Hey guys, this is my review for Supernatural Season 8. Thank you first of all to everyone who joined in on this adventure, thank you for all of your comments and for your opinions and thoughts about the episodes as we went along. It really made this season enjoyable to see your guys' reactions to, especially if the episodes had a bit of a different sort of feeling about it because, and I'll be quite honest, I got bored. I got through this because I had a session, like I had a real like commitment to it, but it did drag quite a bit and I think that is in part due to the fact that Jeremy Carver took over a season that really had maybe season 3's amount of story, so they had to make up a lot of filler episodes or seemingly filler episodes to make up for that. A lot of notes about just how wasted season 7 was was clearly evident while the show was going on, while the season was being made, while Carver definitely had some elements to make a compelling narrative, sort of at least halfway through. He had to try and make up some other things along the way, some of them worked, some of them didn't. This is also kind of the starting point for what a lot of people would say is kind of when Carver would start to kind of change the lore a little bit. I was very guilty of calling Dab out for a lot of the lore changes that he did, a lot of retconning, and there are a little bit of it in this season. It makes more sense for the most part, instead of a retcon, it's like a side tangent for the most part. There are some things that were a little bit retconned, but it was enjoyable for the most part. It's just how long it took for the season to get going. That is the biggest complaint about this season. This one was obviously following the brothers rekindling basically themselves after Dean went to purgatory and Sam kind of just gave everything up. While these two were kind of bickering with each other about who could trust one another, Sam was going through his own kind of memory flashbacks with this Amelia lady who I know that a lot of people didn't like that story. And yes, I can understand as to why it's not supernatural. It was quite literally just a love story. I'm going to sound maybe Pat perhaps a bit sappy, but I liked how they did it because it's the best one that's been done in the show. Aside from some that appeared in season one, two and maybe four, the Amelia character while not really posing much to the actual show really had some connection with Sam. Like that was a story between her and him. Yes, it wasn't supernatural, but I thought it was done all right. But at the same time, I can understand why people didn't like this story because really didn't go where it was just about the characters. Same thing for Dean.  Admittedly, he did, of course, half his reasons for being mad about Sam not really helping to get him out of purgatory.   But there were some other side characters who were pretty well done. Benny, being one who started off pretty strong, had a cool concept, cool relationship with Dean, had some episodes that were just depressing, finding the clan that basically killed him and took away his lover to completely fall in upon itself, that his lover had been turned.    That was also playing into this, the jealousy and the hate and the deceit between the two brothers. And that was also an overarching storyline in this season. The bickering between the brothers while some people have reasonable criticism of this, oh, it's happening again. They were at least trying to make it matter. Like, yes, it was really drawn out, but they did have reasons for bickering. Whereas in the Ander Dab era and definitely after this season, it's going to kind of be created for drama sake. This had a reason to be the way it was. And it was also kind of like the overall arc of what happens to Sam comes sacrifice, which brings in the demon trials.  A bit muddled, perhaps, but it got to a point where it was an enjoyable run if there were some big things of idiocy. But it also introduced a lot of cool things like Knights of Hell. It introduced curing a demon, which found correct. Never comes back again. It also was able to give us some pretty great performances by Crowley. Mark Shepard did a fantastic performance in sacrifice. We deserve to be loved. I deserve to be loved. This season introduced a lot of things, not only with characters like when everyone hates Hitler with the Golem. That was really cool. It dipped into a lot of kind of ghosts and lore from other parts of the world, which was an interesting thing. And it even dipped into things that we had seen before, but giving a little bit of a different twist like the Dijin and werewolves and whatnot. There were also some introductions like the mental letters. We finally got to see the home. We got to see where the brothers would basically set up shop for the rest of this show. This was a huge moment.  On the same token, there were some filler episodes in throughout this one. We had some funny ones like Southern Comfort, our Hunter Eye, Heroky.  LARP and the real girl, we had Charlie come back for a couple of episodes. She was really good. It's good to be clean. But they also had some pretty shit ones, particularly the Bitten one for me very much so freaks and geeks. And remember the Titans?  There are some other episodes in this one that have different opinions by some people. I know I am one of the few who thought that man's best friend with benefits.  Yes, was it done well in certain cases and does it kind of seem a bit, you know? But I like the idea of a cop using witch powers and having this, basically his lover be also his companion thing.  Did it fit into supernatural? Maybe not. But I think it was just so different that I was like, oh, you know what? I'm actually not opposed to this. Yes, but I can understand people who don't like it. Yeah, I get why. But then there was also some other stuff that was about the show that like going back to the kind of the retcon stuff, the entire idea of there being coyotes for demons to get out of hell. And then also how there's just been this backdoor to purgatory.  Yet apparently it's been the door that they have to go through to get out. So Crowley, by definition, would have possibly gone through this at one point.  And I understood why people did not like that. I like the episode itself.  You knew somehow, right? Took a chance. Some big notes, though, there was not a single seven out of seven for me in this. There was not a single perfect episode for me. There was a few good ones. I really, really like Pac-Man fever. Really, really like Goodbye Stranger. My favorite episode of this entire season, it was the one that made me care about watching Supernatural again. Also had Blood Brother, very, very good. I know a lot of people really, really like sacrifice and I did too. I liked one part of it. But there was another part that I thought was like, OK, this is this is a tad stupid. I know I'm probably in the benign minority on that one. It's not a bad episode. It's just not a perfect one. I thought it was going to be. I totally went in thinking it would be. But that's kind of the feeling I have had throughout this season. The whole time I was going through six and seven, I was like, it's going to get better. They haven't seen season eight and forever, but at least it's better, right? Tendingly speaking by the numbers it was, but it was only better than one of those two I mentioned. Out of the score for season eight of 23 episodes, it was a score of 161, all told all of my reviews. This season got a 96. There are count the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, fours, mid episodes, that's how many there are. And that leads into the percentage being 61%, which is better than season seven. Better than season seven, but it's not better than season six. And I have to say, yeah, there's a few better episodes in season six than there was in season seven. Like I actually gave sevens in season six. I gave a seven in season seven. But in the end, my overall rating, my actual four, my out of seven, I'm going to give season eight of supernatural a four out of seven. It's OK. That's basically the best thing I can say. It's not terrible, but it wasn't great.  