Hey guys, it's Nate, aka The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. It is Sunday on FIVA 22 inside of Team of the Group Stage and that means since we didn't have it yesterday, we are expecting today a mini release of some extra Team of the Group Stage cards that should be put into packs today, right? That's a new thing that EA's been doing just about every single promo this year is doing a mini release to try to keep the cards and packs fresh, I guess, and to add some new things in maybe to get some people to open a few more packs on the latter parts of the weekend. So I want to talk about the mini release of cards we could be seeing today, content we could see today on Sunday, as well as this big time showdown SBCs, the two SBCs that we saw yesterday, right? We talked about them, we knew they were going to be coming and they impacted the market a lot. A lot of center backs are down in price because people sold the center backs they had to go do this SBC. So I want to talk about that market impact, the way that fodder is going, and lightning rounds, which I'm going to start off by talking about lightning rounds as we get into the stuff that's in packs, because even right now, I mean, again, last night when I was recording the YouTube video, they did this as well and there's 100,000 coin ultimate, 100,000 coin, not ultimate packs, that's the 125s. The 100K lightning rounds are going on at 4am, or 4, 3am UK time, whatever it is, 10pm Eastern right now. They did this last night as well. So it seems like EA this year at FIFA 22 has a new schedule for lightning rounds and when they drop these packs into the store on a promo weekend, right? This is again the first weekend after Black Friday. So we're kind of getting a sense for how they're going to be releasing these lightning rounds. I believe that on Saturday, they released lightning rounds at 12pm UK, which is also a really random time.  They put out more lightning rounds, they know that people love those. And as you can see, right, the number that is right over here, the community limit, the number on these packs is it's going down slowly, but people are buying them, right? So people love lightning rounds and EA knows they can make a few extra bucks, you know, off of those being released into the game. So I expect to see more lightning rounds today on Sunday. That's another thing that I do think these team of group stage cards are going to get more supplied. Now, again, the pack weight is very low from what we were surprised to see that it was for sure early this weekend. And then the pack weight really has not changed December 3rd as of 6pm GMT. So still 2.8% out of 100k pack that is not changed at all. The pack weight is down, for sure, from what we thought it was going to be. But that is not going to stop EA from releasing more cards into packs and more lightning rounds. I 100% expect the 50k, 100k, 125 and maybe even the 85 plus star pack lightning rounds again today on Sunday. There's going to be some more pack supply, of course. And that's going to be highlighted by a mini release. Now, these are not official card stats that are being released and put into the game today. But these are the players that we expect to see. Bruno Fernandez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Antony and Toko Akambi. Some very interesting items, of course, with Bruno and Trent being the biggest two names. But Antony, of course, with those arid and busy links to the Holler SBC, to the Gravenberge Road to the Knockouts card, even Toko Akambi's item looks pretty dope for a left wing in the League 1. Nothing insane, right? But a cheap item that looks usable at the very least with some pace. I do expect to see three to four cards, probably. I would expect it to be these four released today on this game. These are cards that were leaked previously that were not included in packs yet. So that is, I think that's like the biggest piece of content that we're really expecting today on Sunday, right? So other than that, what do we expect today on the game? You know, we've had two days in a row of player SBCs. I know that the Holler SBC is not that insane. We had Pique and Nicholas Suley yesterday. I don't know if we're going to have another player SBC today. We could, right? Sometimes they start off the weekend with three days in a row of SBCs. You know, this could potentially be a time where they could drop another team in the group stage, SBC, maybe for a conference league player. I feel like there's only one conference league card that has been released. It's Batim Batheim. I think it's the only conference league card that we have right now. So I don't know if we'll get another one of those today as an SBC or maybe even throughout the rest this week, but we could have another just kind of player SBC for a team of the group stage item potentially today as well. Now yesterday, along with the normal SBCs that we had with the Suley and the Pique, we had a 50K pack untradable, which is very intriguing that EA would drop an untradable 50,000 coin pack. Now this costs about 10K to do. If you have a few things in the club, makes it a little bit easier. But of course, people are paying crazy money to get this SBC done. A lot of the lower tier market went crazy yesterday, right?  I think this was probably a very strategic move by EA, you know, trying to put out a 50K pack, you know, you know, getting some fodder into people's clubs, right? A 50K pack, that's going to have an what, an 83 or an 84 plus guaranteed? I think it's 83 inside of that 50K pack. And already people had opened a lot of saved up packs over the weekend with not a ton of insane SBCs out since a lot of the Black Friday SBCs expired. These PK and Sule SBCs, I think are being completed by a lot of people right now because there's really not too much else to do unless you did the moments duo or haven't done the moments duo or you're going to do Sebastian Holler. I guess there's a couple of play of the months and a couple icon SBCs that you could still do. But there's not any big SBCs right now that people really that most people would want to grind towards, right? A lot of people are maybe even saving fodder for the Vinny player of the month that is potentially coming later on this next week. But I think that what EA did with these two SBCs, it was perfect timing because they knew that people have some fodder in the club. I myself, I've got some extra SBC fodder in the club usable to put into these types of SBCs and they made these two SBCs very interesting because these are two cards and right when I heard the leaks about Sule and PK, I knew that EA was going to juice these cards up decently well and make them at least interesting to think about because how often do you get to use Nicholas Sule or even Jared PK in FIFA, right? PK is again famous for the scream SBC in FIFA 20 and this card does look decent but it's not insane. It's just good enough for people, especially if you think about the potential upgrade these cards could get. I think for Sule the upgrade looks the best on this type of card, right? I think most people would expect Bayern to win as well, especially with Barcelona losing to Betis yesterday. It just seems like still Bayern, even if they rest a few players because they are like threw into the knockouts already confirmed and they've won three games already, the last three games, right? The Sane card has already gotten upgraded plus one on the road to the knockout. So I think Sule is like the favorite to get the SBC upgrade. But again, that's how these cards work. If you guys did miss it, these showdown cards get upgraded by the winning team gets a plus two overall and if a draw were to happen both cards would get a plus one. So for the first showdown SBC of the year, it's kind of a W, right? These are out for the next couple of days. The SBC of course expires before the game so that you can't just wait to see who wins the game and then go do the SBC for the upgraded card. E is going to have a little FOMO basically kind of implemented here and if you want to do one of them or both of them, then you have to do it before the game is actually played. But again, the reception in the community, I just think that the way that the game is structured right now with people having some extra SBC fodder and SBC cards in their club, these cards at 130K for about both of them, right? 130, 140,000 coins for both of these items was pretty well received. You look at the thumbs up on both of these cards. Sule has a few more thumbs up than PK does. And if you look at the SBC upvotes, 75% upvote for PK and an 87% upvote on Nikola Sule. Now when you have, this is what I really want to talk about today is these cards impacted the market a lot and it wasn't really in the SBC fodder range, right? A lot of SBC cards didn't go up that much. 83 spiked for a quick minute and they're now back down to almost, you know, back under a thousand coins per card, just a little bit over. Same thing with 84s, right? 84 spiked in the moment as people went out and they did the PK and Sule and then you've seen fodder kind of chill back out with again, continual lightning rounds and supply coming onto the game yesterday. But where you really saw the biggest market impact from these cards was other centerbacks on the game. A lot of people sold centerbacks they had in their clubs to go out and to fund doing these SBCs. Now this is a two-fold thing, right? People are selling centerbacks, right? That's going to make a lot of other centerbacks on the game go down, which is exactly what we saw. But also if people are doing these SBCs and they're they're very, again, well received and a lot of people are doing them, then what's that also going to do? That's going to make complimentary links to these cards rise up. These are the number one and number two most popular cards that people are linking these new items to. Alfonso Davies, his gold card is doubled in price and this rule breakers item has basically doubled in price as well. And Ter Stegen for the links to PK, of course, this card has gone from like he was actually 75K on Friday. Now he's 140,000 coins. And to be completely honest with SBCs with such high demand like these two, these guys are probably going to just keep going up a little bit more as the hype is just all these SBC cards right now at the moment. So you've got a mixture of things happening, right? With SBCs like this and that's what I want to kind of break down today is let's say your center back that's in your team like let's say you had center back screener from this brand new promo that was out just a couple days ago signature signings, right? The signature signing screener went for about 160,000 coins. He's down 20K to like 145,000 coins, right? He is in a different league than both of these SBCs that were released. And you know, the key of any SBC is going to be going away. The screening are the signature stars cards, they were very supplied through the packs and the lighting rounds and stuff on Black Friday. So as you can see here, there's still some of these that are like first owner tradable. These are not in packs still, but some people still might have these in their club as they've just recently gone out of packs. But for some of these center backs that have dropped in price, there are going to be rises back in my opinion on the most meta ones, the most popular ones. What I'd be doing if, you know, as long as we don't have a huge market crash in the next couple of days, a great example of how this happened earlier on in this year was when they released the Gelson Martin's signature signings SBC, right? One of the other favorite right wings in Lee Gunn with great links and a lot of hype on hell de Maria, right? Numbers up de Maria. This guy went from he was actually about 230,000 coins or 220K when Gelson Martin's was released and he dropped all the way down to like 180,000 coins in price and look where he is now back up to 230,000 coins. So as I'm taking a look through the market right now, there's a lot of center backs that are down in value. Millie Tao is one of those in particular. I mean, this guy was like 545 K last week. I think right now he's like 480,000 coins, maybe even lower than that. This to me hasn't dropped that much 479.  