Cool. We are now recording. So thanks again everyone for attending the first managed monthly meeting We had a technically our first one We were at summit and I spent some time talking through the slide deck and about a little bit about manage itself But I think it's the first one we're doing on zoom So super excited to to dive into the to be agenda with everyone. So Thanks a lot for adding to it over time. I I guess we have no accomplishments to talk about I'm hoping that we will in the future and we can use this This meeting to kind of celebrate some of those wins and awesome stuff that we shipped if we hit our okay R's in the future It would be great to use this as a celebratory moment But but I think Dennis you had like the first the first comment under concerns or questions Yeah, I was just trying to Understand like the definition of what is a the deliverable likely to or anticipated slippage So issues that are likely to slip. So I was just trying to figure out like what? What is what does that entail exactly and I you answered that in the Doc, but I don't know if you want to extend on that as well Yeah I mean just more context is that in the we have the in our Pre you know kind of like planning cycle that starts off with like product kind of meeting with EM's and trying to do like a Pre-planning session and the goal of that is to basically come product comes with you know a list of features and you know Future related issues you want to ship and then EMS can and we kind of collectively represent bugs and tech debt We kind of come together on like what exactly we can ship But since we're doing that in the middle of the release cycle, you know There's some stuff that might slip out of the current cycle and influence our you know The future planning session and our capacity So that's what that list is it's just like, you know If we haven't started something our confidence is obviously lower than it'll actually get into it And so it's just for me and for product to say like oh, you know We don't want to kind of over-connit We want to make sure that we leave a little bit of room in case you know important things slip because if they're worth working on in the In the current release, they're probably still high priority for the next so that's all that that's all that conversation is Yeah, that makes perfect sense Yeah, I was just trying to get understand the detail of when you covered it It's like what hasn't been started what is in dev What's in review and like the different ratings of what would be like different levels of anticipation I guess for different levels with it. So yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah Cool and Liam you want to talk about everything else issues? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not sure this is in the right section What we've been sort of concerns or questions. It's more about since I joined I guess one of the things that I found more challenging is trying to Understand the remit of the team and I think that's basically because obviously when a split from platform happened Which had kind of a really wide scope and I think it was very much was to sort of be everything else team and I think create got quite a Clear scope in terms of what they're responsible for And I think managed it as well But I think there was there's quite a lot of things that maybe don't fit necessarily nicely elsewhere And one of my feelings was a lot of those issues were coming to manage I think they are but it also seems like that's happening with other teams as well And so it seems like there's a lot there's a lot of issues at the moment That we're just not able to categorize particularly well And I think a lot of them are around kind of not necessarily technical debt But technical improvements and things like that and the main point of putting this on on the agenda was just to point people In the direction of the issue that has been opened recently And there's a good conversation going on there at the moment as to what we do to kind of solve this going forwards and I think short term we're going to try to um It's going to be encouraged at the pms try to kind of evenly distribute some of these issues Some of which I guess will naturally fall into teams some of which won't And at a longer term I think there's going to be a discussion as to whether We have a specific engineering team who who takes on the seemingly sort of everything else issues And no clear solutions as to the long-term plan yet, but certainly have a read through that that issue because I think it's It is definitely worth well doing so Yeah, I feel mixed. I mean, I think one of the Suggestions floated in the issue is actually creating like a specific team for it. I'm personally against that I think that the main problem is that someone There needs to be like someone that represents like the priority of these kind of like everything else issues And I think that who the team that actually works on getting it done You know, we can we can kind of load balance between the teams um, I just I think that that's the main the Making sure that the prioritization is understood and being well represented is like the main problem in my mind Because if this falls into the crack It's always going to be secondary to like all the important stuff that manages like working on right now That is that there's a clear owner of like that's you know, unless it's some, you know massive security hole like one issue is like this fuzzy kind of how do we perfect sequel injections in the future? And there's no clear like Proposal in that issue But if there's someone that's actually like Kathy from the security team who's like responsible, you know For pushing like that forward and saying like this is something that we need to solve Then at least the ems can say like, okay Let's let's let's look at, you know our road maps who might actually be able to pick this up and then just say like create You're gonna you're gonna pick this up and and move this forward So I think that that's the real thing that's that's that's a gap in my mind It's like who represents the priority and that that I think should have clear ownership Yeah, and I think that was a point of doubt I made on that issue It's almost where where everybody owns something then often nobody owns it because you kind of have that bystander effect So I think that's much of what the conversation in that issue is around So if nothing else, it's quite an interesting read and I don't think we're close to kind of coming to that long-term solution yet But um all input is of course, um going to help us get there Cool cool So James, I think you're next on the SAML issue. Yeah, so this was an issue where I'm adding a simple button Originally, um, but then it was suggested that we should disable it when there's stuff in the form Because otherwise people might lose the things they've entered so after you actually it started to need front end and It's I managed to write that in JavaScript, but it turns out that we're not allowing jQuery anymore so that's stalled on that And also it most jQuery is easy to rewrite but the tooltips part would need to be moved to view so That I'd need front-end help on that or I'd need to learn view so I could have done that from the start Might just be a really good 201 session Yeah, like something on how to get started in view in our code base that'd be really useful So I've built some apps of my own in it, but it's very different to The way we we structure things You're happy to jump in like call with you if you want to go through that Just a quick question. Um, were you told like in your review that you shouldn't use jQuery or Like what is behind that thought? Uh, yeah, so in in room I uh, the first part of view someone said we're not using jQuery as much anymore. Um And I think I could have proactively Sooner kind of asked like what's the best way to approach this but um in my mind It was originally similar to some other code. So I kind of took use that as inspiration so another thought is that um Like uh, similar to how we use rubric op and rules that and exceptions if we go back and add exceptions to the bases Where we've used jQuery and that will kind of make it more obvious that that's not something we encourage anymore Yeah, but if it is And it's only if there's already existing jQuery or existing JavaScript It's better to use one either JavaScript. It's that is also possible if we have We have some sort of jQuery black in there. I think it's a very pragmatic and very Very usable choice there. I will have a look at it because we shouldn't do just view for the sake of view We should be pragmatic and move stuff forward in there and yeah, I will have a look cheers Sorry, do we do we have any guidelines in the handbook outline kind of what we should be doing in this space Kind of like best practices are I think we have a few different pages So I kind of I looked for that and I kind of saw style guides on on how to write the jQuery And so I kind of took that as uh, yeah, it's allowed. Um But it's there's different areas. Um, so I I feel like I might have seen something that suggested the other thing when I went back and looked but i'm not sure where Yeah, we've we're working on a new front-end guide as well We still have the existing one as well. So we haven't merged all that in but we do Generally discourage the use of jQuery, but if we're working in something that's already 90% jQuery and you have to make a one-line change then it's like Preferred to do vanilla if you have to use jQuery then that's okay, but it's not crystal clear But generally we're kind of moving away from it The other thing related to this is part of the thing that made me not Pushed me away from view slightly is I need to rewrite the views that we'd kind of Done on before So that might be something where we don't want to Do a back-end feature then as we start to build out the front end and make it more complicated We don't have to rewrite things. So maybe um, yeah, so Yeah, but in this case, I think what andre because I had now a look at it what andre man was less He wrote that you might be also an option But in that case it would be the main option would be vanilla JavaScript so that we can Simply skip jQuery and perhaps then is or Martin you can jump in here to Get this one alert. It shouldn't be too hard. I think it's only two files and You simply need to change some queries over there. Yeah Yeah, that'd be that'd be really so I think the jQuery tooltaps is the only bit where where it might be a slightly more Yeah, I think it makes sense to to use vanilla chess or even jQuery if there's a lot of vanilla and jQuery stuff on the page already so I was in a similar situation with one of my issues where I decided to use jQuery just because All the other parts of the page were written in jQuery and it didn't make sense to just introduce a new feature in you there Just send in maybe you can post an issue and then we can look have a look at either then is or me and check How we can write it in vanilla chess cool, um moving on so, uh, andreus posted a Item here about ambitious planning I'm not sure if everyone's aware there was a merge request that was merged that Talks about ambitious planning to the product handbook and the direction page and the TLDR is that instead of Hitting 100% of deliverables our aim will be to plan aggressively so that we actually aimed at about 70% of our deliverables um, so we'll intentionally be kind of you know Over you know overshooting this kind of stuff that the number of deliverables that we hope to To deliver in a release As a result of that stretch may be going away In favor of either stack ranking or using prioritization labels I'm personally the favorite of the latter for reasons that I articulated in the issue But we'll we'll see kind of see where that conversation goes But it looks like the stretch label may be deprecated in the very near future And we'll just you know over stuff deliverables and then prioritize those somehow and then use that to educate Like the order in which we get things done in a particular release so We'll see where that conversation goes Would you already target uh for this release the ambitious planning of 70%? I think I think yes Yeah, yeah, I would say this next release the 70 number is uh It would be the goal I think that you know the only thing that's tbd