It was very much middle of the road. And that is how I felt throughout this whole season. It's still one of the better ones post season five. But that's a big pool of to talk about. They had some cool ideas, but it was too drawn out. They had some great episodes, but they weren't the gold. They had a lot of mid. And the ideas that they introduced, while really cool, the time kind of have a little bit of errors and some inconsistencies and what you think about it. Overall, though, season eight is commendable for being what it is better than seven. That's what it all boils down to. But those are my thoughts about this season. I am very interested to see what you guys have to say. And so let's see what you guys have to say. Season eight was a mixed season. There was bad mixed with the good. Charlie and Benny were the best add-ons in the season. The Goodbye Stranger is by far the best episode of season eight. Yep, very much agree with you here. Like I said, it's it's mid mixed. It's just kind of this season really got the let's make Kevin miserable arc from Sam completely abandoning him to Dean, working with him, working him like a slave, treating him worse even than the demons did. Yes, like not taking him to the to the bunker. Castiel even got a few licks in and it only got worse from here.  And I usually don't play replies, but I like what Patrick said here. I'm convinced the writers or the producers had some sort of grudges against the Kevin's actor. Like maybe he hit their children or slept with their spouses. That's the only way I can justify the torture they put him through in just this season, but not just this season, but the whole series. Absolutely.  Now that we've got a big one here from Patrick, this is a hard season to rank. Like most fans, I love the second half of the season. But after watching your reviews, I really started to realize that maybe we've been blind, we've blinded ourselves to his flaws, plot holes and bad acting due to how much we hated the first half. Yeah, that can happen. That's like that can really happen with shows. It's only upon reflection that you rewatches. Why it's I'm very curious of how I will see season 11 when I rewatch it again, because it will be like the first time I've seen it since that I watched that show. Eight nine greatly suffered due to half of their season feuds. Regardless of whose side you were on, both brothers look bad at the end. Also, just feels so tense and bitter, and there's no fun in any episode. And the plot feels like it slows down to focus more on the fight than it speeds up near the end to wrap up everything. I think that's why most fans are forgiving of Henry, Chrissy and the Prometheus episodes, Prometheus episodes. But also, despite the flaws of the second half, nothing was as rage inducing as the first half. But sadly, the second half felt too fast paced for the main story. The trial trials themselves are barely a quarter of the episode, which is probably why fans aren't as upset as they were with nothing in the end.  Thankfully, next season, he redeems himself and there's a good rivalry between him and Metatron.   And like they reused up that character. And I think we're going to see it definitely in the latter seasons. On closer examination, Sam suffered from this, too. Them bringing the demon blood back completely out of the blue, with same with Sam being overcome by his past mistakes. In the second episode of the season, we met this woman whose life was ruined when Lucifer got out and braids Sam for it. Now, why wasn't something like that put in the season? Now, yes, Dean does bring this stuff up in two different episodes. One under the cursed coin. Yep. And another is a bad joke, but there's a huge gap in between. And it would make sense that the brothers were still fighting in the second half. Their hell Dean makes up for this attitude as the season starts. Not only did he cut ties with Benny, but he sent him to his death for Sam. We've had episodes where Dean confirmed his love and trust in Sam. When the trial started, Dean said he wants Sam to have a normal life. He was only mad because it seemed like Sam didn't care about him. Had Sam looked or lied about Dean, it would Dean wouldn't have given a damn. Amelia, especially since Sam dumped her before he got back. Part of me part of me thinks that it would make more sense that the final trial was to sacrifice the one you love. Oh, actually. Oh, and Dean would have been pleading for Sam to kill him. But Sam refuses to give his best chant, give up his best chance of a normal life because Dean is more important to him. That what they went with worked. But I give but I credit that more to Jared and Jansen's acting and the writing. Jared, maybe Jansen, but yeah, that could have been something because it does seem like it's just very quickly resolved. As for the feud itself, weird Dean storyline was good till you added Sam in. And Sam's storyline was awful till you added Dean in. Very good point.  But despite this, Dean showed us clearly that he was remorseful and regretted his actions. Yes, as the season went on, he definitely became more remorseful. This was more like a character kind of thing for Dean in this season. Unlike Sam, who showed no signs of remorse at all. As for Amelia, there's a line.  But what about all those years at Stanford? Sam had more time away from hunting in his adult life than Dean. So even though it is it is deserved him going back, it didn't feel original and how exactly is Amelia better than Jess? I feel that Amelia was possibly the second chance. And yeah, but you're you're right. They he had a normal life before that. Sorry.  Sorry. That's my speaker. Also, if Sam went back to Crowley, back to her, Crowley would have killed her, given them decent events. So him leaving her with isn't as impactful as Dean leaving Benny. Now, yeah, I didn't like Amelia or I feel any of the chemistry in the relationship. And I think people only care about her due to the outrage over Dean's treatment. Not had he not acted out the way he did, when no one would have cared about her or Sam's storyline. Again, easiest fix would have been one scene of Sam and grief over Dean. But there's no visual scene of that in the season. And it's just lazy that the writers felt left it in to fill in the blanks. And you bring up a lot of good points here, Patrick. Like there is some stuff that could have been there. But I think one of the biggest reasons that this season is as mid as it is is one who knew that this season was going to happen again, especially after season seven's reception. Also, as I've said before, they never knew if the show would continue. Like that's hard to write a show with the idea that there could be a continuation, but you also have to make sure that there's an ending. And I think that's my comment here to Mahid here. This is by far the best season finale after Swan's song in the entire show. And I really don't understand how you couldn't love this masterpiece. I like the good parts of it. But like Patrick said, Castiel's change is way too quick, way too quick. Do you have a personal problem with Jeremy Carver, the writer of this episode? And also the changing channel episode of which, of course, you criticize the episode very too much. I gave it a six out of seven, man. Like I still love it, but I do admit that out of the two meta episodes, the French mistake is a better meta episode. As for Jeremy Carver, dude, he was one of the reasons why season three is my favorite season. I don't is not that he's a criticism against him. It's just like literally as other people have pointed out, this season is mid. It has a lot of empty space, especially for 23 episodes and a quarter of that maybe is actually based on the story. Yes, season seven does the same thing, but an eight does do it a tad bit better. But there are so many more episodes that could have been based in story. We got some of the worst filler episodes in a while in this one. And also we just got some really bland episodes. Like the whole season is just bland for a good portion of it. I think the only reason Supernatural didn't get canceled was because the perfect writing he had season eight, nine and 10. Bro, no one remembers nine. I certainly don't, which would literally save the show in the moment that Andrew Dab started the showrunner and the writing. Yeah, the show became worse and worse. I agree with you. However, you look at the ratings. They went up when Dab took over. So technically speaking, yes, Carver saved it from being canceled after the mess of six of seven.  