He's down like 30K, but there's 25,000 coins tax on that card. I know that he also links to PK and so people might be trying to use Millie Tao and PK together with the, you know, Terstegen card. I don't like that one as much. But as I look through some of the other cards that have dropped down in price, one that really catches my eye is Clostraman, right? Clostraman because this guy was like 170, 180,000 coins and he's literally dropped like 40K. He's 140,000 coins. Let's take a look at this graph, right? Now when the Suley SBC goes away, yes, people are still going to have that card in their club. They're still going to want to use that item, but he is no longer attainable, right? And yes, this guy was 180K. I remember seeing him at almost 180,000 coins. But yes, that he dropped from 160 down to 136. And he hit high of like 164.  That's a pretty sizable drop off on a card. It is very popular for his links and for, again, this is a green link to the Nkunku card that is so popular this year in the game, German links in the Bundesliga as well. So this would be a card that if he would go back to 136, like that price that you saw there, people saw that was too low and he got bought back up a little bit. That's the kind of thing that I'd be looking for maybe even into this weekend a little bit further, as if the content isn't that insane or that crazy, you might see some of these centerbacks still maintain pretty low prices. Rutiger, right? Some of your Prem centerbacks, this could be a really, really good opportunity to get involved in a couple of them if they've dropped off enough. Rutiger went from 350, 360 down to 320. So if this were to go like 320 flat again, I would probably get interested in an Antonio Rutiger card. And then, you know, take like Upa Makano, where's Upa? 46,000 coins for an informed Upa Makano with the great links that he has and so popular of a card that he is. He was 60k, dropped all the way to 46 back to 48. You know, in the mid to low 40s for a card like this, I'm talking PlayStation prices at the moment, but like maybe even in 40k flat on Xbox, this would be a card that I would expect to bounce back a little bit because the Suley SBC, again, these SBCs are only out for a couple days. And after this, people are no longer going to be able to buy Bundesliga centerbacks. They're not going to be able to buy Suley, right? They're not going to be able to buy PK. So a lot of times what you see is stuff that gets panic sold because of an SBC, if it's still meta, if it is still popular, and people want to use it in their squads, they will still, that price will kind of rebound back up, especially if it's an out of packs card. But some other cards that dropped were actually a team of the group stage cards, right? Like the Marquinhos team of group stage dropped off, the Tiago Jalo dropped off a lot. I clicked on the wrong card. Where is Tiago Jalo? That's the one I wanted to see. He's back to 358 at the moment, but look at this card's fluctuation. Yesterday, he was 539k. Of course, people sold this card heading into 6pm. He was down at like 450. He actually was down at 350,000 coins, rose back to 416, and is now back in the 350-360 range. Now, this guy has been significantly overpriced, and there's going to be more supply on these cards today on Sunday, as we do have the squad battle rewards, and again, more lighting rounds and stuff like that being open today on this game. But that was a big drop, right? And even some of the icon centerbacks, some of the icon centerbacks have been down in price since these leaks came out that these SBCs were coming. Look at Rio. Rio was 790, like 800,000 coins. The leaks started coming out for Piquet. It's really on like Thursday and Friday. He's down at 700,000 coins flat, right? I think Baby Kanavaro has been impacted as well. 530k. Again, he was 600,000 coins on Thursday before these leaks started to come out. One more that I've seen as well has dropped off a lot is Baby Desai. Right? And it's crazy to, okay, Desai, no, he's still pretty low, right? Because he was 900k on Thursday. Now, he's down in the 780s and 790s. It's crazy to see some of these drops. He was 750 yesterday. Goodness me. That's crazy. So, centerbacks across this entire game are getting hurt right now in price because of these SBCs and because of the basically what you call supplementary goods, right? A new card has come onto the game that replaces an item that was formally very OP and very popular and very used. And people are now choosing the new item over the old one but this new item is only here for a certain amount of time. So, that's why I would just encourage you to watch around the centerback market a little bit on the game and try to find, you know, some of those icons even like the Kanavaro that's dropped off. I know their impacts, but they're icons, right? So, I do think that unless there's a huge market crash in the coming days, which unless EA pulls something out, you know, crazy content-wise, I don't really expect that to happen. Unless there's a huge market crash, I would expect to see some of those centerbacks, especially Premier League ones, you know, maybe like that Marquinhos inform. Some of the most popular and meta, again, it's all about the popularity and cards that people have used so much already in this game that are out of pack special cards in particular. I think you would see some of those bouncing back into the next week or so as the Sula and the PK hype kind of dies down a little bit. So, you maybe saw the peak of that panic selling on those centerbacks yesterday, right after they were released, like seeing this Tiago Jalo. I know he's in packs again at the moment, which is making his price go down a lot more. But for the out of packs ones, you maybe saw the peak of that panic. But if you see prices get really low again today on Sunday, that could be another opportunity to pick some of those centerbacks up as an investment or buy one for your team, maybe sell it later on this next week. So, I hope that helps out a lot kind of because that kind of movement on this market happens a ton, right? We try to explain things when they happen and as they happen. But you're going to see this happen time and time again on this game. You know, it's not just with showdown SBCs. Like again, we talked about the Gelson Martin's SBC, that impacted the market a lot. Anytime there's a good value SBC that is released, right? It's got to be good value because if people are not doing the SBC, then you're not going to have any of those market movements happening. But since these are two players that don't get used that often because they're not meta, EA made them meta. It's very interesting for a lot of people and you know, the price isn't half bad. People are crafting them with fodder they already have in their club. So, it's got some hype, right? And that's why you're seeing the movements happen on this game. I'm really just, I'm curious to see if EA has any other crazy content planned today on Sunday. There's really not any leaks, not any information that we hear or any cards or SBCs we're expecting. I'm just expecting the mini release and some more lighting rounds and some more packs. And yeah, the EA just kind of wants it to chill, I guess right now. They really don't want this market to crash. That is what it seems. So, if anything changes, of course, we'll be covering it and we'll be watching that very closely. But it just seems to be like a good market for a quick flipping at the moment, right? Especially with the center backs that have moved or any of those cards that link, right? Again, we talked about the Tersteg and we talked about the Alfonso Davies. Those cards could continue to go a little bit higher today. Potentially. I know they're up so much already. But again, if there's really not too much else going on, these cards are really rare and people are using and linking those new items with these cards. So again, they're up so much in price, but I mean, really, the only thing stopping them is EA dropping some more content and the gameplay demand like going down. So I honestly see like this Tersteg and maybe going up a little bit more today. You know, the Alfonso Davies may be going up a little bit more. So keep an eye on some of that stuff as well. The links to Suley and Piguet will be very interesting for a slight rise again today on this game. I think Upgrade Packs will be tomorrow and then more content team in the group stage may be wrote to the knockout related later on this week. So that is the video for today, boys. All right. If you did enjoy, make sure to hit a thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new. It has been Nathan Ford Accountant. I will catch you guys later. Peace out.


We had four or five officers here. Traffic, everybody paid attention to what was going on, school zone lights are on, seemed like everybody was paying attention and trying to be careful this morning. With 1.19 here, it's a 55 mile an hour zone and it's a high traffic area, especially in the mornings, people commuting to work and with all the traffic coming in, there's only one entrance and one exit to the Mullins and Pike Central, so that really congests traffic. So just really need to be careful coming through here in the mornings and in the afternoons. I know the Sheriff's Office is taking an active role in, with the county schools, being out and being visible, SROs and all the schools now, and we're going to be out for the next couple of weeks with traffic control at all the schools.


