Today's video is brought to you by Pickmonic. Going through USMLE step one questions can be very overwhelming and stressful, but today we're going to talk about a three step process that you can use to effectively answer your questions with confidence. And make sure you stay tuned to the very end of the episode because we'll be talking about some advanced tips that you can use to effectively get through a block, even if you're struggling to make sure you get the highest score on step one and pass with confidence. Let's get into it. So to illustrate the three step process, I'm just going to go ahead and do a sample block of step one questions. Now this is the free NBME 120. If you just Google it, you can essentially come up with 120 questions that NBMEs will give you for free. If you just want to test yourself towards the end, but here is the very simple three step process to get through any step on question and typically a student will read this and they'll go ahead and start highlighting and eventually they'll get to the question. They'll look at the answer choices and they become overwhelmed because they're like not really confident after reading that. They'll go through all of this again and it wastes time and causes anxiety. So on the flip side, what I recommend doing is taking a three step process where number one is you look at the question number two, you look at your answer choices and then number three, you finally go back to the stem. So let me show you an example of what this would look like for this particular question. So step one, we have to look at the questions. So this one saying examination of the kidney on autopsy will look and show which the following. So perfect. I already know I'm thinking about what condition does this patient have and what would it look like if I'd actually look to their kidneys.  And after going through these answer choices and having some foundation in renal pathology, you can say, okay, perfect. Let me see what type of conditions may be associated with granulation or acute inflammation or our normal kidney. So now we get into step three and look for specific pieces of evidence that may answer each individual answer choice. Now, usually a typical student would still start at the first line. And one advanced thing I like to do is to read the line before the question. So this was our question. I would usually read this. So it says four weeks ago is oligarous responded, resolved, and his creatinine return to normal. My head, I already know that this patient has a condition that improved and now I'm going to essentially be asking what kind of conditions look like that. So we have a 40 year old gentleman who looks like he had a cardiac arrest and he had oligarous renal failure. Five weeks ago, his creatinine was really high, but now we know it's improved. Oh, and look, they give you a urine study of granular cast. I already know based off the answer choices that this person likely had an ATN from having a cardiac arrest and because I read the last line that everything looks normal, I expect them to have a normal kidney and sure enough, that's the answer. Now I'll show you a few more examples just so you can start to appreciate the speed and efficiency that this occurs, but I do want to share why this is so effective. If you think about the person who's making the test, they want to come up with an answer, but they also want to give you a bunch of little traps within the question stem to trick you. And this is often why we end up with 50 50 questions and never feel confident on step one exams. But now when we flip our approach using this three set process where number one, we go to the question number two, actually look at the answer choices. And finally, number three, we go to the question stem and look for the evidence. You're starting to think more like the test maker and less like the test taker. And this will be less likely to fall into those traps they created for you. So let's go ahead and do another example. So here instead of reading, I'm just going to go jump right into the question. We're asking about most likely diagnosis and I already start to see just from my peripherals, this is going to be a pulmonary related question. Cause I see like FEV1 and FPC ratios. My choices are asthma bronchiectasis, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis. In my mind, I'm already thinking about what do I know about each of those? You may not even know or remember details about each individual diagnosis, but the ones that we know, we're going to try to see if we can answer it. Now again, using your three step strategy, we already know what we're going to be asked to look for. We know what our answer choices are, but before we actually jump into the stem, usually again, I like to read the last line or two. So in this one, they say that this person has a decreased FEV1, FEVC ratio, increased residual volume, decreased diffusion capacity, and they have hyperinflation, hypertranslucency of their lower lobes of both lungs. Just with that alone, I already know that this patient has a decreased FEV1, FEVC ratio. So in my mind, if I have to go pulmonary foundation, I know this person has obstructive lung disease. So either they have something like asthma, emphysema, COPD. So I can already take out the other answer choices that won't necessarily fit. So I can take out this one, this one. And again, I haven't read anything about who this patient is. Now I see a 39 year old, six month history of shortness of breath has a smoking history. Look at that for 16 years. I'm already going to go ahead and say that this is emphysema without reading all of these things. Just by going through those details, I already have enough evidence that this person likely has emphysema or COPD much more likely than they have asthma. If I answer it, cool. As you guys can see, I'm talking this out loud. So it's actually taking me longer than it would be. I was just thinking about this. But again, using the question to guide what I'm going to be looking for the answers, using the answer choices to then guide what evidence I'll be looking for. And once I have enough evidence, I'm going to go and answer. Now, if you're using the traditional model where you're going through the question stem and then trying your best to answer, but typically we'll have to go back to the question stem to figure out what evidence actually points to your answers. Transitioning to this quicker model where you're going to the question, and then they answer choices and then back to the stem is going to require a little bit of transition. Some students may even find that as you're making this transition, you may actually be making more mistakes because in the process of going fast, maybe you missed a piece of the clue in the question stem that you just didn't actually look out for. And so for those students who provide feedback that this approach is too vast or making too many mistakes, usually my response is perfect. Make the mistakes now as you're going through UL as you're going through NBME practice exams and understand, okay, cool. There is a piece of evidence that I didn't account for that I should look for the next time I see a patient with asthma or emphysema. But it is okay to miss a question on your practice tests, on your practice blocks of your world and make those mistakes and try to be efficient. And then as you do more and more questions, you already know what piece of