is kind of how we order the issues across gitlab But on this team we've been stack ranking using the board, um, which is the next is the next item, but yeah Lean would you agree with that? The infinite definitely agree Cool. Cool. Does that work for you as well, Tim? Cool cool So I wanted to talk a little bit about release So like we just mentioned the like we've talked about using this board kind of for stack ranking issues And the one thing I just wanted to mention is that we I I changed the link on our Manage page so that actually points to this board here and this board which I'll just share super briefly Uh is the prioritized label which now only has like so there's 19 issues in back ends 16 in front and 11 in UX And the idea is that like it was super unmanageable for me because before there was like 100 issues in back end It was impossible to stack rank them all But now the scope for this board is basically what we're working on the current release and what's coming up in the next release And that's it and the stack rank should only be about 20 issues in each particular list So, you know, if there's ever a question like what our near-term priorities are and like what the order is It's always this link top issue is most important kind of moving on down So this at least breaks down like the issues that we think are the most important for us to kind of tackle in the next Release and then the ones in the order in which we should kind of consider doing them the point, you know if the really the um deliverable plus milestones should always represent like the Aggregate number of issues that are, you know marked as deliverable and then we you know hope to hit 70 percent of um at least and That board should kind of define the order in which we do it and again Like that might change and you know evolve into like p1 p2 labels or whatever But for now the board is a single source of truth and that stack rank kind of tells you what the priority is So I think Liam had a question about you know comfort level there Yes, definitely just a continuation really of the points that you've made there So I just wanted to make sure that everyone was kind of happy and understood What the new kind of prioritization process looks like and kind of what you should be looking to do when it comes to pick up Picking up new issues. I know previously obviously we used to do I think probably more work up front in terms of waiting the issues And I think often at least it seems to case when I joined we used to assign a lot of the issues to engineers up front And I think generally we're not doing that now I think there's some issues where maybe some work has already started or it makes complete sense to assign them And I think the the method we're moving to is having kind of just a Long prioritized list in in terms of the backlog and then when you're ready to pick up something You sort of pragmatically pick up something that's if not at the top then very near to the top And then obviously that that coincides with what Jeremy was saying about the prioritized and prioritization label And I think in a doc as well where I've Highlighted issue boards that take you through to a border. I'm using which I found helpful And I think generally that's probably the same feel so that everyone else is using but I just wanted to make sure that that was clear and everyone understood and We're not going to be kind of picking up issues that that maybe aren't a priority due to kind of Me or maybe Jeremy not not communicating clearly Yeah, and one goal is to kill the spreadsheet like the the spreadsheet that I've been using I think that I'm going to continue to use that with Andreas to help our own planning process again, like you know So we don't have like 500 issues that have the prioritized label. It's impossible stack rank those will live that list will live in my spreadsheet But you know the Pride the immediate priorities of what we should be working on this release and then the next release Should live on that board. It should be very clear It should be like just a handful of issues that are very easy to kind of like to crock So i'm love to get feedback here or and async on like whether or not they make sense So if people find it confusing you can improve it Would love to get some feedback It'd be a shame to lose that google sheet code Jeremy. It's awesome You get that printed and frame Oh god I'm sure all the printenders be horrified at my javascript capabilities I The only problem that I see and and I've seen in the past is simply with dependency management because this means that there might be The first frontend issue is number four Bacon has only capacity for the first three What happens then um That's a classic problem in such Circumstances and sometimes the other problem that I see so that uh most probably we will keep a size Issues simply based on the priority list, but we want to assign issues from the front and side at the beginning Is also what I see sometimes is especially if you get new people on board And number three is a eight super hard one Then of course this person will not pick up the number eight and the super hard one But then rather an engineering manager should have the Feeling okay that person Is capable of doing that stuff or that person needs some Has already super advantage knowledge about exactly that screen. So perhaps number three is better for that person. So That's that's something that uh, yeah gets complicated with a rather with a list of pick up Yeah, so so I I agree with you and that's kind of why I like the the p1 p2 method a little bit better than stack rank because you know if you have a situation in which you have a junior dev versus a new dev and You know there you can at least look at like the the p1 issues Maybe there's four of them or something and you can say like well It doesn't make sense for them to pick up, you know Smart card or some you know hard authentication problem But there's other p1 issues that are really important that they can kind of dive into and it's very easy for us to make that The student product, you know Whereas in a stack rank, you know, it's just a top issue Which you should technically always pick up, you know, um, and then you kind of have to say well Maybe it's second. Maybe it's third and you know, it gets a little fuzzier Um, and then if you have the p1 p2 strike if there are dependencies you can prioritize like The you know the the first issue that needs to be done whether it's front end or back end or whatever Like first and make sure that that gets picked up first by that team um and so forth so I I that's why I personally like that and I think that the dependency issue gets reduced a little bit if you have Separate issues for each one which this team has been doing Like we've said specific product discovery back in front end issues And if there's back in that needs to be done first then that goes to the top of the list Or they get to p1 or whatever so they get to picked up, you know sooner rather than later So I think that you know, these are tractable problems But I agree with you that you know, we just need to be thoughtful about them as we look forward And I think it's almost when we when we assign issues or the only reason we would maybe assign issues Is to solve some of those problems So it might be if there's if there's an issue that's absolutely urgent and it's related to subscriptions Then because of the urgency we may just automatically assign it to to Reuben because he has knowledge in that space Where if it was less urgent the preference might actually be to have an opportunity to do some knowledge sharing and And basically somebody else pick it up as and when they get around to it Um, I guess that's something that we have to be sort of pragmatic with and if anyone notices that you're finding it Harder to pick up issues or to understand issues because they're not in your Usual domain area then obviously just just sticking out in slack and we can we can figure that out But at that point if we know that it's like going to go to someone that has that That domain knowledge and that would already be pre-assigned, right exactly that exactly that. Yeah. Yeah Cool Uh, so on that note on 11.5, um, again Feel free to kind of take a look at the board spend some time looking through the issues kind of thinking about it But at a high level, I wanted to share what that's kind of looking like at the moment um, so on the back end side like the Priorities that have talked kind of talked about from a product and customer perspective that remain really high are billing and The smart card off smart card because there's just it unlocks a lot of business in our public sector again And then on billing there's just we have lots of improvements that we need to make To kind of help our customers answer questions and manage that So those are in me like some of the biggest priorities you can see like the smart card and Back in support for some billing improvements is kind of top in number one and two in the list But I think that right now the biggest thing that we're facing for 11.5 Is just a lot of bugs that we kind of need to crush before we can really move on There's I think I think seven or eight p choose Six of those bugs right now on the board are security issues So that's kind of you know being a serious headway towards more more progress we can make on back end So we need to burn some of that down On the front end side, like we're working on some really exciting things Chris Peresini worked on some design routes some really awesome improvements for billings or License page for self hosted in dot com So we'll work on getting those in along with like this new help menu which will help Improve our navigation to a big degree and then some awesome awesome awesome improvements to make the product make it land more lovable than project project improvements tool tips and the better activity feed Which are all really exciting On the ux side, we're going to keep moving and we're going to keep working on billing improvements I think chris is going to continue to work on like customer portal stuff And how we can improve the billing experience and payments for customers Um dev ops score versus cycle time is something we're working on and then also I think Matei might be working on a really really awesome Personal dashboard features that i'm i'm pretty excited about So that's kind of things at a high level. Um, you know, we're we've been prioritizing the billing work and we still a lot We still you know, it's we're going to start making like the first improvements start implementing the first First improvements there and then continue to make progress on billing and smart card in a lot of these kind of UX UI improvements for uh to make it a lot more lovable So that's kind of how 11.5 is looking right now Feel free to kind of take a look at what's on the board right now And that there's things that are missing or if you disagree with the with the with the ranking, please Please let's talk about it Cool over to you sonad I was in the middle of adding it um Yes, so going forward, um We should plan on delivering the qa automate automation test the entrance test along the the future So In the same way that we deliver documentation When we with our merge requests So i'll be reaching out to developers who are working on on their respective features to help them understand the uh The qa test the qa automation test base if they are not yet familiar with it um, and I will be also helping them contribute to it James and I had a session on on on saml Entrant tests and I did post a video on the group channel as well um So yes, just calling that out That we should keep that in mind while planning Our The delivery of the features so sonad, what's the What needs to have what what do you what do we mean by keep things in mind like is there? um, do we need to make this Like us like a definite part of our kind of definition of done when it comes to new features Um, I I know that quality there was an issue in quality where we were trying to debate Like how test plans kind of fit in I don't know I don't recall if that issue kind of went anywhere, but um, how do we how do we write this down? How do we formalize it? So we do have We do have a page. I'm going to post it over here in the Right here hold on So so there are some updates to uh, the test