Can do it one two three it works. Yeah. Yeah, that's yours work, too Caltered for yes one two three one two three Look where this is going can we continue Well, we just said officially the slot starts at 350 right and if we start ten minutes early and people are actually Unless if anybody waits for us, I mean Shall we go ahead of time? You get more questions as a bonus towards the end It's a good point, too Sounds good. We'll do it All right folks quick question because obviously you can hear by our accent And I'm sure you have guests by our names that we are not from Chicago Any any Austrians in the house Any Austrians now we're the only one over there. Oh, yeah, so what do you do? Okay Have you been to Austria? You should so do we get anybody that is at least a little bit closer has anybody been to Austria before define Austrian, right? Sweden count oh My god, we have a different problem than backstage. You hear this off Awesome, so we are from the lovely country of Austria. It's not Australia. We always say cows not kangaroos Some other facts that people may not know about Austria Red Bull is Austrian Even though I think to be honest, I think Mr. Matt the sheets who passed away like two years ago But he kind of screwed his business partner from Thailand back then and he became really famous with it But still we claim the fame. What else do we have our most what's in a car obviously? Mozart Mozart Beethoven even though is German The winner schnitzel Yeah Here we go All about food so exactly but we're not here to talk about food We're here to talk about backstage and the way we are going to do this We have kind of two parts Wolfgang you will bring us through the kind of the journey From backstage at diner trace and then I in the end kind of wrap it up with a little bit of the observability aspect of backstage because we are an observability company and I do a lot of Advising around observability of platforms From engineers, I want to just bring in my perspective but I Want to push it over to you now because I think you have a great story to tell and a good analogy of our journey towards backstage Awesome. Yeah, thank you and thanks for the internet actually I think this is a historic moment since even though we've been working together for over 10 years It's the first time you're in stage together. It's interesting. Anyway, thanks for for joining us and putting up with our rambling I've two acknowledgements or two to things to acknowledge first if you've read the abstract as another colleague mentioned in the guy called Beirnth, so hi if you watch the recording unfortunately, he couldn't make it here. That's why we have Andy and The second thing to mention is back then when we put together the abstract and came up with the title How am I big backstage improved developer efficiency of a thousand plus engineers. We might have been a bit overly optimistic with the speed of our backstage adoption and have to be honest that we're not quite there yet We're on a pretty good trajectory. I would say But yeah, we haven't yet met that number. So if you're here because of that share below story, unfortunately I I have to disappoint you Anyway, speaking of acknowledges, I didn't want to Go with that. It's a marathon not a sprint thing I wanted to compare it with my wonderful cobit project that did together with my wife Tiling my basement floor, which was also a thing. I expected to be done much sooner than it actually did So that is we've got that going for us um So yeah In this case, let's suit up put on the schwarzenegger gear and get started so how how we started on our Move and on our path towards establishing a developer portal at dino trees um Few years ago dino trees was a company where pretty much all of the devs were working in a few large Monorapos you push code either to the agent part, which is the stuff running on our customer side Or to the server side part, which was a or is a huge monorapo consisting of 260 gradle projects and You didn't have to worry about anything. It just pushed the code in there Versioning was done delivery was done. Um, also hotfixes and so on all of that was already cared for um There are downsides to that over time the project kept growing and growing We had to put in by my effort to keep it fast and maintain it And eventually there was the time when Dino trees decided we want to move towards the dino trees platform and um, that is a New project product where um, we provide apps that are built on top of the platform And the home work for us was I was back then in the team that was a central part of dino trees where we maintained the Internal ci is the infrastructure provided a lot of guidance around how to build and test stuff And the challenge for us was how to keep up with that back then in previous times creating a new project For needed somebody to create the repository create the Jenkins build create some basic build scripts That didn't happen too often so it was fine to do the manually and then we had to figure out how we can keep up with that And for us that year was in about mid 2020 um Let's write something on our own where we can do templating because backstage was Just released. What did we hear earlier march 2020? So we decided not to go with that brand new project that we didn't fully trust at that time But decided to roll with our own and we called it the project initializer It was a tool that you could use to create a template That did all the repository creation templating and so on for you We had a couple of nice features in there We are uh, if a template changes you get updates On your project that you created in the form of a pull request for example We had an approval feature in there. So if somebody wanted to start something somebody had to approve it And that worked. Um, so we were heading Not really towards chaos, but um, it was used quite frequently and people were happy with it But it showed that we were lacking something we were very focused as I said on on the templating on the scaffolding and eventually we realized, okay Let let's stop that We saw the templating is not enough There were so many open questions that we couldn't answer with the tool that we had provided and the question was Do we want to invest further into improving our home ground tooling or do we want to move towards backstage? And since we were at backstage con and not initializer con, I guess you can imagine how that Decision turned out. So we got together in that group of of people running that internal Team we call it engineering productivity. So the guys that are working on on our Jenkins and build infrastructure and so on And we said, um, what do we want to know where do we start again? My tiles in the basement where to start we start at the door So we started at the beginning like a lot of other companies as we also heard today Ownership the big question who is responsible for something in the component or a service who is taking care about it Which resources do we need which apis are used or where is the documentation? Where is it actually deployed? I'm a build screen. Where can I find the self monitoring data? All of that was something we couldn't really answer with the tooling we had So we decided to move towards backstage In our case now we have a screenshot of backstage itself Where we have all of those things covered. We have ownership. We have a link to our self monitoring We have the documentation linked from here Yeah, and the other plugins for CI CD monitoring for the docker images together with the security Vulnerability sensor on we have to then use as well The great thing was that at this time we didn't only adopt it in our own Team and in that group of of engineering productivity folks, but also teams from the In that case the active gates one of the dynatris components Also started to adopt it and on board the the services and the projects in there. So that was pretty cool We also moved on to integrate existing tools The dynatris we have something called dynatris teams Which is a web application that we can use to navigate The organizational structure of dynatris. So you can look for users you can look for teams and of course we didn't want to maintain that structure again in backstage So we built an integration to sync everything in there, which was already quite a cool achievement then that you can see a team from teams What what is owned by this team and and didn't have to worry about getting the users in there getting the right team name in there and so We also use tech overflow for example, so we also integrated that with our with the surgeon in backstage So in that the engineering productivity group, we were quite happy and we thought okay How to grow how to continue with with my tiles and how to how to go on with that And we had a couple of conversations that pretty much went this way with We've got something. It's called backstage. Why don't they use it and the response more often than not what was why What do I get from it? That took us a bit by surprise so Again, we put our heads together and defined a bit of a process for us where we said that that also came together with my Role change towards a product manager. So I said, okay, let's treat it like like a product. Let's look at it a bit more Product oriented identify the stakeholders we want to work with think about the user journey is what are they doing What are they supposed to do? Are we solving the problems that they actually have and then start small and iterate once again, we looked at our Dynatris platform and Try to figure out which part we can contribute most which part of that Platform is the one where we would have the most impact And it was the the top level called the Dynatris apps Where we want to support with self-service solutions and more automation for creating and maintaining apps So for that part of the product there is a Documentation page called developer Dynatris come Where you can see how you can write an app, okay? And we want to automate that so we want to provide a workspace template to train and triggers the ripple creation via A github's approach for github and then we want to move towards an automatic deployment in our development environment Provisioning a workspace in the remote IDE so we use github for that So the idea is to be able to start the app get the repo and immediately connect to the to the workspace in github And also set up the self-monitoring automatically However, there are a few hurdles on that way that I would like to talk about now So on the one hand as we started initially with our initializer There are a lot of existing projects that we need to onboard and that is Manual effort that needs to be done So in our case once again for the apps and the app uses an SDK and the SDK depends on an api There are already a few of that and Now manually creating all the cataloging for the sense that we don't want to do We built some initial automation How we can onboard them and how we can get them into backstage But there is one of the bigger hurdles right now that we need some automation to really Consistently automate not only the SDK onboarding, but also the app onboarding the apps are amp-amp based So there is a lot of info already in the package chase They will also like to use to put it right in the in the backstage catalog The other thing that we saw with onboarding when people are doing it It can be quite difficult To get the format right So what we consistently try to educate people on is to use the entity validator to see If the format is correct and also have the entity checks right Visible next to the component to see that Whatever you put in is complete and fulfills the needs that we have The people that just come in and think why are they already talking because officially the talk started two minutes ago We have a little bit ahead of time here in the conference and we started early. So we have more time for questions And you can also ask what did we miss in the first 10 minutes? Well, we can give you the recording I guess right We'll just tell you again. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So first hurdle was manual effort for onboarding. The second hurdle is That we have a need for more complex templating workflows So as I said earlier, we had our own approach to templating in our initializer which had couple of features One of them also was to be able to wait for Something to happen in another system. For example, that was where we built our approval on top So you could create the pull request and somebody had to approve it Which is something that we can't do right now in backstage So there is an open GitHub issue where we're also planning to contribute to make To enable gates in templates to make it possible to wait for a PR to be merged for For a user to provide input also for some other resources to be created for example Right now, this is what's limiting us from adopting backstage further since in a lot of cases we depend on Some github's approach So that means that in order to proceed with the templating or with the scaffolding we need to be able to wait for a PR and Yeah, that is something that we will have to invest in And last but not least what we saw is especially during that initial phase when when we started to use backstage There was some some good traction to our teams that were looking into it quite quite early And then we changed something and something didn't work anymore And then we changed something again and people were not really frustrated, but there was a certain degree of feedback like You want us to use it don't break it all the time and we said Yeah, okay, that's actually a nice thing and that is where I'd like to hand over to Andy to talk about Why observability matters in that case Cool. So uh, Wolfgang you basically as you said earlier you changed your role From what you did a couple years ago to then kind of like a product management role where your product is The idp or the back backstage and you want to make sure that this product Is actually running and is adopted and you want to make sure everything works smoothly exactly my PM role i'm responsible for the internal processes that take Code from development to production based on on our platform and Backs to choose a key component of that quick show of hands who in the room here Is responsible for running backstage and also making sure it keeps running and it keeps your users happy All right, are you guys Monitoring and observing how your backstage is running how it is used who is using it Yeah, just a little fewer hands. Hopefully Uh, a couple of tips that I have first of all for us Yeah, I like so la la maybe Maybe we are monitoring means when people start screaming at my door, then I know something is wrong That's an an an approach, but not the best one. So The the test that that's kind of we or I try to figure out in before this talk is how can we make backstage observable? fortunately We have a lot of observability opportunities, especially on kubernetes. I'm sure I don't need to remind you What open telemetry is what prometheus is that you have a lot of logs that are created kubernetes events One of the things that I really enjoy and I learn a lot from This is just a little commercial to is it observable dot i o one of our colleagues henrik His mission is to actually look at all of the different technology in the cloud native space Where that's open telemetry prometheus logs to make things like service meshes to make things like Critical components to our platform like backstage and others observable and then use this data to answer critical questions Like is it available all the time? How many users are using it? Can we optimize the performance and what about all the other depending systems because backstage is not a standalone island It needs other systems and when they are down then we all have a problem So to give you just a couple of tricks and also what we use internally One of the things we do is we're detecting Based on the logs that backstage creates common misconfigurations and misusage right, I think you mentioned earlier that People might get frustrated if all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work as expected The question is is the system the problem? What a way to use the system? And so what we have here is just like based on Based on rules that you can also apply Whatever log analytic solution you have Assuming you have logs if you get the logs from backstage you pull it into a log analytic solution You can extract exactly these Top problems that we have seen in our organization as it comes to backstage And you can then use this data to say hey Either you have templates that are simply wrong and somebody's using the wrong templates So you need to fix the templates or somebody's using the templates wrong which results into errors and you want to also avoid that Log data can give you this information. By the way, we share the slides later on So you can obviously take a picture of these queries and of these examples But we'll also share it so it will be easier so very Simple figure out if something is wrong in backstage based on configuration The next thing and this is a very simple one I've been working in observability for the last 15 years And we have some very simple means to validate Things like is the service up and running Some simple things like a synthetic monitor So looking at the focus again that raised your hands earlier that are responsible for backstage You need to treat backstage as any other business critical system that you have whether it's your company.com Where you actually make money Backstage is as important because your developers are very critical We heard earlier how costly it is to lose developers if they are getting frustrated And developers with cost a lot of money too So you want to make sure they are productive and they can use the tools Therefore setting up a simple synthetic monitor, which whatever tool you have that tells you is backstage up and running So you don't need to wait for people knocking on the door or Leave in the company because their productivity is not good because of all these tools So a simple synthetic monitor is really easy to set up whatever as many tools out there We obviously use our own product, but you can use whatever you want. Just a good tip Next thing is really use a monitoring. You said you want to know who is using it, right? Because you're talking with people you talk to the our development platform team I mean that for the for the developing damage with apps And you want to then actually know are people actually using it? Where do people From which different engineering locations as you can see here We are we're heavily engineering is heavily based in europe and in austria and in poland So we can actually use really use a monitoring data to figure out if our colleagues are really going to backstage And what they're doing in backstage are they really using the latest features that we've just pushed out through an internal blog post through an internal educational meeting Another tip Sorry, not only for monitoring whether people are actually using it But also to have some metric to to track usage And also to be able to argue why we invest in that area Why we we have to have something like backstage to have a developer portal if nobody is using it Okay Why why don't we put all the effort in and that's why it's really helpful to be able to track the adoption In in in one place. Sorry. No, that's good. That's Then the other thing is From a performance perspective I'm sure you're all frustrated if you try to use a tool and it takes forever To load and it doesn't do the job. So performance Optimization is as equally important to tools like backstage or any other tools you have on your platform Then for your business critic lab So you can leverage Your real user monitoring data You can leverage your built-in browser tools to actually figure out why are things slowing very slow to load And then combine this with what you mentioned earlier open telemetry to figure out what is slow within backstage Maybe there's a problem on backstage itself or the depending components and coming to the depending components Backstage is not an island that is on its own because it needs and depends on many other systems So what you see here is one of the visualizations of a distributed trace So what you should figure out is how do you get your open telemetry data? From backstage to all the other tools it connects to So that you have enough evidence to ac. Oh my god, we just introduced a couple of plugins They all now have dependencies to tools. We've never thought about You actually see where things slow down where things break Because if you are bringing backstage into the organization, you're not only responsible for Backstage that little component, but you're responsible for the end-to-end experience That you provide to your developers and that includes everything from backstage to get to whatever else you are connecting with backstage And I think with this it's a hopefully a couple of observability tips and tricks remember logs you can Figure out misconfiguration Setting up a synthetic monitor to validate that your backstage is up and running And if it's not up and running then you can react proactively and not wait until developers knock on your door Then figure out who is actually adopting it uh, and then Performance optimization is a good thing and making sure that you understand all of the dependencies Every plugin will make your deployment more complex also more powerful, but also more complex And with this hopeful this is good enough great data for a product manager like you To actually that is responsible for something like backstage To then not only build a beautiful product, but also to get the adoption up and with this Finish your project and and see where we go next and what we what we do next. Yes Okay, thank you So we have reached the stage where we can Think about putting Stuff back in Um, what are the next steps? What what do we put in so for us? It will be more automation supporting the onboarding for npm based apps So as I said our apps that we we would like to see in backstage We are working on the prerequisites to make sure that we are actually able to Also cover the various aspects when it comes to sdks and other other libraries that are that are needed Second for us is extending the templating capabilities So the gating I talked about to enable backstage to wait for prs Before proceeding with the templating to allow us to proceed with our github to use cases And the third internal topic is establishing backstage as the cornerstone for developing Internal dynatris apps based on the tool chain that we provide around github and github actions So what are the key takeaways? First as I said it's important to treat the idp like a product not As maybe we did earlier think think about it like something that is working as a side project and Takes us to the second take away build it and they will come does not work at least in our case. We've seen that The the intrinsic drive of people to change the behavior is is not as high as as we expected Third for me was except that it takes time It is a huge change when it comes to adopting and adapting the workflows in the company in the dev team Not to act too intrusive and maybe get adverse reactions It is important to also acknowledge that it is a huge change and that that takes time and the fourth is Apply observability in the same way as you do on your business apps. As I said, it's a product I have to treat it like one and then take it seriously Here are codes for the feedback is up with that we come to the end My basement is done. I can put my bike back in and my lemon tree which has died in the meantime Anyway, that's it from us. Thank you. If you have any questions, we have time left Thank you for gone Do we have any questions? Hi, thanks for a good presentation. How long did this journey take for you? Um After realizing that we don't want to continue with our internal development efforts We started deploying backstage. I think mid last year. So a bit over a year, I would say in the tiles project Sorry How long the tiles project the tile project a lot the tile project the tile project that that started in December 2019 and I think the last thing was done in june. So that was also longer than expected But I realized that Things take time. You have to let it set you have to dry stuff and so it was I underestimate it Any other questions? I have the mic There was a part where you're talking about like your onboarding workflow and things like Once the process changes, right as it evolves, how do you keep? How do you keep things in line for the apps that have already applied the old workflows or the old skeletons? How do you make sure that as you evolve the workflows and onboarding you keep those apps that already applied them Inline with the new changes because that's a big problem that we have that we don't have solutions for That is also one thing we are We are working on right now in our old system, which was used for a lot of these apps already. We have the way to Take updates that are done on the template and pushed it out to ensure the things are in line with what we change on the Templating side Currently our approach is more to move towards renovate to extract things that we want to keep in line to some library that we can update Either for example as a Jenkins shared pipeline library or with our move towards GitHub actions To separate it there and to be able to update this not why are why are actually changing the template But by extracting that from the template and making it a normal version update that you can do through other mechanisms But would be interesting to learn more how you're tackling that maybe we can chat afterwards Any other questions? Yeah, i'm just curious with your With with implementing backstage and dynatrace are you just displaying the dynatrace info in backstage or are you Actively creating some kind of processor to create a dependency graph Or how how do you how do you utilize that within your org? I think that was actually more a question towards you Yeah, i feel if you're talking about how we bring our observability data from our product back in so we actually had Tell us is one of our customers in like a telecom in in canada. They started Like a year or so ago building a plugin For backstage to bring in dynatrace data. They actually now contributed that plugin to dynatrace So we now to go with that plugin and we will extend it to bring in more information like we as you I'm not sure. I guess you know dynatrace. Maybe yeah, so we have our dependency model We have mostly have Our metrics logs and traces so our goal is that we bring exactly the time the relevant observability data Onto the right components in backstage so that you don't have to always Find this data and dynatrace, but you get it and there's a plugin already out there And as i said, it was initially developed by tell us They contributed or they pushed it back to dynatrace and now we're taking over and we have a certain Maybe we'll be interested to have a discussion because I can then bring it back to our product team to see what your thoughts are Any other questions? So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you


