Good morning. Please join me in a moment of centering silence. And now please remain seated as we join together in our in-gathering hymn, number 360, printed in your order of service. Here in Society of Madison, this is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an environment that is accepting and nurturing. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in this world. My name is Lorna Aronson and on behalf of the congregation I'd like to extend a special welcome to visitors.  New comers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service and to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. Bring your drinks and your questions. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding teal stoneware mugs. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith community who would love to visit with you. Experience guides are generally available to give a building tour after each service. So if you'd like to learn more about this sustainably designed addition or our national landmark meeting house please meet near the large glass windows over here on the left side of the auditorium immediately after the service. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service. However because it's difficult for some in attendance to hear in this lively acoustical environment our child haven and commons are excellent places to retire if a child needs to talk or move around. The service can still be seen and heard from these areas and this would also be a good time to turn off all electronic devices that might cause a disturbance in the service. I'd like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly and I want to add a little editorial comment that we needed to do some last minute recruiting to fill some of these positions. So I encourage you to go on the FUS website under serve click on volunteer and you too could take over some of these duties. So thank you very much to our sound operator Mary Manoring. Our greeter this morning was Karen Hill. Ann Ostrom and Doug Hill are two of our volunteers and Charles Stinger and Pat Stinger stepped in at the last moment to fill two positions. We're also especially looking for volunteers today to provide our hospitality. The staff stepped in this morning to make sure that we would have coffee and tea at the end of the service but again this is a really valuable service that brings us together and we encourage you to volunteer. Hathaway Hasler has offered our pulpit flowers today and John Hill will be our tour guide. Please note the announcements in the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today's activities. I do have one special announcement that I'd like to highlight that's in the order in the red floors. An informational session about Quest, our two year adult spiritual deepening program will be held this month on two dates. The first is this morning between the two services in the landmark auditorium and the second is Saturday February 28 following the worship service after the 430 worship service in the landmark auditorium. For further information contact Janet Swanson. Again welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. This morning we reaffirm our unbreakable ties to our heritage to our environment and to the human community and this morning we recommit ourselves to a vital and healthy planet to a realm of love and justice and opportunity for all and we express gratitude for the many gifts the many advantages that we ourselves have received. We would be reminded of the human spirit's potential to be healed from the error and the grief of the past and of its unfailing ambition to push past the troubles of today toward the brighter promises of tomorrow. I invite you to rise and body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice and if you will join me in reading the words of affirmation printed in this morning's program. We are children of yesterday fully alive today and with hearts and minds trained on the future. As people with a history let us heed the lessons of the past. As people freely joined in community let us rise to meet the challenges of the present. As people of faith let us bring forth visions of a brighter tomorrow. May we commit ourselves as a community to profiting from the past serving the present and protecting the future. Now I invite you on this chilly morning to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm greeting. Try to set aside a few minutes at the beginning of the hour for the sharing of joys and sorrows. Members, friends and even visitors to our congregation to relate to the entire gathered community some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone close to you in recent days or weeks. More general announcements, news items, partisan appeals are discouraged during joys and sorrows. And so for the next few minutes anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium and with the assistance of our lay ministers light a candle and either the candle labra to my left or my right and then using the microphone provided share your name if that feels comfortable as well as your brief message. Please note that our services are live cast to a larger audience so listeners are not restricted to the people sitting in this room. You may also step forward and wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and then simply return to your seat. And now I would open the floor for the sharing of these important and personal matters of our lives and I would begin by noting that yesterday I spent a half hour or so with Shirley Drayton over at the Hebron Nursing Care Center at Oakwood and Shirley had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for the last 10 or 12 years and I learned this morning from her daughter that she had passed away quietly yesterday afternoon shortly after I left. So a candle of sorrow and grieving for Shirley and for her family. And now your joys and sorrows. We're celebrating the birth of our third grandson on Wednesday Lucas Morgan Carlson eight pounds nine ounces big and healthy. So my name is Mike Whistler my wife is Abby and I'm just up here to share a joy kind of making my heart sing this week. My son Connor who is seven years old he is starring or co-starring in his first musical at Minona Grove. He is young will in the musical Big Fish and he's got quite a big part we didn't realize that but he's doing fantastic and it just makes our heart sing. So he's too embarrassed to come up here but I told him I was gonna do this. My name is Michelle Reese and I'm lighting this candle in honor of my uncle who is in hospice with a brain tumor. I'm Elizabeth and I'm lighting a candle of gratitude for this community all the people in it and all the opportunities that are here. I'm Amalia Hicks and I'm also gonna light a candle of gratitude. My dad had a bone marrow transplant last month and he's out of the hospital. He got out two weeks early with flying colors. He's really tired right now but so far everything's going great. Kim Staggy and Kurt and I are going to Vermont for my brother's retirement party and very happy for him after 40 years of case management and social work on Friday. Hi my name is Greg Frankos. I just found out to the joy of my sister my brother-in-law my parents and myself my sister's 35 and I'm going to be an uncle. I'm lighting this candle as a joy my boyfriend had heart surgery about three weeks ago. Had surgery on a Thursday a surgery on a Friday and then went home from the hospital on the Saturday. He's been healing wonderfully. He's back at work and doing really well and I'm really grateful to all the awesome doctors at UW who did such a great job. A candle representing all of those unexpressed joys and sorrows that may have occurred to those of you who are listening as others were speaking we hold those with equal compassion in our hearts. Now our children can leave for their classes as we sing them out with hymn number 322 verses 1 2 and 5. Please be seated. Gary Snyder was a well-known beat poet continues to write poetry from his home in California. He also studied for quite a number of years in Japan in the Zen Buddhist tradition. We are free to find our own way over rocks through the trees where there are no trails. The ridge and the forest present themselves to our eyes and our feet which decide for themselves in their own learned wisdom of doing where the wild will take us. We have been here before. It's more intimate somehow than walking the paths that lay out some route that you must stick to. All paths are possible. Many will work and being blocked is its own kind of pleasure. Getting through is a joy. The side trips and the detours show down the logs and the flowers. The deer paths straight up the squirrel tracks across the outcroppings lead us on over resting on tree trunks stepping out on bedrock angling and eyeing. Both make choices now parting our ways later rejoining. I'm right. You're right. We come out together. Motake pine mushroom heaves at the base of a stump the dense matted floor of red fur needles and twigs. This is wild. We laugh wild for sure because no other place is more than another all places total and our ankles knees shoulders and haunches know right where they are. Recall how the Dowde Ching puts it. The trails not the way. No path will get you there. We're off the