planning process and how the uh, the test plan fit into uh, the release so Coming back to your question We we have to we have to integrate uh The automation test as part of the It should be a deliverable In the same way the documentation is a deliverable for a feature So when I said we have to plan ahead I meant that we have to keep in mind that uh, At the end of the release. We are also supposed to have the end to end test in place and the merge request is in place How how are you sort of determining the Scope or depth of the end to end test that need to take place on each issue Is that a conversation with the engineer? Is it a conversation with product or maybe a stakeholder or a customer? It will be a conversation with the uh with the engineer and And the test plan would be would be there to guide the end to end test So, um a decision would be made in in collaboration with the test engineer Uh on on the scope of the uh end to end test Does that answer your question? Yep. Thank you Cool. So when does that conversation take place? So does that does that happen kind of during feature development? Well, we're talking about developing the test plan in parallel with the future and then at the end, uh, we kind of make that a yeah, like like you said Like documentation a condition of Of our definition and done and getting this merge and production So the test plan would the test plan would be Would be created at the start of the release And the conversation would be like ongoing throughout the release The test plan would have the the expected Expected tests or the coverage that would be needed and as the features being developed The test engineer would continuously monitor What tests are being added and at the end of Nearing the end of the release um I think that's when that's when the end to end qa end to end automation tests would be added But again, um, it would be a high level test and uh and something that the qa test engineer and And the and the back end engineer or whoever is working on the uh on the feature would decide together what needs to be covered What kind of features um, do we expect To do these end to end tests for because it's something like somewhere out there where there's a lot of setup It's really useful to make sure the configuration like everything will work in reality But for a lot of smaller things like uh That's not Exactly We should not have interest in tests for everything like Not every feature not every small feature that we develop or deliver as part of the release would have end to end test uh For those that would require end to end test we would We would have a conversation around it and then decide. Yes. We need we need something more here So is this something that we just pick up in review? Like would say this is missing end to end tests and at that point go back and then for the future get in the habit of planning for them um, if I I don't think I industry your question correctly But for the feature that we are we are developing as part of the release For the larger features that would warrant an end to end test. Uh, we would discuss throughout We would discuss it During the release And then decide that we need to have A label or something on the issue Yeah Label just had sorry. Um, did you mean A small feature as in label? No, so so if we um Decided that this would need end to end test would it help to have a label that said this this should have end to end test And so that when a developer picks up even if it's a community contributor, they know that they've kind of got to add end to end tests Yes, that kind of makes sense and it's a good idea um Yeah, we we can think about adding a label for um for something that would require for a feature that would require an end test. Yes Well, can we make it just part of like the mr template to like ping? I don't know You know Remy or mech or someone on quality or to sub for for that for someone to say like either you need to have someone sign up and say this doesn't require end end tests or Link to the test plan and you know that needs to be part of you know of what gets merged So that this check happens when you create the mr I don't know we don't we don't have to discuss it here But I think that I think my point is that like like that James was kind of alluding to like it would be helpful if there was like a specific check or mechanism or a discrete way of saying like This needs end-end testing. This does not need to end end-end testing Um, and that would be really helpful in helping us kind of like identify what we need to do Because I become I would prefer it to be less of a of a judgment call. There should be like a very discrete kind of way of telling um, yes, that is uh, there's something that we can talk about and um How how about if we if if a feature has a test plan associated with it then, um, Then we have then the developer looks at the test plan and The test plan would clearly say that we need an end-end test for this If there's an assault, so if there's an associated test plan Uh, go go and look at the test plan The test plan would clearly have an indication of adding the End-end this Okay, um, that might make sense I you know, let's let's let's talk about it. Maybe an issue or in an mr to the handbook um You know, I think that that makes that can make sense I'd be concerned about cases where you know, you're really busy the test plan doesn't You know, isn't isn't available that that's a precise moment But you want to do it in the future and then we you know I think in the meanwhile it gets merged without actual without us like keeping track of like the need for the testing So, you know, and that's why I think that's something very lightweight Just like either a checkbox or a label or just something to say like this needs it And then you know, we either check the box or remove it when the test plan gets kind of like fulfilled Um, that way if we miss stuff along the future, we can just like filter by you know needs test plan And then is open or something and we can very easily see where we're missing coverage Um, so I'd prefer something like really lightweight like that But we can discuss it offline in like another issue or you know with the rest of the quality too Yeah, sure. Thanks for bringing bringing that up by the way and I do like the idea of for of the label Um, but we will still discuss it Cool, I think an issue will be good It'll be good to get input from other teams as well and even if they don't have something like this in place So maybe they'll they'll find it useful All right, I'll I'll add it to my list For talking this through with the quality team as well Thanks a lot. This is this is important. So, uh, we just want to make sure we get it, right? All right. Thanks. All right. That's it for me Cool on the okrs. So, uh, I wanted to talk a little bit about okrs Um, what we've got so far in the okr page for the managed side Um, was what you see there sourcing team um I wanted to talk a little bit about okrs. Um William and tim does that kind of cover the okrs that are there any existing mrs or discussion that I'm that I didn't cover there Or is that kind of what what the status is or what's on the page? So we have over all for the frontend engineer. We have frontend okrs. Um, and There are two okrs who Are valid for a match so overall in the frontend team we want to hire two more managers and 10 more engineers uh until the end of the year so What will happen is that we are actually spreading them out Based on priority and I'm touching base as much as I can With all the different product managers and all the team members of each team to figure out When do we need or where do we need the the next engineer the most urgent? Currently, I think with free frontend engineers manages has even the most in one specialty. Um, so let's see How this works out and how soon we will need another one But at least definitely one more frontend engineer will come to the mage team until the end of the year. That's for sure Um, right now it looks like that we will even be able to fill all those positions in the next weeks. We have Two already in offer stage two more are in the final check stage We have I think 600 more applications to go through for the other six So I think we should be fine To to fill those positions as soon as possible and also to get With of all the interviewing that we that all levels in the frontend department currently doing So that's part of the manage, uh, ok rs and the other thing is that we um, uh, we'll have now the quality the dashboards that quality has created about the the error budgets and through them, uh, we want to We want to count and keep track of everything that Was created on the backside. Uh, that falls into the error budget for manage So we will have a board for frontend for manage and figure out that we keep our error budget Yeah I think i'm i'm quite envious of those numbers on the on the hiring side because we're not having quite so much luck Um from from the back end, which I think everyone everyone is aware of I think there's various different reasons why and I think tommy's kind of been assigned a personal mission of figuring out how we can Kind of increase the flow coming in And I think we've got about five candidates at the very start of the pipeline at the moment specifically for manage And so so fingers crossed. Um, we can kind of see some progress there But I think the the number that tommy was shown yesterday. I think it's a we're hiring pretty much about one percent of Um applicants that we screen. I think it's one or two percent. It's not a big number And so kind of The good thing there is we have data around this now And I think we're trying to use that to figure out where we need to focus our concerns And to kind of pick some of those numbers up And but I I would you know, I I don't expect To be to be making any offers within the next week or two given kind of what the pipeline looks like Hopefully this time next month while I'll have some better news on that And at any other one was obviously around the sort of the specific team initiative Um, which was specifically on the two way one session and another sharing And and you know, I I think I There was good feedback when when we suggested taking that on as an initiative I think it actually may have been in re who said it seemed quite an ambitious goal And I think in part it is I think, um, you know, if you look at doing 10 that that's nearly one a week Um, and I'm sure between all of us, you know, that that's not kind of to actually run that session Maybe isn't a huge undertaking If you want to get value from them, obviously we want the majority of the team to be part of those sessions And so I think you know, this is a great opportunity. I see James You've already made a couple of notes as to topics that we could discuss And and it would be great to see input from from everyone and hopefully by the end of the quarter I'll have some value to add there as well and and hopefully I can run more myself Cool, um, maybe we should open an issue on topics and we can kind of drop Yeah, and drop these ideas in overtime I will take the, um, I'll take a note to do that Awesome. Perfect. Perfect Do you have a link to, um, where you described the structure of these? And like is it to the rest of the team and like, how would we go about that? So I don't know if I understood I understood all the questions that I've got a link to the, um, the merge request effectively that we created to have the, um, to have it merged in Which gave a bit more of an in-depth description as to what we're trying to achieve with the 201s And I can I'll certainly link to that and I can link that on the dock. I don't know if that answers all of the question Oh, yeah, because I remember you mentioning it somewhere like you said it could the structure could have this for 10 minutes that for 10 minutes But I kind of I'm almost certain the mr covers that if it doesn't I'll I'll add it in and and I'll assign that or I'll link through to that on the dock Sorry, is this back in specific or is this for managed team? I just I thought I moved under the back end bullet point I was making sure Yeah, I think this is actually a bit of confusion for me kind of going through the process because, um It was kind of the the engineer and managers responsibility kind of As part of the process to kind of work with the