Okay, for our next talk, we have Lukas Klammer who will be talking to us about Horizon EDA. This is our fourth EDA package of the day. You should consider yourself incredibly fortunate, and let's hear round of applause for Lukas. So welcome everyone to my talk on Horizon EDA. So for those who don't know yet, Horizon is a full-featured EDA package for PCB design. That's everything from library management to schematic entry, PCB layout, and 3D export. So this talk marks the release of version 1.0 after about three years of development, and like this talk as an opportunity to take a look back and see what decisions drove the development in the past three years. So when starting, I had to make a few decisions up front that would ultimately guide the rest of the development. So first and foremost was keeping it simple. Since an EDA package of that complex, of that size is something inherently complex, so most of the work was basically keeping complexity low enough. So and that meant not having any funky class hierarchies in the inner core data model, since for example, mirroring a symbol and mirroring a package on the board is something that takes very different operations. Keeping simple also meant, keeping direct mapping from user interface to data, as I think that if the user interface and the data model are aligned, then that really helps to keep complexity down and avoid bugs in that regard. Since I was starting from scratch, I decided to do a breadth-first implementation. So basically implement something that's usable for all aspects so that I could validate my architecture and get feedback early on. So I didn't like develop the schematic editor from start to finish. And then I think about the board editor, I developed a minimum viable version of every component first. That also implied not being afraid to rewrite stuff, since that project is a learning experience for me, a code that was written some time ago, now isn't that good anymore since I now know more stuff. And last but not least, having fun is also an important part, since I'm not getting paid for this, I'll have to keep myself motivated and having fun is the best way to do so. So that wrapped the back time back to September 2016. That's when the first commit happened, not public yet. At that time, I decided to write the program in Python and see for the OpenGL rendering, since that's what I knew at that time. And I started with the simple editor, since the plan was to have more or less the same editor for everything from symbol to schematic and board and so on. And symbol was the one that had these dependencies. That went for about a month or so until I got fed up with Python's weeks typing. So I decided to scrap that and rewrite everything in C. It only lasted for about a month as well, since I then got fed up by G object, since I used GDK for the UI and tried to pass my own data type through a G object callback, and I just couldn't be bothered to do this. So I decided to give that C++ thing a try and was pleasantly surprised. So in November, I got the symbol and schematic editor done, and at that time the schematic editor already had all the stuff it has today, like knowing about nets and buses and so on. So pretty good actually. Then in December 2016, everything that required layers like pads like package and board came, and I also made it to run Windows, which mostly involved some wrappers for UIT stuff, and on that year, I met Raphael from the Libre PCB project. He's also here, and I talked about the project with him since I saw the Libre PCB on the Congress Wiki that year, and he encouraged me to release it since I was a bit hesitant due to the audio state. In January 2017, I cleaned some things up and wrote text editors for some of the non-graphical stuff like entities and units that defined the pins of a part and put it on GitHub. And so that's what it looked like then, the schematic editor, so many things are still that way today, and the board editor as well. So the first thing that happened after the release was adding a project manager, since back then you had to launch each editor from the command line, which was a bit unconvenient for many users. And in May 2017, I then added DRC since you basically can't live without DRC if you wanted to do an actual board, and my approach for doing this was to just dump the whole board as polygons, and then use the excellent Clipper library to just offset and intersect the polygons, and that was a pretty easy and correct way to get DRC running. Then in June 2017, I added the parametric padstacks and packages, since up until that point, you had to draw each padstack individually, so if you wanted to have a pad of different size you had to redraw it, and I sort of set by adding a small stack-based language that modified the padstack in place so that the user can just type in the dimensions as usual. And September 2017 was a pretty big month since I added the pool manager that allowed for managing all of the library elements without CLI at all, and I also managed to integrate KCAD Router, which was about 2,000 lines of code on my side, and like 20,000 from the KCAD Router, and so that was a pretty good return of investment, since the KCAD Router really helps to make the board editor actually usable for actual projects. In October, then came Copper Plains and a 3D view that at that time only could show the board without any packages, and that was mostly driven by me wanting to do OpenGL the proper way, so actual 3D, then just the 2D rendering for schematic and board, and that view just works by dumping the board as polygons and triangulating them and rendering them, so pretty basic stuff, and I think it was also less than 2,000 lines of code. Since the 3D view is pretty much ornamental without packages showing, I added step import and end export, and for the import, I used the code, the OpenCascade, with the code from PyCAD to use OpenCascade to triangulate, to convert a step model into triangles, and then render that, and the step export was adapted from KCAD to step. April 2018, then saw the start of a master thesis, which was an X-plane transmitter, so a moderately complex design with FPGAs, and DTA converters to differential pairs, and about 10 gigahertz in output frequency, so that was the first real-world project, that was also not too simplistic. That then motivated me to speed up DRC by making it multi-threaded, which was pretty easy, since DRC just involves intersecting polygons, and there are quite many of them, so just spawn threads and let them do the work, that helped a lot, and then also added export for bill of materials, and later in that year, I unified the pull-in project manager, since users ran the TAPI that they had two entry points for the application, and now we only have one application, they then click on the desktop as they expected. And October 2018, also configurable colors, since users were complaining about the color scheme, not suiting their preferences, and I didn't want to force my taste on everyone else, so I decided to make it configurable, so that could have happened, so users might wish for that earlier, but it was one of the things that wasn't that much fun, so it had to wait for a while. January 2018, or January 2019, then saw some other improvements, such as parametric search in the pool, since with that many passives in there, you will need to have a proper way to search for them, and my approach for doing this was to add a parametric search at your SNL from distributors, and so you can search capacitors by value and tolerance and so on. I then also added a proper PDF export, actually PDF export has been in there since more or less day one, but that just exported what was sent to OpenGL, so if you had a polygon, you got triangles in the PDF, and the new PDF export actually exports polygons and also makes text searchable, and adds a proper table of content, so you can easily navigate your sheets, and I also added the incremental pool update, since if you change something, it had to rescan all the files to update them into the SQLite database, and that took 10 to 15 seconds each time you edited something, and with that change it just updated what actually changed, since for the first implementation, the focus was on getting it correct and not fast, and then I decided to add more speed with that one. So in November 2019, I then added the part info API from Kitspace, so that you can see the stock at DigiKey and other distributors right in the part browser, so you know which parts are actually on the shelf, especially important for passives, where there are quite a lot with similar specs, and you want to pick that one that has the most stock. And last but not least, and so now we are at the present date, in January 2020 or February, where after exactly three years since the public commit, I released version 1.0, so since we are now at the current date, I'd like to talk a bit about something else, namely taking care of dependencies, since pretty much every other open source project, Horizon EDA wouldn't have been possible without dependencies, and I think it's an imperative for every open source developer to treat their dependencies as part of their project, since if the dependency has a bug and you just complain to you, you can't tell them it's the dependencies fault, they want you to fix it. There are actually quite a numerous bugs that got fixed as a direct consequence of my development on Horizon EDA, so the most important one that GTK is an open GL area, which I rely heavily on for displaying schematic boards and basically everything broke in very strange ways when your application had one then more window open that had a GL area in them, took quite a while to debug, but eventually fixed it, and another Windows later thing was Lipkid 2 that had a regression that broke, that made a tech fault due to reallot input path, that was also quite interesting to debug, and a rather odd bug was that 0MQ, which I use for IPC, I decided to use the current locale when formatting port numbers, so when the current locale at that time was set to locale that had a thousand separators, the port number would include a thousand separators, which would then break everything, and that was also quite easy to get fixed, and not a direct dependency, but I noticed that Ccache, which I use for speeding up compilation, stopped recognizing the headers, and that was also a regression that got unnoticed, but was also quite easy to fix, and in general my whole experience in dealing with the other projects was quite positive, since I was always able to provide a very concise test case, and that they were easy to fix. So you might be wondering what's next, that might be a bit un-exciting, since my development will go on as usual with no really big banks plans so far, so I'll do what's on my mind and what users suggest, and that's it, and now we have time for questions. So the question was how I imported the bits and pieces from Kaikai I use, I just copy pasted their code in there, and made a few adjustments to make it compatible in my environment, but it's not linked in any way, so I'll have to update it manually, and there also was a, related to that, there was a bug in the router that made it not recognize large clearances, I noticed that bug, it took me a few hours to fix it, the next day I had a look at Kaikai's commit history and found that they fixed the bug a few months ago. How have users responded to your policy of only including orderable parts in the library? Okay, so the question was how users have responded to my policy of only including orderable parts in the library, for the response have been a bit mixed, somewhere a bit, some found it a bit too restrictive, but I think it really makes a bomb export a lot easier. Yes, so since I am from Stuttgart, and there, okay, so the question is if there were any projects done with it, they weren't done by me, so at Stuttgart there's at the duale Hochschule, there's a Formula Student team that built electric race cars, and since a year or so they're using Horizon EDA for their board work. So what should Kaikai look to import from Horizon? So the question was what Kaikai could learn from Horizon EDA, so I think that's a bit a difficult question to answer since my decision for not working on Kaikai and starting my own project was like that I wasn't as same as with library, I wasn't satisfied with the library concept and that's something that you pretty much can't import since it's the very foundation of the program and if you change that, that wouldn't be Kaikai anymore, and so some things that might be, so as Clement suggested, might be the length tuner, I unfortunately don't have a slide for it, but it gives you a progress bar like indication of many tracks, so that allows you to easily tune differential buses. So the question was if there's a migration path to import Kaikai projects, unfortunately not, so but what you can import is packages. So since the projects at the current state mostly developed by me and my time is limited, so I think I can spend my time otherwise that's more productive. So I think it's most, so the question was what third import options are on the roadmap, so I think what makes most sense is to import library elements like symbols and packages. So right now the package import works quite well and I'm looking into doing the doing a symbol import, so Kaikai would be would be the biggest option since their file format is pretty reasonable.