evidence to look for. So let's go ahead and do this question. I am going to read the last thing. So it's most likely diagnosis and I'll probably read the lines before this. But let's see, this looks like a site questions. So I'm dealing with a bunch of answer choices that are frankly are very similar to me when I was a med student and I didn't really know how to answer these. But let's go ahead and read the last two lines. So this patient says that they only use natural substances. They don't let them essentially get a drug test. I don't have time to wait. So this is going to be a question stem where the last two sentences don't give me the answer right away, but that's okay. Because now what I'm going to do is just the typical. We have a 33 year old lady. She's stalking the president for two months. Cool. And she claims that she's married to his twin brother and then just had his twin kidnapped to avoid competition. So it sounds like a lot of delusion going on. She speaks rapidly. Okay, that's interesting. Difficult to interpret. Associates are loose and she hasn't slept in days. Now that's changing what evidence I'm looking for. Originally I was looking at delusional disorder, but I'm already starting to find features that this patient may have by fuller and be in a manic state. And she says, God has been instructing me to take over the White House. I can't wait to be reunited with my husband. I hear this voice. Tell me what to do. Okay, perfect. This is frankly actually a pretty difficult stem and I think it would have been more difficult if I'd gone from the top to the bottom and then looked at the answer choices because all of them could be right. For going backwards, I already start to see features a more likely a manic death episode with psychosis than somebody who just has schizophrenia. So I think this is not it. I don't think this patient has a general medical disorder that points to psychosis and I don't think that is just delusion. I think this person is talking about hasn't left in days and this brief psychotic disorder again wouldn't be the best answer choice. I'm going to say this patient is in a manic with psychosis. Let's see. Beautiful. Okay. So again, working backwards to find the clues and yes, because the test taker is designed to create traps you will find clues that point to multiple answer choices but because we're working backwards we're saying that there are more answer choices for one of them than the others and that's how we tend to get more questions right this way. I'll do one more before we get into advanced tips. So for example here is which is the following nutrition deficiency is most likely. I can already see peripherally that I'm going to be looking at magnesium vitamin A, B, C, zinc and then I'm going to read my last line as well. They say his stools have a large volume and float. Now, knowing this again, having a foundation in GI I know that if you're going to describe stool that floats you're likely dealing with a fatty content. So in this setting I'm already thinking about vitamins and nutrition that are fat soluble and not so much water soluble. So for me, I already remember it's ADEK someone try to see if there's multiple choices and actually just looking at that I already see that the only fat soluble vitamin that I see that could be messing something is just vitamin A B is water soluble so C and so boom and there you go. Again, this is the answer choice and this is a question I can make much more time for difficult questions later in the block because I can easily just use the last two lines literally and there's nothing in the earlier question stem that I necessarily need to answer this question. Sure, if you wanted to remember dry scaly rash but I feel like I have enough inside move forward. So hopefully you guys can start to see how effective and how quick going through the questions the answer choices going through those last two lines and then looking for evidence your stem really speeds up your process especially if you're doing this in the world trying to make a habit of this makes you again look for those clues. So if you miss a question because you didn't think something was useful actually ended up being the reason that was the answer choice. So in that example that we just had with our bipolar patient you can say I may have missed that they were talking to pass and had all the other features of dig faster that acronym because they do that is the best answer. So next time I answer a site question where bipolar may be an answer choice I'm going to look for those clues and if I don't find it maybe it's not the best answer choice for that question but again I'm looking for pattern recognition most importantly thinking like the test maker and not the test taker. Now before we get back into today's episode let's take a quick second to talk about today's sponsor which is Picmonic. Now if you're unfamiliar with Picmonic and you're on your medical journey they have hundreds and hundreds of videos for literally any class or material that you may need. And what makes Picmonic so unique is that in addition to having so many videos on literally any topic you need so for example here where in microbiology you can click on any video so here's staff warriors and the videos themselves are very short so this video is about one minute 54 seconds but essentially we'll break down the most high yield components that you have to know in this setting about staff warriors in this very nice story format using images so here's a very nice Oreo cookie that essentially will link an image to your brain on important concept about that and the future videos you may find that the same memorable images included in another related video so then you can link together concepts for example here this venom jar with green represents food poisoning so any bacteria that may cause food poisoning may have this image in their overall picture and video so you can say okay I know all different bacterias that have food poisoning and then whenever you feel comfortable with a relatively short story you can easily go into the review and quiz phase and actually quiz yourself on the various different high yield components now in addition to having a very unique and easy way to remember information for your quizzes and tests you can also add all of the videos you're watching into a relative playlist so if you're setting for a microbiology class you can go ahead and essentially click all of the videos you add and add it to those playlist and then whenever it's time you can come back to your individual playlist and either watch those individual videos again or ask for specific quiz questions related to the videos that you've now said that you've mastered or at least learned the first time and that's just scratching the surface in terms of features that Picmonic has to help you on your medical journey other cool things include having a weakness guide so you can see which topics here are the weakest in as well as their study scheduler so you can actually say these are the topics I need to know and here's my test day and then it will essentially will give you a study schedule based off of that so if you're looking for an all-in-one resource your on your medical journey and you haven't quite found it definitely recommend checking out Picmonic if you're interested there'll be a link down below and our friends at Picmonic have also been nice enough to include an extra 