There? When else? I've been to that one. Wait until I go out of the room. So it's a great test. Let's see what he says for me. Good, good. I've got a lot of things to talk about. I'll wait for a minute. Can we see the handy movement presentation online? Yeah, yeah. All of them should be available already. I'll go and check tonight. So if you see slides.com and then FJ coming, then I've got all the things in there, so that's the handy-models one. Cool. Wifi's not working, but I'm just using the mobile. If it's not, try disconnecting or reconnecting. I've done that already. It's fine. So many people are out at the same time at so many people. Yeah, it's still very fine. We'll survive. Okay, thank you very much for checking. Cool. So yeah, welcome all to the talk. I'm aware that it's the very last one of the day. We're probably tired, we're probably hungry, we're probably many things. Alert might not be one of them. So I tried to make it interesting.  So just feel free to ask around. Little bit about me. Some of you already know me, some of you don't. So my name is Fram. I work for AMIC Labs. I usually work right now on working on support and maintenance. I can send you a developer on that thing. Those are my contact details. I'm basically, I mean, anything, if you just type FJGarlin on Google, whatever comes out of the feed, that's where I am. If it doesn't come on the set, it will shine. So what we're planning to cover today, this is in the track of community and business, so it's not going to be a technical talk at all. But I'm trying to make it super-orientated as well as much as I can. So this is about team leadership. What is that person's role within that team. And we also try to hook it up to Drupal. And I'm going to be also showing some real-life examples, talking about some old colleagues, and things like that. The first thing is why and if we're giving this talk. Okay, so first of all, I like sharing. If we're over here, if we'll use Drupal, there's that sharing part that we'll have in common. And I just like talking about my experiences, talking about what I know, because by doing that, I find that all the people back and then I learn, and then I might be able to tell those people something that they didn't know. So I just like learning at the time and I like discussing, I like talking, and by talking to other people, it's the way that I've learned the most. So that's kind of what inspired me to give this talk. I did a bit more about myself, so when I started to work, I started as a teacher. So I was teaching kind of an MBQ level, so after high school, before uni, that sort of thing, and I was teaching more sort of computing things, so programming, databaseing, networking, all that. It's something that I did like a lot and it was really fulfilling except for a few things. One of the things that I've never finished working so I have like three, four, five hours lessons on that day, then go back home and I need to do the markings, I need to prepare the lessons, and then comes the end of the semester when the parents come and meet you and I didn't like really all those parts but teaching was something that I really enjoyed a lot. But then at some point I was really attracted by, I mean, I knew development obviously, I blended in uni and I was using my free time but I wanted to get my hands a bit dirty as well. The noise is not only telling students jugara to be, jugara to that, it's doing it myself. That is in real challenges and I'm getting out a bit of the theory level. I started working on PHP, bit of backend as well, same framework, busy frameworks and all that but then at some point I was introduced to Drupal and I started working with Drupal 6 in the last days of Drupal 6 so I've been mostly working on Drupal 7 and lately Drupal 8 as well. And then around those years I came most of my career as developer has been in Drupal and most of that time I've been growing as a team leader. So I started off in my old place as kind of junior developer, mid-level developer and then I was growing and growing some of the people left and that kind of put me in a spot in which I needed to be, I mean we also had a culture in there of hiring a lot of junior people for several reasons. So I was in a spot in which I needed to actually teach all those junior guys I needed to mentor them I needed to spend a lot of time with them and that was cool. I mean it's on one hand as I said as I said I did enjoy teaching but I didn't like certain parts of teaching and then I did enjoy development and that's kind of where everything come back to that again so I could still spend some time with people see them grow, see them improve but also I was as well working as a developer and it was more a real time situation sort of day by day as opposed to when you are teaching which is this could happen, this could happen this is happening, we go to fix it let's sit down and do it Now I'm just senior developer of team leader anymore just because I moved to to a medicine but to be honest I would mention it at the very end of the presentation I still do the same I'm not called team leader but I still spend time with juniors I sit down with them we do pair programming it's kind of cool so we're going to be talking a lot of things about that what my thoughts are it doesn't mean that that's the way to go that's what my thoughts are so as I said before opinions and different points of view or these sort of things so the role of a team leader and I always I mean I like it but if we would need to put it I mean it really depends on the size of the company obviously but on a normal situation we would have management at the top we would have all the team at the bottom somehow and then we would have project managers, project owners those are the people who are usually in touch with the client and and then we have the team leader in between like linking passing the information from the project manager and product owner it might even be involved with the client or not but then that's kind of the challenge lead the team towards achieving the project and I want to make a differentiation between management and leadership if you say I put management and I put team leader because I really think that they are very different a manager, the way I see it is a person up there and this role is far beyond that I don't even think of that a leader is somebody that has to be inspiring that has to be human, has to be exactly the same level as a human person because if the moment that they see you above them they will be reluctant to talk to you they will be reluctant to approach to you they will have fear that they won't share with you so I really think that part of the role of a team leader is a lot of attitude and basically there is a difference between trying to lead a team as opposed to trying at team when you are living if you saw some old movies when they go toward the leader, that's the one that goes first whereas the team stays at hand so that's management versus leadership you really need to get your hands dirty and be in the middle of the situation and all these sort of things I put in there that it's usually a developer just because in my sense it doesn't need to be or the time it really depends on the context of the company but usually it makes sense for it to be a developer I'm not saying backhand from team I'm just saying developer because it's more in contact with the team his or her role is towards the team one of the key things that I think is the most important and probably in that sense you are exposed when you are living, you are exposed everyone is looking at you, especially the juniors so you really need to live by example and that might be really typical really silly sentence to say but that's hard to achieve because living by example all day every day it can be sometimes you get lazy, you get bad days you get all sorts of things between the skills that I think are important is communication regardless of your accent you just need to pass the message across, it doesn't matter how as long as it gets in there you need to be organized but I've put in bold the ones that I really think are key in here you've got to be approachable that's a very challenging one we'll see later on that as a team leader you're going to have probably more pressure than any other team member just because because of your seniority or position they're going to try to make you more accountable and you're going to be more involved with the budget whereas maybe a juniors that so it hasn't got a clue about what budget is or the time implications so it is a real challenge to be approachable if somebody asks for your help you're going to be there and that could create stress sometimes at the moment I'm working remote but as I said even if I'm not team leader it doesn't change that much I mean there are some times in which people just slap me and let's just talk and we just video chat and I think that's really important is what we'll make developers grow as well because they won't be afraid to ask a silly question once they ask it they will learn it and that means that next week they will know about it and that means that in two weeks time if maybe another junior has that issue maybe that person can help having done that investment at the beginning on your time if we invest on the rest of the team confidence I think it's important respectful and again as a team leader you can have all sort of people in your team and sometimes you just need to shut up on your opinion don't know you can be careful with that it's all about respect I always say that I'm more than open to listen in any opinion so long as you're open to listen to my opinion so if there's a culture of good communication use it otherwise just be careful and if you are not willing to do all these kind of things probably you are not willing or maybe or maybe you're going to have harder time okay you can still be a team leader but I think as I said before attitude really makes a difference with this route in the sense of enjoying it okay you can be a team leader a really good team leader and