I would now like to introduce Jennifer Milne. Jennifer is the senior research program officer for the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Strategic Energy Alliance at Stanford University. Jennifer will facilitate our session on bio inspired solutions for carbon and introduce the two speakers over to you Jennifer. Thank you. You know this workshops about hybrid solutions and engineered solutions. And as you'll see the biochar David's going to talk about is quite clearly in the hybrid because it has an engineered component to it. But one of the most important aspects that underlines a lot of these hybrid solutions we talk about our soils. But without being able to measure or monitor or verify the amount of carbon that we actually sequester and that stays there, implementing soils on a global scale for carbon management. It's not really going to be one of the things we can do with integrity without those. So Pete is going to talk about almost everything else except for biochar to do with soils. And he's going to talk about one of the most important aspects which is monitoring and reporting and verifying the carbon that we can actually sequester in these soils and he's going to give some real world examples. Now with David's talk he's going to touch on a platform that he that actually exists on bioenergy and biochar so as most of you will probably know biochar can be used to supplement soils to increase carbon in some some instances. He's going to talk about some of the details there and talk about some of the products that we can get with that some of the energy products. So with that, I'll introduce David. He's a professor. David Laird is a professor in the Department of Agronomy and Environmental Science at Iowa State University. He's his research interests are mainly in the use of pyrolysis and today he'll talk about fast pyrolysis to process biomass into bioenergy and biochar and co-products. And also talk about biochar amendments to soil and what that can do for soil quality. And I'll also just introduce Pete just now so that we have a smooth transition going between the speakers. So Pete Smith is a professor at Aberdeen University in Scotland. He his main expertise is in modeling greenhouse gas and carbon mitigation, bioenergy, biological carbon sequestration and global food systems modeling and greenhouse gas removal technologies so you can see their full bios on on the website but these are at the top of their fields and really the best folks to talk to us today about these subjects so with that David, do you want to start sharing your slides. Thank you Jennifer. First of all, I want to thank everyone for the opportunity to be part of this workshop and really exciting the last couple of days. And secondly, I want to acknowledge my collaborators in this effort, Robert Brown, who's Professor of mechanical engineering and expert in fast pyrolysis technology and Mark Wright, who's also mechanical engineering and is an expert in techno economic analysis. Yesterday, one of the biggest challenges we have to decarbonizing our economy are liquid transportation fuels, and in particular jet marine diesel fuels which cannot be easily displaced with electricity. There are relatively few options for obtaining these, one of which is biomass and the other of which of course is electric chemical production of CO2. And second point I want to make is the overall role of soil carbon in this system. There is as much carbon in the soils as there is in the biosphere atmosphere and upper ocean combined. On an annual basis, around 120 gigatons of carbon removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis and another 120 returned to the atmosphere through combined effects of plant respiration and soil microbial respiration. So in any system to address climate change to remove carbon, we need to think about whether carbon is exiting or exiting the soil or entering the soil to address this challenge. This takes me to what's called the paralysis biochar bioenergy platform, which is somewhat analogous to BEX. It's envisioned as a broadly distributed network of relatively small pyrolysis, using a bio crude, which can then be sent to a refinery for production of liquid transportation fuels, and a biochar co product, which would be returned locally to the soils, ideally from which the biomass is harvested. And in so doing would recycle plant nutrients potassium calcium magnesium phosphorus that are harvested with the biomass, and at the same time provide a highly calcitrate carbon to build and enhance soil quality. This has the potential to initiate a positive feedback system in which we enhance soil carbon sequestration at the same time generating a liquid fuels which are critically needed. The enabling technology is known as auto thermal fast. Fast pyrolysis has certainly been around for a long time. But two new innovations have made this move this to the forefront. First of which is auto thermal operation, which means titrating in just enough oxygen to make the reaction exothermic. This solves the transfer problem and allows a seven X scale up of the biomass throughput the feedstock without any change in the size of the reactor. The second advancement involves various stage fractionation technologies, which allows the physical isolation of a sugar fraction predominantly liberal Gulkasson, which can be in first generation plants for meted to make ethanol and later generation plants can be used to make polymers solvents and other products. A phenolic oil fraction, which in first generation plants can be used directly for the production of bio asphalt, and in second generation plants can be stabilized by hydrogenation and then shipped to a existing oil refinery and turned into drop in jet marine and diesel fuels. There is also an acetate fraction, which is relatively low value, but does have some potential applications either is generating thermal energy or production of other products. And finally, of course, there's the biochar fraction, which I mentioned before, and which is critical in making the overall harvesting of biomass sustainable. Techno economic analysis by Mark Wright suggests that a 250 ton per day plant can reach about a break even cost of production when the knowledge oil is selling for around $500 per megagram, which is in the mid range of current prices for So the technology David, David, I'm sorry to step in. This is Evan, your audio is cutting in and out. Could I get you Oh, I see. Okay, yeah, could I get you to just help still. Yeah, it'll probably help, but it's fine still loose cable. So, so just try not to knock the cable too much. Okay, sorry about that. Thank you so no sorry. The, the economic analysis does not include a significantly more economical. 250 ton a day plant is also what all of these plants would be highly carbon negative, because they are thermic reactions so they're not requiring any fuel. The biochar itself gets a high long term credit. If you're making a bio asphalt there's at least potential for carbon credit for that if the phenolic fraction is turned into diesel or jet than that zeroes out. And briefly the reason we're looking at a 250 ton per day scale is because of the, well certainly economies of scale that increase with plant size, but at the same time there is a negative cost associated with biomass harvest storage transport logistics. So about a 250 ton per day plant is about where those two lines cross for at least corn stover in the Midwest, it will vary by feedstock. Turning to biochar. There is a first point is that there has been an enormous growth in literature with over 17,000 publications in the last 15 years. And emerging from this is a broad consensus that half life in excess of 100 years. It also enhances soil quality soil health in the physical sense by addressing bulk density soil porosity water retention chemical sense by recycling nutrients harvested with biomass and functioning as a liming agent. This has an impact on the biological properties of soil increasing nutrient cycling. There are of course a large number of gaps and I've just mentioned a few of them here. One of the key is the value proposition for farmers, many times, particularly in temperate regions there's little or no yield increase and tropical regions there's often more obvious yield increase. There are also management systems for very diverse soil climate crop systems, defining and greeting biochar system level LCA's and the last two priming and modeling, I will address in the next two slides. The second is the concept of getting a synergism here. This is an example study in which 7.25 mega grams of carbon biochar carbon were applied in 2011 came back 2017, and the total soil carbon had increased to about 14 mega grams. This 7.25 that was applied was essentially still there, and an additional 6.75 mega grams of carbon and accrued. And this is the result of a priming or negative priming phenomena, the fact that biochar functions to catalyze formation and stabilization of new soil organic matter. This means in a sense, the potential to almost double the carbon credit associated with the biochar. However, there's a question mark here and this is because the literature is not at all consistent. We've seen positive negative and other types of reactions and net zero reactions. So more basic research is needed. Secondly, I want to mention modeling first generation models are now available. In this example, predicting the probability of a crop yield increase across crop lands in the United States. However, the need is for a second generation modeling capability, in which we can start advising individual farmers with individual crops management systems on the optimum management process for biochar. This will be to summary. First of all that the paroluses biochar can provide critical jet marine and diesel fuels dropping. Secondly, this technology can be scaled to address the very serious logistics problems. Regarding biomass harvest storage and transport. Thirdly, and perhaps, most important is the fact that biochar has the potential, if done correctly to initiate a positive feedback system, what you sequester carbon in the soil, which enhances soil quality, which increases crop productivity increases carbon input to soil, which sequesters more carbon in the soil. This positive feedback has potential to increase the amount of biomass that can be sustainably harvested, going from maybe 50% crop residue to 75% crop residue being harvested. And at the same time can have an impact on food security food production by decreasing or perhaps better to say, slowing the increase in the amount of land area needed for food production. And of course, this is intrinsically located in rural communities and therefore has the potential to create jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities in those communities with that I thank you. Pete, are you ready to take it away. So you can see that full screen. What I'll be talking about today is soil carbon sequestration, the technology challenges. But as Jenny outlined in the, in the introduction at the beginning I'm not going to be talking about carbon sequestration per se. I'm talking mainly about some of the technology challenges for monitoring reporting and verification, which is the thing that's really preventing market penetration for soil carbon sequestration at the moment. So if we have a look at the technical potential, the reason we're looking at soils is because there's a large potential out there. So the technical potential for soil carbon sequestration is about 1.3 gigatons of carbon equivalence per year that's carbon not CO2. And the economic potential, if we just look at what's economic for between about 20, 100 US dollars per tonne of CO2 equivalence. It's