team to come up with what the specific okr should be I know across some of the other teams there's kind of some back end technical debt issues that they've covered I am I would actually encourage that we make this seem my initiative rather than back end um Firstly because it means that obviously there's going to be more contributors and and more chance of kind of Getting some of these sessions out there, but I think it'll also help knowledge sharing And I think the topic that you and James were discussing earlier in terms of vanilla versus view versus jQuery Um, I mean, you know, they're the topics that would be really useful to be having as a team Yeah, that's a good point though Like I think 10 talks might be very aggressive if it's back in specific And I don't know if we've ever done like a shared okr between front end and back end I would I I would you know wonder if tim would you know buy into the to that okr I'm I Have a hard time seeing and push back at it but uh Experiment and on the other hand, I mean the reorganization is going exactly in the direction So why not started already? Yeah, it's less the okr and more of this this is useful. We should And just to clarify so is this something we do like a presentation where everyone kind of watching Is that the audience? Yeah, I think so. So I think it's an open invite I mean if you're comfortable just doing it with the team That's fine if you think it'll be useful to the wider team So specifically in terms of you know, how we address some of java script concerns And you know, I'm sure like every team would good to get some value from that And so I guess what as and when we come up with the topics we can Can probably determine who you really should be And I had a really good conversation with tommy when we come up with the okr about the different types of metrics I think he he has a definition of kind of a A lead in metric and a lag in metric and I think the metric that I've created here is effectively a lead in metric Where it's quite prescriptive in terms of what we're trying to do kind of we're at the beginning We're saying this is exactly what we want to achieve As opposed to saying we want to see a result and then we figure out almost a journey to get there And and I think the reason say if you think about what we want the result to be it's increased knowledge share And it's increased team collaboration And I think certainly the suggestion of having all of the team involved And you know, maybe it would be even be great if Jeremy and I did a session as well in terms of kind of That the things that we're focused on and then Certainly in a more than area. I think anything we can do to help kind of cross collaboration would be it would be useful Yeah, I'm happy to do one as well But the way that I've been thinking about these two of ones and you know, this is me in a vacuum But if I were a developer and I was working on it like an an audit event issue or like SAML or something What is a video that could live in google drive that I could just double click on? Watch, you know, maybe there's some interactivity in it where there's I can actually get hands on and like get a really good overview But at the end of it kind of have an at least a very high level of like How that feature works in git lab and how I might be able to dig into whatever it is that I need to work on So like obviously you won't be able to get you know a comprehensive view in 30 or or you know, 30 to 60 minutes or whatever But at least gives me an overview of like how do we track audit events? What table do we use what methods do we use well models? I need to worry about To at least get me started. So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it Cool. Awesome. Sorry I so I had the You know, like, you know, I asked when we should start the answers now. Let's start student SAP So hopefully we can even create that issue Get to get something on the calendar sooner rather than later. I think that'd be a goal There's one thing so I think that there I thought that there might be a features level okr I don't know if there's other okr's lay up going on I know that yob asked me for like the features that we wanted to hopefully ship in q4 if we could ship nothing else Those were the three that I provided To him. So that might be that might pure is an okr at some point The last point that I had and I'm going a little quickly because I know I wanted to make sure we get the show and tell You know, does anyone follow a care about okr's and how can we make these more valuable? I think that I would just love to see us like keep track of these okr's keep talking about them on a monthly basis in these meetings so You know, at least we can keep an eye on like our progress and kind of how we're doing because I don't because as a product person like we don't Really talk we only talk about okr's when we set them and you know, kind of when we uh, when we you know, push the hand But the the handbook and like what happened But during the quarter, right, you know, I feel like we we can we could talk about them We can keep talking about them in this meeting Um I had this point here about uh team vision page and then sharing with git lab There were just two links that I wanted to make everyone aware of The one first is the first which you can see there under vision Which is kind of the page that we're using to kind of talk about the overall scope of the DevOps manage kind of in the in within the DevOps lifecycle What we hope to what were what our scope is what kind of the vision is for what we hope to achieve in the future Um, there's obviously content there that that page will continue to evolve over time Um And then do we have obviously the team page which is more kind of you know, how we operate as a team Uh, kind of the process that we use in order to make that happen So the first is the vision for like that Stage of the DevOps lifecycle and then the second link is the team that actually gets us done Which is this this group obviously, um, and then how we kind of function operate as a team So if you haven't seen those links take a look, you know, these are obviously open to mrs And I will continue to add to them over time um And the last point was that manage, uh, there's a there's a issue there link manage is going to start doing FGUs Um, we'll we're trying to figure out the date and when and get get these on the schedule But um, once that's done, we'll figure out a template and then we'll kind of probably rotate presenting responsibilities Um in terms of in terms of that I'm sure Liam, Tim and myself will probably take a leading role in the first one And then we will uh, we'll kind of hopefully rotate that around on a monthly basis. So that is uh, that's coming All right, so show and tell so if you're not familiar with the term show and tell it's a very american-centric term And show and tell is something that you kind of do in elementary or primary school generally as you're a kid and you will like you stand at the front of the class You show off something cool to the class and you tell people about it and that is show and tell um, so I Thanks a lot for i'm going to turn turn things over to dentists Who's going to do a little bit of show and tell about some stuff that he's been yes Or you cry you're afraid of your presentations or we're all friends here So uh, so dentists over to you, uh, we'd love to hear about what you're working on and uh, and see a little See see see about it. So over to you Uh, just for the record, I have not cried giving presentations. Um, get really nervous when I was a kid, but I have seen that from classmates, so Not for everyone, I suppose. Um, cool. So first one i'm doing is just to set user status in the modal I'm just doing this one first because I have to fire up the uh enterprise gdk further the group level project templates Which Rubin and I have been working on so we'll just start off with um user status, so it's pretty straightforward. Um, so previously I mean, we just recently launched user statuses, right? And so right now the current way to do uh to update or clear your status is to go through the settings edit page, so um I think the main goal is to make this more accessible So, you know, if you're in some random page of get lab or to do or whatever you can just quickly change your status From where like wherever you are on get lab. So in the user menu, you have this option here It actually displays your full status. Um, of course, if you have a longer one it truncates and just shows in the tooltip and um, you have the option to clear edit or Yeah, just basically set your status here. So if I just remove the status then just sets everything um resets it Back so if you're if you only use it for like your out of office, then you can just go back and clear it And then you can same basic concepts with setting profile the profile setting page, so You can set your status and then you can also do the whole emoji auto complete within Set it and you're good to go one caveat that we have right now that we set up this follow-up for is that I'm currently reloading the page just because We have to update the status and to update we have this issue in A number of places where we change some field and it doesn't update through the rest of the page. So right now Um, it's reloading the page just so we can update that in not only in the drop-down But on issues and merge request pages or other areas where we display the current user's status so that's Something that we're going to continually improve but for now It's just a more accessible way of updating that Then I'll pass it on to uh, germy It'll all I fire up next dk. No, that's there's any questions. Yeah. How does this look on mobile? Uh, great question. Um, it's Not bad The flyout menu is a little weird. Um with the emojis If I go here and edit status, uh, it's It's fine, I should say But there is some Consideration with like having like a layer on top of a layer and selecting everything still works but, um, You know, it's just a little bit smaller. It's responsive, I guess. So I don't know if that answered your question But it's still functional, right? So Yeah any, uh Anything going on under the hood that I don't know was That surprised you or What anything any like challenges you ran into on the way or was it all pretty straightforward? Um, it's the classic story. I think Tim's very familiar of this as far as my time at get lab is where it seems very straightforward at the beginning but isn't um because the Code that we use to set the status in the profile settings page is a mix of hamel and jQuery and vanilla javascript. So kind of The same problem that that james was encountering as well and so, um That required some I'm finessing particularly because it's easier for us to develop these things in view Especially because we have to get live ui framework with the new modal and tooltip components that we want to try to push forward So getting that to work with so basically just to Provide more detail This emoji menu is in jQuery This uh, and then getting this to basically play nicely have this layer appear on top of the bootstrap modal Required some changing in the code. So, uh, it wasn't actually until this week that I was kind of doing that finessing. So, um It's it's a I think it's a classic case of as we're trying to move these things to to view When necessary at least vanilla that there's this integration that we have to do with jQuery or or porting or refactoring to make it all work and Also more maintainable because at the end of the day, we don't want to have to keep jQuery around. We want to get rid of it, right? so We'll continually find these areas in the product where we have to say If we just update this line here, or do we need to kind of fight the bullet and do a bigger refactoring But at the same time not refactor just for the sake of refactoring, right? So Yeah Awesome. Thanks. Any other any other questions? cool Thanks a lot Dennis. That was awesome, man. Sure Um, I'll fire up the e e gdk. Um, but if you can stall for me Yeah, yeah, no, that's good. It sounds good Uh, so the one thing I wanted to talk about and thank everyone for so we had three respondents to the september pulse check So thank you to those three people. Um, if you didn't fill this out shame on you Um, so I just wanted to say thanks and then also kind of run through