not enjoy it you can be a crappy team leader and enjoy it and that will make you a happier worker okay and I think the happiness of each and every employee is key even if you are not the best position for that okay I might be I mean I know that along all these years and still today I do really things that could be done differently better but I enjoy and I have an open mind to learning and all these sort of things and it's kind of the way I'm enjoying it is what makes me keep on going as well being fair okay so credit when it's view and all these sort of things so just really need to yeah I mean again we're talking about people we're not talking true but we're not talking about any technology so just really gotta be careful not being unfair towards somebody just because you don't like that person or anything like that so yeah that's important integrity influential I think some of the things come with time as well delegation for me that was a real challenge I started off as I told you before as a developer I was besides a more senior person I was a junior at that time and then at some point I started to have more and more and more responsibilities and then all those senior people went away so that was everything on me and when you know the systems when you know the project well it is really hard to let go of it and trust somebody that you know is gonna make mistakes which is normal it's okay I did my mistakes as well at the beginning and they have to do it in order to grow so that delegation delegate your job or task into somebody that you really need to learn how to do that is really important as well because otherwise you would end up doing everything you would be like micromanaging those people so it's kind of important to learn that as well and what happens when you delegate is that then you need to facilitate it's not just okay just here it is just do it I chat with you tomorrow it's like okay here it is you have to do these tasks maybe you can find resources here here here and maybe you can find an example of how to do this in this project and in that other project so that's important as well is again we are trying to make people grow and so it's important to give them the resources I always say the approach that I always taken and that might have been right or might have been wrong is I try to be to the junior of the developers what I would have luck to have when I was a junior okay I was lucky enough to have food with people and I took a lot of the things that I do from them but I was unimportant in that as well to be thrown at projects without any sort of background without any anything and I was hard to really ask for help and this sort of thing so I really tried to facilitate as much as possible I think it's important you need to negotiate especially when it comes to that side of things okay we'll talk about it in a bit and it's probably the most important to me and it's only if you mess up you really need to admit it if you said something stupid and you've realized later on just say this be human it doesn't matter again you are a leader you are not a manager you are not I think it's easier to get a respect from other people if you are honest if you are open if you say I don't know somebody asked you something I have no idea I can look it up for you we can look it up together we can just try to do it together and oh yeah if sometimes you mess up then go home talk to the wife or talk to your friends and then you realize that you made a mistake it's important to go on for a win day and apologize might be stupid but it's hard to apologize for some people so I really think that honesty is it's the same key is coming back to what I said at the beginning we are trying to lead and in order to lead you need to be at the same level okay if you are going to battle I mean I probably don't like that the sample of battle but when you go to battle you all go together so when you are leaving you need to lead with the rest of the people and you need to be one more and we are talking is like do you mean that this this role is usually a developer do you need to be an expert developer I think that helps but I think that's not everything at all I think it's really more about attitude because again maybe I don't know but I'm going to sit down with you and we're going to find out together helps more than knowing what it is and then not facilitate that to the person I have had that I was very frustrating and I was starting with Drupal and my beginning was a bit bumpy because of that I mean yeah because I didn't have I think I didn't have the support that I should have inside the company and that made it hard it was a very bumpy start then over time things got better people changed and all that so yeah I don't think that this really you don't need to be an expert developer you just need to be there help all the other things that I just mentioned before and then it's important things that maybe maybe the person of the team or maybe more junior people don't think about it is you really need to think of which approach and I'm going to take two projects so as a team leader you usually need to think of that beforehand because depending on the skills of the team it could be that we have mostly front enders we have mostly back enders we have side breeders but none of them you might have there's all the news to Drupal what do we do in those cases and then not only skill set wise I mean do they know the technology or which area do they focus on is their experience are they just is it their first job are they coming out of another job or they are experienced developers so we focus on this question later on when I try to hook it up to Drupal but again that's something that you've got to think of when you are in that position before even starting a project and then what are the challenges so if you say I literally copy paste that first line so to me most of the times most of the challenges have come from the left side but as a team leader you also have a lot of challenges on the right side so the team itself is a challenge you have a myriad of characters a myriad of skills a myriad of willingness to learn or to listen or to anything and then on the left you've got management and you've got product managers, owners and clients as well and you might be lacking maybe not to be doing both in clients but still management owners they an extra pressure and for example some of the key things that I've been facing over the years it's been first performance so and again we're talking of a team leader is it just your performance it is your performance but it's the performance of a team if you are having a team of juniors that can apply to you if you are going over about it over time it's just going to apply to you because to proceed your leading day your experience you should know the drill blah blah blah so you've got a challenge in there and the second one is accountability which is kind of similar and again it's your own accountability on the team something goes wrong who is to blame in here are we going to blame the juniors that just started working with you about two months ago it's not fair you should have taught him better something like that so those challenges those are situations that you are going to find and then probably I mean there has to go together most of the times time and budget what's the time that you're giving for a project and what's the budget many times as a team leader you always try to stay away from money I always say even when they start telling me numbers is I don't tell you the number is that because I don't get the number you are putting it and you are that's your decision I'm not going to say whether this project is 10k, 50k, 100k because I can tell you all the time what I think could be so I think that that was that has always been a challenge but by sticking to it in my case at least it has worked I refuse to talk money because I don't know the other side of the thing okay you want to live with the time you want to live with the time I can tell you how long I think something is going to take three days, four days are you willing to absorb part of that training so be do you want to charge everything out so be I'm telling you what the time could be and usually when we are talking about time I'm not even going to give you tell you five days I'm going to tell you this might be between five to ten days five to ten days we are talking about it really depends is that we are talking in this case or this case so on that I think again coming it is a challenge we were talking before about kind of the attitude towards the team you need to be close you need to be honest you need to be fair respectful this sort of things but at the same time you need to be harsh in the sense of not harsh in a bad way but I'm there because I am somebody okay because I have some experience so if I'm telling you that this is probably going to take ten days if you don't want to listen to me it's going to be your decision but I told you ten days and that is a challenge that's not easy to say to a host that's not easy to say to somebody who is over you but if you don't say that then you are exposing yourself then you will be a compel if you never say I thought it was going to be ten days and then they are going to fight and then it takes ten it's ten days why? I told you okay so that's kind of the key and that's again this is in the challenging area all this is going to comfort our part all this you can make it comfortable and nice but you don't need to be scared of this I mean again if we are relying if they are relying on you if somehow you are put into that position because you've done something right to be in that position so you shouldn't be afraid to talk to management to talk to a product owner if a client comes back with a silly request just try to talk them out of it just try to tweet it a bit so that we still achieve part of what they want but we do it in a way that is achievable in a realistic time and budget more challenges but days I mean it's my kid has woken up three times tonight I've been up since