20% discount if you use the code the empty journey at checkout and so if you're interested in learning more about Picmonic that link will be down below and as always thanks to Picmonic for being today's sponsor now finally to close off the episode where I feel like the three step process is more than enough to get you better grades sometimes people still struggle with anxiety and just getting through actual test blocks I want to talk about a few things you can do to effectively get through a block particularly on test day so firstly talk about how to effectively mark questions so let's jump back in and go through some of the questions we haven't done now as you're going through your questions you know you're likely obviously going to mark the questions you have no idea about maybe this is a biostat question I just didn't understand what hella was asking me but then you also have some questions where you may have been able to narrow it down to one or two answer choices but you weren't quite confident and you move on but we still have a natural tendency of marking those now where most students go wrong as I'll do all their questions and with whatever time is left then they'll go back chronologically to all more questions the problem with that is that if you had a bunch of questions at the very end where you had no idea what you were doing and then some questions would be more towards the start now you're giving an inappropriate amount of time to those questions where you already feel confident and not giving yourself enough time to answer and earn those points for the questions that were difficult and so usually what I recommend to students is one you have a question so let's say question three in this example is to go ahead and on your scratch piece of paper and you can do this even with your practice you world is to write down the number of the question that is the most difficult so maybe three and then a bunch of questions down here so then my first pass of my flag questions I'm going to go to those difficult questions first to make sure that if I have an epiphany that I can go ahead and earn those points so my first time I'm around I may have not even known what to do with this question but I see that they say the mean is 7500 and approximately 50% will have which of the following well in my head now I may say oh that's easy some means so it should be they're higher above so let me see there's an example where the answer yep answer choice is you know less than this below the mean perfect now I've earned points for a question that didn't make sense and then I'm going to do this with all of the other difficult questions that I have on that piece of paper once I'm done with that with whatever time is left now you can do chronologically the remaining questions that you may have been 5050 on because the nice thing about these is that even if you only have two or three minutes left ideally you've already walked away the answer choices you don't think are appropriate so now you're just thinking about is this Canada is this trick or something else and then you can go back to that three step process to look for evidence that may point to one versus others this person has white discharge so where that's why Canada was I'm more likely option next up to talk about the benefit of getting into an earning point mindset I know particularly when I was taking step one after four blocks I felt like I was doing terrible I literally look myself in the mirror in the bathroom I was there and said like you got this like you really just need to go one question at a time because all of them are going to be hard from this point you're tired you're overwhelmed and so really one of the best things that I did for myself at that point and I recommend this to you is as you're doing a question if you really know the answer let's say this question I had no idea to answer it but this one like we answered already I felt pretty confident when you have questions that you feel confident of the answer even if you end up being wrong use that as like perfect got a point there and then as we came here and we answer this question later well beautiful got another point now you're in a momentum state versus you may come to a question like this and saying or you know one of these and saying I have no idea how to answer this I don't even know what the hell they're asking me most students will get caught up on not knowing how to answer this question and less so focused on the questions where they have earned points it seems like a small difference but the student who focuses on the questions they don't know may come to a question like this and not know the answer which is fine I may not either but then may come to an easier question like this and still get it wrong because they're separating on how difficult the last few questions were this is particularly important especially if a block just gets stacked with questions the first 10 15 they're just hard for you maybe the last 25 ended up being stuff that you could do but if you get focused too much on the first 10 15 or difficult you won't be able to answer the questions later on they're really meant for you so make sure you look at every pitch some of the pitches are going to be difficult and you're just try your best to swing at them but somewhere are going to be just be easy and you can knock them out of the park you have to be focused on still hitting them and the last thing we're going to talk about is just efficiency now ideally using the three step method you're already answering questions quickly comparatively to what you were before obviously if you're using you will you'll be able to see how long it took you to answer an average question and then use that as your average so if it takes you about two minutes to answer a question to improve your efficiency and to prove more time where you can actually do all the questions but also come back one thing I recommend is to cut down your time average time per question by 25% so if you took you two minutes saying perfect I'm going to try to do every question within a minute 30 a minute 40 maybe have a timer on your phone going as you're doing your practice of your worlds and your practice of your MBAs because now that extra time will be added to the reviews you'll be doing for your flag questions ideally using the three step method you may be able to come to a question like this and saying cool that only took me for another hard question this is the efficiency tool that's made all of my setting for all my board exams step one step two step three so much more effective and I rarely have come to an end of a block where I don't have any time left again using that three step process really helps with this but having a mental timer and if you need using your phone as a visual timer will force you to move along and not start getting perseverated on small details if you found this episode helpful and you're interested in more definitely check out the step on Academy to get a step by step blueprint on how to get the highest step one score and pass with confidence but if you did on how to create a step one schedule step by step as well as this episode right here on everything that I used to do in medical school to get a 3.9 tp a as always my friends hope you guys enjoy today's episode thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully I was a little help to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one peace