trail. You and I and we chose it. Our trips out of doors through the years have been practice for this ramble together deep in the mountains side by side over the rocks and through the trees. The second selection in a somewhat different although related vein from Robert Folgem's the names that remain. Folgem is of course a humorous the author of many books of short essays and a former Unitarian Universalist minister. My task for the next two days organize my address books bring order out of that chaos of names and numbers in reviewing this mess. I am reminded how much of my life is lived relating to this passing procession of people who come and go by happenstance not by design. The neighbors business colleagues fellow travelers members of clubs tradesmen. Some of the names are mysterious. Who is this? Why are they in my book? So many of the names need to be crossed off actors on the stage of one's life who have few lines play a small part go off stage never to return. But I will not throw the used books away a decision inspired by a friend who thinks of his little black books as personal history. He has eight of his from as far back as his college days. Once in a while he says he reads through them. He says that I take up several pages in his book because I'm such a transient. I wonder how many other places my name and number are recorded. And I wonder if there are those who will review their books and files this year find my name and eliminate it as no longer being on the stage of their play. Forget him whoever he was. But I miss some of the individuals listed in my books. And I wonder do they miss me. But thanks to the plus side of life's lottery there are those whose names have been there for years beyond remembering. There are many numbers may change but they remain to play primary roles in my life year after year wherever they are. Not so many names really and less as age and disability and death remove them from the active list. But these are the names that I know by heart whose telephone numbers are stored in the meat of my mind whose images are not digital but mental. And when I triage my little black book and begin a new one I will write their names and their numbers first of all. These are the essential friends the companions of a lifetime. Those I can call in the middle of the night anytime anywhere in sorrow enjoy. We need we know each other so well we don't even need to identify ourselves. We know the sound of the voice on the phone from the first word uttered. The conversation never begins from scratch it's ongoing. And now as time takes its toll these are the voices that will speak over graves in the end. We don't know which voices will give whose eulogy but we know we are keepers of each other's history that we are witnesses to one another's lives. We will be there one way or another. The updating of my little black book goes slowly but I don't mind. I review these names. I connect them to memories. I get lost in nostalgia. The names that remain remind me that I am a very rich and a very lucky man and not nearly as alone as I sometimes fear that I am. Here's from now. Will you still be sending me a valentine? Birthdays, greetings, bottle of wine, meet me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64? We just hear and say. That's significant irony accompanies the song that you just heard when I'm 64. Apparently it was one of the first tunes that the Beatles frontman Paul McCartney ever wrote. He was 16 years old. The group played variations of that song from time to time but it wasn't recorded until many years later, 1967, inspired perhaps by the 64th birthday of Paul McCartney's father. Now as I read it the song conveys sentiments that a spouse, a lover wishes to share with his or her partner. Though still early in the romantic phase of the partnership, the writer wonders whether the bond is strong enough, the commitment staunch enough to keep them together well past middle age. You'll be older too McCartney writes and if you say the word I could stay with you. The tone is both hopeful and tender but unfortunately and here's where the irony kicks in the reality of Paul McCartney's life failed to reflect that song's yearning. Paul's own mother, Mary, had died of breast cancer after only 15 years of marriage to her father, his father.  Paul subsequently married another woman, a divorcee whom he had met shortly before when I'm 64 hit the charts and as it turned out she was the one but his own dream of growing old with the love of his life Linda Eastman that dream was shattered when she like his own mother succumbed to breast cancer just shy of the couple's 30th wedding anniversary. Now Trina and I have been fortunate this month we both reached the 64 milestone having celebrated 47 Valentine's Day together and logged almost 42 years as marriage partners. So during that time we have relocated, moved to new homes on five occasions, we have raised a child to adulthood, we have suffered the loss of both of Trina's parents, we have endured various health crises, coped with professional setbacks, done our level best to manage the sundry stresses and strains of daily living and it has not as I'm sure Trina would affirm it's not always been easy but I think we can both honestly say that life together has never been boring and always deeply rewarding. In traditional Irish lore the Celtic term Anamkara is used to describe a relationship whose bonds are all but indecisible. Anamkara means soul friend which develops when in the words of John Donahue two people have broken through the barriers of persona and egoism and achieved a unity of their two souls that is not easily severed. This isn't something that happens magically or without any real effort on our part perhaps there are people who stumble into one another who are amazed by their natural compatibility feel completely blessed with the by the relationship just as it is but that still doesn't mean that they don't have to work at it it does not mean that they cannot be willing and should not be willing to commit. If we are really serious about a person at some point we we have to stop hedging our bets because many of the commitments that we do make are in fact provisional ones tentative ones we enter into those commitments with a set of personal expectations that must be fulfilled in order for the relationship to continue and if we don't feel satisfied with it if the arrangement is not producing the rewards that we'd envisioned then we may consider our commitment to be null and void but if it is contingent upon the profit that we ourselves derive from the relationship any commitment that we make is bound to be very fragile because conditions change people change the tides of positive emotion ebb and flow and a true commitment accepts all of these contingencies many others that can't be foreseen and so I remind couples in one of my wedding homilies that being joined in marriage does not ensure that a couple will live in a steady state of undiluted contentment what a good relationship does afford over and over again is the opportunity for renewal it represents that abiding shared hope that after every long Wisconsin winter the sweet breezes of summer will blow again that after every fierce storm the sun will come out and shine again now for most of human history people did not expect to make long-term commitments life spans were relatively short many wives died in childbirth many men succumbed to war and to workplace accidents to survive as a couple to the age of 64 that was a luxury a few couples could count on today however life expects expectancy for the average American male is 76 81 for females my own parents will mark their 67th wedding anniversary in June and an impressive number of couples do survive to celebrate a half century of marriage but many more relationships as we know and much earlier for a variety of reasons including unrealistic expectations you know I've always liked what the novelist Jane Smiley had to say about this you know what getting married is Smiley writes it's agreeing to take this person who is right now at the top of his form full of hopes and ideas feeling good looking good wildly interested in you because you're the same way and then sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates and he does the same for you you're his responsibility now and he is yours if no one else will take care of him you will if everyone else rejects you he won't what do you think love is she says going to bed all the time the problem is that Americans are for the most part in curable romantics and we have been conditioned to expect our partners to be reliable sources of stimulation and arousal and that's not necessarily a bad thing and during the first blooming of a relationship people should feel this strong kinetic attraction but at some point the libido cools and our ideal partner becomes less intoxicating the luster begins to fade explaining the breakdown of his own marriage to winnie now some Mandela said she married a man who became a myth then the myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all fairy tale romances typically end with that trite line and they lived happily ever after and as long as we understand that this is the language of fairy tales and not applicable to flesh and blood relationships then