around about 0.4 to 0.7 gigatons of carbon equivalence per year. And as you can see on this graph, which I've shown at the bottom, we've got some options that one over on the right, and the bottom, the bottom right hand corner is restoring histosol. So that's restoring peatlands. You get a very big bang for your buck there. There's a lot of carbon that you can avoid emissions and also sequester up to about 50 tons of carbon per hectare per year, but relatively small areas. So on the Y axis, you can see is the area of the practice that in millions of hectares that it could be applied to. So you got a few big ticket items, but available on fairly small areas. And then you over on the right over on the left hand side of the graph, you can see those that can be applied to very wide areas. But they have a lower mitigation potential per hectare. So this is where biochar application grazing land management, cropland management and those sorts of things fit in. So the technology is very mature in terms of knowing how to manage the soil and knowing what will increase the soil carbon. But the thing that's holding us up at the minute, as I'll explain in a moment, is mainly the MRV, the monitoring, reporting and verification. So in a paper on climate, climate smart soils, which came out in 2016 by Keith Paustian and colleagues. We looked at the what you can do to restore soil carbon. And we developed this decision tree, which basically you start at the top, have you got degraded or marginal land, you can restore it to perennial vegetation. If not, have you got drained cropped histosols? If not, if you have, you can restore wetland. If not, you go to look at your nutrient deficiency and so on and so forth. Most of these options are to do with increasing the carbon input to the soil or reducing the carbon losses through reducing the intensity of tillage and increasing the carbon inputs through things like improved crop rotations and deeper rooted species. So those, those are the sort of techniques that I'll not be talking about today. I'm now going to move on to the reason why it's not currently happening at the scale that it could be. There are a number of issues. So the first one is saturation. So as, as you, as you change your management practice from a low soil carbon level. For the first time step, say that's five or 10 years, you get a large increase in carbon stock. So that's quite a large removal of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. So the same same time step, so that's five or 10 years, you get gradually less and gradually less for the next time step until you reach a new equilibrium position. That could be between 20 and 100 years depending on the soil type and the climatic conditions. Basically it means, unlike carbon capture and storage where you can store the carbon for a long time, but you can just continue doing it and every year you store more carbon with all biological sinks and soils included and vegetation is the same. When you, sorry, when you increase the soil carbon, it will eventually reach new equilibrium position or saturation, whereby after that time, you no longer get an increase in soil carbon and you no longer get a net annual removal. The second issue is to do with non permanence or reversibility. Just a couple of examples here, a manure treatment on arable field and a woodland establishment. You can see them shown here in different colors. But this is what happens when it turns into low input cropland. This is from a long term experiment at Rothamstead, and you see the soil carbon plummets and drops down to close to its original level. We have a very strong reversibility issue there, which could either occur through management and not continuing management practice, or could occur through natural climate extremes and natural disasters. And the last thing is to do with leakage and displacement. So in these two examples, we're taking manure from a field which contains manure and mineral and we're moving it over to the field on the on the left. We're putting more manure on that field. So we increase the soil carbon sequestration in the left hand side, but we decrease the amount of carbon that's going on in the right hand side. The effect over the whole landscape is zero. So it's to do with just to do with making sure that we account for the whole land surface that we're not claiming credits where they don't exist. So all of these issues, saturation, permanence and liquid leakage and displacement, affects the effects of the confidence in soil carbon sequestration as a greenhouse gas removal technology or greenhouse gas removal option. So we have to find ways to show that the soil carbon is increasing and we have to find ways to verify that this is happening over large areas. So in a paper in 2020, in global change biology, we put together a list of what would be what would be the perfect soil verification system. In a couple of minutes walking through this, it's a complex diagram, but the most important thing is that all of these different components exist already. It's just that they don't exist everywhere in the world. They're not distributed equally in the world, and they don't all exist in the same place and they've not been pulled together. So what gives me heart from this is knowing that all this all these components are together is that we could pull these together into a monitoring verification reporting and verification platform. So the first the first component number one is the long term experiments of benchmark sites. We have several hundred of these around the world long term agronomic experiments, which look at the impact of a management change on soil carbon, and have real measurements over many decades up to 150 years in some cases of long term change nested within those number two are short term experiments which measure things like fluxes of carbon, and they investigate the processes and they're good for developing tools and calibrating models. Which brings us to the soil organic carbon and greenhouse gas models, which are good for monitoring and reporting. We've got that developed using all these two data sets that I've just gone through. They can either be used to develop tier two emission factors, or they can be used directly in a tier three method to directly model changes in soil carbon. We have all data to drive those models so data on climate soils and land cover and those will exist globally at quite fine spatial resolution and quite fine temporal resolution. So those are available. We need activity data. So that's just information about what the farmers are doing on the soil, what in the field and when. So activity data tends to be collected through agricultural statistics. And in the developed world in Europe and in North America, we tend to have really good statistics which are available spatially, which we can use but in the developing world. These are much more sparse. We also have soil sampling and resampling that goes on a grid, which can be used as an independent verification method to check that what we're looking at and what we what we what we think will change in the soil carbon are actually changing. So basically we have the remote sensing component, although you can't detect soil carbon directly from space, you can verify activity data, and you can calculate estimates of above ground biomass. So calculate the inputs to the soils to run your soil models. I said all of this information exists all of these components exist, but they're not yet brought together in a global system or even nationally in a national system to allow confident monitoring reporting and verification of soil carbon change. So at the time we were writing this paper, my friend and colleague Keith Paustian was writing exactly the same paper coming up with exactly the same conclusions, suggesting a modeling activity measurement data platform. And he comes up with a much prettier conceptualization and a much nicer diagram, but effectively we're saying very similar things. And this was entirely independent. They were published relatively close together and we found out about each other's work after after it being published. But are there any other technology challenges. So, there are a few things that are going on. So, for example, there are handhelds devices that are now being developed that use spectral methods to determine soil organic carbon. So organic carbon is difficult to measure because you've got a very large background and a small change in soil carbon. So you need to take an awful lot of samples to detect a change and it can take many years to detect that change. What yardstick have done is they're using spectral methods so that's mid infrared and near infrared spectroscopy, which is mounted mounted in the end of the probe, which is shown here just connected to a normal DIY drill. That drills down into the soil, and it takes measurements of the of the spectra, which are then compared to spectral libraries, and they use to estimate soil carbon. And I've looked at this, and the technology at the moment is not accurate enough to detect soil carbon change, but the hope is that you can take so many samples it's so easy to take samples and to get readings that you make up for the lack of discrimination in the tool by just taking huge numbers of samples all over the field. So this is being trialed against some destructive sampling dry combustion methods to test soil carbon by the startup, which is called yardstick I've given the links here. And it's an interesting thing that may develop into something useful. And some other techniques that are available, for example, used in gamma radiation that's naturally emitted from soil to map the soil and the soil properties. You still have to take soil samples. And you can then relate the soil samples to the rest of the soil properties. So you this doesn't get around the problem of having to take soil samples and measure the soil carbon, but it may by combining with these sort of remotely sensed machinery mounted techniques to map the soil properties. It could have some use in the future, it could have some use if combined with automatic sampling of soils, which are then tested back in the lab. So we've got some exciting developments taking place. We've got all of the techniques available. But as I mentioned earlier, there are some difficulties in developing countries in maintaining in obtaining the data that you need for some of this verification. So in order to address this the food and agricultural organization of the UN, that's the FAO have started this project called rec soil, which is stands for recarbonization recarbonization of soils. And they've established an MRV platform which relies on modeling and collects together a bunch of data sets which can be used in developing countries across the world. And this is a bottom up suggest as a suggestion to do this bottom up so that developing countries opt into the scheme, and they follow the this MRV protocol, and they assess what soil carbon can be requested and the hope is to attract some payments that can be then pay the land managers that are changing their soil carbon using this globally, this global assessment, but which is done by the individual countries. So just summarized by saying there's a great potential for carbon sequestration, especially in croplands but also integrated pastures. There are some co benefits associated with it so we should be doing it anyway. But in order to get there we have to overcome these problems of demonstrating confidence that the soil carbon sequestration is is real and stable. And there is sink saturation reversibly and leakage issues need to be overcome by robust monitoring. So that remains one of their biggest challenges, the MRV, but all components of