Thank you everybody for being here. I know it's a really difficult time in your industry and I know everybody's affected in various ways and also similar ways at the same time. So it's a really difficult, strange, confusing time, but I really admire all of you. I admire the drive and the determination to have a float center. I really value stillness. I value the ability to meditate and take time, mental health and in fact, I think it's probably one of the most important things in the whole world right now. And I feel like this group is a group that really understands that and there's something that led each of you here and my guess is it may have not always been the desire to make the most amount of money for yourself or to be selfish in any way or maybe it's to try to a better life that's more meaningful to what you care about. So I really salute you and I appreciate you being here. I was thinking about you all this morning and what I wanted to share and if you've heard of me it's probably because you heard how in 2015 I took a million dollar pay cut so that all of my employees could make a minimum of $70,000 per year and I thought about how that message might seem a bit far-fetched for many of you depending on what your location is and depending on your business structure and like, yeah, sure, sounds good. How do I do it? But I know that that's not necessarily the reality that everybody can afford to do that. So I just want to say up front that I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you anyway. And I also want to admit to you up front that my first employee at Gravity, first long-term employee who's still there to this day and really an amazing person to work with, made $24,000 a year, $12 an hour to start. That's it with virtually no benefits. And so, granted, I was maybe 20 years old at the time or 19 years old, something like that, but I'm not here to point the finger at anybody or say that you're like a bad person or not doing it right. I am here to encourage you that the more that you can grow the success of the people on your team, the more that you can be successful as a company. And I have basically a quick story to tell you, but before just to kind of not leave you on the cliffhanger, after I implemented the $70,000 minimum wage, I got lauded and ridiculed, Rush Limbaugh said that I would be a case study and MBA programs about how socialism doesn't work. It infects the company because we're going to fail. The New York Times wrote a very long and critical article about gravity payments, about the $70,000 minimum wage, and talked about how much discord it was causing.  So it felt like the deck was stacked against us, and we even started to have customers who canceled with gravity because they were worried that they didn't want to be on a sinking ship on the way down. But we stuck it out, and five and a half years later, I'm here to tell you that it's been a huge success. Our pay scale before went from 30,000 at the bottom to a little over a million at the top, and now our pay scale goes from about $70,000 to about $300,000. So we compressed our pay scale, and giving more money to the people at the bottom of the pay hierarchy has proved to be incredibly successful for us. And I'll give you some proof of that, which is we went from having zero to two babies born per year at the organization to in those five and a half years. We've had 55 babies born or announced. So about 10 per year, you know, 10 times the amount. We also saw a first time home ownership skyrocket, which is wonderful experience. We had 70 percent of the company report that they paid down debt because a lot of people critiqued us that with a higher income meant people would spend and get into more debt and it would be a net negative. But actually the stats are the opposite of that. And 30 percent of people have either gotten completely debt free or mostly debt free and maybe best of all in a tough place like Seattle, where it's very hard to make ends meet. We saw people between double and triple their savings for retirement. So that those are all really great proof points and oh, by the way, we also tripled in terms of how much processing volume we process to now where we're processing about a million dollars or excuse me, a billion with to be a billion dollars per month in payment value. But the story I wanted to tell you was a very recent time back in March when I thought all this was coming crashing down and Rush Limbaugh and the others would be right about what they were saying about us because when the pandemic hit, we thought, oh, we're so diversified across geography, across industry, but where we weren't diversified is we serve small businesses.  We saw an average of 55 percent drop in payment card volume. And that's a direct tie to our revenue. So we lost 55 percent of our revenue. We went from kind of eking out a profit that felt, you know, a little bit scary, but a little bit safe, kind of writing that line of like, should we charge less but be a little bit more dangerous or should we, you know, keep what we're charging steady and things like raises and all those is a big negotiation of like, how do we divide up this pie internally? We did it openly with 200 people. But we said if there's a recession, the worst recession, the once in a lifetime recession would be 20 percent because that's what we experienced in 2008.  So we plan for it and we all set as a team. If this happens, we're going to rally around to each other. We're not going to do any layoffs. We're not going to do any price increases. We're not going to do anything that can have any adverse effect on the small businesses we serve. We know our competitors will do all those things. And we want to provide safety and a stress free environment in a crisis for small business owners where they don't have to worry if they're being ripped off, they don't have to worry if their credit card processor will be there for us, and that will be our function in a recession. We'll be able to do more good in a recession because we'll be more needed than we are in good times. So we thought we have the perfect plan and we lost 55 percent. And I went to my team and I was honest with them. I told them that I didn't know if we were going to make it. And I called some of my closest friends and family and I shared with them that I thought there was a good chance that I would be looking for a job soon. But there was an easy way out because one of my competitor CEOs pointed out to me. That if we just implemented a hundred dollar fee per merchant location of our customers with our 20,000 small businesses, we would go from losing one point five million dollars a month and being on our heel to making half million because that would raise two million dollars in monthly revenue and we could use that extra half million to hire and build products and tools that would replace the customers that would leave us by the time they left us reacting to that. And also it was pointed out that we could manage to do that and still be under the average of what our competitors charge. So according to quote unquote market rates, we wouldn't be overcharging even if we added this hundred dollar fee to your business and every other business out there like that and that just seemed antithetical to everything we're supposed to do, put this stress and really this insult to this already injury that's happening to all these small businesses.  