And I felt like so much was wasted on the trash moment like when Jeremy Carver left the series. Yeah, no, like, well, also, I don't like car. I I've got a grudge with Carver because when he found out that season 11 wasn't going to be the last season, he left. He left halfway through. So Andrew Dab had to finish season 11.  So like that's a point against Carver. Carver didn't act well in that in that aspect. If I would describe season eight of Supernatural in three words, it would be a mixed bag. Let's do a quick summary of what the season did right. Benny was an interesting character with charm, a character you could not you could root for. It's a shame that he was never brought back in ladder seasons. He only had that one little cameo in season 15. That was it. Yeah, that was a weird cameo, too. The entire second half of season eight, proudly becoming a great villain, the trial story arc closing the gates of hell was mostly good. The introduction of Amidon, Metatrona and Sacrifice being a very good finale. Probably my favorite favorite in the series. Now, let's summarize what the show did. The season did wrong. First half of the season is not good. It feels so subpar compared to the second half. Absolutely agree. The Amelia arc is long, boring, and the only thing it accomplishes is making Sam and Amelia look like terrible people. Combine that with Sam's pretty petty jealousy, hatred of Benny and the fact that Sam knowingly left Kevin to be tortured by Crowley and makes him aggressively unlikable for the first half. I, like I said, I don't mind the Amelia arc, but everything else you point out here is absolutely true. Sam's a pretty character.  But yeah, no, he like there's the fact that he left Kevin alone. Like what the shit? Many supernatural fans would also say that Sam not wearing wanting to save Dean from trajectory is out of character. But I personally can let it slide. Same because I get it. I mean, we already saw what Sam went through in season three of Mystery Spot and the four months between season three and four when Dean died at the last time and was in hell. It's not so far fetch to believe that Sam would not try to bring Dean back anymore because he's just had enough and in general wanted to leave the whole hunting thing and family business life behind. After what he went through in season six and seven. Yeah, because he's got no one around like there's no one, but I can't let it slide with Kevin.  Absolutely. That's actually a kind of a cool story that could have been done. But, you know, you would have to try and have this show where Dean's in purgatory for like half the season. Sam's with Kevin. Overall, I feel that season eight of Supernatural is six out of 10 or four points, four point five out of seven. It's definitely far better than structured season six and seven, in my opinion. But that first half, man, that's the biggest problem of season eight. I will say, though, season six has more. I feel season six has a better structure. I feel like, yeah.  But I still feel it's a better season overall, especially with the whole thing between Crowley and Castiel, like the man who would be king, such a good character episode in season six. When it comes to Jeremy Carver's first year as a showrunner, he did have some missteps for season eight, but I did still enjoy the season way more than season seven. Yeah, I can agree on that one. Jeremy Carver has come a long way since Time on Supernatural, one of the series, Doom Patrol. My mother and brother both love that show as do I. I have not yet seen Doom Patrol, but I've heard very good things about it. Season eight is my favorite season because it parallels the journeys of seasons one to five in an inverse way that shapes Dean, Sam and Dean as anti-heroes into the Carver era. Sam giving up hunting and not looking for Dean always made sense to me because, to me, I viewed it as a psychotic breakdown after dealing with this trauma of Lucifer's torture in the cage and losing everything that mattered to him in season seven. His romance with Amelia never bothered me like most, unlike most fans. I get other fans felt like it was the show steering into a natural sitcom opposed to a supernatural horror with brighter colors, but it was established as a contrast to Dean's time in Purgatory. Yeah, I can agree with that. Absolutely. Dean is a much better character than he was in six and seven. I love that he's running on survival instinct at the beginning of the season. Castiel dealing with being controlled by the angels made sense to me also because after everything that's happened to the species since season four finale, I really love the addition of new characters. And I felt like to this day that Benny is the most underrated character in Supernatural. I can agree that they really underutilized him throughout the season.  It also it honestly made the angels and demons more interesting to me since the Kripke era opposed to Sam Rock gamble's attempt on focusing on monsters being the focus of season six and seven. Yeah, I in some ways, yes, I can agree. I think that the Purgatory like trying to get to the door of Purgatory in season six is still I like it more than the demon trials thing in this one, especially with the outcome. But yeah, like some of the monster stuff in six and seven just really sucked. The monster of the week episodes are so fun. We can we can half agree on that. But I can understand how they feel so forgettable for fans. It was a huge retcon to the to introduce the metal letters as part of John Winter's heritage. But it's a big part of why I feel like the Carver era was more of a reinvention of Supernatural. Still refreshing that the boys have a place that they can actually call a roof with four walls home and that with a lot of hallways and doors of exposition as a sandbox for the writers to play in. Yeah, like all the little hidden stuff and all the books and everything. The season has a lot of vigor to make up for the backlash of season six and seven and it shows. I honestly love how it had a great setup for making Sam and Dean go in different directions that we had never seen before and that they're tests their morality and growth going forward into season nine and 11 nine to 11 from Carver's version of vision. I am very curious when we get into nine because I have I cannot remember nine except for the first episode. I cannot remember it doesn't he? Oh wait, Dean dies at the end of nine, doesn't he?  Wow, I remember less of 10 than I thought. The season that brought the series back after two not so good seasons. This season for me does it right by bringing Supernatural back to basics and the new concepts. It presents like Percatory, the bunker and the whole thing about the tests to close the gates of hell. There are many good like the arc of Castile being brainwashed and Crowley as a villain as well as Sam being one that takes the tests. It's pretty cool. The problem of the seasons are various filler episodes that take away from the rhythm of the season and the drama of the first half of the season which is pretty boring. But it's also a welcome evolution of the last two seasons and ends with one of the best season finales of the series. And yeah, yeah, I can say that for my mom. Some good's and some bad's. That's a lot of what season eight is. All right guys, that's it. Now we're going into the top five best and the top five worst. Some of you probably know what's gonna be in the worst. Some of you probably don't know what's gonna be in the top best, at least for me. Again, thank you guys so much for having been a part of this journey. We have a few more to go. And as I said, we have a special one to come being a conversation between Jay, the Zoomster and I. We're gonna be talking about season eight, hoping that it's gonna be a good one for you guys. We haven't got to do the conversation yet as of recording this, but I'm hoping that by the time that this comes out, we have done the conversation. But I'll be keeping you guys in the loop about that. I've enjoyed the guy's videos. I think he's done great work with his videos about the supernatural. So I am very, very excited to talk with him about the show. Anyways guys, that's all for me. Hope you enjoyed the review. If you did, leave a like. And if you're interested in more, subscribe. And until then, I'll see you guys next week.