their results real quick What i'm going to do is i'm going to Just kind of discuss them at a high level. We have only eight minutes left So i'm going to create an issue for all of the Interesting bolded points that I bolded and hopefully we can kind of discuss them async and then see how we can improve Um, so things we're going, you know, there's a lot going well One person kind of Love to see us deprecate the the google the the my crazy insane google sheet for get lab issues So hopefully the board is like a stuff forward there Stuff that we can improve at Was like maybe a team call we could not talk about work style stuff, but more hanging out in nature I think it's a great idea. I would love to see us do more there as well Um struggling at the transitions between milestones mrs to review issues to wrap up. It's chaotic sometimes Planning a bit further ahead possibly I would be keen to to discuss that see how we can improve there Second bold point was about identifying and solving problems of having issue slip Trouble with scope of issues when back in and front end are involved You know, I'd love to discuss of ways that we can improve there as well Like we already split out like back in and front end to try and reduce that but like there are always dependencies that You know may or may not kind of be the obvious and you know things get picked up Different time. So definitely definitely keen to improve there Um It's lost on how the meeting how the team is kind of meeting the goals for the iteration release or what the confidence level is meeting the goal Um, stand-up bot, which is still, you know to be configured. Um, I'll poke that issue again But there's there's probably other things we can do there as well, which we can discuss async Um any suggestion for managers ok ours for q4 I thought it was interesting that someone says I don't understand the current ones So we can obviously should make these clear so that we're all if we we have no chance of hitting our ok Or as if we don't understand what they are So we can definitely make these clear and hopefully the ones that we set forth will be will be clear Um, and then there's some great suggestions there on other things that we can we can be doing as well Um issues making time for user onboarding overhauling pages that haven't seen much 11 years I couldn't agree more. I would love to know if there are specific pages that we're really kind of keen to That we feel like need some need some love I have some thoughts in in my mind of pages. I'd love for us to get to But always, you know prioritization is always always hard Um, and then this that issue that's linked is is what is a security issue that we are playing to tackle 11.5 I think the idea of having like a general pool of issues that any team can just kind of pick up If they have spare time might be a really good one to kind of make like Stretch to like not totally eliminate stretch, but maybe make it like get lab wide especially for those kind of plumbing type issues I think that's that's a real interesting idea Um, so, you know the uh, thanks again for everyone that kind of proved that that shared their thoughts. It was super helpful Um, and I would uh, I don't know if it's worth doing this again But I this was this was really great feedback and I really appreciate it. So you can I'll take it I'll leave things there for now and then we'll take them into into an issue for more discussion But thanks a lot Does does everyone understand now q4 ok ours? awesome Yeah, please please please say no if they're not clear like if there's things we can do make them more clear Like they should all be be super crystal clear. Um, and hopefully, you know, as things get added They will they will not get any money or so Like I said, we can't hit them if we don't know what they are. So thanks Over to you Dennis, maybe Yeah, gdk just finished Giving it to business. Um, I was a little I was just going to fire Sorry, I was just going to screencast the the loading screen for a while or at least talk about the project labels But um, it's all fired up now. So, uh, the other thing I've been working on for this release is the fun and for the group level project templates, so I think it was 11 to be launched Or 11 3 One of the recent releases we launched instance level Uh project templates and you can define that in your admin area But something that I think what's much more useful is to define it per group and you can select a subgroup for you know creating templates within a given project's namespace So the way this is going to work is um Stolen you to Well, I can't think I can demo that But what I was going to say is that you can go on the groups edit page and define it there So for every group that you're in, um, you can uh define a subgroup that you can use as a source for your project templates I was also working on moving that in the settings page. So that's probably why that's not working But let's just pretend that didn't happen. And so when you create a project, um Uh, you can go you're in the blank project. I just clicked something else awesome Uh, so when you're in the project create screen, you have a tab for creating from a template Um, we'll see if it switches my page. Yeah, sorry Uh, so you can go to create from template and originally we just had built in and then we have custom Which will now be renamed to instance and then we have group Uh for the group level templates now if you're entering the project create page from just the general top level of navigation menu and you can see all the different subgroups, but when you select a Uh template it will go to that main Uh groups namespace But then you can change the namespace within that group if you want, but you can't go from Like h9b in this example belongs to h5vp. I can't put this under um twitter or uh Whatever any other group. So from here you can preview it takes you to the repo to look through it And then you can just use template then you go on your merry way to finish the rest of the project details And then you can create the project from there um And that's group level project templates. I've been working with rubin on that and so Yeah, any questions for this one Uh, I just want to mention two things. This is like really really awesome. There's uh, like this is This is going to solve problems at git lab like we have we need these templates for like the account management team who like they set up they set up a separate project for every account that they manage Now we can just templatize that and then make that really easy But those are obviously templates that we want to live at the group level We don't want them to live at the instance level. So that's super that's super awesome And then other customers who typically work with like uh contractors or external Customers really often and they set up like bespoke projects for each of them and like their project or customer group or whatever Um, they can just simply like templatize these and then make their lives. It's really really easy So really awesome from you know, it's going to really help our users. It's really great um The one thing I wanted to mention to martin though is that now like the Like the the the snow plow tracking that like he's been working on Are now it's immediately out of date because we just added like stuff to the project page So martin, I guess for context has been working on like adding snow plow click tracking to the project creation page And then now we now this this new functionality is going to be untracked. So I'm maybe we need to think about for new features Making sure that click tracking gets added along with those features or if there's a way for us to include This in the tracking that's being pushed You know, we we should consider how that happens because you know The he's he's doing awesome work on on the on the tracking side and now if that it's going to be out of date when the ships Yeah, I would I mean we can talk about analytics In a separate topic or issue I would venture to say that it probably made make sense as a checklist item For when you're creating the issue or the merge request of basically asking yourself Does is there anything here that needs to be tracked in terms of feature events? Yeah, but yeah anyways, yeah I think that applies to Most of the new features probably right because we might want to add click tracking to all the new stuff as well At some point. So I think the checklist is a good idea Is there a handbook page describing how to add tracking and everything about it? Um, I think not yet um But that's definitely a good idea to add something there because it's it's it's a straightforward process But you need to know how to do it and at the moment it's just documented in the code. So we should definitely add a Guide there topic for knowledge sharing Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. Cool Thank you so much for the demos Dennis. That was awesome. And it's uh, really exciting stuff All right, we're over time The only thing I wanted to I will mention is please share your feedback about the monthly meeting. There's an issue there linked on 6a You know if you have ideas to make this better if you thought this was a giant waste of time like please You know feel free and unfiltered in your your feedback. So Thanks a million. This was awesome And we'll we'll leave the rest for uh for discussion and slack and and async Thanks everyone. Thanks team. Cheers. Cheers. See you around.


So today we're starting Aristotle's Metaphysics. We're going to spend two days on it. We could spend it in time as a master, which is what some people do when they're in graduate school. They go over line by line and look at it very carefully. We're only looking at the first book. So you might think of this as we're peering our head around the corner of the door, listening to Aristotle and his students as they talk about some really fundamental, but difficult to understand stuff. And I don't expect that anybody's going to immediately get this like that. I didn't myself immediately understand all of this, the first, the second, the third, you know, time that I read it. And I'm still finding more and more stuff in this as I go through it myself, which is why it's a classic work. You know, every time that you approach a classic work, you'll find a little bit more to contribute, a little bit more that you hadn't thought of before. So Aristotle starts off with this famous quote, usually translated all men desire to know. This is a classroom, which is about three quarters women. So I mean that you don't desire to know, just men do. Aristotle actually had some kind of sexist views. He thought women were naturally inferior to men and all sorts of stuff like that. But that was, you know, in part his culture and in part because of some strange commitments on his part that he didn't have to be stuck with. The word that we translate as men in older translations actually means human beings. It doesn't mean male. It means human beings. So all human beings desire to know. But that doesn't count. Well, what do they want to know? And why do they want to know? Do we all desire to know metaphysics? How many of you have signed up for this intro to philosophy class because you want to study metaphysics? Nobody? Nobody said, you know, well, I know it's a required course. Let's say it wasn't a required course. How many of you would have taken this course? One, two, yeah. You know, we want to know other things. How many of you want to know these? You all do it, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't be in college because what is college about? Getting to know things.  And these are all pretty simple. I don't think that they're going to require an awful lot of self scrutiny or anything like that. The first one is, what do you want to study? All of you are freshmen, so you haven't set a major yet. But I'm guessing that all of you have some general idea of something you might want to study. Some of you are probably here precisely to study this thing or that thing because Marist has a lot of, you know, pretty good programs. So all of you have some sort of idea. What's the one thing that you, right now, at this moment, are planning on majoring here, majoring in here at Marist College? So that's the first thing you need to do. Did everybody get that down? Okay. Now, I want you to imagine for the moment that you won the lottery.   