I was playing in a rock band at her coffee shop and she hated it. And I was so angry about it. That's why I started the company to prevent that from happening. So it's like that would be the death of the company. And then the idea of laying off an employee, you know, maybe there is employee sometimes, you know, that that needs to move on for whatever reason, but in a pandemic when the unemployment offices are flooded and if you just get a little unlucky and there's some exception on your unemployment account, I have a friend that it took her six weeks of a full time job getting through to unemployment because her automatic application got rejected for something that had nothing to do with her ability to be fastidious and make sure to be accurate and do everything on time. But of course, there's exceptions where they have to have a human look at it. She got put in that line and I just felt like the people that had built this company that were waking up every day, taking your phone call, giving you that application to help people schedule their appointment, to help people social distance, you know, supporting a great company that we admire a lot, Float Helm and others that are building technology that allow you to have a seamless appointment and interaction with your customer and support your employees, what they're doing, you know, that's what we're all about and adding a hundred dollar fee or laying off and leaving an employee behind that had built that and had made that possible just seemed like a level of disloyalty that would kill the dream of the company forever. So that was the predicament I was in, but I didn't know how the employees felt about it and I didn't know how our customers would feel about it. So I was just honest and I went to the employees and I said, what do you think about this? What should we do? You know, should we do a layoff? Should we do a price increase? Like I really I don't think I could look myself in the mirror if we do one of those things, but what do you think? And the employees came up with this idea that blew me away. They said that why don't we have an anonymous program where people can volunteer pay cuts and other forms of volunteerism of building social distancing apps, connecting with companies like Float Helm that help with social distancing in a way or have technology that can be used to help with those things and and let's just, you know, slog through it and just stay together. And if we go down, we'll all go down together or if we make it through it, we'll all make it through it together. And it was like a it was like a spiritual level of anxiety and stress that I felt. And and like many people at Gravity, I was spending, you know, 14, 16, sometimes even 18 hours per day triaging emergencies and opportunities and people that needed help, customers that needed help. And so it seemed like just a really wonderful thing to try. I just I was so inspired by our team. But I was talking with my with with our chief operating officer, Tammy Kroll, who really was most responsible for for the senior leadership of the company day to day. And I was like, Tammy, I don't think this is going to work, because if it's voluntary, everybody's going to do like one percent and think somebody else can do more. But the opposite happened. A lot of people volunteered to go completely without pay for basically one defined amount of time or to cut their pay by 50 percent. We capped it, you know, at the highest paid people, we said 50 percent the highest and the lower paid people, we said 30 percent the highest. So we tried to do things, but the team ended up raising, you know, enough monthly resources of people volunteering their pay to eke out a break even during the worst months of the pandemic, which which blew me away. But what was even cooler was to see how inspired and wonderful. I mean, I just heard a story yesterday about two employees when there's contact tracing going to be required of restaurants, two employees just took the initiative to build a contact tracing app that we would just give for free to anybody, any small business that needed it, whether they're a customer or not, without any strings attached. We went out identifying all sorts of solutions. We have a partner that's like float helm for the coffee shops. It's called Joe coffee. And it basically gives Starbucks quality order ahead technology and now later point of sale technology to mom and pop coffee shops. And so coffee shops that use that didn't experience a decline in their revenue and ones that didn't use it, experienced a 70 percent decline. So, you know, there were some industries like yours that were the most hard hit, where it's very little that anybody can do, but still do everything you can because every penny that we can try to help our customers with is a penny that they can use to try to make it through this and make it to the other side. So it was just amazing to be a part of. And one of the craziest stories was there's a guy named Austin Kameen at Gravity and he decided to keep this restaurant in Ballard, Seattle, Washington, neighborhood of Ballard open by being their Uber delivery driver unpaid for five or six weekends and delivering food to their loyal customers that would keep them open and also help them out with marketing and getting the word out in an amazing way. And then he built all this documentation for restaurants that want to do kind of their own service and opt out of the duopoly of Uber and Grubhub and those that are so taxing on small businesses. So, you know, we we've been able to claw through and it's because of our employees. And a lot of people will say, well, it's your leadership or your motivation. And if you ask my employees, they will tell you for sure that's not true. It's not that I think that people out there, there's a lot of really good people out there. And I think that we as leaders sometimes, and I'm pointing the finger at myself more than anybody else, we demotivate our teams when we try to control them. We demotivate our teams when we try to over monitor them. We demotivate our teams when we are trying to do our best to lead them and do what we think is necessary. And a lot of people out there, I would say the majority, they don't lack for motivation, especially for something as important as the type of self help, self caring that you all provide. I think you're going to attract people that are very motivated to be a part of that. But I think what we need to do is invest not so much in motivation for employees, but invest in their capability and their license. Give them a platform to stand on and then see how they shine. And so, you know, this crisis was the second time in my life that something hit me that I thought I couldn't imagine because in 2008 it was like that's going to be the worst ever. And I was not prepared, but we made it through in a similar fashion. Then I said, never again, I'm going to be prepared for another 2008 anytime. And 2020 was almost three times as bad for us. And our teams just pulling together and we're getting through it every day. So, you know, I could keep talking forever, but I want to open it up to questions. I want to open it up to you all and hear where you want to take the conversation. But thank you so much for having me. And for those of you that use gravity payments, thank you so much for, you know, being the reason that I go to work every day and the people that I love working next to go to work every day.