So before wrapping up the segment, let me show you some of the examples of successes in model-free reinforcement learning in a domain that I particularly like, which is robotics. So here's an example from OpenAI of a robot hand that is solving a Rubik's cube. This was done with three RGB cameras, 16 motion capture cameras as sensors, and it was done with 100 years of experience in simulation. What was the equivalent of 100 years of experience in simulation, but using large compute cluster and with accelerated simulations, this amounted to about 50 hours of real-world time. And this was considered as one of the sort of major advances in dexterous manipulation for robots. Things like this are notoriously hard to do with robots. Here's another example. This time in the manipulation setting again, and what it's trying to do is this robot is trying to turn this wheel to some given configuration. And you can see that it's managing to do it. It did it from image observations in this case, a single RGB camera in about 20 hours of experience. So these things do take a really long time to train. More recently from what are called state observations, meaning you're only operating in the space of joint angles, etc. You can teach a walking locomoting robot like these. You can teach it to walk in about two hours from those state observations. So they're pretty low dimensional observations and that's why you can get away with two hours.


We all know that government and business are deeply entangled, from Wall Street bailouts to the military-industrial complex to the housing crisis. And yet, economists have long treated these institutions as distinct and separate, regarding government as a Lord of the Manor, which acts independently while remaining uncorrupted by special interests. In his new book, Richard Wagner argues that economists must recognize the fundamental entanglement between politics and commerce in order to properly analyze and understand government and society. This dynamic theory explains how limited governments can morph into a system of destructive politics and why democracy is difficult to maintain. To learn more and discover insights on what reforms are possible to limit this corrosive relationship, read Politics as a Peculiar Business, insights from a theory of entangled political economy by Richard Wagner.


another everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Arma with the Stack Swoosh and I'm reviewing BYND. This is a bullish golden gap that happened this week. And it had a huge move in the gap up overnight. So we're gonna go over this trade. This was an options move. If you'd like to watch me, you can always tune in to Fox Business or Fox News. I talk about the market. Or you can reach out if you have any questions to call me at 929-3200 GAP or follow me at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Skype or call me or email me at Melissa at thestockswoosh.com. So I'm very focused on what I do daily. I'm always looking for the best pick, the best gap, the highest quality gap. So I call that a golden gap. It's like gold when you find the gap because you play it, okay? And I have a rating system and that's how I choose which gap each day to trade, okay? So that focus allows me to sometimes only do one ticker symbol or one trade in one ticker symbol or sometimes two, but it's usually just one stock that I'm focused on, okay? Now here was the BYND. I'm showing you the week before. So this one is the sixth stock, had earnings gap up, rallying followed through. So this was Friday and then into the Monday. Thursday night was the earnings, okay? This is before, okay? This is the week before, the week before this week. So then this week on Monday, June 17th in the pre-market I called two options trades for the people on the options letter. The 162.50 BYND calls, which expired the 21st and the 28th, 165s, okay? Both calls, which are long as far as an option goes, all right? So trade one, again, this is an advanced risk. You would have paid around 10 bucks, maybe a little bit less. Seven contracts would have cost you $7,000, shelled at 30 and that wasn't even, I mean, these two trades kept going. It was a really, such a nice move, but it was really, really quick and really, really fast. And so, you know, when you're up a lot like this and I'll show you, it was in the gap up in the pre-market in the morning, you have to get out. You're never gonna get out at the high and along or you're never gonna get out at the low in a short, but this was a really nice move. Profit trade one, 14,000, returning investment 200%. Trade two, cost 13, six contracts, okay? Risk was 7,800, shelled again at 30, have the orders out for the both of similar price. Again, great move, great exit, 10,200, return on investment 130%. So tonal profits on BYND for just this from Monday into Tuesday, which I'm gonna show you the chart. So it's basically, not quite 24 hours, but you had to take it one day on a Monday into the Tuesday, 24 grand, so here is what it did. Okay, so this was the earnings week, showing you this here. Then, this is Monday morning, so I had called those options in the pre-market. And they were positive, okay? But they really didn't get the mojo in them yet. Then overnight, the next morning, the stock had a jimungus move up, opened at 200, ran up to two, one something, then it fell. So again, you're up all of this money into the open as soon as it opens. This is like a dream to get up and see a move like this and something that you're in. So everybody made a lot of money in this of the people that took it and got out that were on the newsletter option letter because of the percentage of the money of turnaround that it had so quick, so fast, even if you had one contract, you would have made 200%. And I had called two trades in it. So BYND total 24,200, again, this is an advanced risk. However, you could risk more if you can afford it. You can risk less if you can only afford less. You could have done one contract. You could have done one contract, paid $1,000. You still would have had tremendous profit. You still could have made 2,000, risking 1,000, which is a great trade.  You wanna have good, solid quality trades. That's why I focus on one thing, usually a day, one trade, one direction, which in this case BYND was, again, a call, which is a long, as far as an option goes, to buy the calls. And I set the strike. So when you're doing this, if you're thinking about working for yourself, if you're thinking about trading for yourself, it really is about financial freedom because you can make unlimited money in the market. Like I said, you could have risk, you could have made 100 grand in this if you had taken more contracts. So it's just one of these things where you set your risk, your risk has to be similar in each trade and you have to rate the gap, if you know the rating system, which you'd have to take my class to learn the method or you just sign up for the options newsletter and you get these trades like this. So in this case here, I call them sometimes in the morning, you got to wait until they open to get them, but I mean, I've had some really nice calls, particularly in this stock, but just this year, so these kinds of moves can happen. And what does it show you? This is the power of the gap. This is the power of momentum. This is how you make money in the market. This is how you make a lot of money in the market. You plop it on and you get the momentum and you get the move, but you have to get in the right direction. In this case here, it was a long, the stock was higher. The stock closed the night before around 170, open in the morning around 200. I mean, a 30 point plus move like that, really, really nice move. So my process is I get up in the morning, I rank the gap using the golden gap checklist, go through it, rate it. If it rates per my system, then I know that you can take it in the direction of the gap. So if you want to learn my method, you can learn it in the class. I teach it once a month. The class is called the golden gap course. July class is July 13th and 14th from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time. Class of the class is $59.99 US dollars. Class is online. It could be anywhere in the world and take it. Email me at alissa at thestockschwisch.com if you wanna sign up. If you wanna just sign up and get the trades, the annual subscription is $49.99 a year. You get all the trades for your email to you. Email me if you wanna sign up. There's no prerequisites for this. If you wanna be in the live trading room, you must take the class first. And if you just wanna do your own trades and gap ratings, you just learn my system in the class, okay? The two day class. If you just wanna get the trades, okay? And you don't have time in the weekend or if you wanna get these trades first, some people are signing up for the options that are doing the letter, making money with the letter and then doing the class because they've made money in the letter. So that's another option as well. Anyways, any questions, email me at alissa at thestockschwisch.com. More on BYND later. Bullish golden gap, really nice move. It is amazing to be in a position and have it move like that overnight. But that is what gaps do. And that is the power, the power of the gap. And that is the only strategy that I trade, teach, call trades in, all of it. It's a whole thing. The whole shebang is all about gaps for me. And they really define momentum and that's how you can make a lot of money in the market. Email me if you'd like to sign up. Alissa at thestockschwisch.com. Have a great day everyone.