Let's say you're actually going to stay here at Marist College. I imagine you all like it here, right? It's not bad. Food's good. I can tell you that because you're in your cafeteria compared to other places I've been. So you're independently wealthy, but you're going to stay in the school. What would you study? Or maybe you wouldn't stay in the school. Maybe you'd go somewhere else. But let's say you were going to study something. What would you study? What field? This will take a little bit more time. Those are the questions you said. So would we change or study if we got all that money? You might, or you might not. So you're saying what we would want to study if we had? If you didn't have any worries about money or time or any of those sorts of things. You're actually sort of getting ahead to the question I was going to ask by sort of a show of hands. How many of you, if money was no concern whatsoever? Would study exactly the same thing as you're planning on studying? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 16 out of, there's about 24 people here. So that's about 60%. That's unusual, actually. A lot of the places that I've taught before, most of the people that were there were going into fields. And why were they going into the fields? Because they figured those are where the jobs are, or they're profitable. And they're not particularly interested in this particular thing. But it's a means to an end, earning a good living. Usually not the case, say with art students, music students, because it's hard to make money with those, and very demanding. But a lot of students, yeah, that's what they do. Okay, so I have one other question for you. I want you to write down what you think you're too most indispensable for your life or how you live. Your two most indispensable pieces of technology are. Is that a pretty easy one for you to think of or not? Hard when you have to narrow things down, though, isn't it? That's why we don't say like the five top ones, that's easy to answer. And you don't say just the one, because then, you know, people constantly do that. Okay, so the third question I'm going to ask you about later on. First question, let's start with that. What are you guys actually studying? You're doing criminal justice, I know, right? So I'll just abbreviate that. Communication. Okay, we talked about that after class. Communication, what are you studying? I'm undecided, but I'm my goal for business or psychology. Okay, business, psychology, yeah. Biomed. What is it? Biomed. Biomed. How is that different then? Is that like a combination of biology and medicine? They have a pre-med major here, so it's a bio-med on a pre-health check. Okay, so you're like on the med, on the medical track, then, yeah. Graphic design. Graphic design, okay. You do that through an art department here, or do you do that through the fashion department? Art, it's really cool. Okay, so I know that I've got this, they have these interesting signs up there. Property of fashionology. I didn't even know there was such a thing as fashionology, but apparently there is. I know fashion, but didn't know it was anology, yeah. What are you going to study? I'm undecided. Okay, no idea, no yearning or anything? Did you have, did you have anything that if money was no object, you would actually study? Social work. Oh, that's interesting. That's what my sister does, yeah. And you don't make a lot of money in social work. That's one of the things I think holding people back, but there are some things that are very rewarding about it. Who else? What other, yeah. Education? Yeah, okay. Anybody else have any other ones that aren't up there? All right, those classes. I'm fashion merchandising. Fashionology is a store. It's like a student-run store. Okay, so it's not like a class or anything. I thought maybe it was a business class. You know, in food studies, they have, and I didn't know about this until I got involved with culinary people. They have this whole field called gastronomy, and it's like the study of the history of food and all that, and I was like, wow, why doesn't it just history of food? No, it's gastronomy. So I thought maybe fashionology was something like that, the types of fashion. So fashion, I'm just going to put down fashion. What else? What else are you able to study? What other fields are people going? Did anyone else have anything that's not up here for your majors? Who had anything for what they would do if there wasn't any, you know, money was an object? Who had anything else besides these that they'd study? Yeah. This is awful. I'd probably go to beauty school and do like makeup in here, but I don't want, I didn't want to stay like where I was, and I wanted to move, so I wanted like a, I wanted a natural major. What do we call it? There's a word for it. That's right. My mom, uh, cosmetology. My mom used to be a secretary in that place called the School of Aesthetics and Cosmetology when I was in high school. And so I'd go there and I'd do free air cuts and all that sort of stuff, and she was always trying to get the girls to, uh, she'd pay a little extra to cut off as much hair as possible because back then it was, you know, cool to have long hair. That's, that's probably, that's an E. Yeah. So I should know how to spell it. You know, another reason I should know why to, or how to spell it, it comes from a Greek word that actually means beauty and also the, the cosmos, right? Did anyone else have any other things they could pursue? Anyone be a musician or yeah, that's something you would pursue if money wasn't an object? Okay. Nobody had like things like art or music or Oh no. I would switch to elementary math. Okay. Education. That's, what, what are you majoring or planning? I'm a bio major. I want to be a pediatrician. Okay. Anyone have anything like, um, I think any other sciences that they would like to study, but they're not planning on studying or any of the humanities, anyone want to be a historian, write literature, make music, any of these sorts of things? Anyone want to go to culinary school? They're going to have a cook really well? Actually a lot more than that, but learn how to run a restaurant, learn how to break things down. Okay. Well, this is a good list to work with. Aristotle talks about, um, arts and skills, disciplines we call them, and how they developed over time. Um, how did they in fact develop? He gives you sort of a story and this tells us a little bit about what metaphysics is going to be because we're, we're concerned with what wisdom is. Wisdom and metaphysics are going to be connected. Metaphysics comes very, very late in the game. Um, and one of the things that you, you know, if you're taking an Aristotelian approach, you would do with things. We're going to talk a lot more about this next time. Is you ask the, the why question? Why are things the way they are? Why are things what they are? Um, why do we pursue them? And for each one of these, these arts or sciences or skills or techniques or whatever you want to call them, we can ask, what is the point of it? What, you know, and this may be different for you than what the point of the actual skill is. Um, somebody might want to become a doctor in part because they want to heal people. That's what the goal of medicine is, right? Or they might want to become a doctor because they, you know, saw, um, what's a medical show? I'm sort of blanking on things, CSI, but that's more forensic. What's another one? General Hospital? General Hospital? Yeah, so, uh, more scrubs.  They're pretty miserable. I do too, but, um, I wouldn't want to live their life. Um, so you can ask remedies. What is, what is their point? Why do human beings do this sort of thing?  You know, um, I knew, I knew a kid in high school who used to steal all the chemistry equipment and, uh, he was, he was, he was really enterprising.  Um, you know, what he was doing with it, I don't know. Um, he just seemed to like, yeah, I don't think he was cooking meth because this is back before that. Meth became popular in the nineties. This is back. If he was doing chemistry, he wasn't doing it for the reason that chemists actually do it, right? What, what do chemists actually get out of it? Why are we interested in chemistry? Well, it produces all sorts of great things for us, like pretty much everything in this room, including our bodies. They've all been modified by, by a lot of chemicals. Um, business. You can say, why, why do people go into business? I want to make tons of money. But if that's really your case, you shouldn't go to business school. You should probably just start a business. You have a better chance of making lots of money unless, you know, you're going to be a big executive or something like that. Maybe it grooms you for that. Um, but really, what is the point of a business? It's not just making money. Why do they give you that money? You have to give other people things in return. How do you have to give them? There's a catchphrase. Goods and goods and services. And if you're not doing that, you won't stay in business. Or if your goods and services aren't, aren't very good, compared to the competitors, you won't stay in business. Business school is about learning how to, how to manage that sort of stuff well, or how to market it, or how to finance it. Um, communications. Why do people study communications? You can go into a lot of, you know, communication and psychology. Those are two degrees that are very, very portable. Most of the people who get a psychology degree don't work in psychology. They work in some other field. Um, why is that? What, what does psychology also, another way communications provide the person who studies it? Understanding of what? Well, um, maybe critical thinking. Reasoning, certainly. Um, but something even more basic. What makes people tick? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was just saying, like how people think, like a psychology degree, help you to understand people better. Exactly. So you might actually be a good person for business if you've got a, a psych degree who really studied the, the topic. Um, it could have therapeutic purposes. You might be trying to heal somebody.    Um, what's the point of education to teach other people, to teach other people where your topic is all this other stuff, right? Education is kind of a funny field in that way. You can actually get a a doctorate degree in education, but in order to really be an educator, you have to know some subject really well besides education. Otherwise you've got nothing to teach anybody. But, you know, there are good ways to teach people and bad ways to teach people. I knew, um, when I was at Fayette Hill State University, um, one of the old school professors, his pedagogical method was to yell at his students and to slam things around. And he gave them a lot of work and then he would just yell at them. And I actually called security the first time that I was down the hall from him, because one of his students was raising his voice too. And I thought that there was like a fight breaking out. That's not good pedagogy, right? That's not good teaching. What did, you know, you've all had good teachers in the past. They soon, right? What did they do that helped you learn? What do you remember about them? They were probably nice, but that's not what makes you a good teacher. Okay, patience. So they did the same thing over and over again with you, right? Walked you through it. Anything else? Did they seem prepared for the class when they got there? Or did they just kind of make it up as they went a little far? I've known some people who do that, who literally don't know what they're going to say when they get into the room. Fashion. What's the point of fashion? There isn't going to. What's up? Well, everybody wears clothes. Yeah, we all do wear clothes. We don't have to wear fashion clothes, do we? You could all wear the same thing that I'm wearing. We're gonna have, this could be our uniform. You could all have a maroon. This is a maroon, right? Does this color work? Yeah. A maroon shirt, brown pants. You could all have vests like this. Maybe you guys don't have to wear ties. You know, we take it easy on you until you get your B.A. or B.S., right? Or B.P.S., I know some of you are doing B.P.S. degrees. So it's not just about clothes. It's about marketing. Well, that's more the business end of it. Yeah. It makes people feel better about themselves. Yeah, that's key. People buy clothes because they think the clothes look good. And, you know, a lot of that's subjective.  