it exists to some extent, but it's uneven globally, and they haven't been integrated into the system yet. But FAO's rec soil program is an opportunity that brings these things together, especially in developing countries. And as I mentioned, there are some new non destructive measurement techniques that are in development. They're not quite there yet, but we need to watch this space to see how they develop and monitor progress because they could be a game changer in terms of making monitoring reporting and verification of soil carbon possible. Thanks for your attention. I'll leave it there. It's lovely thank you Pete. Yeah, that was that's quite an overview quite a good reality check for us but a lot of inspiring things to think about to so welcome David back again and I'll just go through we have a few questions and from the audience so after about five so a few minutes of discussion I'll turn to those questions. So, David, if I can ask you, you know, I'd like to dig in a little bit deeper to the biochar platform that you have there and you notice quite a quite impressive potential for stabilization of soil organic carbon and soil organic matter Is there, are there any circumstances in which that works better than others so I guess I'm getting at you know the composition of the biochar and the composition of the soils that you're applying it to what's what's the optimum and what's if you can get there also the potential, not just in the US that was a beautiful map you showed the potential to do it there but do you have an idea of like in the world, you know, other other parts of the world that could apply your kind of model there. Well, thank you. First of all, there's a lot of diversity globally, and in general biochar seems to have a more positive effect on crop yields in tropical soils acidic soils, depleted soils, whereas in temperate region soils molossals. Often there is little or no crop yield increase with regards to the first part of your question which was about the positive feedback or the synergism. First of all, let me emphasize that again that the literature on that is not yet consistent, and no consensus has been developed. However, my observation is that we are see tend to see this. When we tend to see a negative priming effect when there is a biogenic carbon input when there's manure when there's crop residue root residues are added with the biochar on an annual basis, and we see positive priming in fallow systems almost inevitably. So a clear balance is needed that biogenic carbon will, as Pete has pointed out, be subject to more ephemeral nature it can be built up and it can be degraded depending on changes in management climate etc, whereas the biochar carbon is intrinsically or stable. Thanks David. So, Pete, you know you, you did allude to these, some of these issues with saturation of the soils. And also some of the measurement techniques so I guess they'll be part of understanding this is being able to measure and monitor and see what happens over time. If we just step down to the kind of the ground level as it were and think about those the techniques that you mentioned the rod in the soil you need a lot of samples with and then the sensor on it look like a tractor there. So, who would do those measurements and you know which are more likely to be implemented which in your, your mind would be more valuable at this point in time or do we need all of them. And you know is there a cost factor and an incentive factor to these and yeah, we'll start with that. Yeah, sure. So the reason we're not doing destructive sampling going and taking hundreds of soil samples and sending them to the lab is because the cost of doing that would be far greater than any carbon credits that you get from the carbon stored. So anything that we do to reduce that cost by non destructive sampling, ideally with sampling in the soil would help us a great deal. So I'm, I'm, you know, I'm really interested in these technologies as I said they're not yet they're not yet not there yet. But it's great that they're in development because we know that technology can advance very quickly and we learn by doing. So that could be the real game changer I think something that could be done in the field at the moment these are being done by people who know how to use them. Imagine in the future you could just have something mounted on a on a small ATV or on some farm machinery that would take these measurements automatically as the tractor drives over the field. In the same way as we have precision agriculture maps which map out how much fertilizer we need on the field, we could be also be measuring soil carbon. And if we don't get there even if we don't get to that anytime soon. We know, as I say it's a fairly mature science we know what activities cause increases in soil carbon. So we can you could imagine a sort of a carbon carbon payment system, which allowed carbon payments to be made based on just doing the activity which you can detect from space or could be self reported, or anybody can see what you're doing tillage or not. And the carbon payments could be adjusted after say five or 10 years, based on some real measurements. So I think there are ways forward and there are clever ways to incentivize soil carbon soil carbon practices, but I just I don't want to I don't want to over emphasize how simple it is. The reason it's not happening yet is because of because of these issues. So these are the issues that we need to need to address. Right, and so we'll get to what I want to press on that a little further later, but go back to David again. You know we had a, I want to bring in one of the questions from from the audience, because they were talking about some of the limitations for the feedstocks and the scalability and the water content and all of those things. Can you can you speak to some of the challenges with with your the technology that you proposed, and maybe how some of those challenges could be overcome. Sure. The with the technology itself paralysis is relatively agnostic about the type of feedstock that you're putting in, but the quality and quantity of the products that come out or not. You can put almost anything in a pyrolyzer but the lignin content, the cellulose content are varying the water content varies obviously if you put a high moisture feedstock in the energy to remove that water could could dramatically influence it. So, one of the key limitations is you need to be able to sundry the biomass feedstock. And secondly, one of the issues is particle size, particle size needs to be reduced to maximize the yield of the phenolic fraction and other liquid products, otherwise it increases the biochar so there's a trade off there, depending on the value of the biochar as it's and for the most part we're seeing the greatest value coming from the phenolic fraction which can be turned into liquid transportation fuels. Another key limitation is that the phenolic fraction. Just heated up it's very reactive and it will auto polymerize and basically turn into a hockey puck, essentially equivalent higher heating value of anthracite with very low ash make a great coking material and steel production. However, to use it as a bio crude. It's required that this be hydro treated so you're going to have to co locate a source of hydrogen presumably from electrolysis of water, and that will derate the energy value. Electricity can come from a zero carbon source but it is a necessity. The other key issue that I already alluded to during the talk are the logistics of biomass harvest storage and transport. And the bigger the plant gets, then farther you have to hold that biomass the more likely you're to have problems with supply with degradation of quality of your feedstock at a depot with fire to pot built a tried to build a cellulosic ethanol plant nearby and and they had multiple feedstock fires. These are very serious issues by keeping it small and widely distributed. We can end up with just in time delivery of that biomass and reduce the costs of that so there is a trade off in those economies of scales and the logistic problems. That's great. So just one last quick question. This we're, we've got more questions than we have time to answer, which is a good place to be in. So are the markets there right now, David for the products that you were talking about. And, you know, I think you, I think before I learned that you can switch, you know, you can vary the products that you get out depending on that. So what's the situation right now the other markets there and or is there just something need to happen to make sure those markets. Sure, there are there are economies here. No existing oil refinery is going to take a single truckload of of phenolic oil. And train load delivered every week. And this means the system has to scale up to be able to provide it and no one small plant like I'm talking about could do that it's going to have to be an aggregate of plants working together to fill that contract. And through that scale up. There are some first generation products I mentioned the bio asphalt, which can be used directly without hydro treating of the bio of the phenolic oil. Other products sugar fraction certainly can be fermented to produce ethanol. And that's fairly easy now it can be blended with other sources of sugar. So the biofraction relatively few markets for that and that will have to be developed with time. The biochar. Clearly, we, in our techno economic analysis, estimated a value to the biochar of $50 a ton. It's going to vary depending on the crop the soils, the climate, and, you know, the farmer has to see a crop yield increase under the current economic situation to have a value on that biochar. David so I hopefully we have 30 seconds left. We have so many questions for you from the audience. And I guess that you know one of them is about the acceptance of the various carbon credits registries for their approach that you talked about for the MRV system. So, this person Ross, but Brickle Meyer says that they understand registries require soil sampling more frequently than every 10 years to meet their MRV requirements. Can you just very quickly comment on that. There are, there are obviously different levels of monitoring verification that acceptable to different registries. But I think carbon director I do a little work for is coming up with a sort of a what would make a perfect project for all of the verticals in fact all of the different removal technologies so watch this space or watch carbon direct space I should say, because we're going to be saying this is a this is the what would make the perfect project and how frequently you'd have to measure and monitor, but that varies there are some pretty crappy projects out there that have been funded which only have very poor verification, as well as some really good ones so the quality isn't, isn't equivalent across all projects yet. And that needs to change there needs to be more standardization across across different registries. Thank you so thank you both very much Pete and David I think we could do this for half a day at least more. I see Sarah has appeared so thanks again that was great. Yeah, thank you. Thank you to Jennifer Pete and David for an excellent session. And I'd also like to thank the audience for coming today I hope you learned about the state of the art in these very important carbon removal technology areas, as well as their So, please be sure to come and join us tomorrow for a day three of the workshop, and we'll be discussing mechanisms for overcoming barriers, including issues such as scale, global commitment technology diffusion and deployment behavior and environmental justice and financing. So have a great day and see you tomorrow at 8am Pacific time.