will probably be okay but unfortunately that distinction isn't made often enough in our culture as the Jungian counselor and psychologist Robert Johnson observes human love is so obscured by the inflations and the commotions of romance that we almost never look for love in its own right and we hardly know what to look for when we do go in search of it Johnson warns that when we enter into a relationship with an idealized vision of the love object with this glamorous version of what life together is going to be like then then the partnership is unlikely to succeed based on an unrealistically high standard entered into for the purpose of fulfilling our own ego needs it simply lacks the kind of commitment that true love demands romance Johnson writes is not a love that is directed at another human being let me repeat that romance is not a love that is directed toward another human being the passion of romance he says is always directed at our own projections our own expectations and our own fantasies so any commitment that takes only our own gratification into account will not weather the pressures that reality places upon it it will not survive the obligations that must be honored the disappointments that inevitably crowd in the compromises that must be made romantic love can only last as long as two people are high on one another Johnson says to enter into the entire spectrum of human life together that is beyond romance's capacity the whole American ethos of individual autonomy and the encouragement we are given to pursue our own self-interest that does not serve our relational lives very well a marriage partner is not a service provider and expecting another person to provide us with happiness or security expecting that of them that is not loving love begins John Odani who says love begins with paying attention to others with an act of gracious self forgetting now to be sure some relationships do endure for decades on less than ideal terms without love such relationships may be characterized by codependency a situation in which the less assertive party routinely satisfies the needs of his or her more forceful partner a close and perhaps enmeshed connection is established that left to itself can feel pretty stable it is not conducive to mutual happiness when one truly loves when Anamkara or soul friendship informs the relationship we quite naturally want for our partner the best that we can offer in its very essence Robert Johnson says love is an appreciation and it is just as important for us that our partner should live fully as that our own needs should be met and when this is the case we don't need a lot of excitement to feel close to someone sharing small pleasures simple entertainments completing domestic tasks together patiently untangling interpersonal puzzles working through problems this is the stuff out of which enduring relationships are forged as the 19th century Unitarian poet James Russell Lowell once wrote true love is but a humble low-born thing and it hath its food served up in earthenware it is a thing to walk with hand in hand through the everydayness of the workday world it's a simple fireside thing whose quiet smile can warm earth's poorest hovel to a home a commitment is a principle we would do well to honor in certain other areas of life for instance developing a close connection to a particular locale that can be almost as important as creating that bond with another person a key problem in American society right now is people's lack of commitment to any given place Gary Snyder complained in a recent interview and if you read my 2009 book making the good life last you would know that for Trina and me this has been a high priority as I mentioned earlier during the first years of our marriage we moved around quite a bit that was okay because for the most part when we were younger we enjoyed exploring new territory Florida northern California great planes upstate New York but when we made the decision to come to Madison with an infant in tow it was with the intention of settling in partly we were seeking stability for our young son but also for the two of us after a couple of very peripatetic decades we wanted to place that we could truly learn to call home but this hankering on our part to stay put isn't something that comes naturally to us as homo sapiens until the advent of agriculture and settled villages some 10,000 years ago human beings were principally nomadic mobility is the rule in human history Scott Sanders said rootedness is the exception it would be naive to think he goes on that Spanish horses corrupted the plains Indians tempting a sedentary people to begin rushing about it would be just as naive to say that the automobile gave rise to our restlessness on the contrary our restlessness gave rise to the automobile and it as it led earlier on to the taming of horses and the carving of dugout canoes with each invention Sanders said the means of moving farther and faster has answered an itch that coils in our genes but this deeply embedded attribute may well have outlived its usefulness and it may now jeopardize our children's and our grandchildren's future unless more people commit to a place and are willing to study it to learn from it to love it and to work to keep it livable then those places are almost bound to deteriorate every township every field and creek every mountain and forest on earth would benefit from the attention of stationary men and women Sanders insists the question he says is not whether the land belongs to us through titles that are registered at the courthouse but whether we belong to the land through our loyalty and through our awareness now the city of Madison Dane County has changed a lot since Trina and I moved here in 1988 but the quality of life here I think remains remarkably high thanks to the commitment of citizens who have stayed who have put down their roots and who now sit on the Landmark Commission who supply leadership to its many neighborhood associations who support the work of organizations that are committed to protecting and restoring Dane County's natural assets the natural heritage land trust Madsen Audubon the pheasant branch Conservancy the water sentinels to name just a few now many residents of the city way out in the northwest the city of Seattle are equally loyal to their community and have helped to maintain its high quality of life and recently Robert Folgem a resident of Seattle took notice of a phenomena in his city that many others in their rushing about overlook Seattle has placed these islands in the middle of neighborhood streets to pacify traffic and to discourage commuters from using those streets instead of the main arteries if you go down to Farley Avenue just a couple of blocks out of here you will see similar islands now in Seattle Folgem observes some of those islands are pretty unkempt uncared for but there are others that feature ornamental grasses and flowers and even fruit trees what's the difference he wondered well in some of those neighborhoods the islands have been adopted by area residents who tend them on a regular basis and these volunteers receive no compensation but it appears as Folgem says that the island keepers have a larger view of what it means to take care of their corner of the world that's what commit that's what commitment to place is all about now it goes without saying that commitment isn't ever and always desirable because any principle even this one taken to extremes can become counterproductive I suspect that we have all had dealings with individuals who cannot say no who are unable to set proper boundaries who routinely over commit the old adage if you want something done ask a busy person that may hold true in some cases but just as often it is a recipe for failure and disappointment we have to be realistic about how many commitments any one of us can handle and similarly absolute commitments can be just as problematic as ones that lack conviction while it is important to honor the commitments we've made sometimes making them without fully understanding what they require of us that's not such a good idea many Americans were manipulated into making mortgage commitments they could never hope to fulfill and opportunists will often wrangle commitments out of unsuspecting victims at other times we misplace our loyalties committing ourselves to people or enterprises that prove unworthy of us so backing out of a commitment doesn't necessarily make us unethical at times it may be the responsible thing to do and it's not a bad idea periodically to just revisit our commitments to see if they are still valid to see if they're still serving us and our partner as well Joseph Landry has suggested just such a strategy for married couples he says that instead of separated couples going to court to get divorced couples who wish to remain married should go to court to present their case for marriage renewal husband wife children relatives in-laws would all present testimony and maybe all who were present at the original wedding should be reinvent re-invited why not have a public show of appreciation for those who continue to attempt the impossible Joe Landry calls this a crazy idea but it's not all that different from the renewal of vows celebration that Trina and I put together ten years ago and 30 or so family and friend were in attendance about to turn 64 well we're still confident about our commitment two souls whose unity cannot be severed on them car may your own commitments prove as fruitful as ours have been thank you dear and now our offering appropriately standing on the side of love our second week to collect for this wonderful denominational program invite you to rise in body or in spirit now for our closing hymn number 1053 in the teal hymnals for this hour spent in the company of one another may each of us go forth and into the week ahead better prepared than before to appreciate the joys to face the challenges to deepen our commitment to the causes the communities and the people who are standing on the side of love please be seated for the post