Cool, great So probably gonna kick off now. I know some people are still gonna be trickling in from the general session But figure it's better to start now and at least get the story kind of underway So we're gonna be talking to you today about Building a true hybrid cloud with OpenStack and AWS right and we're gonna be using Sky TV as an example Who have built out this platform originally on AWS and decided to extend that out into OpenStack And we'll be going into kind of why Sky TV have made that decision And some of the challenges and learnings that we've made kind of through this journey So just in terms of introduction, my name is Nigel Wright I work for a company called Dimension Data in New Zealand and I kind of look after their cloud technologies their DevOps stream and I've come to them from kind of a background of Well, I'd say HPE That's a bit of a dirty word Sometimes, but that's my background OpenStack background cloud automation and software software development and Hand over to JP now Thanks, man Yeah, like you say JP it's Jean-Pierre Sienekal. I'm infrastructure architect at Sky TV, New Zealand I'm afraid that my brain is still working on New Zealand time. So please just bear with me Yeah, so we're just gonna kick off Just give a bit of a background on why we decided to go Why we actually had to change How we changed and then we'll delve a bit deeper into the The lessons learned category So I'm not gonna spend too much time on these slides because we've all been bored to death with stuff like this but Connected personal devices they've been growing at almost an exponential rate We're currently in the billions and they're looking at, you know, I think projected Numbers are into the trillions and by 2030 What does that mean for broadcast like us? Well, it changes the whole landscape People are no longer just focused on one device to consume the content. It's all about having multiple devices So the way that I consume content have changed If you then couple that with the fact that we will be disrupted aka Netflix We've pretty much got a good case to have to change So Let's start off. What did we do about it? We had to change. We knew we had to change. What did we do? first of all, we changed our technology vision Now there's a lot of buzzwords in there broadcast quality with agility and an online speed of change Basically, what that refers to is whatever you deliver Deliver it as a quality product within a short time frame and keep the momentum going by updating that Always well always evolving the product and this is this is in reference to our whole technology you stack It's not just about applications. It's not just about platforms infrastructure. It references the whole stack We also had to define a few principles Again not going through all of these because we'll touch on them as we go through the presentation But some of these phrases were bandied about in meetings all over the place But it was it had to be done because we had to get the people to start understanding What does it mean? You know, what is cattle cattle and pets cattle's versus pets? What does it mean if I say there's no humans in the cloud? touch on that later so we had to start building a capability and being an enterprise company in in New Zealand was about 25 years old We are very project. We used to be very project focused With a waterfall delivery model We had to change that and become a bit more product focused With an agile delivery model and always keep the user experience within our sites I don't like using its own customer centric. It just sounds weird, but yeah keep the value and The user experience in our sites and as we started gaining velocity through this transition We were able to increase our capability models so Brings us to open stack and why are we here? We had the vision and we needed the mission and That mission came in the form of the Olympic Games in 2016 in Rio We were tasked with providing an OVP or an online video player for Olympic based content and We straight off the bat knew that our legacy system, which is called sky go was just not going to cut the mustard so the decision was made with the backing from our directors and our vision to Provision provision the OVP platform in in the public cloud Because we had to leverage their performance and scale scaling capabilities, which we just didn't have on prem We did that Through a well architected manner as well because we had to get bind from various stakeholders right from the start And that included security being compliant But with that and through secure it through automation We were able to deliver a product that was really performant And we were able to during the four weeks of the Olympic Games do quite a bit of of changes And without any interruption to the user experience as you can see in the slide We did a hundred and thirty-five code changes 40 prod deployments and 176 pre-live redeployments And that that might not sound like huge numbers, right? But when you compare them to the the other lines there, which is the delivery to their existing legacy model Those are huge, right? So you've only got a handful one pre-live deployment Yeah, you know a handful of production deployments and only a tiny amount of code and config changes, right? So that means that their legacy environment just simply wasn't able to handle the amount of changes that needed to be made So I really love that slide because it shows you that with you know open sack and AWS together And you know everyone talks about hybrid cloud, but Actually making it work and making it deliver something valuable is kind of harder to prove. So this really proves that Yeah, I think the total changes for that legacy system was about seven changes in four weeks So that was we thought that was quite successful and we wanted to Get the same capabilities that we had in the public cloud on our private cloud as well And like they said in the keynote this morning someone mentioned that you know There's no cookie-cut away or just the one-size-fits-all So that's where open stack came in Because it bridge bridges a lot of the gaps for us Open stack is located on our private cloud Running on infrastructure. We're also on Do I have a pointer on this or not? No, thanks. I wouldn't put it at your eyes trying to figure it out So anyway on to to the right of the slide Our legacy systems applications running on on VM where we decreased the footprint in that by redeploying it on hyperconverged infrastructure and then increasing our footprint on the open stack platform and To the left we've got public clouds now. We've got different use cases for public cloud integration So we had to be agnostic in our approach. We couldn't just get sucked into one provider We had to be able to deploy the same stuff in on multiple different clouds This is just an idea of that legacy sky go Application how it's changed and evolved. It's actually a true hybrid application with a front-end sitting in public cloud and AWS An authorization stack which is bridging public and private and it actually talks back to IDM and OED services Which is all on legacy systems internal on physical hardware and cool so That's kind of a background of you know an application that sky TV have transformed to work in a hybrid model What I'm going to talk about now is I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that have Popped up in this journey. It certainly hasn't been completely seamless and we didn't you know Click next next next and we've got open stack and AWS talking together and everyone's happy Definitely not the case and I should go forward instead of backwards. There we go so the developers already had an existing pipeline they already had processes in place and Way to kind of deploy their code in AWS right the problem with that is that there was no kind of architecture in place around those models There was no Planning done with sort of the wider business the developers had a need and they met that need And the platform kind of just increased and increased and increased rights with no regulation and no kind of Planning and architecture. We like to refer to it as the Wild West And that's I mean that's great. They were able to do their jobs and they're able to develop code Develop applications develop products with Sky TV, but really need to start thinking more about how to manage that right because it needed to be managed so we brought open stack on board and use that as an opportunity to start planning these things and Defining an architecture that could be used for both private cloud and public cloud Which was important. We didn't want to have a different process up in AWS and a different