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All right, so This is a user story your data center will implode in 30 days It is based on a true story, but the names and data center locations are have been changed to protect you So We are Stark and Wayne. We are a founding silver member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation You know, we've been going to these summits for a very long time. I think since the inception I've we've been everyone. We've been every one of them So we're here to help we're as I like to say we're the leading Cloud Foundry and cloud native technology consultancy and Myself I'm Brian Segwin. I'm the COO of Stark and Wayne and with me is Bill Chapman. He's our VP of engineering so We wanted to have some fun with this because it's kind of a fun story and fun So what we what we're doing here is we actually have an act or we've kind of orchestrated a play here for for this and So I will be playing the you know the VP in charge of the cloud platform for the for this custom for this company And this is a platform of a multi-billion dollar company that has 300 business critical applications on it with 2,000 AIs and a whole bunch of data services things like that So I had thought as this VP in charge of this platform that my director of engineering was Taking care of the migration efforts because we knew this was a long time coming. We had our data center. The contract was coming to a close So I thought everything was being handled and I approached him one day it were we're just a little bit about 30 just a little more than 30 days out from This this data center migration that we would have and I talked to him. I said all right. So what's the plans? What's the progress? You know, I have a report and He says to me, you know, I don't have anything and by the way, here's my notice. Okay, so So at this point I'm sitting here thinking all right, well My my my director of engineering is left. I really only have a few options. I could quit I Could beg for an extension from our data center people but apparently they had already sold this space And they're forcing the contract out. Okay Or I could find someone dumb enough who thinks they can actually do this all in 30 days So I hire a new director of engineering So please welcome Bill Chapman who is our new director of engineering that says he thinks he can do this We find our fearful C-level executive pacing in their office. They've just got the bad news Bill What are our options here? Well, I think our primary Focus should be standing up a new platform in the new data center and We will have the application developers Each have a maintenance window where they will deploy their applications in the new We have 300 applications here and there's 300 applications teams and about like Three times the size of that in people Do you think you can orchestrate all of those teams to get in sync and do all of this and in this small of a window? Maybe we should go to the whiteboard So what you're saying is we've got our cloud foundry and it's flat Individual platforms. We've got our data services We've got 300 applications 2,000 application instances One thing we haven't mentioned we've got six brokered service teams. So that means Those are all a separate issue. Those need to be migrated as well And we have various user-defined services that we don't have here It might make more sense to deal with the six brokered Services teams and then treat the platform as a data service as itself on itself Migrate it the same way Let me Well, let's I mean, I like the idea that six teams versus 300. I mean, that's a lot easier, you know I mean, so how would you do the migration? Like how would this work? Like let me talk to the team about that. We have some options Okay They've all slept on it calls have been made teams have been alerted. No one is happy No one is happy But plans are in action. Hey boss. Good news. I think we have a plan that we can work with Okay, so we've got a staging platform. We've got a pre-production platform. We've got a production platform We've got a data services tenant in Poughkeepsie We need to migrate all of the databases We need to migrate all of the blobs these blob stores could be large We don't know how fast the pipe is going to be between the data centers You know the second data center is in Anchorage, Alaska. Okay, so We may need to fly it there That is a possibility well fly it there I mean, I guess I could talk to the CEO about a corporate jet, but I don't think he's gonna be I mean There's a lot of risk associated to that. It's it's not likely. We need to do some investigation I think the pipe will be fine. We should be able to sink everything over. I'm just keeping you aware. Okay, so So with this plan, I mean Is there gonna be any like freezes to development like what's our what's our? you know What's our downtime gonna look like? well Most of the risk is gonna fall in the service bound teams. So our our database backed services our my SQL team our Rabbit MQ team those teams are gonna need to migrate their data services individually Those are gonna have to be coordinated with all six of those teams the platform itself We won't have to worry too much about freezing development, but we will have to freeze deployment So the developers will not be able to deploy to the platform While it's inactive migration the data service teams on the other hand, that's a different story the data service teams may have to Have extended periods where there may be outages that affect some of the applications We're hoping to mitigate that what might be ID what might work best as if we deploy those data services to a separate Location proxy to that location the new the apps won't know the difference There will just be a small cut over, but we're not sure yet. We're still in day one here Well, so what's our data loss risk here data loss risk is minimal if you remember Data migration is really just disaster recovery that you get to plan So what what happens if it doesn't work? All right, am I asking the CEO for the corporate jatter? Are we playing ice road truckers and trying to drive us to Alaska? Well? Once the new platform is deployed we can always fall back to what I said on day one The application developers can just individually repush their applications and it will converge on the new state Okay So, I mean how many people do we do you actually need to get this done? I Would say we need at least one member of each data service team That knows that data service and they can plan out their migrations individually Since I run the platform team, I will focus on that and I think I'm going to need two engineers 30 days is going to be cutting it kind of close, but they're going to need to be focused on the price Yeah, I mean how much time is that is this data going to take to sync like Do we even have enough time to sync the data with our 30-day window? If we use the jet But seriously no, I think we the blob store is our biggest concern those are those are the bits of Source code and stuff that's compiled and sitting up