Number one, the every other weekend single mom who doesn't want more kids. So like every single mom on every dating site will talk about their shared custody. That's right. They put this stuff right on their bio. They'll say things like, me and my ex have the every other weekend custody situation, or me and my ex have the every other weekend visitation situation or whatever it is, right? And there's an option that they can check off, like a little check mark box that says that they have kids and they don't want more. How convenient for her, right? She wanted kids like a few years ago, but she doesn't want them now. She don't want them with you, right? The new guy. That just brings like so much to the table. And she does it every other weekend thing, you know, where the baby dad gets the kids like two weekends out of the month. And the mom has them like every weekday. So that basically translates to the single mom being free of her kids for two full days a month, which in turn translates to if you date her, you get two nights a month with her. And that's tops. That's considering if everything goes smoothly and you're lucky. Two freaking nights a month. Go ahead and scratch Sundiopolis because she has to pick them up on Sunday.  And go ahead and cross Friday off the list because she's too tired and she has to work on Friday and she's stressed out. And if there's no Joey fevers and the baby dad didn't sabotage the situation, you get like two Saturday nights a month with her. Geez. That's a bargain. And number two, the multiple baby daddy single mother. Okay, these chicks are really good at making poor decisions. Not only did they make one bad mistake, but they make two or three. And they never learn from their mistakes too. All three of their baby dads are going to be the same type of dudes. They're all going to be classified as losers. Okay. You'll never find a scenario where it's baby dad number one, loser.  Baby dad number three, part-time college professor and financial banker, right? It just ain't going to happen. All her baby daddies will be Jesse's, guaranteed. Take it to the bank. Number three, the prison baby dad single mother.  Do you think he's going to take a trip to BG? Do you think he's going to go to Timbuktu? No, he's going to go straight to his kid and baby mama's house, okay? You see, when they release inmates, they try to put them in the custody of the family members. And guess who this guy's family is? The chick you're dating and her kid. And you live with her now. So, good luck with that. Number four, the recovering single mother. She's found Jesus. She's in a rehab facility. She's done a lot of stuff in the past, right? But that's all behind her now.  But she's on the road to recovery. She's got a job now. She goes to church. She attends double A meetings, right? But, honestly, she is just one wine taste away from returning to that lifestyle.  And next thing you know, she's snorting up again, right? These chicks are very, very fragile. So please proceed with caution. And number five, the mom with multiple boys over 10. Okay, so if a single mom has three boys and their ages are like 11, 13, and 15, that's got to be one heck of a stressful environment. These kids are starting to get fascinated with, like, lighting things on fire, breaking windows, and vandalizing. They're at the age where they want to skip school, and they want to start smoking pot in the backyard. You name it. Boys are much more difficult to raise than girls. I promise you this.   You know, it's the boys doing all the devious, dangerous, so... Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where you all of a sudden have to raise three boys of this age, good luck with that.  And all our kids are boys between the ages of 10 and 15, and she was in a rehab facility, and they do the every other weekend thing, right? So basically, the best single mother you could find, if it even exists, is a single mom in her 20s who has one daughter around the age of seven and whose father is either A, no longer alive, or B, a millionaire. But, uh, good luck finding that...


Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the launch of the Cannabis Commission. We know that much has been said, much has been debated. We know that the cannabis debate cites a number of dimensions at the level of economics in terms of the sub-industries that it supports and in terms of livelihoods, at the level of health in terms of benefits and certainly in terms of the implications for reforms to be able to support a cannabis industry in St. Usher. At the regional level, it was I think about five years ago that the heads of government of CARICOM at the heads of government conference in 2014 that the heads of government had mandated a commission to interrogate the issue of possible reforms to legal regimes regulating cannabis within the community and for a while it may have seemed that St. Usher is lagging behind. We know that much has happened in other members of CARICOM. But here we are today for the launch of the Cannabis Commission and I believe many people will welcome this event today because many interest groups have been lobbying for a national agenda on cannabis that represents the interests of the diversified groups that are invested in the decriminalization of cannabis and in the development of industries from cannabis. So I think it is a good day. I think the proponents will welcome today. And I certainly thank you for being here. Today we will hear from our Honorable Minister. We will also hear from the Attorney who is chairing the commission and we will also get some perspectives on how we will move forward in terms of how we will communicate on this issue. So without further ado, let me welcome to the microphone the Honorable Bradley Felix, Minister for Commerce, Industry, Investment, Enterprise Development and Consumer Affairs to address you. Good morning members of the Cannabis Commission, the media, invited guests and our online viewers. Let me first apologize to the members on the panel sitting next to me. They did take a smell of smoke on me. It was not because I was indulging but I entered a smoke field office this morning because of the unfortunate situation we had in town. So my apologies. It is indeed a pleasure and a privilege for me to be here this morning at the launch of the St. Lucia Cannabis Commission. First, I want to start off by thanking the members of the commission for participating and for agreeing to be part of such an important dialogue and to the working groups for providing the various expertise to the commission. I know that it has been a very long and complex journey but I wish to state that the government of St. Lucia is committed, is committed to reviewing the laws on cannabis and to ensure that a balanced and holistic approach is taken. For a long time now, the cannabis industry has been subdued by regulatory restrictions all over the globe. However, the legal market is rapidly emerging as more governments legalize medical and adult use of the herb. The government of St. Lucia believe that the current legal regime is ineffective and in many cases deeply unjust. We believe that the initial classification of cannabis as a dangerous drug with no value was made without sufficient scientific research and data. In fact, scientific evidence can now prove or rather disapprove most of the popular beliefs and perceptions on cannabis. There is overwhelming empirical evidence illustrating the positive impacts of a well-regulated cannabis industry. We must therefore position ourselves to take advantage of the transformative economic benefits in the industry given the investment potential and consequential positive impact on GDP. I believe that areas which may be a cause of concern can be mitigated with proper regulation and a well-crafted public education campaign. As the minister responsible for this initiative, I want to assure the citizens of St. Lucia that we will thoroughly consider all aspects of a regulated cannabis regime including its impact on the youth, public health, criminal justice and state revenue and mitigate any potential risks associated with it. I wish you thank again, once again, the members of the commission, the working groups and all those who will be assisting us in crafting a model program for the benefits of the citizens of St. Lucia. I thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Minister. At this point, I call on Mr. Michael Gordon QC who is the chairperson of the commission to unveil what the terms of reference of the commission are. Mr. Michael Gordon, as most of you know, is well-known in legal circles in St. Lucia. I believe perhaps he might be best placed to chair this commission because he's well-situated in both the legal sphere and what we in journalistic circles call the public square. You would know that Mr. Michael Gordon QC was the managing partner of Gordon and Company from 1975 to 2003. From 2003 to 2007, he was judge of the Court of Appeal of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court. He returned to private practice in 2007. Mr. Gordon has also served as the IADB, the Inter-American Development Bank as consultant to advise on the establishment of a commercial court in St. Lucia and subsequently as a lead consultant to operationalize a commercial court as a division of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court. You also know that he is the chairperson of the voice publishing company, publishers of the oldest newspapers in the Caribbean after the Jamaica Gleaner. So please welcome with me Mr. Michael Gordon QC. Good morning to you all and thank you for coming.  