process in open stack And then someone's using a different process in VM. We're down here Definitely not the case We want to make sure those are kind of standardized and we used the deployment of open stack to kind of do that and force that through the business Which worked quite well The other key thing I want to touch on here is that we need we needed to minimize the amount of time taken to Get open stack in production right and that there's two parts to that There's deploying open stack and there's also making sure it's ready and fit for purpose for the workloads that the developers want to put on it So we have that two different ways so that the deployment was done with a vendor We worked alongside HPE to actually get open stack in place And we did that kind of in a you know sprint based approach Which was quite different for both HPE and for Sky's infrastructure team And we're actually able to start getting open stack up and running You know within a couple of weeks and then for purpose for development workloads within about you know Four weeks or so which was great and that's fine for actually getting it stood up But then we needed to figure out okay How do developers that use the platform how do they want to use the platform? What are they going to get out of it? What do they need to get out of it, right? These are the things that still had to be kind of defined and we had to do that very quickly So the very first part of the whole implementation was around standing up the infrastructure making sure it actually works And then we had to go okay. How do we make it work for developers? What do we need to do here? And it was really important at that stage to Have those conversations with the developers and with the development team leads and bring them on board early as possible because I Think it's pretty clear that without that buy-in no one's going to use the platform And I think I've seen it many times before when an enterprise comes in and goes hey We've got this amazing platform and hey, it's developer first and it's got an API and please use it Please please it doesn't it doesn't really work right you trying to force people into a different model of working So what we had to do is just make sure that it was fit for purpose for those developers and as part of that We you know, we don't want to force tools We don't want to force processes between the two clouds shouldn't hit my microphone Otherwise the sound guys are gonna spank me And we wanted to make sure that we're using the right tools for the right job, right? The key thing that we needed to do was we need to make it repeatable easy to support and Make it fast right and the easy to support bit is kind of the most important bit And that's why we had done the path of a vendor just because we had kind of one throat to choke And it was a lot easier to kind of get that done So what I'll do let's figure out how to use the pointer There we go So this is the existing pipeline that the developers had in AWS. So there's a few different components there though using the Atlassian suite Using bit bucket and bamboo. So basically the developers will go through the normal process, you know, they develop code They commit it and merge it pull requests would be issued the Bamboo system would actually build the artifacts or build a Java war file store it in an Artifactory and Artifactory was backed by Amazon S3 buckets, right? And then what bamboo would do is it would run a deployment plan Fantastic, and it would talk to code deploy code deploy would grab binary deploy it to the deployment groups specified All auto scaling groups load balance, etc. Everybody's happy. You've got a highly available application in the cloud That worked really well One day. I'll figure this out.  They've got a process that works in AWS So there are things that are really different here is that We've got we have introduced an orchestration layer on top of everything, right? So, you know, they check the code in they commit it pull request bamboo will still build the artifact as normal But then the deployment plan for bamboo will actually talk to the overall orchestration layer that sits across the top of everything So what that does is that actually goes out and checks that you know the artifact exists locally and that's where Swiss storage comes in because The key parts here is a bit bucket bamboo and artifact tree. They were all up in AWS, right? So what we don't want to do is every time we do a code build We don't have to pull the artifact down from AWS and install it locally because that's just stupid So what we've done instead is check to see if the artifact exists and Swift for that particular project if it doesn't exist It'll pull it down and catch it So it's now in the in the local private cloud environment Then that orchestration layer goes out and talks to heat which will actually stand up the instances required deploy the software software with software deployments and software config and again That's all auto-scaled load balance the whole lot So similar process slightly different that we have the overarching orchestration layer Hey So then we have the final deployment pipeline and you know it kind of makes sense That's just a combination of the two right? I've just joined them together So effectively bamboo is a decision-maker here so we can decide whether or not it's going to be deployed to AWS Whether it's going to be deployed to open stack or whether it's going to be an application It's going to be deployed to both and that as an example the sky go product architecture We showed you a couple of slides back with the authentication stack and open stack front-end at AWS an example of that So we can choose where it's going to go That kind of moves us on to some more of the the challenges that we encountered and the first one there is terminology And it sounds like a really minor challenge But it turned into an absolute nightmare I'm sure JP can attest to this in the beginning of the project We're having conversations with with project management with different parts of the organization Talking about open stack talking about applications products projects Okay, great. So we talk about an open-stack project and we stand up an open-stack project then the project management office is going Oh, okay, how do we get involved in that? Like what does that mean for us? So, okay, it's not that type of approach So we had to figure out how to change that language and make a kind of common model For a product an application deployment models, etc. So there was many Many meetings discussing what we were going to call things and how we're going to how we're going to refer to them So we just defined a product as the highest level and a product kind of corresponds to an open-stack project, right? And that's how we kind of got away from That issue of weird terminology meaning different things are different parts of the business So we had to kind of map that out and model that out So it's something we didn't expect to be an issue, but turn it to kind of a big issue And then we had to that kind of flows on to the next point Which is kind of architecting open-stack for applications in a way that's understood by the business, right? So that's where the terminology fit in we had to make sure the business understood what we were trying to do What an application looked like and all the different components those two were tied quite closely together and The key bit around that would be Communication so we had to make sure that we were talking to the business on a regular basis We weren't an isolated group of you know engineers and project resources going Okay, we've done this we've done this we've done this and then take it to the business who then say this is completely unworkable Right, we need to make sure that they were involved in a very very early state and often Which leads us into the other issue that we had DNS and this shouldn't be an issue right, but it is unfortunately so sky TV have a Unique kind of DNS set of requirements. So there's no internal DNS server within the sky TV environment though using public DNS route 53 and We hadn't really thought about how an app a hybrid application living in open stack and AWS is going to talk how services are going to discover Each other and how to make sure that the front-end services are talking to the right load balanced instances in open stack And we kind of took the approach of Okay, she'll be right which basically means we'll sort it out later, right? We'll sort it out later and everything will be fine and Not fine Definitely not fine So we have to end up doing things like you know host file hacks when we're