five my kid is crampy and I'm even crampier and then I need to go to work to find more crampy people it all comes back to really I mean those things happen it really happened I mean we're all human at the beginning I always try to hide it at the end I was just hoping as a book it's like it's been awful like if I say something that I shouldn't today please so again it comes back to to honesty again we're talking about challenges that is a challenge then some more challenges the last two I think they are very important and these two they are very fulfilling and if you get them right one is keeping developers engaged so we're talking we're talking before about juniors many times juniors but what if you're living more experienced developers I mean I've had in my team people with 10-20 years experience whereas I only have five in itself and the respect that people keeping engaged it's it could be tricky but I think it's possible I mean you need to find ways I always say I have regular catch ups with them I try to say okay what do you want to do and what can we do within our constraints of the company it's much harder when you're in a company structure that has plenty of projects in parallel and that the developers have to switch from project to project to I mean did you find any situation like that to be able to keep that really engaged and invest it into the project that you're trying to run yeah I know what you mean so in that sense the approach that I used to take is I really thought for having regular catch ups with the developers again I was honest to them so I would ask somebody where do you want to go what do you want to focus on I really want to focus on backing I want to do symphony to relate and I told them okay if the opportunity comes I'd make the most I'd try my best to have you do it if it doesn't then it's completely out of my control what can we do right try it do we have a training budget or not if you have training budget can we convince management to get them to do a symphony course so for example and something I did and so what you're suggesting is that we can offer to developers within the team the possibility of choosing their own stuff in terms of the different parts of the development step into the other different kinds of projects yeah I focus try that um I mean maybe I've been lucky but I found out that this um if I was like a mix of some of them went back in some of them went from 10 whereas some of them went just to do a bit of everything and in that sense it has worked out and it has given me very very valuable information when working on those multiple projects that's pretty much what the context that I've been working on always say many projects going on at the same time I mean this means precisely the tools the information that I need to allocate people to project but yeah the only way that I could find that out was by meeting with the developers regularly I always kept log traffic and we always used to we used to come back to it and say okay two months ago you told me this what have we done in these two months I haven't had any back-end project okay I look for training try to find a course try to find a certification try to find a conference go for it maybe we can work that way if I mean at game of the day if we don't have certain projects we don't if I want to get better at react but we don't have any react project the only way is to do in another way okay which is not a project and then yeah the last challenge is career progression which is kind of close to keeping developers engaged because when they are engaged then we try to make their own way and then career progression again I talk about your own career progression and your team and I think it's important to really see where they want to go because that will make it easier to allocate them to this or to that or to other things I will keep them happier if they are happier they will keep on working for longer and they will keep on growing and things kind of will work out better and then think of of your own progression as well it's like again it's a good question to yourself and I'm happy in this role and I'm having too much pressure and after pressure I would wait and then the other nice things that the role have so yeah you can keep it on with yourself and see whether you want to do it or not the career progression is a little bit overlap with the management I mean in our company it's the way that it's done it's like the project managers or managers at a high level we have like introduced with the staff on a regular basis and ask them where would you like to go functional development, testing and stuff like that but do you think it should still be the responsibility of the team leader? At least in the part I mean obviously not with everybody maybe if we're talking probably the team leader could be because I think the way I think is that the team leader is a person that is closer to the team usually POS or management they won't talk regularly to the developers so they won't know that so if a developer tell me I want to be project manager then I could just pass that information and say to management or to any other POS this person wants to be that what can we do and then forget about it but I think that the team leader in this case when you are on another development team is the entry point of the information after that it can be spread to It's very much into the attitude to get close, very close with your team and establish this kind of relationship Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to focus on that first but I really think it's the key is what you can enjoy and what they can really Yeah, you can be a group together I want to bring it obviously when all in Drupal come so I want to bring all that a bit into the Drupal world that's a lot of information we don't need to go through all of it but obviously I'm not going to say too much about why Drupal and not WordPress I think we're over here for a reason it's got a great foundation it's got flexibility, community so I'm not going to go too much into that but if we want to focus into okay, if I were talking to a managing director, PEO, PM so we can always say it's open source or maybe when building sorry, those roles when building with clients an argument that you can use is it's open source there's loads of information out there so it's easy to move between agencies so you're not really saying I'm going to do this and you're going to be hooked with me forever so that's a good argument as a team leader when using Drupal so I think it's really good for mentoring and coaching so there are other frameworks that might not be as good in the sense of resources and in the sense that you can really architect the project in multiple ways if you're using the same framework good luck it's awesome once you know it but going through the documentation is hard and it really focuses the architectural approach of a project in a certain way whereas with Drupal we can always go more towards custom modules site building all these sort of things so I really think that Drupal offers a little bit on that and then when talking about leading by example again so how Drupal is how are you doing the things when you're working how are you doing the Drupal way are you hacking a way so yeah, you've got to be careful with that and then as a developer the cool what we find with Drupal is that obviously we have an initial learning queue but that is Drupal 7.8 whichever version it's very big yeah, it's a steep at the beginning it's much harder than it could be any other CMS or WordPress or maybe not but things like that they are easy to pick up and you have lots of things but once you know a little bit it's very flexible something that I really like about Drupal is that yeah, you've got those separations of back-end from tensile reading I mean, if some of you were in my top-handy modules you can build loads and loads and loads of sites just clicking away without calling a single line you can build a whole website that was something that we got a few years ago many more years ago in order than I want to be so it's flexible and it's got a lot of modules it's got a huge community so that helps a lot as a developer again, do you need to be an expert Drupal developer? Now away you don't have to at all and then if you remember I told you that I would come back to this approach to projects so in that sense for me the way I've been approaching in all these years when developing with Drupal so how do you engage, experience developers make them code okay they were excited about calling Drupal 7 modules and they are even more excited now to call Drupal 8 modules it's way more challenging but that's part of yeah, keeping them engaged so whatever is in the project that could be could need custom code send it to them send it their way even if sometimes it's over-engineering I mean so long as you stick to the budget and the time at a developer I mean I have found situations in which people have been willing to work on their own time just because they wanted to learn how to code Drupal 8 modules it was a big challenge from Drupal 7 to 8 therefore, they wanted to learn and they said okay we could do this but maybe we can do this custom module okay, go for it that could be I want to keep them engaged whatever we have just the opposite extremely I just first joke I don't know my way around Drupal I will say completely the opposite don't let them code don't let them write a line of code because each line that they write it is a potential point of failure of their programming so in that sense with junior developers it's really easy to work with Drupal because they can achieve loads and that give them really good sense of achievement because they think we are able to build whole website using a tool just by yeah, installing modules and all that and that's cool I mean we don't have that with all the frameworks yeah, in some other frameworks you are forced to code whereas with Drupal yeah, you could and then when the situation in between we can most always build I use some site reading