Cannabis has been a topic of debate for a considerable time. Many years ago, there was a gentleman called Professor Michael Bobrun who was a professor of psychiatry. He practiced his psychiatry before he went to Mona as professor as a doctor in Trinidad. My own uncle was also a psychiatrist who practiced his psychiatry in Trinidad at the same time. I was privileged to listen then, and I am talking of some 40 plus years ago, to the debate between these two gentlemen on the merits of marijuana and the dangers. Michael Bobrun was a leader in the thought of liberalizing the use of cannabis. My uncle was of more conservative mean and thought that insufficient information was available as to the effect of cannabis specifically on persons who already had psychosis. Well, much has happened in the period between then and now, and I believe that we are in a position to go forward with a regulatory environment for the use of cannabis. I use the term use with some care because you can use something for medicine, you can use something for pleasure, or you can use something for profitable, legal gain and profitable, illegal gain. Am I allowed to say the master of ceremonies or must I say the mistress of ceremonies? As our leader has said, some years ago the leaders of the Caribbean governments commissioned a report on cannabis. The leader of that commission was Professor Rosemary Bell Antoine. It is a magnificent piece of work but not light reading. Fundamentally, what Professor Antoine's commission concluded was that the use and regulation of marijuana in countries can be done to both economic advantage and social advantage. What this commission has been mandated to do by the Government of St. Lucia and specifically the Minister from whom you've just heard is to suggest to the government the regulatory environment in which cannabis can be used to the optimum, eliminating those negative aspects which might undermine the perception of its benefit. It's quite a task because, as you will all know, the pros and cons have been debated at very considerable length. We have with us Mr. De Carries and Mr. Bain. Many, many, many years ago, and I think it may be as many as 20, so I don't wish to date them, they came up with a plan for the use of cannabis hemp. Now I haven't put that correctly. Hemp is part of the cannabis family. It is useful in all sorts of ways. It has no psychotic effect but because we didn't know then what we know now, that plan was not pursued. We have lost 20 years. The time has come to move forward. The commission is mandated to supply a report to the government before the end of the year and in the absence of any horrible happening, we will do so. I would like to thank the members of the commission who have met on their own time to debate the way forward. Next week we will be starting an encirclement of the Island of St. Lucia meeting in communities to try and both give information and perhaps more importantly, receive views from people as to the way forward. It's exciting. It's possibly profitable for the government. Most importantly, the commission wishes to ensure that small farmers are the substantial beneficiaries of any change that may come about. There is little more to be said that the minister hasn't already said and I am personally quite averse to repetition. So with that, I will say thank you very much. Thank you very much Mr. Gordon. I am aware that the cannabis industry supports livelihoods in various parts of the world and I too like you. I share that excitement and interest in getting feedback from people on the ground in St. Lucia, certainly from the farming community to hear what kind of interest there is and what types of innovations people are considering in terms of the industry. So I do welcome your comments and well we hear that now we have a commission that is active and it's operating. We hear that the report is due by the end of the year and we hear that there will be extensive consultations on the ground. At this point let me ask Mr. Leslie Collimo who is the principal of the company that is providing services to the government in that regard, Mr. Leslie Collimo to tell us a little bit about that. Good morning everybody. I'd like to thank the government information service for being on the ball and quickly removing my bio after I heard the bio from the chairman. You know I would pay in comparison. So GIS, thank you. As critical as the establishment of a commission is the communication and marketing that goes in to support that. Just to give you a story, when we started the initiative and we set up the social media pages some of the comments were, yeah boy the commission is there you're going to free up the read. This is exactly what proper communication will avoid. The overall strategy is to educate everyone all demographics about the commission and its goals. Marketing and communication is emotive. It's hearts, it's minds. However, we firmly believe that you can't manage what you don't measure. So really it begins with research, insight, sentiment, understanding how people feel about this very divisive topic. People are in great support of it conversely they're persons who are adverse to it and it's important to understand these pain points and to address them and that is what marketing and communication really is there to do. The methodology that we employ is really going to be a 360 degree methodology. It's going to involve the ground game which we call it very important boots on the ground, hearing from the people, use of traditional media as well as in the 21st century and day. Information age, use of digital technology and media as well. So, just to let you know about some of the research that we've done. There was a report done in 2017, a cadres report which really got a lot of information to gauge the people's perceptions and insight and feelings towards the legalization or the criminalization of cannabis. We believe that it was important to start there. Then we initiated a survey on the November 8th again to gauge the sentiment as of now. The survey has reached 15,000 people with a response rate of 11%. And I won't tell tales out of school and I won't share any information at this point but it's very interesting to understand the sentiments that people hold towards this topic. Next week we're going to be commencing social media polls. Reason being, after the launch, we anticipate that it's going to be a lot of chatter, a lot of debate on the subject and we want to be able to capture that information. We've also been doing social listening across traditional and digital platforms. Again, there's been a lot of debate, a lot of conversation, a lot of dialogue at all levels concerning the industry and the product and the hub. So we feel that it's really, really important for us to capture that information. And again, the community consultations. Aside from using the community consultations to communicate, it's also a great way to get feedback. It's not us or the commission pontificating about cannabis and what the legal framework and the regulatory framework is going to do. We want to hear how people feel about what is coming. There's no stopping it. However, we need to understand the sentiment and address those. So again, we spoke about the technology and the channels that we're going to use. Traditional, we're going to be using television, radio, print, PR, press releases, articles. We're going to be doing media tours on the various talk shows and the news shows. Out of home, which is in marketing speak, anything that communicates outside of your home. So we're going to be seeing billboards that are going to be erected. They should be going up over the weekend. And then on the flip side, we're looking at digital, so social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp. There's a website that we'll take a brief look at. Direct messaging via email and the WhatsApp platforms. And of course, the live streaming of the event which we're doing today. Right, so there's the ground game which we call it. There's the community outreach which schedule to start next week and the week after. So I think that there should be up on your screen. This is what the poster is going to look like. There's a schedule on there. And again, the message we want to hear from you is not us just speaking to you or at you, but we want to hear from the communities. The billboards, this is what they will look like. One is the brand. And when you look at the imagery there, you will look at its abstract, but it would show the legal aspect, the public health aspect, the socioeconomic aspect, and of course our people. And then there is the secondary billboard which is really to gauge people's sentiment and we want to hear from people what are your feelings towards a regulated and equitable cannabis industry. On social media, this is just some of the content that you will see. Again, it's to communicate the objectives and the mandate of the commission. The commission is not a dispensary for the hub. It is not that. The commission is there to advise on a legal regulatory framework going forward. And it's important that we communicate that. So, access. It's very important to give people access to information. Whether it be physical touch points like the community consultations, but when you look at where we are now, we have 178, 179,000 people in St. Lucia. We have 100,000 active Facebook users. 