there. Those can be very large The last time I had to sync when it took about 10 hours But we'll sync it ahead of time So by the time we get to the actual migration date, we're only syncing the Difference so you're going to have whatever has changed since the last time if we sync it daily It's only going to be 25 hours worth of change Couple that with the deployment freeze so that the developers can't actually push anything different in that last 24 hours Might have nothing there might be no difference So we'll already know the platform is ready when we actually do the final switch over It's been a rough two weeks some things went well some things went very poorly Jane the platform team lead came in Friday and said don't forget. I'm on vacation next week so we've Managed to migrate staging and the data services that are needed for the applications in stated staging were handled by the individual application or a data service teams pre-prod and production are still not provisioned But we have automation to run once those are available Well, so I spoke to Tom Why did it take you guys a week to get? All the networking stuff that you needed for the environment turns out the networking team was complaining that there isn't enough IP space Available for what we're asking for the new platform and remember that since we're doing a Direct migration of the platform. We have to have the same IP space available in the new data center So this is a common problem. We have with with networking issues with we want too many IP addresses It's a large platform. All right. I mean what other blockers do we need to worry about? At this point since we've done the migration to staging we've proven out the idea We have gotten that test in place The plan seems to work as expected, but we're really pushing it for time Also, two of the data service teams were not yet able to migrate Okay, so it took you two weeks to get what I'm looking at is one environment So like by math I'm sitting here thinking alright It's going to take us two weeks for the next pertinent the next two environments So that's four weeks out. We only have two weeks left. I mean well, I understand But the results in staging have been encouraging and the reason it took so long is because we did a large upfront proof of concept We have the I thought you said this was gonna work. Why do you need to do a proof of concept if you've done this before I? Might not have done this before But I promise you it works now Also by the way The stark and Wayne team has a really cool product called shield that helped us out a lot along the way anyways The migration is complete things have gone pretty well some developers are grumpy, but developers are always grumpy The team is reflecting on the month so although This was successful and I still yet to see seem ungrateful to our director of engineering who has actually pulled this off So bill can you actually confirm that we did not lose any data? Well, the data services teams have informed me that their migrations were successful. I'm going to trust them Honestly it really is just a expansion of the application migration paradigm When you when you push an application you are going to move the data move the application cut over DNS This is the exact same thing. We've just done it for 300 applications I'm fairly confident that it went pretty well. I have talked to the leads of every data service team They have confirmed that each data services intact and running is expect expected and we Did have some grumpy-ness from some of the developers when they couldn't deploy But they were all happy to find that their data was where it needed to be when they Were able to get back to work So when you know when we kind of spoke a couple weeks ago You said we might actually have like minutes of actual application downtime and only like a 10-hour window of Development downtime where they couldn't push our applications What was the downtime we actually incurred so? We had a 24 hour deployment freeze for our application developers So we had 300 developers who were not able to do you know their weekly deployments, but Some of the mis-deadlines we didn't do a very good job communicating that to them But with respect to actual downtime It was measured in minutes. Oh The data services were migrated ahead of time things were proxied accordingly when the platform came up it converged on the proper state and There were only about five applications that weren't running as expected One of them is still being troubleshot. It turns out it wasn't running as expected before the migration So you're the scapegoat. Yes, okay So, you know In all honesty, I'm looking at the the projects of the team still working at it I still see that there's migration efforts going on and you know Everything's been up and running for a few days now. So why are people still working on this? There's still a lot of questions about the migration there are still developers who had problems before the migrations that weren't noticed They followed us to the other platform when we did our due diligence up front We knew what state every application was in but it turned out some of the developers didn't know what state their own applications were in So we're still fighting through that. You've told me our mission statement is to be helpful So that's what we're doing. Okay. So how much longer will they need to be on this project? It's mostly done. We're gonna need somebody Partially engaged for both PR for the platform team so that they understand what happened and why this was a tremendous Effort and success on our end, but we're also going to want to help developers so that they understand That there really aren't any differences in the new platform Most of them should have been unaware if it wasn't for the 24-hour freeze on deploying Most of the developers would have been unaware that we moved the platform 6,000 miles away Awesome well, I mean Good job and thank you for your efforts and as a token of our appreciation, please accept this pen This is my pen Thank you Are there any questions So, you know, this is actually You know, we kind of took some liberty of What actually happened from the from the comedic standpoint, but This is actually what happened for a migration effort that Stark away and was involved with not last year and It was it was crazy, you know, they we have a customer that comes to us and they you know, they say well We only have 30 days or otherwise, you know our this data center is going to delete all our data and We said well, can't you talk to the data center people and can't you do this? Can't you do that? And I said well, we had all these conversations and the answer is no Do you do you think we can do it and and the funny thing is is they were going off of You know a timeline and quotes that we had given them like Three to six months previous so immediately they come knock on our door and they say hey, we have this emergency Can you still commit to the the timeline that you said was a best-case scenario and we kind of said? Yes, and no and we actually had a