coding so when I used to work with developers and I always told them I can yeah, it was mostly about content types because some of them they would just go crazy start reading content types and end up decide too many content type like and then yeah that was awful to maintain and I told them I keep it simple keep it yeah, easy um yeah, so my point is what I'm trying to get at is again as a team leader you can lead them in any specific direction you can try to keep them engaged in a different part of the part of the project how do you start with people yes, graduate developers people who know zero Drupal yeah how do you start with them do you start with all the projects um, so usually I mean that could really depend on management and how willing to invest time on them usually when you take a junior you're making a commitment to training somehow because you do know the lack of experience so I always push for a few weeks of pure training having the first two, three weeks of pure training I always I give them the resources I go in this Drupalized mini series just go through it go in this blog post I'm even trying to set them dummy projects or maybe if I see that they are very easy to do tickets, just try to give them that but I think that yeah, for a graduate the very first experience that you've got with Drupal is key because that would be confidence and then I will make them more harder towards getting to know better Drupal obviously it's not everything down to me if I set them up and spend I want three weeks for this area but just to be trained they may say I wasn't in production straight away then yeah, again part of the challenge we were talking before you really need to talk out your mind and say that's not a good idea that I'm going to stop and there's nothing we can do because it's not even there for it right basically there's no choice it's either you did it love it yourself or yeah, exactly so yeah, I think this is really talking about them again, I mean talking a bit more about challenges and so if you say I'm reading custom, custom, custom so it's time to challenge do you need to really choose whether you write something custom or not that can be custom theme or it can be using bootstrap out of the box as it is it could be on a module like do we want the Salesforce base integration or do we want to write something for Salesforce we're talking budget it's the same so most of the times whether yeah whether or not we go over time whether or not we go over budget it really depends how much custom culture you do but then it's on the other side to keep the bio person engaged and to keep to improve you really need to start doing custom things it's the only way if you don't do modules you don't get better at doing modules yeah, go one minute wasn't it until 5? we can't go over time I thought it was until 5 and that's what I was counting on are we okay until 5? yeah yeah, okay so 6 minutes cool I'm so fine with alright so I just wanted to talk to you briefly about some people wow that's no internet so there are nice photos in there of those people but because I hook it into my mobile they are not loading for whatever reason anyway, we've got Alex we've got Joel and we've got Nick the three of them were actually team members so Alex's background was more PHP developer so he started as a junior was in his first job his main struggle was that he wouldn't really understand everything so it took him forever to really go through any ticket because he was actually reading the code of the modules so how did Drupal help in his case trust other people call trust the community trust your peer developers you don't really understand it I'm telling you that he does that trust it you don't need to go through it and see how many variables or whatever just use it and he also helped and learned good patterns from there so he improved obviously in practicality and what is he now just is technical elite of UI so in his case it was a total shift from he started packing and now is doing mostly frontend she did sound engineering no programming whatsoever she did a bit of programming in some math modules but no programming so she started as an intern and then she struggled a bit more in packing and server management so in that sense we realized that straight away and we kept her away from that so how did Drupal help in this case because she could focus on the frontend side of Drupal that's where we put her in and that and she's amazing I mean she's really good at it it took her some time but by focusing just on that side and yeah we didn't force her into learning things that were beyond her capabilities and then yes improving on that that I said and now she's Drupal frontend developer and then Nick so he did computer science it was his first job but he had a really good base he started as a junior developer and his struggles were maybe budget he was a perfectionist he wanted to do everything up to the last detail he just he would spend hours and hours and hours of his own time just working on a project and that's no good either and as a team leader you really need to first job you're super enthusiastic okay great but oh we see because you're gonna just burn out very soon and you just need to keep it practical I need to to be within the constraint if you always go over budget then yeah I'm not gonna learn to work within those constraints which I think is important so Drupal helped in his place to follow a simple approach to some projects as I said instead of creating 20 content types and you better go over three and use paragraphs and do it easy and then he improved a lot in yeah knowing the complexity of tasks stepping out and see the whole picture and thinking about it which I think is important and especially when coding was involved and where he's now he jumped into digital consultancy and now he's Drupal developer again he wanted to do development so that was it I mean as I said at the very beginning the team leader skills are not really technical they are important but they are not key and in order to make developers grow you really need to know them you need to know what they want and also know the context of the company and all that and how does Drupal help with the flexibility to follow multiple approaches there are multiple parts of Drupal that they could touch on the community is I mean for a reason and and then yeah obviously the path of each person is unique people and technology can help then shape it but yeah it's up to really people how they shape that and and I really think I told you all this at the beginning I'm not in leader anymore but to me nothing has to say I'm part of a team we are like seven, eight people we have juniors we have more experienced people and I just try to help when I can just because what I like so I believe that's it all the slides are in there so just feel free to take them and any more questions in the last minute then thank you all and let's go let's go yeah I mean we'll be around yeah and I'm probably going to can I switch over? Fran see you at the time alright, yeah I'll go there they're really interesting topic yeah you are a program yeah I was pretty much the same path as Fran actually I had some yeah how are you? yeah, how are you? I'm fine oh yeah brilliant growing dupo it's complicated topic yeah it's a challenge especially when you throw dupo to the question yeah this is I mean I've been in dupo development for 12 years and I haven't been able to solve this problem so it's constantly complicated and you have to try to think of a way to simplify it problem is if you're looking to hire trained people the price is going to be like this yeah if you're looking to hire juniors then your learning curve plus the time that you spend training as well as that's the reason why I mentioned the challenges is like because yeah in my previous company they really wanted that they wanted to hire juniors just because of the price because they didn't want to pay that but yet then then I need it to be honest it's like yeah you cannot produce high quality things in midday time in midday budget with that kind of people so yeah we really need it to to get to a midday point midday ground and with that knowledge the complexity besides it doesn't guarantee that these developers will not leave once you've trained them yeah so you keep having this kind of ever ending problem yeah, Amiga at the end of the day Amiga is just everywhere and you've been talking about people and people in that sense doing the work


Listen, I know what you guys are thinking agent. I have $60. I need to know what to spend it on I'm here for y'all. I drop a like subscribe to the channel put on post notifications click the link in the description listen to my new podcast Okay, that was enough plugs listen ladies and gentlemen I have wasted $60 of my own to find out what the NBA 2k 18 on the ps3 looks like I spent two and a half hours That is not a made-up number two and a half hours problem solving using all my brain power Because I kept running into issues forgetting my PSM password PlayStation store is super buggy off rip The graphics are some cheeks I can't believe I used to play on this console with these outdated graphics and no one I had a beast PC behind there the whole time I don't know what I was thinking. All right, let's click start checking systems. Sorry. Oh My god, okay, I could tell it's gonna be bad. Yeah the following tailstay Man NBA 2k 11 off rip looks better than this. All right.  Listen. I know you're gonna say agent You always talk about latency, but the button delay and I'm not even playing online. It's ridiculous. Let me click down Okay input didn't even work fantastic down All right, here we go.  