40,000 active Instagram users. The mobile penetration is 120%. How many people have two phones? It's okay. You can say you can put a hand up. Most people have two phones and the statistic is you move away from a television. You move away from the radio.  You may pass a billboard. You never more than three feet away from your phone. So, therefore, it's critical to give people access to information, to dispel misinformation. So, again, we have the multi-channel aspect. We have the website. It would have been nice to have taken you through the website, but you can go on there and look at it on your own. The web address, that's what it looks like. The web address is www.slcconline.org. There's all sorts of information on there. There's access to the documentation. There's articles, press releases. And that's more or less in terms of the approach. However, it would be irresponsible for me to not let you know that there's a public service announcement which will be shared across all of these platforms. And I just want to share that with you at this point. This is the first time, aside from the commissioners who have seen it, this is the first time that it's going to be viewed. When you listen to it and you see it, when you listen to it, the voice may sound very, very familiar. I won't give it away. Maybe you might be able to know who it is. But again, without further ado, the first public service announcement for the St. Lucia Cannabis Commission. The St. Lucia Cannabis Commission was established by the government of St. Lucia to review and make recommendations on the laws and regulations relating to cannabis. The commission is chaired by Michael Gordon QC, Retired Attorney at Law, and is composed of agencies such as the Ministries of Health, Agriculture, Home Affairs, the Office of the Attorney General in West St. Lucia, the Leader of the Opposition, the Cannabis Movement, the National Youth Council, and the IONOLA Council for the Advancement of Rastafari. The commission is tasked with examining the social, health, economic, and legal issues surrounding cannabis, with a view to making recommended changes to the Drugs Prevention of Misuse Act, and to design a new regulatory framework on cannabis. Through the commission, St. Lucia will be able to offer their views and suggestions on this critical and timely cannabis dialogue. Go. That is the first public service announcement that will be launched in the public space. It is intended to inform and to dispel misinformation and to accurately position the commission. There's going to be a second PSA, which will be coming out, and that one will take a different format. It will be conversational, and really the format will be an individual who is averse to the regularization of a framework for cannabis, and a younger individual who is actually dispelling all of the misinformation surrounding cannabis and the industry. The first one is informational. The second one, which is really conversational, and that will really resonate with persons. It's driven by a lot of the insight. All of this wasn't developed out of thin air. It was actually dictated by the insight that we've collected over the last two months. In my view, I'd like to thank the commission for the opportunity to work alongside them to craft this, as I think that this is critically important to Centrusia. With that, I'd like to say thank you. So that's it, folks. Thank you so much for being here. As you heard from Mr. Colimo, there are numerous channels that will be employed in speaking with people, getting their perspectives. You know, this is the age of the citizen journalist. We have social media. The reason why it's social is because it's conversational. And so what we hope is that you will spread the word. You will invite your counterparts, your colleagues, your friends, you know, to get involved in the conversation because ultimately, you know, the voices of the people, it's critical in social planning, economic planning, when you have an opportunity to participate in the process, we really do suggest that you take up the opportunity. So at least at the end of the day, what Centrusia will advance is a very populist position on the issue and an agenda that represents broadly the perspectives of the citizens of Centrusia. So having said that, I thank you so very much for being here. Thank you.


Hi, I'm Amanda Richards with the UT Libraries and the Betsy P. Creepmore Special Collections and University Archives, and today we're going to be doing Page Tear Repairs Two Ways with Tape and Glue. A book to repair. Tape. So there's the own folder. Alright. So for the tape repair, you'll need a torn page, and here I have two examples, one that has a curve, and then one that's rather straight. So we'll grab the document repair tape and measure out the length of the tear. Here, I'm just kind of eyeballing it, and I like to tear instead of cut the tape because it just blends into the paper better when you burnish it down with the bone folder. So now we will try to separate the very, very fragile tape from the backing, and we'll place it over top of this tear. Now if there were text on this page, we would try to line up all of the edges of the font, so that way you would be able to see the repair at all. But it's a blank page, so there's no text. Now with your bone folder or Teflon folder, you will lightly burnish the tape like that and just work out all the air bubbles and work that tape into the tear, and it should disappear rather well. Then for the top, you can either fold it over or trim it off, and I prefer to trim it off the top. So with a pair of scissors, or if you prefer a utility knife or scalpel, you can do that as well, and you'll just trim close to the page without trimming the actual page. You can do the other side, but that tends to be a little bit more bulky, and I don't think it's really necessary, so I usually don't. Alright, so then if you have the curve, it's the same process, but because your tape is straight, you'll just do it in two parts. So a smaller tear here, it's like fast-forward through all that. Alright, so now we'll place it on that tear up to the bend, same process as before. Now you're seeing the lines on the edges of this tape because this has come to me without the box still on it, so it's picking up a lot of the hairs, which you normally wouldn't see, but this is a withdrawal book anyway that I'm using, so we'll just pretend it doesn't exist. Now we'll measure out this one as well, same process as the first time, there you go. So this is repairing a page tear by the gluing method. You will need a book to repair, two wax paper sheets, PVA, paintbrush, okay. For this repair, we're going to be gluing the page tear, and this time to do it the glue method, you need to have the tear that is going across the page at almost like a 45-degree angle, so you can actually see the inside of the paper, and yeah, it's about how that is. So, you'll start with putting a piece of wax paper down underneath and grabbing your paste in a very small brush, and when you glue the tear, you're going to make sure that you're getting just the area of the page, the surface of the tear that is considered I guess the inside of the page. You don't want to get any of the printed area or surface of the paper, just the inside. The less glue you use, the less cleanup and the meter your repair will be, so now when you've pasted it, you will lay the top page back down on top and try to line up the text. You'll line up the text as evenly as you can, and then burnish that top page over top, and this tear usually is not the neatest. It leaves a lot of fibers in the paper out, frayed I guess, and I will just pull those fibers over so it blends in a little bit better, and I'll run my finger over it on the front and the back to see if I need to tidy it up with a towel or a napkin, make sure everything is even, place the second piece of wax paper on top, and leave it under a brick for about 20 minutes until that dries, and that's a complete repair. And today we're going to be doing the page tear repair with adhesive of some sort. I don't know.


