate the colors of the raw salmon. And no, tuna. There's the tuna, of course, and there's the salmon. And that's the unagi to roast the eel. Okay, so that's about it. I think I'm going to dip it this time as opposed to pouring it on everything and ruining the beauty of the dish.


It was a good turn, still go down the left, it's a nice setback. Steven is able to prevent even a corner. Shot from Sutton, he's well blocked. Steven is able to get it down. Sutton runs for the visitors, out-swing it, plenty forward from the back. End of this, the man with the header couldn't keep it down. Off to this first half, can he find the cross? He can! And it stays 0-0, low from Sutton, the likes of Cook lurking. Want a chance for Songa, header just couldn't be wanting one, but able to somehow maintain possession. Now he's Hendrik once again, at the city back.


by the committee's place and stuff. Very good to hear from the research office.  Because that was a book that asked me about it. So it's a book that I like to have a book on. So it's just a book that you're interested in. So I'm going to read it out. That's great. That's great. I'm going to show you guys what it is. It's how it is for me. It's how it is for you guys to be interested in the book. It is not real. And you've got some teachers that have done a lot of research in that kind of business and see the great scientists. And see that right now, there's a plenty of cameras. Right now, I can see some of the footage of the book that says on the block, what is it for me? There's a lot of numbers. And you have those videos.  That's great. All right. So I'm going to show you guys what it's like in California. I'm going to show you guys the book. It's a great book. So here's what it's about. It's a book that I'm going to show you guys. And we're going to use what the screen here is saying. This is a front page that shows what the screen needs to show. If any of you guys want to see what it says on the book, some of the things that we've got there, a new book that's going to be coming out. And I'm going to start with you guys and show you guys what the screen here is. We're moving to the third one. So this video is about power and development. I'm going to show you guys something. So I'm going to use the update and the student reference system. The productivity thing that I can is what I'm going to call it. So I'm going to show you guys what it's like in the screen here. So you can see that it's going to show up behind you. So that's what you're going to call it. And we're going to move to your browser right now. And it's so cool about you, so, to go ahead and show it to your competition. You need to get past it. I'm going to show you that. The good point about how it works is we need to develop it for yourself. You can be on top of things. You can be on the stage of this. You can be on the stage of how to use the video. I don't know if I'm right, but maybe the things that I'm going to show you is computer, computer, music. And you can use music on it. And you're going to be on top of it. We're not all using music. We're just talking about how to use it. And so this is how I want to use it for myself and for you. You can start the application on that box. But you can also see how it's going to be already quite effective. And that's what you're going to start with. So the people who just see how I'm going to use it are going to be able to get past it. They're not going to be able to get past it. So we're going to be able to see how I'm going to continue with my integrals. All of the integrals that I'm going to create are going to be able to start progress. So we're going to talk about how you can use it and how you can start making progress. And if you want to use it, we're going to be able to get back to you and see how you can use it. This is a great tool to use. So while we have our own social systems, like UCI, the Project Grand Prix, we have our own teams and our own companies, we're going to be able to provide a piece of presentation that I'm promising that will help us on our own. These are all kind of different things, especially on how to use it. And we're going to be able to use it in a way that people can use. So we're going to go through a lot of different ways in totality. And so we're going to start with our project. First, we're going to be able to see how we're going to do our project. So we're going to provide a piece of presentation that will help us try it. So maybe, maybe from your perspective, it's a little bit of a challenge to what people are going to be able to do in terms of our projects, again, this year. We're going to be able to start the project. And so what we're going to do is we're going to be able to create what's going to be our project. Great kind of sound, because often I say example chains would work. Stations do. It's very interesting because we're going to work something out until Tuesday and maybe on Wednesday. It's all data. So it's a fire, it's a new demand we're concentrating on. And we also see how to sell the project manager as the presentations. And then the third point that we might do that needs to be done that their public page will be succumbing because people are flexible The building is the same as the other building. First, I recommend that you go and have a view of the second building to the first building. Everybody has a different concept. You might have better. The concept is just like me. It's easier to go to the third building.