lot of really Big discussions on it and and we did do some proof of concepts before saying yes and the other fascinating part about it was Something that was kind of implicit in this but it was I mean There's a couple ways you can do this migration is a lot of ways But the easiest way is to just deploy a new platform and to get all of your developers on the same page and allow Them to see if push on the other side. They're literally were 300 development teams that Nobody had control over So at the end of the day, they wanted to leave them out of the situation. So what we had to do is deploy the Platform move all of the data and the blobs and the and the bits that matter over to the new platform And then just hope everything converged on the same exact state that it was in in the other data center There is a technical talk on this concept or on this coming today at five o'clock 515 and the actual engineers who did the migration will be giving you the detail about it, but We just wanted to kind of talk through Kind of the high level here. Yes, I believe that if we thought we could have coordinated That many different teams and given them a minimal downtime window because that was the real problem the problem was lights out in this I mean We didn't have to go lights out here lights on here because what they did is they proxied all the data Services from a third location But it in the beginning we didn't know that we didn't know how that was gonna happen We were a week and a half for two weeks into the process before we knew how they were gonna handle the data services So that was the concern there was that if all the data moves then all 300 teams have to be on board right away And all CF push their apps so they're gonna get downtime until they actually see F push so we figured Moving it and letting it converge on that state and not even really caring if the develop caring is the wrong term But not worrying about whether the development teams knew even because from our perspective We weren't the ones notifying the development teams We're under the impression that a lot of them weren't even told this was happening because once DNS was managed and data was moved They wouldn't know any difference Because all all the endpoints were identical in the new data center Honestly in the beginning we had we had many heated discussions about the best way to do it We've done it before but this that the developers might not know about it was the real Clinsher here because we had to make sure that they didn't experience any significant downtime And even when we got to the other end we were pretty pretty happy that it worked I mean, but now we know it works. It's a viable strategy because we've proven it out, but We had some concerns all the way through the process We all we had access to was the CF endpoint so we could profile the system we could figure out what's there But as I joked in the talk We didn't know if all of those developers even knew what state their apps were supposed to be in in any given Oh, you know any given part or some of those apps didn't even have teams assigned to them They were just there and some some automation somewhere was pushing it Yeah, and what was neat about this is any teams that were modern And being proactive about their development and had pipelines that were working on things all of that automation should have Just worked because all the endpoints stayed the same and all the access was proxied appropriately So it was it was pretty neat to see happen MKB right here is who accomplished this feat and we just scratched on the surface But his effort was Herculean. It was actually impressive very impressive Thank you I do want to say that the the satire about actually flying it there or driving it there was a legitimate conversation that we had Yeah Right and and and we were we need we're like well how big are the blobs and are we gonna have to sneak or net it to you know to the other statement and We couldn't believe we were having that conversation in 2070 we couldn't believe we were having a conversation and it was If we still have some time if we have more questions Thanks, everyone. Thank you


In the time when the Tree of Knowledge was planted, all things were given form. Even the deep waters of the darkness below and the vaults of darkness above took shape and form, and many elder gods were born of them. Of these gods, whose names are often forgotten, there was Charaak. Charaak was not great upon his formation. In truth, he was small. He crawled around in the darkness of the abyss, but, unlike his brothers and sisters, he knew himself and knew the abyss. So, blessed and cursed by awareness, he felt pain and loneliness and looked beyond the depth. But the thought of the light and the shade of the tree pained him more. Existence was pain and he would have no part of it. It would be better to not exist. It would be better for all things not to exist.


Leonardo da Vinci, the true renaissance man. No doubt you'd recognize the Mona Lisa, and you've probably seen a model of one of his countless inventions. These are all the work of Leonardo da Vinci. The celebrated painter and inventor was born in 1452 in Vinci, Italy, and those were only two of his many talents. He was also a sculptor, architect, philosopher, engineer, and scientist. His portrait, the Mona Lisa, is the best-known painting in the world. He painted it between 1503 and 1506, and the identity of the woman behind that mysterious smile is still disputed today. Almost as famous is his mural, The Last Supper, which portrays Jesus with his disciples. Leonardo experimented with a new type of paint for the mural, which is why it's unfortunately very faded. Typical for the renaissance, his subjects were mostly religious. Yet his work demonstrates that his true fascination was with nature, why clouds form, how plants grow, or how the human body is put together. Anatomy is also the focus of the Vitruvian man, a human being standing in the center of a circle and a square. Leonardo's groundbreaking drawing depicts the ideal human body measurements and proportions. Today, the drawing is featured on Italy's 1 euro coin. One of Leonardo's greatest dreams was to fly. By observing the movements of birds, he invented the very first flying machines. A parachute was later assembled by scientists in the year 2000 using his original design, and it worked. The sky wasn't the limit for Leonardo, who was fascinated with water too. He studied the flowing motions of the waves and applied his discoveries to technological innovations, including diving gear, irrigation systems, and the very first water meter. As an engineer, Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time. As early as 500 years ago, he designed the first precursors of the tank and the automobile and even a solar reflector. He spent his final years in France. By his death in 1519, he had developed a legendary reputation as a Uomo Universale, or Jack of all trades. To this very day, Leonardo da Vinci is widely considered to be one of the most extraordinary people of all time.