Hi, my name's Emil. Today I'm going to be talking about testing rails at scale. So I'm a production engineer at Shopify. I work on the production pipeline on performance on DNS. Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows merchants to set up online stores and sell their products on the internet. To give you a little background on Shopify, Shopify has over 240,000 merchants. Over the lifespan of the company, we've processed $14 billion in sales. Any given month, we do about 300 million uniques, and we have over a thousand employees. So when you're testing rails at scale, you typically use a CI system. And I wanted so that we're all on the same page about how I think about CI systems. So I like to think of CI systems as having two components. You have the scheduler and you have the compute.  Typically, it's a web hook that comes in from something like GitHub. It orchestrates the work, so it decides what scripts need to run where. Whereas in contrast, the compute is where the code is actually run, where the tests are actually run. Now, the compute is everything that touches the compute as well. So it's not just the machine, but it's the orchestrating the machine, making sure it's there, getting the code to be on the machine, and everything that's involved. If you look at the market of CI systems, you typically have two types of CI systems. You have the managed provider. This is a closed system, multi-tenant. They handle both the compute and the scheduling for you, and you just give them the keys to your code base. Some examples are Circle CI, Codeship, or Hosted Travis CI. In contrast, you also have unmanaged providers. So these are systems where you host both the scheduling and the compute in your own infrastructure. It's an open system. You have access to the code base, so you can make whatever changes you'd like. And to give you an idea, some of these are like Jenkins, Travis CI or Strider. Today, Shopify boots up over 50,000 containers in a single day of testing. During that time, we built 700 times. So we built Shopify 700 times. For every build, we run 42,000 tests, and this whole process takes about five minutes. But this wasn't always the case. Winter around last year, Shopify's build times were close to 20 minutes. We experienced serious flakiness issues, not just from code health, but also from the provider we were on. We were the biggest customer of this provider, and they were running into capacity issues, so we would get problems like out of memory errors. The provider we were also using was expensive, and not just in the dollar amount, but you pay typically for a hosted provider by month. But if you think of your typical workload, it's five days a week, eight to 12 hours a day. So the rest of the 12 hours, you're not using that compute time. And so we set on a journey to go and solve this problem. So we were given the directive to lower our build times down to five minutes. At this point, due to the level of flakiness and the long build times, you would have to rebuild your build, even though the suite should be green, multiple times, like two or three times before you got agreed and got to deploy. And the goal was also to maintain the current budget. So we looked around on the market and we found an Australian CI provider by the name of BuildKite. The interesting part about BuildKite is they're a hosted provider, but they only provide the schedule component. You have to bring your own compute to the service. And the reason that's very valuable is because for 99% of use cases, the scheduling component is the same for any CI system. And this satisfied our non invented here worries of rebuilding the wheel. So the way BuildKite works is you run BuildKite agents on your own machines. Those agents talk back to BuildKite. BuildKite also ties into the events for your repo. So when you push code to GitHub, BuildKite knows that it needs to start a build. You tell BuildKite what the exact scripts you want the agents to run. Those agents pull the code down from GitHub, run the scripts and then propagate back the results to GitHub, or sorry, to BuildKite. And BuildKite propagates to wherever you need the results to be sent to. So the compute cluster we have is at peak, 90 C4 8x larges in EC2. That gives us about 5.4 terabytes of memory and over 3200 cores. So the cluster is hosted in AWS. It's auto scaled. We manage it with Chef and prebuilt AMIs. The instances are memory bound and this is because in the containers that we run on the instances, we put in all the services required for Shopify to boot. And finally, we have to do some IO optimizations on these machines because of the right heavy workload we do when you download a ton of containers. So we use RAMFS on the machines. So I mentioned we auto scale our compute cluster. We couldn't use Amazon's auto scaler because Amazon's auto scaler works only on HTTP requests. So instead we had to write our own. It's just a simple Rails app, but the way it works is it pulls BuildKite for the current running BuildKite agents. And it checks how many are required. And BuildKite calculates this based on the number of builds it needs to run currently. Scrooge then goes and activates boots up new EC2 machines or scales it down. That basically works. We also tried we kept cost in mind as we built the system. So we do some AWS specific optimizations. So that includes things like keeping the instance booted up for the full hour because Amazon builds by an hour. It also includes using spot instances and reserved instances. We try to improve utilization. So if a machine is booted, since the machines can be booted up for an hour, even though we don't require that capacity, we allocate a dynamic amount of agents for builds. So at peak for branch builds, we can give up to 100 agents or up to 200 agents for master builds. Keep in mind, not one size fits all. So for us, AWS and auto scaling works for other companies, bare metal might be the correct solution. So the funny thing about Scrooge is BuildKite agents are this implicit sort of how productive developers are at the company, right? Because when you're pushing more code, you're more productive. And so we can track the amount of productivity per se going on. And so I took this graph from an average day. And you notice there's three points. Can anybody guess what the two valleys and the one peak is? Any guesses? Lunch. So a Shopify at the bottom, that's an UTC time. And lunch at Shopify is at 1130 to 130. So that first peak is the first lunch rush. People get up and they go to lunch. But what, sorry, that first Canyon is the lunch rush. What's the peak? Well, what do you do when before you leave your computer and you're working on something? You commit, work in progress, and then you push it up to get up, right? So that's what that second peak is. And then that big dip is everybody going for lunch. So I mentioned containers. The large speed up we got with the compute was using Docker and using containers to run our tests. So we were able to get a large speed up because we do all the configuration that you would need during the container build. And then you only have to do it once. And the moment a container is on a machine, it can instantly start running tests. So things we do are things like we get our dependencies on the machine, we compile all of our assets. We also get test isolation from Docker. This isn't as big of a deal with Rails, but it's still quite useful. Finally, Docker provides a distribution API. Most things speak Docker so we can put the container anywhere we want as long as we announce where the registry is. So Shopify has outgrown Docker files. We have our own internal build system called Locutus. It uses the Docker build API to build containers using bash scripts. It ran on a single EC2 machine at the time of this first iteration for our CI system. And this single EC2 machine wasn't dedicated to Locutus. It was one of those machines where you have a bunch of apps that need to run in production, but they're not critical for production. So you like put an app, you put an app, you put an app.  So it was one of those. And building containers for our CI system forces us to repay a lot of debt, a lot of technical debt that the app has grown. Shopify's 10 years old, the code base. And so you're a cure, a lot of technical debt. And so while we're trying to build containers, we run into really weird issues like compiling assets required in MySQL connection. For test distribution, we went with the simple solution. Every container ran a set of tests plus an offset based on the container index. We had two categories of containers. So some containers ran Ruby tests and some ran browser tests. And the issue we ran into with this is the Ruby test pool was much larger and browser tests are much slower whereas Ruby tests were faster. And so what would happen is the Ruby tests would be complete running and then the browser tests would take a couple more minutes resulting in like longer build times. For artifacts, at the end of a CI run, the agents on the boxes would go into Docker, grab the artifacts and upload them to S3. We also had an out of bounds service that would get webhooks from BuildKite, dump some of those artifacts into Kafka and emit some metrics to SatzD. All roads and Shopify on Kafka lead to Dataland. So we were able to use some of those artifacts and then later go and find flaky tests or flaky areas of the code base. And this was our first iteration. This is what the final architecture of the first iteration looked like. But then Docker decided to strike back. So we shipped a second provider, but when we shipped the second