Look at these player models. These are coming straight out of 2009 Listen, I usually have the soundtracks muted, but uh, I'm gonna just let this rock for today All right, let's see what NBA today is talking about so you can play quick games. What else could you do, man? That's it can't play online. No head to head on that's great That's who needs those features the anti aliasing on these players is ridiculous You can see all kinds of lines and markers Pixelation on the edges of the player models. Yo, this this game released in 2017 guys This is a game that released by AAA developer in 2017 that cost by the way the same amount as the same product on the ps4 and Xbox one and the Best part about this is that this game on the ps3 sells better than the PC version of the game Mads are buying this version of the game There is probably at least five thousand people that are gonna watch this video that have this Specific version of the game and I would ask y'all what the fuck y'all were thinking man off rip this looks like a mistake Yeah, so they got updated teams they got updated rosters, which is nice They didn't just completely abandoned the game off rip. They've been giving it roster updates So there's that let me kick escape for help I need help now All right. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, so some new came out online. Let's uh boot this up I might have played myself. Oh, you can't do it. What cruise yo first of all ladies and gentlemen This is groundbreaking material not only does the guy have on a brown shirt He has on brown sweatpants. They are not great sweatpants ladies and gentlemen You were looking at him correctly He is dressed like he just came out of a prison But like a special kind of prison because it's a very good print me Orange shirt with some orange na na na. This is a 2k prison, bro This is the prison people go to when they decide to play this version of the game and the interesting part about maybe all of this Is that it tells you how many people are online right now the ps4 version of the game hides that number? Oh my god Look at the graphics look at the anti-aliasing the pixelation around the player models and of course Of course they have the ruffles advertisements there. I knew it. They couldn't resist. I knew it It didn't matter. This was on the ps3. They couldn't resist. It's 2k man. It's 2k Yo this gameplay This game dropped in 2017. I don't believe that this game came from 2009 for sure It's not from this era pull up and it has NBA 2k 16th shot meter the Exact one and the gameplay feels exactly like NBA 2k 10 NBA 2k 11 exactly What come on yo, I thought the sliders would be a little bit better on this game. Here we go Here we go. Kyle. That's you my guy That's what I do man any game bro any game name a game. I'm shooting greens Look at that stuff. Look at that press him. That's Arden. Why would you why would you leave this 2009 AI? This 2009 AI does not there's not recent AI Pull up. That's gotta be cash buckets. Stop leaving Corvair open. This feels exactly like 2k 10 Exactly, and I played enough 2k 10 and 2k 11 to know Are we playing a rookie when you shoot the ball and it hits back room and it makes that doon sound This is part of the reason I fell in love with 2k is that sound effect green light baby a skull I wish you could have done that in the NBA finals Bro if he hits that there we go, you ain't caught Corv baby Rodney hood Garba jazz player Jab jab jab the controls are identical to 2k 11 You can go in the post but using the right stick is probably past is it what? He almost don't for that man. He was on a mission. You got a double-team hardened. No That's not break. It's cool. I don't know. I'm gonna be real with you chief Zero percent chance. I make it through this game.  I'm not ahead. I'm down for Five quick math quick mess. Yo, the gameplay was 2k 11 the shop meter was 2k 16 And they don't even hide the players online. They just pull out tell you they're like you listen, man We got a thousand people online. There's probably not a lot. But what do you expect? It's the piece three version. No Yo, I wish I could make this stuff up y'all the last generation version of 2k 18 so 170,000 copies let me remind you NBA live so 400,000 last generation 2k 18 so 170,000 that doesn't even include PC that doesn't even include obviously next-gen or they sold millions and made billions Lyinging up their pockets. All right. I'm curious. What is the crew? Let me create a crew Bro this they took 2k 11 my guys click control seeing this bitch control v right afterwards And they copied and pasted Exactly what 2k 11 was you can tell the player models look like 2k 11 My man's wearing the brown shirt with the brown sweatpants Unbelievable this is a game that was developed and launched in 2017 First of all, I love it.  I want to play in Venice Beach.  I put out a tweet just talking about it So you can edit the crew. There's leaderboards. No, please. Tell me like people really play this Yo people really play this man. I would too. I would too So of course you can play with friends. I got the black top the all-star team up We know about those. I'm curious what the my team is looking like. Yo, this is my team This my team is straight out of NBA 2k 13 and I love it I love it. I'm a 2k 13 was my favorite my team ever since 14 and on They switched up the way the direction of the game mode and I didn't like it I like the fact that Javail McGee can play well in game and then his value would go up in the market They got the booster packs from 2k 13. Of course, welcome to my team ready to play wrote to the playoffs I remember so let's click wrote to the playoffs and I forgot you have to pay his team salary Man, I really wish they brought back 2k 13's method I love the fact that I got back and predict that Donovan Mitchell was gonna have a fantastic season Buy him cheap early on and then his values skyrockets You could sell him for more like I used to love playing the market doing that in 2k 13. Listen, I'm not even mad I feel like they took a lot of the best things in 2k and put them in a game They took 2k 11 gameplay, right? They took and NBA 2k 16 shot meter They took the game sounds in the sound effects from NBA 2k 10 the my team over from NBA 2k 13 Honestly, it's kind of like a conglomerate of all the things I liked in NBA 2k listen now I'm gonna just say it like this gameplay is better than NBLI 18 it just is I don't think I'm ever gonna find a match, but I do want to try out the my career mode All right, so this will happen. They're in a board room. They're trying to figure things out, right NBA 2k 18 They're just control C control V control C control V. They're copying pasting everything they get in the board room They're thinking to themselves. Hey, what should we price the game guys one guy is rational, right?  That's probably exactly what was said word by word You could probably quote me on that can't be sure, but I am sure 1000% look at the lighting Why is the crowd occasionally going blue? Hey, here we go. Hey coach get off the court man. What are you doing pull up red a red release 2k 16 shot meter identical day. Oh my god, they're getting away with this man. Look at that step back clean pull up brave. I Can't look I can't look at these faces without laughing guys. You can't look at these faces All right, so let's bring it back to the original question. You have $60 Like we just heard all these exciting e3 announcements man And which what should I spend my money on and the answer is NBA 2k 18 on the ps3 and not only that hold up I got a special little detail for you You can buy VC on the ps3 version of the game ladies and gentlemen if that doesn't sell it for you I don't know what will I just announced to you not only can you spend $60, but you can give even more of your money This is a bargain 120,000 VC for $30.  What are these screenshots? I'm so why would they even put screenshots here? What this is not what the game looks like? This is false advertising Yo, come on y'all. This is not the game at all. This is the ps4 version of the game This is not the ps3. They that is not them All right listen man, I don't know how to end this video. All right, just spend all your money Make 2k rich their investors will thank you Ronnie will thank you and drop a like subscribe to the channel Put on the post notifications link in the description my new podcast out low went in on the waviest rant of all time We're gonna turn into a poem long story short. Click it. I'm gonna catch you guys later. I'm out peace


I always say, you want to get good at this. Flirt with everyone, right?  It's impossible to get good if you're doing one thing 99% of the time and then only doing that thing you want to improve on the other 1% of the time. It'll never happen for you. So I always say, flirt with everyone, right? And not even in a way that, oh, I'm trying to get in bed with you, but just in a way that acknowledges, hey, when we're around each other, this funny, natural, God-given thing happens in our bodies. We can't control it. It's kind of silly. It's kind of funny. Might be a little weird, but it's enjoyable, right? Waitresses. I've gotten so many freebies just from flirting with the waitress. How's your day going? Yeah? What do you recommend on this menu? Older women. Flirt with older women, man. Oh, they're the best practice in the world. Enjoy their company. Make them feel beautiful. Make them feel sexy. You're so sweet. I'm going to introduce you to my daughter, my granddaughter, right? Look at the most charming, charismatic, sexy men. They flirt with every single woman, not just trying to do something differently when they're around someone they like. You have to practice this all the time. If you want to get good, if you want to be considered a sexual human being, it has to be part of who you are, part of your natural communication, right? And once again, if someone, if the waitress is like, I'm okay, sir. I'm going to go back. Great. I'll have the pancakes. Thank you.  Better be like, you're so sweet. How long have you been working here for? Doesn't matter what you say. That feeling that's being exchanged between the two of you. I almost wish this was more complicated, that there was some greater secret that I was involving. It's simple, but then it's not easy. Not when we've been trained by our culture to try to actively figure something out, to try to actively do something. When that's our standard MO, it can be tough to break away from that.


Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in, Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, CUBE alumni. One of the first CUBE alumni, go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Oh my gosh, almost 10 years, that is unbelievable. It's hard to believe, so many years of theCUBE, I love it. It's been such a great honor to interview you and you follow your career. You get quite the impressive run, executive level, women in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props for that before we get started, thank you. Thank you, John, it's been my honor and privilege. Just talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport. And we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners in growing. And we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well. So I feel right at home. You quite have a knack for mastering growth, technology and building out companies. So congratulations and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about? How did it all start? Like I know you had a bump into it, you went Microsoft, AWS, take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened.  So I did start out in healthcare, right out of university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication. And it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world, culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare. And by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there. And then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Key File Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashville, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into Big Tech World, we ran on exchange for everybody who knows that term exchange and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Bomber. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what? My next step was I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade.  I had been a SVP and went to a manager and it's one of the best news I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of Big Tech and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that. I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010 where I eventually ran all of the US federal government business which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinched myself some days because we went from two people, no offices. To the time I left, we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. I was there until 2021 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple of projects for Microsoft with CEO Satya Nandela who's also another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me and I'm at Flexport so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. I got to say, the Amazon one well documented certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watch you rise and scale that thing. And like I said, at a time this will be looked back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean, it's a zero to massive billions. At a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings?  What did you learn? I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with this, you know, you can't give up and no is not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes that you have to figure out what are all the questions people are gonna ask you. I learned to be very patient. And I think one of the things John for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves if we're gonna do something super transformative and truly disruptive like cloud computing which the government really had not utilized. We had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of cloud computing we were not gonna accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there who's still there. Who's the CISO and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out without them, you know we would have just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I learned about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development it was data center operations, it was legal finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why cloud computing could be such a transformative and changer for the way government operates globally. Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport again, transformative supply chain not new computing wasn't new when before cloud came supply chain, not a new concept is undergoing radical change in transformation online software supply chain hardware supply chain in general shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working similar kind of thing going on build out growth scale. It is, it's very much like that John I would say it's kind of the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly it's not as there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain you don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know I was at a conference last weekend LA and it was the themes were so similar about transparency access to data and information being able to act quickly, drive change know what was happening. I was like, wow this sounds familiar data AI, machine learning, visibility common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of things that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea at number one to give access to everyone we want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and wanted their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell the story years ago, John and I don't think Michael Dell would mind I told the story one of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them and they had renters and they would run around they would run around the floor and do their orders to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade in my mind I still see renters running around and I think that's moved to a very digital right world that all this stuff you don't need people doing this you have machines doing this now and you have access to the information and we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an underabendance or an overabendance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping in the shipping yards around the world. So we need in the ports so we need to also we still have some clearing to do and that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. Great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion diversity and equity programs. What do you got going on there that's been a big conversation in the industry around you're keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other but clearly every company if they don't have a strong program will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants diverse workforces inclusive equitable all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy? How do you guys supporting that in the workplace? Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader that I could have an impact that the words I used the actions I took the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace in the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that that I can help empower women around the world in the tech industry now I'm hoping to do my little part John and that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all I've not been there that long yet but I'm getting to know we have some we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know while that this industry is different than the world I lived in day to day it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know for us we're trying to approach every day by saying let's make sure both our interviewing cycles the jobs we feel, how we recruit people how we put people out there on the platforms that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top from Dave and all of our leaders we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something it's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the areas as you know very well we lost a lot of women during COVID who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. There's now clear visibility at least from in today's world and notwithstanding some of the setbacks from COVID that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the board room. That's a big change. A lot then even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table, the board still underrepresented by most numbers. But at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top. And a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this level approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of and credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were rising through the ranks? What's different? Well, one of the main things and I honestly did not think about it too much but there were really no women, there were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally it was me or not me at the table but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through. And that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot. In the US, if you look at just our US House of Representatives and our US Senate, we now have the increasing number of women even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to, women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share John globally in the US, one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the US have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters, I have nieces and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what we have to instill in every little girl out there that they can accomplish anything they want to, the world is theirs. And we need to not just do that in the US but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain over 60% of the tech workers were females. And most of them held the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering, but many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger but the top we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go, but again, that part is really changing. Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done. And I want to give you props for that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of F-causes in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I want to love to get your opinion because I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge. It comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring or it's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? Yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship.  But I mean, there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world and I tried some new things. In between roles, I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and the questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you want to mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing and I don't believe we actually do that still in ethnic companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team when I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that had a lot of opportunity for growth but they just weren't getting a seat at the table and we brought them to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor, they had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring them into executive meetings, they would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without feeling, wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environmental setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do but they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with John that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program and I said two things, I want you to lead this program and say to yourself, I would have never had that experience if I had gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months that it probably taken me five years to learn and that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity and unless you all feel that we're in an inclusive environment, sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not gonna get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them that we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held them up, taught them things that gave them access and two selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business, please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me, that's more sponsorship. I still had people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying you were so good with me. Can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not, pray a hundred percent. Some things pray fall into the cracks but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy who were very honest in that front with me about my career. Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women to take paying it forward but you're quite accomplished and that's why I'm so glad to have you in the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously, storied career in your other jobs, specifically Amazon, I think is historic in my mind in this next chapter. Well, it looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit what's on your mind with your current job. Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners, I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world-class enterprise, global sales and marketing team, really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is, I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful that you listen, you learn and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me and flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for TET for refugees, which brings assistant to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria and flexport recently, in fact, just did three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria that we're very active in the Ukraine. And our goal for flexport.org John is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost-effective, easy way as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so happy. And Ryan Peterson, he was our founder. This was his brainchild and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commerciality and giving. And I think flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all these exciting things around sustainability. And we just had Mobile World Congress for a big cube broadcast, 5G's right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we're tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact, we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's the thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we're doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with their climate initiatives. Well, Teresa, it's great to have you on security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. Well, John, it's an honor. And just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. I really appreciate it's super important and these videos have impact. So we're going to do a lot more of them. I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Teresa Carlson, the president and chief commercial officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching.


Hello everyone. I hope I'm not speaking to a lot, but thank you so much for joining us today as we talk about Ford's journey from click-ups to get-ups, so basically zero get-ups to a whole lot of get-ups. And I am Jailam. I work at Red Hat and I am in the OpenShift team, in the OpenShift product marketing team, and I'm super excited to talk to you all and talk about Ford. And I have Arthur with me who can introduce himself. I'm Arthur. I work at Ford. I'm on the platform engineering team that handles the configuration and deployment of OpenShift and Kubernetes. And at Ford, we obviously build vehicles, but with those vehicles, they are now more connected than ever. So those telemetry vehicles, our system build vehicles, our other sub-organizations like Ford Credit, our banking divisions all require the services and they're moving from legacy VMs and applications to more modern container-based solutions. So the rise of Kubernetes at Ford is prominent. And Red Hat, if you didn't have a chance to stop by our booth outside, we're an enterprise open-source company. OpenShift is our hybrid cloud application platform, and we're excited to talk about how Ford has been using OpenShift and get-ups. And I'll hand it back to Arthur now. Thank you. So Ford started their journey into Kubernetes back in 2017 with CoreOS and Tectonic. Later when it was acquired, we switched over to OpenShift. And then around May 2020, we started to become more production-ready with OpenShift. And learning the hard way, we figured that we needed to switch our permission model to a more least-privileged. Previously, the entire team had cluster admin, access to all the secrets, et cetera, et cetera. This led to some disastrous effects. So we switched to a more least-privileged model with a subset of the team having access, as well as granting increased access on an as-needed basis. Later that same year, we switched over to using Customize to manage our YAML manifest. Previously, we were using Shell Scripts to manage the configuration of different versions of our YAMLs, and that ended up becoming extremely complicated. At that time, we were also only managing two monolithic clusters. So we had a non-production production, which contained all of our workload of various differing performance characteristics. So in 2021, we started to break down those two monolithic clusters into purpose-built clusters where we split off RCICD to their own clusters, for example, one for Jenkins, one for Tecton. And we had shared clusters for general purpose workloads, as well as dedicated clusters for GPU-based workloads or any other custom workload that we decided would be better to have separated from everyone else. And then starting in KubeCon last year, we started the process of joining or starting to use ArgoCD, because as we split off those clusters, now we have a whole bunch of permutations of YAMLs that we need to keep track of and deploy. So we started to refactor our Customizer overlays to be more multi-cluster-oriented, and then integrating with ArgoCD to manage the reconciliation of those YAMLs onto the cluster. Where we sit now is basically everything is managed through ArgoCD. There may be a YAML or two, that's missing, but essentially everything is done through ArgoCD. And then next year, we plan to also launch ArgoCD as a service to our application teams so they can use ArgoCD to manage their application lifecycle on OpenShift as well. Our current fleet size is about 50 clusters, with 2,000 application teams split across about 8,500 namespaces. They're PROD, they're non-PROD, they're CICD namespaces and so on. And with OpenShift 414 around the corner, we have to essentially rebuild every cluster. So we'll be immediately doubling our footprint as we migrate people from one cluster to the new cluster. And with the decommission of other legacy applications or legacy platforms that our applications are hosted on, we'll be increasing the footprint size due to that as well. So we should be seeing a 2-3x growth probably in the next 1-2 years in terms of our footprint size. And some of the challenges we had before we introduced ArgoCD were that configuration drift, we have a whole bunch of clusters to keep track of, and we still put our code in our YAML and GitHub, but even then there are still humans in between the code and the cluster. So sometimes you miss something, sometimes you're not paying attention, or you're on the wrong cluster to begin with, and that's disastrous. So as we learn to be more careful, ArgoCD just ended up being inevitable. And why do we use ArgoCD over, let's say, another product? Their plug-in mechanism is very extensible and very helpful. Because ArgoCD out of the box takes your YAML and applies it to the cluster. But there are cases where you want maybe more checks in place in between the YAML and the cluster. So using the CMP plug-ins we're able to extend ArgoCD to do those custom checks that we want. The metrics that ArgoCD exposes up into the OpenShift is also useful for tracking purposes, and then we aggregate those across all our clusters into one place so we can see across the fleet what Argo is doing. And that's actually a good example of this. It was a couple weeks ago the container registries for Red Hat went down, and we had an upgrade going around at the same time. And essentially everything was failing everywhere at the same time, because nothing could pull images. So we were able to catch that. At least we were able to see it, which was nice. We couldn't do anything about it, but... So the differential YAML viewer is also nice. We have a lot of stuff auto-syncing, but not everything. So with the YAML viewer we're able to see the deltas, particularly when we were enrolling old clusters into ArgoCD. It was very helpful to see what was missed in the past, because we had made configurations, but you didn't know what the configurations of the clusters were until you installed Argo and compared all the deltas. So some of the plug-ins we're currently doing today are secrets management. So we're using the ArgoCD vault plugin to pull secrets from Secret Manager. That way our YAMLs only have references to secrets and not secrets themselves in GitHub. And then we have two other plugins for pulling information from the cluster directly, the infrastructure ID and the unique identifier for the cluster. Those are not known ahead of time of cluster build, particularly with IPI installs. So those are generated dynamically, so our YAMLs can't contain that in GitHub. And then the last plugin is just a simple framework for testing the YAMLs. And we'll get into more of that a little bit later. So like I said, basically everything is managed through ArgoCD. And then at about this present time we're sitting at about 60% of our configurations, just autosync from GitHub to the cluster. We are also looking at doing more sync waves, not sync wave, time window, the time window feature of ArgoCD, I blink on the actual term. But trying to get that more oriented so we can time box certain clusters to certain time windows, and at least we can get those merged in GitHub sooner, instead of being instantaneous. The last 40%, as we get more comfortable with how we process our Git PRs and how Argo does its syncing, we'll continue to increase. Some of the major ones that we are still skipping out on are upgrades. We don't autosync from GitHub, just in case something were to downgrade. We don't want that to happen, particularly for the cluster. But we continue to increase that and we will do more of that. So since Argo applies the YAMLs to the cluster, we want to make sure those YAMLs that are in GitHub are as clean as possible. So each overlay from Customize has a test script in there. And in that test script, the logic varies all the way from just running a Customize build to pulling in the secrets to even checking the contents of those YAMLs. So if I want to go to cluster A and I want other references to that cluster A in the YAMLs, I want to make sure that that folder that that cluster is in matches all the content items within it. Particularly one that's pretty important is the one overlay that manages the cluster certificates. So we don't have sort manager on our clusters due to some internal business requirements. So up until then, we're storing our certificates in a secrets tool and we're pulling those in dynamically through Argo CD. But we don't want Argo CD to apply the wrong search to the cluster or even expired search to the cluster or if for some reason someone deleted the cert from the secret manager. So that test that runs on the PR and that same test file that runs through the plugin to the cluster checks. Is this cert for the right cluster? Is it expired? Does it have all the intermediary chains? Does the key even match the cert itself? So we're running all those checks beforehand. And we're also using KubeConform to check the YAML spec of the YAMLs as our linting mechanism as well. And for items like the OpenShift upgrades, we have to include both the version of OpenShift and the SHA and then based off that Cincinnati graph that Red Hat publishes, we're able to confirm that, hey, there's no typos. This shot for this image matches this tag that is being used to upgrade the cluster. Some other features we want to add to that one in particular is making sure the upgrade paths are supported as well in RPRs. So if the git says you're at this version and you want to go to the next version, pulling that upgrade path information as well. So we're not upgrading from one version to another because when you code through, when you apply the YAML directly, it skips the cluster checks by default. So whatever version you put in, the cluster will just happily accept. So since we're using Customize to upgrade our overlays, we wanted to make sure that when we refactored them, we structured our overlays in such a way that we're not duplicating a whole bunch of code, but we also don't have code that if we do change won't necessarily cause an unexpected change to the entire fleet. So we kind of went with a structure that where base contains stuff that will be fairly static and pretty consistent across the fleet. So like your name SpaceYAML is essentially going to be the same for every cluster and it probably won't change. Certain RBAC values, we have a custom job for approving operators on the cluster. Now in our components, we have optional fields that are for each cluster. So in the context of Argo