doing deployments and running cloud in its scripts to make sure that We're hard coding. It's just an absolute nightmare, right and this issue is still ongoing I don't want to paint a picture. That's completely rosy and everything's working and everything's 100% No, it's still a problem that we have to address. So it's still kind of working through that challenge And then kind of brings us into some of the other challenges and the other the other areas of open stack, right? networking challenges being quite a quite a hairy piece of the puzzle So what we wanted to do is We wanted to solve the problem of you know, we've got a lot of different projects being stood up and torn down at a high rate We want to make sure that the Networking wasn't held up by any of that So JP is probably it's best to talk about how they address some of those networking challenges. Yeah Yeah, I think whenever Well, you can actually say that adoption of something new was really slow from the network team and they were pushing back quite hard Especially if you said the word SDN they just like not we're not having that and Originally, you know, there was a bit of headbutting and you know shouting over the table and all that but Once we realized that we actually thought of this this analogy that about 10 years ago when Computer and server virtualization started making making grounds The infrastructure and the server support guys they were going through exactly the same thing They were like, you know, the some of them saying man, this is awesome. This is like gonna change everything It's so cool. And then you had another group that said, you know, now this is witchcraft. It's never gonna take We just we're not even gonna look at it So at least now we were in a position where we can look back at that experience and go like hey guys You know what? This is probably not going anywhere. We're gonna use it anyway So better get on board someone once made a reference to you can't be half pregnant You need to be you you're by the pregnant or you're not and that's kind of the stance we took Yeah, so And then that's I mean that was one of one of the big issues that we had around that The the other bit is that, you know, we and I touched on it just briefly before about you know The how to handle the amount of networks that we're creating on the fly and talk to the network guys about this and they just absolutely freaking out right So the decision was made by one of the architects to use a slash 16 for external networks Which caused the network guys to have kittens And security and security they were they were not very happy about any of this because they didn't really understand the model right that we were trying to build and The next slide's actually gonna describe that not that one come on there we go And so what we've done there is we've just made had to make them aware that yes We've got a slash 16 network and yes We have a lot of dynamic networks being stood up and provisioned on the fly, but they're all controlled right? They're all controlled by the template. They're all controlled by the method in the methodology So we had security groups in place We had role-based access for neutron in place to make sure that only the instances that needs to talk to each other That's it and only on the required ports one port ideally so that they were a kind of Made to feel a bit better about the whole situation because they could see that security's baked into the into the template into the model into the infrastructure and they kind of got away from The okay, you know slash 16 will we'll deal with that. That's fine. Yes I can just touch on that with with you know in an environment. You've got a Dev stack a test stack pre-live stack at a prod stack and they can be multiple stacks as well So what we ended up doing was using knuckles to separate the stacks so that? Dev can't see test this country pre-life pre-life can see pride And when we also had security groups for this because we just used a normal 3d architecture application architecture So we were using security groups to allow communication from the web to the logic to the data layers Yeah, and that's how we kind of got past that issue with the network team. Not really an issue. It's a slight challenge Concerned. Yeah Cool and So that led us to another of the challenges right so SD and SD and ZZ. Yay piece of cake next next you've got you've got virtual networking Right, and that's definitely not the case. We had a pretty unique problem at Sky TV where There was a requirement to have software to find networking across the entire environment virtual and physical So they decided to go with Cisco ACI to do that, which is great You know great SD and engine to handle that capability And so they've gone through at roughly the same time an implementation of ACI learning how to use software to find networking and then we go hey open stack neutral on whoo and They had to learn to SD and engines look there was some pushback around that to say why do we have two engines? What's going to drive what is there any integration points between the two? So we were running in a pretty strange environment with two SD and engines being installed at the same time and a network team Who had to suddenly learn the differences between the two we to use what we the integration points were right and that was hard that was very very difficult and a Problem that we have and it's still a problem now because there are still problems Is that the integration between ACI and neutrons still isn't done and now we're sort of kind of moving very very close to Production and that becomes harder and harder and harder as you get workloads in place right working backwards Untangling a mess and kind of re re-architecting. Yeah, that was very difficult and I think that the key take away from that is maybe don't do that and Education was really key because the education is key. That's yeah, absolutely the networking team were to be fair They were left out of some of the conversations that we were having at a very early stage And left out of maybe some education sessions that they should have been involved with And that's that's something we took away as a lesson learned Yep, if we could do it again, they would be in the door from day one and maybe we'd space out the two SD and engines Everyone would be and we'd be one happy family exactly. Yeah, that's right so I'm just gonna move relatively quickly through these Brings us onto operational challenges Because we've solved the technology and now we need to figure out how to actually run it and in production or close to production So we had we've talked about, you know the code pipeline and developers and developers and developers and developers and that's great But there's a whole other part of the business, right? And they do have a requirement to use some of the capabilities of OpenStack and of hybrid cloud So we had to figure out a way that we could deploy this hybrid cloud make it easy to use for both developers And for the rest of the business So what we had to do is is identify a way that the rest of the business would use the platform How they consume workloads and so we've decided upon a self-service kind of portal layer so that they can log into a website spin-up instances for testing spin-up instances for you know general kind of Hacking around if they want to see how a new flavor of Linux works or they want to install windows or what have you and That was that's us taking care of the rest of the business. So we've gone, okay, you can use this platform as well It's not just the shiny thing we've put in for developers and you know, the rest of the business has to Go down to the coal mines and use VMware Definitely not the case And the other part of that is the developers and we've kind of we've catered to them pretty well So we've we've integrated it into the code pipeline. We've made sure everything's API API first API friendly And that's the way that things should be consumed. So that's kind of taking care of how we handle those two requirements and Let JP talk about some of the other operational challenges around building a team I'm quite aware of the times. I'm gonna fly through this building building the team so it was Quite clear right from the start that we will not be getting any headcount or we will not be able to stand up another team Which in hindsight is quite a good thing because at the end of it one of the benefits that we had from what we were doing was that We were breaking down silos and we didn't even realize it, but I'll get you that now yeah, so because we couldn't do that we had to revert to using virtual teams and To get a virtual