Back when I remember my mom used to have lots of clothes. And there was this book that came out that was really influential in the 1980s for fashion. And it divided people into four seasons. You might be a spring or a summer or a fall. And you have to figure out which one you are.  You have to wear these colors. And if you're fall, wear these colors. Well, what was going on there? Yeah, it sounds kind of complicated, doesn't it? Very complicated. And you don't understand what that was. Yeah. I didn't understand it myself either. And she tried to explain it to me. Well, what was the point behind it? What was the end? The purpose? It was to have people look good. And why do people want to look good? Because then, like you said, they feel good. We enjoy things. We get pleasure out of things that look good. That's aesthetics. Cosmetology. Makeup. Why do people wear makeup? Just because it's part of the uniform and you have to wear it? No, because people want things to look nice. Why do we care about, look at this classroom? This is not a particularly aesthetically pleasing classroom, but it's not bad either. The doors at least are painted. The walls are painted. I've taught in places where that's not the case. And those things affect people, the values of our lives. But how our life has lived out, whether it's felt to be a good life or not, depends in part on those things. There's some legitimate value to it. Musicians produce things that we like to hear. Cooks produce things we like to eat. You could just eat oatmeal all the time and take pills, and you'd probably be okay. If you didn't take the pills, you'd get scurvy. There was actually a girl when I was in graduate school down in Southern Illinois. She got scurvy. She tried living on potatoes to save money. So all she ate was potatoes for like two months, but she got scurvy. I think it's scurvy. Well, if you have vitamin C deficiency, which is very hard for us to have in this society because everything's got vitamin C loaded into it, right?  There's no vitamin C in potatoes. They get it at C because they didn't have any vitamin C to consume. So all of these things, all these arts, they all developed at one point in time to meet some need, to satisfy something. Education, you know, 150 years ago, you couldn't specialize in education. Business, you know, we only have MBAs and we can actually get a PhD in business. Until recently, in Europe, you couldn't get an MBA because they felt that that's not something you can actually teach. You have to learn that on the job. Each one of these things developed as a discipline in time, and they didn't all develop at once. The world that we live in is the product of a lot of different things happening over and over and over again, progress being made. That's what Aristotle's talking about in the first part of the metaphysics. He talks about a couple different motives for why people develop arts or skills. And one of these, and you have to do this, is what he called the necessary. Medicine is useful, keeps you alive. Most likely, you know, for any given human population nowadays, if you didn't have modern medicine, half you would be dead by now. I know I certainly would. We didn't have all the things that modern medicine provides us. You'd have died in some epidemic, or when you broke your arm, you would have gotten septic or something like that. You wouldn't guess why they're dying of scurvy in part because they didn't know, right? Yeah. And people were dying of scurvy just 200 years ago. What else are absolutely necessary arts or skills? Making pottery. That's one of the first skills that develops. Agriculture. Nobody's farming. Then where are we going to get our food? What's the other alternative? It's in gathering. Any of you want to go out in the woods and look for berries and hunt squirrels? Sounds kind of romantic, you know, when you're involved in a row and stuff like that. But when you actually have to do it, it's not fun, especially when you don't know what you're doing. There's actually a great book and movie, very controversial, called Into the Wild, have any of you ever seen that? Yeah. I saw that recently. I'm thinking about writing or something about it. Because my reaction was, god, thank you, man. A lot of other people were like, oh, yeah, he's this hero. What are other necessary arts that we end up pursuing? Well, you know, we have food, agriculture, we have storing things, medicine. What else do we need? Architecture. Yeah, at least building houses and not architecture necessarily and building the Washington Bonds. Construction, I guess. House building, you know, making clothing. Somebody had to actually figure out how to weave this stuff. Do either that or you're going to wear bark. Or animal scares. Some people do. You know, not like oak bark or stuff like that, but some people do wear bark. And then once we get past the necessary and useful, and these things start to make our lives better. This is a sort of history of human progress. Then we get to arts that give. Now it's no longer just a matter of having clothing. Now it's a matter of having good-looking clothing. Now it's no longer a matter of just having food to eat and learning how to cook it. If you put the meat on the fire, it's easier to digest. That's sort of necessary stuff. Now we start thinking about how do I make this actually taste good? How do I please people? How do I do things that are pleasant? And those produce a lot of other good things. And that makes our lives better yet.  And those who can do this are more highly regarded, Aristotle says, than those who just supply the necessities or do things that are merely useful. They're seen as being closer to wisdom. Eventually, what all this offers us is through this, we have vision. We are able to take it easy. We don't have to work as hard. We have surpluses. We have resources. Maybe not everybody in a society. As a matter of fact, in ancient societies, they were all slave societies. Just about every single society that developed has nothing gathering enslaved somebody. They may not have called them slaves, but most of them have that. And that was the way it was for quite a long time. And even when we had industrial society, did everybody share equally and the benefits of it? No, and they still don't even completely today. All things are pretty good here, historically speaking, compared to when you could have died of scurvy. We can multiply instances, and I want to get through this. We have leisure. What does leisure offer you the possibility to do? You could just take it easy. Enjoy yourself. Is that the kind of action or response that continues human progress? Some people will do that. Maybe even most people will do that. Societies in which some people say, now I'm actually free to, I just called leisure too, didn't I? Societies where some people start to say, you know, I don't have to work for a living. I'd really like to study this. I've always wanted to learn about this. There are some things that are intrinsically, there are some things that people study, not because they're going to get something out of it, but because they want to know about that, because the object itself draws them in. So if you actually do enjoy mathematics and you start making progress in that, when I can understand that, because when I was an undergraduate, I was both a philosophy major and a math major, and I ended up going to graduate school for philosophy. But I understand the allure of these elegant, beautiful, complex problems, concepts, all these sort of things, that once you put in enough time, they start to sort of unpack themselves for you.   Those are things that are intrinsically worthwhile. Given the chance to pursue them, people do. What often keeps them from being able to do that is being occupied with this stuff. Now, Aristotle talks about metaphysics in this life. Metaphysics is the one that's sort of at the top of the scale. So let's, for the rest of the period, let's talk about what is this metaphysics stuff, or discipline. I mean, in our society, like I put it out in another lecture, you know, some people think metaphysics is crystals, or past lives, or stuff like that. And that is a certain type of metaphysics, but that's not philosophical metaphysics. That's just exploring the occult or things like that. Actually though, before I go into this, I did ask you that second question, the third question. So what are the most important pieces of technology? So the internet and the phone? That's interesting that you said the internet, because that is technology. And that's not yours, you don't own the internet, but you certainly make use of it. Yeah, I think about all the things that had to take place before the internet could come up. And then your phone, yeah. These things are awfully handy, aren't they? When I came here, it's a Marist one day, and I forgot my... This is a day that I was here for the whole day. I forgot my phone at home. This has all my email stuff on it. It's how I access half of my social networks. Of course, I use it to call people as well. Take pictures, store data. When you leave something like this behind, you feel kind of naked, don't you? It's almost like leaving for men this behind. And have you ever misplaced your wallet? That is scary, isn't it? This is also a piece of technology, though. The reason why I asked you this question about technology is I imagine that most of you probably said things like this, right? How many of you actually said your phone is your most important piece of... Every single one of you? Yeah. But this is technology, too. Anything that human beings have made through art or craft or skill, Greek techné, that's where we get technology from, is technology. This is technology. This is a very complicated technology. It ties in with an entire network. Even this business card, you have technology surrounding yourself. It's not just electronic devices. You're wearing technology. All of this stuff was produced through these massive supply chains. This doesn't grow on trees, right? Or you don't find this in the wild. This is, I think, a cotton shirt. So somebody actually had to pick the cotton and get all the seeds out, and then turn it into cloth, and then the cloth had to go to the factory where it was actually sewn, and then I had to come through the supply chain over here where I could buy it in the store, and now I'm wearing it. This is all technology. You are constantly surrounded by technology that came from all of these arts. Now, with all of these arts, they all have a certain resciences. They all have a certain circumscribed thing that they're looking at. If you're looking at things from a business perspective, you're leaving some things out, right?  If you're looking at things from a chemical perspective, you leave some things out. If you're a psychologist looking at people's emotions, you may look at them in a very different way than a neurologist watching grain states. If you're an artist, you look at paints in a very different way than a chemist does, right? In all these cases, these arts and sciences are telling you questions about what and why. What things are, why they are the way they are, why they are that thing. Metaphysics is the science or the art, however you want to put it, that studies all of it. And here's where we make a sort of shift.  Everything you're not encountering in your existence is being, being of one form or another. Here's a human being. Here's another one. There's another one. We have inanimate beings, right? We have other inanimate beings. We have beings that you can't see, like the thoughts in your head. They have existence, right? Your memories.  