CD, the applications that are applied to a cluster vary. So those we threw under components. And then under, we have a version sub folder under components, which contains all the different versions of Argo CD and all its associated YAMLs that change between the versions, generally CRD changes. And then overlays are point to the combination of all those previous sub folders and any custom patches that need to be done on a per environment basis. And then there's that test file we're talking about that will test the specific values. And then this is kind of some of the open source tooling that we use on to kind of manage everything. Argo CD, obviously. We use Helm very sparingly. The main benefit that I found Helm for is when you need to do nested arrays. Trying to do nested arrays with customize is a mess. So for managing machine sets and storage classes, particularly, we're using Helm and for everything else, we're using customize. And then we use Caverno as well in our pipelines to do policy checking, as well as we're starting to roll that out on our clusters as well. That way we can check in the PR and then we can check in the cluster. Then we use Argo CD vault plugin for our secret replacement. Customizes our YAML management of choice. Cube builder is what we've been using to build operators, custom operators. We also are starting to look at the operator SDK as well. And then cube conform is what we use for spec checking. We pull those values in from the cluster, throw them in a repo, and we're able to reference them. Pipelano's code and Tecton is our CI CD that handles all of our PR checks and then open cluster management for our observability. And then the clusters live in GCP, so configuring all of our GCP resources are done through Terraform. So not everything on OpenShift presently is very GitOps friendly. But with these plugins and our custom operators, we can make it become more GitOps friendly. So with the monitoring stack as an example, OpenShift configures it through a large YAML in YAML. And when you're trying to manage many permutations of this, it becomes very complicated. So what we did is we essentially wrote an operator that contains a CRD of the configuration of this YAML in YAML. So all the operator does is convert the CRD into a config map. It's really straightforward. But what this lettuce does is use customized to patch the different pieces of this CRD instead of trying to mangle a YAML that's inside of a YAML. Similarly, before the UID gets injected on that replacement line by the CMP plugin, because that gets passed in to the open cluster management to identify the cluster. And another tidbit if you didn't know, the UID of the cluster is not immutable, so you can lose it. So we have the backup as well beforehand just in case. The next step forward for us is managing our tenant namespaces for application teams through Argo CD. Right now we have custom APIs that manage our namespaces, and they interact directly with the cluster. So we want to migrate those to Argo CD as well, which means we need to first put those in GitHub. So we need to retroactively dump everything. And then we need to reconfigure all of our onboarding APIs to point to Git first. So similarly, the pipelines we have for configuring the cluster will also be used for configuring namespace tenants. But we have additional policy checks for different business rules, because we need certain annotations on the namespaces. We need certain permission structures. We want to make sure people aren't throwing in extra YAMLs that they may or may not need. So as long as the business rules pass, if people want to write their own operator and operators, their own APIs for interacting with our clusters, they can. As long as it goes through Git, we're good to go. One check that we don't have in our pipelines at the moment that will be challenging is how to account for resource quote increases, because people like to increase their quotas, but they don't necessarily understand how much they need to use. I'm going to pass it back over to Jaylen to talk about the next couple of slides. Thanks, Arthur, for walking us through Ford's journey. And no journey that spends so many applications, so many teams, so many clusters could be done without challenges. So let's talk a little bit about some of the challenges that they've faced and what they're planning on doing next. So some of the bigger challenges that Ford has come across has, they've arose because they've started to scale so much, namely the experience of using Argo across multiple clusters and multiple instances is not very pleasant, and they are a bit intertwined with each other. The problem is that when you have more than one instance of Argo CD on a cluster and you try to look at the status of your applications, you have to go into each individual Argo instance to see the CD, to see the status of the app. There is no centralized place as such to see the status of all of your applications. You could be using one Argo instance to manage other Argo instances, but that also only does so much. You can only see information on the configuration of the clusters and not the status of the apps themselves. So we do have a little bit of an observability problem, especially at scale on our hands here. And this also makes isolation harder since the multi-tenancy is insufficient and it's just not good security practice. And at Red Hat, we've seen this problem come up with a lot of our customers, not just Ford. So anyone who is expanding their Argo usage to use more than one instance or more than one cluster is going to have this problem. And so as the Argo community, we have a really good opportunity on our hands to provide solutions to this as the Argo usage grows in larger organizations and teams start to use it at a bigger scale. The next few problems that Ford has faced are a little bit more platforms, so OpenShift specific, OLM or operator lifecycle manager cannot roll back or roll forward. So if you use Argo to manage operators, which is the main reason to use Argo to manage operators is to allow them to roll forward. OLM doesn't allow to do that. Some of our OpenShift components, like Arthur mentioned, uses YAML and YAML, which we all know how much fun that can be. It's just not easy to manage. It's a little bit of a pain and we don't want to do that. And finally, when Ford upgrades clusters, things always, they don't go very smoothly. It sometimes results in improperly configured PDPs for their app teams. Nodes get stuck. Applications do not terminate properly. And OpenShift has a couple of operators that might help solve this issue. So Ford will be looking into that into the future. And these are just some of the boundaries that Ford has run into as they use Argo at scale. And as larger organizations start using Argo, we're starting to learn more about these challenges. We're starting to uncover what happens when Argo is used at such a scale. And we see this with other customers as well and we're working on fixing it. But these are problems that if we come together as a community to solve, it would be really helpful and we can figure out how to get Argo past these boundaries. Finally, let's talk a little bit about what's next for Ford, what are the future enhancements and how we're going to help do more with Argo as well. So Ford wants to use progressive delivery using Argo rollouts. Arthur's team is looking at rollouts for the developer team so that the devs won't have to worry about Argo instances as much. On Red Hat side, a lot of our customers are also looking at rollouts and they're already starting to use it as well. So we've started contributing to the rollouts community and we look forward to getting more and more involved in the community as we work with our customers even more. Ford is also interested in the Argo image updater and they're looking at it specifically for deployments. This is something that they've been waiting on the upstream community for and they're hoping that they can start exploring it soon. With multi cluster, they're interested in seeing how they can use, how they can have Argo CD communicate with other OpenShift or Kubernetes clusters without using tokens. And like Arthur mentioned, they're interested in the Secret Store CSI driver for secrets management. They want to have the lowest touch secrets management system and we're helping them as they explore this as well. The plugin system in Argo wasn't created with multi tenancy in mind so if folks have multiple teams in a single instance who shouldn't be sharing information like Ford or a lot of other big organizations would, the certificates or secrets should not be stored on the cluster itself and you'd probably be better off using something like an external secrets operator or a secret store CSI driver. And it basically is a secrets management tool that acts as a go-between so it fetches secret data from the world and makes it available to the container. And this is just been made tech preview with OpenShift 414 and it already works with Argo CD so it doesn't need anything special to be added to it. And the scalability is like finally, this group has been very collaborative and exciting. It's been a really great opportunity. The Red Hat GitOps engineering team has been really heavily involved and we're very excited to just work more on testing and finding root causes for scalability issues that the customers and community run into and Ford tends to push boundaries a lot with their use of open source projects which is really cool and I hope that there are some of the first ones who test the work that comes out of the scalability sake. Finally, Argo as a service. Arthur's team would like to explore and run Argo CD as a service for their app dev teams. Arthur mostly spoke about what they've done managing their configuration and infrastructure with Argo CD so helping their dev teams with this would be a new area and they do want to give their teams as much flexibility as they need. So if a team wants to manage their own instance and they want more control they can have it versus if they want to be more hands-off Arthur's team can help with that as well and Red Hat and Ford are working together to help them be successful with this. We see a lot of other larger organizations use this method so we're learning from the ones who've been successful and trying to help Ford as well and I think that's it. It's time for questions and feedback. Please let us know if you've run into these similar challenges and how you've solved them and if you have any questions we'd be happy to answer them. Thank you. Hi, an approach we've taken for controlling for configuration drift and approaching upgrades is repaving and forcing repaving, forcing instances to be deleted and then reinstantiated from the freshest spec. So you spoke to the challenges of keeping some of the components of the platform up to date. How do you manage that? How do you manage upgrading Kubernetes nodes and the software that isn't so easy to update AutoSync with Argo CD? How do you manage that? So as far as I guess you're saying you rebuild the clusters to do upgrades? That's what the approach that we've taken because it's hard otherwise. Our developer base would be very hesitant to that model. They are not quick to migrate so we have to make sure we're able to do everything in place. And overall from an open-source perspective we haven't had too many issues with, from the cluster perspective we've had pretty much no issues with doing upgrades in place. When we run into issues it's generally with app teams and that it hasn't been really an issue. We're able to do in-place upgrades pretty frequently. It's just a matter of we have to basically force terminate stuff. Stuff gets stuck and we just have to force terminate it. But we've never, we're very rarely rare to a case where we have to re-instantiate an entire instance due to some bug or something. Thank you. Okay I have a question. Part of the list of softwares you guys are using and with the help of Red Hat is OCM, correct? Yeah. Okay so with OCM what would be the main difference with OCM and cluster API? Yes I'm not too familiar with cluster API. Do what? I'm not too familiar with cluster API. So cluster API again is an open-source project. I think that came from VMware and Tanzu to control and maintain your set of clusters. Basically it's part of the, I think it's part of the Kubernetes projects on CNCF and it's for, you know, the same thing like has a central hub and you know brings up and maintains clusters. So we have these two open-source projects. I'm really curious if you guys would have answered the question. I had a listen to the other one. I'll have to take a peek at it and see what it offers. All right. Thank you.