provider, we brought a bunch of confusion to the company. We decided to run both of them in parallel. We also noticed that a single box doesn't scale and Likudis started running it to capacity issues. And the two having two different types of containers run tests was making our builds longer than they should have been. So battle of confusion. When we decided to ship both CI systems in parallel, so we could gain more confidence before we rolled it out and removed the old CI system. The problem with this is we did a bad job of communicating to the whole company what we were planning on doing and how we were doing it. And developers saw two statuses. One was green, one was red, and they weren't sure which to trust, which to believe in. And so this unfortunately eroded developer confidence for us. The solution for it was to full on switch the new system to 100% and take the dive in. Clustering Likudis. So when we outgrew our current Likudis instance, we nearly had to go to the drawing board and rebuild and make it scalable. We also wanted to keep it stateless as much as possible. And so this is what we ended up building. We ended up building, so the new, the old version of the Likudis had a single instance. It would get the webhooks and it would run, it would build the container and then push it up to the Docker registry. In this new, in this new version, we had a coordinator instance that would get the webhooks. It would then allocate the work to a pool of workers. The workers, each repo was hashed to a particular worker. And so the same worker would receive the same work, or sorry, the same, yeah, the same work. And now when I say stateless-ish, that's because there's a cache on each one of these machines. And when you can lose the cache and the containers will be able to build the, or the workers will be able to build the container fine. The problem is, though, is once the cache is lost, you could take upwards of 20 minutes to build a new container, which just doesn't work that well. So our second stab at test distribution, we, the first container that would boot would load up all its tests into Redis. The rest of the containers would look at that Redis queue and pull off one by one the test suite, or a test job. We also got rid of test specialization. So containers ran all tests, and this equalized the running time of containers, so they would finish within tens of seconds of each other. Finally, this is what the second iteration of our CS system looked like. So Docker, the gift that keeps on giving. So no one tests starting tens of thousands of containers a day. And Docker doesn't do that, unfortunately, but it's exactly what we were doing in our CI system. We ended up running into a bunch of instability with Docker, and we didn't account for these failures. And this unfortunately did erode some developer confidence in our new system. Every new version of Docker had major bugs. They would fix old ones, but they're bringing new ones or bring back old ones. Some examples are we'd see network timeouts randomly happening. We'd see kernel bugs where Docker would refuse to boot up if Aparmar was on the machine. We saw issues where concurrent polls would cause deadlocks. So that was a lot of fun. And since we didn't allocate for this, we would cause builds to fail. You would have a green test suite, but your build would fail. And that's very annoying for a developer. So the solution was to actually swallow the infrastructure failures, identify when they were occurring, and swallow them. And one thing, going into this project, you hear stories from Google where a dry fails every couple minutes, and you think, well, that's Google, that's not for us. Well, what we saw was, even at our scale, we still saw over a hundred containers fail a day, which made us realize we can't ignore this problem. So the solution to thinking or to approaching your infrastructure is to get into this mindset of pet versus cattle. So you want to treat your servers as pets. You don't want to treat your servers as pets. Don't treat your servers as pets. But the way you can sort of identify if you are, is you give each server its own unique name. If something breaks, you SSH in, you find out what the problem is manually, and then you create an artisanal fix, and then you move on. In contrast, when you're treating your servers as cattle, each server has a number. Node 1, node 2, node 3. You want to automate detection of issues. You want to remove it automatically from the cluster. And you want the node to know how to clean itself up, and then put itself back in. And we had to go and do this, and until we had done this, we had a lot of toil on the team, where we would manually find a broken node, go and fix it, and then put it back in, and we just wasted a lot of time. Side note, while I was making the slides for these talk, or yeah, the slides for this talk, I found a bunch of pictures of cats with lasers in space. And so I just wanted to say that I love the internet, and I think we all deserve a round of applause for making this possible. Now, our third iteration on our test distribution was actually stability, or so the problem we saw with test failures is you can get into this race condition, where a container pulls a test off of the queue, it fails, but then since all the tests are run, and all the tests were green, and nobody knows that this test was never run, the build is green. And that's a very scary proposition, or a situation to occur. So what we do now is when we de-queue a test, and when it's after it's successfully run, we in-queue it again in a second set, or we insert it into a second set, and at the end of the build, we know all the tests that should have run, and all the tests that have run. We compare the two, if they don't match, then we fail the build. This is a rare situation, we don't see it often, but it's good to have that safekeeping there. So this is what the final iteration of BuildKite looks like today, and this is what it looks like internally at Shopify.  It's not a productive use of your time. It took a long time for us to get through this project. We had multiple people working on this for months. Also, here's a small application, typically the issue isn't compute, typically it's a configuration issue, and you're likely to be able to find large optimizations when to build your own CI. If your build times are over 15 minutes, you should start considering implementing it on your own. If you have a monolithic application with snowflakes all over the code base, and you've optimized as much as possible, getting your own compute and being able to have more impact on that could be a very effective. Also, if you've reached parallelization limits in your CI provider, having your own compute allows you to break past that. If you do decide to go and build your own CI system, please don't make the same mistakes we did. Be sure to commit 100 percent once you've built your new system. Beware of rabbit holes. I know we all like to say it'll be done in two weeks. It's very difficult for that to be the case. Finally, make sure to think of your infrastructure as cattle, not pets. You'll save yourself a lot of headache and time. Thanks. The question was, did we spend any time optimizing the code base or the tests, instead of just focusing on the CI system? We actually didn't. We found that parallelization was enough at the time. When you have something like 40,000 plus tests, you're going to have some slow ones, and it just evens out in the long run. The issue we did find with the test code base is flakiness. You'd be surprised by the amount of tests that assume state because of the order the test suite is running. When you distribute tests from a queue and they're on different containers, the state is different. We had to spend a lot of time and develop some tooling around going in and figuring out why a test is flaky, fixing it. That's where we spent time fixing it. The question is, how bound is the system to Docker? I would say most of the speed up we got was actually from Docker. Not Docker itself, but using containers. The reason is when we built the container, a lot of the time today you spend in a CI system or in most CI systems is the configuring the application to be able to run tests, so compiling assets, downloading the new gems, on and on. When we built, when we use Docker, we were able to do all that once and then all the instances just could instantly start running the tests. A lot of the speed up did come from Docker. We also did gain a lot from the parallelization, so you would see a lot of gains there. The question was, what was the time frame of the project, essentially? We started initially working on this in the winter last year. By the summer, we were, I would say, around phase two, so most of the company was already using build kite in this new system and we had seen the performance gains, but during that time we spent a lot of time going through learning the, hey, now half the team is like trying to fix these machines or we're still seeing quite a bit flakiness because of the test distribution we're doing. That lasted until about September, at which point the project mostly wind down and the team moved on to other things. The question was, did we maintain our costs? And the answer is yes. We were able to keep the same amount, we maintained the same budget. It was sort of like you can fill up this budget. We had more compute capacity, faster build times for the same amount of money. The question was how big was the team? Around six to eight people. It shifted, but like I would say around there, yeah, in that range. Thank you. Thanks.