Okay, that's a kind of being. Your experience of it isn't, though. It's not something corporeal necessarily, but it has being. The words that I'm speaking have being. Metaphysics is not confined to studying just one kind of being, or studying being in one particular way. It's looking at being, as another physician later on said, being as such. That's a hard concept to wrap your head around. What do all these things that you experience, some of them you don't even experience you just think of, like numbers, what do all of them have in common? That's what metaphysics studies. And one of the things that metaphysics does is it looks at what we call, and this is a concept you're familiar with, let's take a real simple instance. So I've got this, what do we call these? Cup jackets, collars. There's a word for it. Oh, sleeve, good, okay. What just happened? The cup, sleeve fell because I dropped it. Is that the whole story? Gravity pulled it down. An event take took place. We can look at that and we can say what are the causes? Of these sorts of things. Let's think about another thing. I'm going to pass this around later on. This is one of my favorite books. And I don't just mean favorite in the sense that I really like this particular book in general and I could buy another copy of it. Like, I like Shakespeare's Hamlet and it doesn't matter whether you give me one that's got gold leaf or on an iPhone or something like that, I like Shakespeare's Hamlet. This is actually a book that has this particular object I really like. This is one of the ones I read when I actually had a little time to do so. And one of the reasons I like it is I can get something out of it that a lot of people can't and I saved this from destruction when they were throwing it out. The library was actually getting rid of this. In part because very few people can read this anymore. It's Grimm's Fairy Tales. And it's in German. And I'm going to pass it around. You can see it's in the old German script that most people don't read it anymore because the Nazis kind of screwed it off for everyone, right? The Nazis used this script so after that they didn't teach German kids how to read it anymore or how to write it. It's called The Fractur. Now, how did this come to be? You can ask that in a lot of different ways. Think about this physical object. You can ask a lot of questions about this when you ask. First of all, what do we know about this? What can you tell me? It's a book. It's a book, right. So it has a certain shape or structure or form, right? A book is different than say an iPhone. Can you open up an iPhone? Well, you can take the cover off. The book, you can actually open and go through it as a particular structure, a shape to it, right? Remember when I said books were before they were this sort of thing? This is what we call Lebellum. What were they? Scrolls, right. They had a different form, a different shape. But you notice it had the same function, didn't it? What is this made of? Yeah, for the most part, I think the, I don't know, I mean, I guess the outside cover part is a different kind of paper, I think. Oh, there's some other things, ink, glue, you know, whatever else is in books. I don't know, I'm not a bookmaker. That's a different question though. What is it made of? Then what is its shape or form? What else can you ask about it? How did this come to be, this particular physical object? What sort of processes had to take place? Yeah, now that applies to all of Grim's fairy tales. What about this particular object, this physical object? You know, it's made out of some stuff. Can you just take a bunch of paper, put it out there, and say, here's your book. Yeah, there's a publisher, and the publisher does a bunch of stuff to it, right? They originally, the pages are not like this. They're these long things, and they stamp it with a printing press. Nowadays, these laser printers are a clean process, but we don't say efficient. Yeah, but it's the same idea that you take the paper and you change it in some way, and then you put it all together. I think this book is actually not just glued, but sewn. You can actually see that when you look at this older books. This is why older books tend to last a long time. They're actually sewn into the cover. So somebody actually had to make this object. And then you can also ask, what's the point of this? Why does this object exist? You can say it exists in part because it's made of paper and all that. It exists because it's in this shape. It exists because somebody actually took the time to fabricate it. Why did they do that? What's the point of a book? Some people think the point of a book is to sit on the shelf. Every generation, there's a lot of people who buy lots of books and they put them on the shelf, and they think this is going to make me smart. Because now I own the knowledge in this book. Do you really own the knowledge in the book? No, you read it. There you go. Not until you read it. The purpose of the book is reading. There might be other purposes to give pleasure. Grimm actually, or the Grimm brothers, do you know what one of their reasons for writing this book was? Anybody a student of Germanic languages or anything like that? These are all fairy tales and household tales, house marriage. And these are stories that have been told orally by lots of people for generations. And because of the industrial society, the Grimm's realized, hey, the people who are telling these stories, they're going to die out. And they're not going to pass these stories on. These are some really great stories. So we had better get with these people and write these stories down. And that's exactly what they did. And a lot of the things that you see coming from, say, Disney, are Grimm's tales with some of the gory parts taken out. You know, like Cinderella, for example. This may gross you out a little bit. In the real story, Cinderella's sisters don't just have a bad time.  Grimm's world is a lot bloodier than ours. It's nice. It's, in some ways, it's more fitting, you know. They were really mean to her, the heart thing. Grimm's world is a world of rough and ready justice, we might say. But for any object, you can think of it for this. I don't just mean this cup. I mean this coffee. You can ask about its being. You can ask about human beings. Do they have a purpose? You know what they're made of, you know. You know how they come to be, right?  Even if you didn't have that, you heard it on the playground, I'm sure. Or Mom would have had explained it. You know what the shape of human being is, what the form of human being is. You recognize that every day when you look in the mirror, if you quit recognizing it, you'll have a awful start. Is there a purpose to human beings? This is another question we can ask. We're not going to answer that one this way. We're going to answer it. So these causes, Aristotle talks about them in four ways, the four causes. And he's got special terms for these and I would like you to learn these terms. And you're going to want to practice with this, to think about this a lot. And I created a handout that'll help you with this. There's, for any given thing, when you ask what it is, you're asking in part, what is its essence? What is its form? What is it that makes it what it is? So if I say human being, and I want you to point out a human being, all of you can do that really quickly, right? Any person in this class. What do they all have in common? What is their form? There's a couple ways we can look at this. You don't have to answer that right now. I mean, one would be the shape, right? If somebody comes in here and they've got tentacles, they might not be a human being. Somebody comes in and they've got 18 eyes, or spider legs, or something like that. I mean, they could be a superhero, or a super villain, perhaps, right? We have these imaginary things, but in real life, we would be tempted to say they're not a human being. Somebody comes in and they've got, they're on all fours, and they're hairy, and they have a long snout, and lots of teeth, and they bark. Is that a human being? Probably a werewolf. Could be. Probably just a dog, but it could be a werewolf. Could be a human being dressed up in a strange costume. So there are certain things. The thing has what we call a formal cause. It has a particular structure. Why is this a book? And I mean, this wouldn't work because it's this coffee. Why is this a book? And this is not a book. This is made of paper. This is made of paper. This has a particular structure, right? It's things put together in a certain way. Think about your human body. Or think about, well, let's not gross you out, actually. Think about cows instead. All right? You guys like hamburgers? I love hamburgers myself.  One reason a lot of people don't like to eat hamburgers because they think of the poor cow. They say, oh, you know. What's that? So, you have a cow.  I'm not a vegetarian. I like to eat things that lived at one time. So, you take a cow. How does it become a hamburger?  And some of those we throw away or we give the dogs, you know, like the bones. Or actually cooks roast those to make those into soup. And then we take parts of the meat. And is the meat still the cow? Yeah, but the meat doesn't have the structure of the cow. The meat's just meat.  Their corpse is no longer animate. It's lost something that made all those organs and bones and all that hold together.  You can talk about what things are made of, though, as their material cause. That's why they are the way they are. Think about meat again.  But, you know, if meat goes bad, it's not really the same thing. It's material structure has broken down or has changed. Would a book like this made out of what could substitute for paper? Some sort of plastic, right? It would still have the same formal structure. Let's say it has all the letters. I should pass this right to you guys to take a look at this. I brought it in specifically so you guys could, you know, actually look at it and think about these causes. It would have a different material cause, though, wouldn't it? Let's say we can actually, you know, in a science fiction world make a human being. Exactly like, say, Mr. Kuhn, a replicant of some sort. We'll make him out of non-human things, you know, make him out of plastics and rubber and who knows what else. But he has exactly the same characteristics as Mr. Kuhn. It still wouldn't be exactly the same thing, wouldn't it? Because it wouldn't have the same manner. They would have a different material cause. What else? We can talk about what Aristotle calls the efficient cause, that which makes the thing come to be. And when some efficient causes are sort of unintelligent, right?  Girl, let me pull this thing down. Gravity is not an intelligent cause. But it is an efficient cause. It makes things happen. When there is some sort of intelligence at work that we can discern, when there's some sort of purpose, then we have what we call a final cause. Aristotle says, he might be right about this or he might be wrong. But this is the thought I want you to try on for a while. If we take all four of these and we understand them thoroughly, we understand them adequately, we understand what a thing really is. Much more than just saying, ah, that's a book. If you know that the purpose is to be read, a bookmaker, structure of a book, paper and glue and stuff like that, now you actually know a lot more about that object. Let's think about this in a few other cases. And then we're going to do a lot more of that next class. A sickness, a disease. What is it that a physician actually studies when they're trying to figure out what's going on? Let's say a virus. You're all familiar with viruses, right? We've all had them. Had enough basic biology to know that a virus is different than a bacteria. What is a virus actually? What is a virus? It's something that makes you sick, right? Does it want to make you sick? Viruses don't have wands, actually. They do have the final cause of it. Do you know how a virus actually does make you sick? It's different than bacteria. Viruses go inside your cells. They're really, really tiny. As a matter of fact, there's debate about whether they're even alive or dead. Don't they try to change like the DNA in your each soul cell? Like I said, they affect. Exactly.  And what does that do, then? Let's develop that cell. It screws up the cell, but it screws it up in a very distinctive way. What is the... Why does the virus actually do that? They use the cells reproduced, so it spreads. Say that again? The cells reproduce to the virus. The cells reproduce what? They don't reproduce themselves. What are they? Like copies of themselves. Copies of what? That virus. Exactly. Cells normally make copies of themselves, right? The virus comes in and it takes over the code and it makes hundreds of new viruses.