team up and running we kind of had to look at at how do you pick people to become a part of a team and That's where Attitude was chosen over aptitude. So we didn't necessarily take the best people in Skill-wise and and certified wise We took the people that had the attitude that drank the Kool-Aid pretty much that had to buy in that believed in what we were trying to do right from the start and Because we were doing this in an agile delivery method. We pretty much had two week sprints So we could the well from a lot of goodwill from the managers as well we could take a resource from a team and run through a sprint and At the end of the day it kind of looked like we had this I Don't know this cloud ninja cloud ops team because it was made up of people from different resources from different teams Infrastructure network security developers products people would come in and go out, you know, not always the same people But this turned out pretty well And this is actually now our operational model as well for for support And like I said, you know one of the key benefits and takeaways from this was we were able to break down silos between teams Because people were kind of forced to work together Cool, so we've built a team Figured out how people the different personas involved and now we need to figure out how do people actually use the platform There's a ton of different ways you can interact though and sec obviously so CLI API you can log into horizon You can you can do what you need to do But we need to make sure that the way people are accessing it was the right way, right? It was the right way for their particular persona We didn't want people just all logging into horizon spinning up instances and just going for it Nor did we want kind of unrestricted access to the API and people could do what they want So it kind of goes back to the the principles that that JP defined earlier Not the rise of cloud ops, but no humans in the cloud, right? We didn't want people logging in doing tweaks standing up things and you know, oh this instance doesn't work quite right So let's log into it and make a little change here. That's not really that they recorded So what we decided to do is access to horizon was only allowed by the cloud ops team So a very very small amount a small virtual team And that was kind of it was strongly recommended to them that they use that as a sort of last approach Right if there was something that they absolutely had to do in horizon sure log in and do that But generally we're trying to move them away from that and try to move into kind of an automated world So they could you know, they could run playbooks. They could use terraform They could do anything they needed to do to kind of stand up and tear down instances We want to make sure the workload creation was only done through orchestration and through API and there's got this Obviously some exceptions to that because not everything could be done that way So we did when you're standing up a new environment Maybe you need to check how you know how to lay out the networking how to stand up servers How to configure them so maybe you'd log into horizon and do that build a template and that's that you wouldn't get back in again What we wanted to also do is make sure every instance It's created has meaningful metadata attached to it So we know exactly why it's been created and what purpose it's serving right because it's a private cloud the open-stack part of it Users users resources we need to know what's using resources and why So every time instances were created they were tagged with metadata for you know the scaling group The application that's being deployed the project all are useful information to look at an instance and go This is exactly what it's used for and it was easy on the flip side of that to go Okay, let's have a look at all the instances that are created that don't have metadata and We can you know We can point the dev killer at them and destroy all those instances if we need to which is just a script Just sounds more impressive when you call it the dev killer, but it's easy to actually pull that data out and go Okay, there's some instances here that shouldn't be here and we can we can get rid of them and free up those resources and The outcome of that is that the platform is actually being used as intended Developers are using it hitting the API's only hardly anyone's logging into horizon everything's done by an automated fashion through the self-service and the orchestration layer and That works for applications And so I'm just gonna touch really quickly on the last Sort of challenge that we hit which was automation and that's a very very common problem Right Automating there's so many tools out there so many different purposes and we talked to a lot of people about automation They spit out the automation Prayer or sentence or whatever, you know, Antipole soul she for pub salt So okay, is that one product is that is that five products? So we needed to break down all the different automation tools into their roles and go, okay What do we want to do? We want to stand up instances. What should we use that? What should we use to do that? What do we want to do? We want to ensure configuration is consistent across all the instances What should we do to make sure that happens? So it's all about choosing the right tool for the right job and in doing that sure You might have three or four different automation technologies in place But by having an automation an orchestration layer across the top of that essentially acting as an API gateway You can control the rest of those app of all those automation technologies in quite a granular fashion and make sure that if you Want to spin up an instance maybe use terraform if you want to deploy some software you could use Ansible, etc So we tried to make that as logical and rational as possible by layering that orchestration engine over the top of everything else So that we can add new tools and if we need to because it's easy to extend the orchestration layer out And that's kind of the the automation challenge that we had right tool for the right job And I'll just finish up by actually What does success mean? Did we succeed with this project and Slices what does fast look like and that doesn't look really fast But the key takeaway from this is this is one of the projects that we had the internal part of the hybrid application the sky go application And in the past to stand up this environment in AWS had to go through security Had to go through change control had to go through design meetings had to be signed off by the business Then actually had to be stood up and made sure it stood up correctly and that process took about six weeks to go through And what we've done and what we demonstrated to the to the sky team is Deploying that project in three minutes and 20 seconds everything security's in the template Change management's in the template you do the template once you get that approved signed off You don't really need to go through change control again So that was a huge Just game changer for sky TV, and I know that everyone talks about big numbers big number here small number here But this is something that Actually took six weeks to do and now only takes three minutes and is a pretty pretty great outcome I think for a hybrid application. Yeah, like how do you change the direction on the well tank? It's not gonna happen fast, but this was this was definitely something that helped. Yeah So that's really all we had to talk to you about success. Yes Questions, I don't think we've got time for many but yeah, I think that it's a bit of both So we we always try to not change the the way that the developers used to work But we also had the fact that we've got some DevOps guys who were trying to Kind of figure out where do they actually fit into this because who's gonna spin up the service It's gonna be the infrastructure guys who's doing the templates, you know So there was there was a bit of that to and fro But there's a much better understanding of what needs to happen and who should be looking after what after four sprints So yeah, there's this I don't think that the way that they work has changed at all that much and just to just to add on that the The way we approach it was a little was a little bit clever as well because we got the developer involved Well one of the developers from the team involved and he saw the value of it was working really closely with us And then we got his team leader involved demonstrated this to him and then he could see it right He understood how this worked and then that would that good will kind of means that it's easier now to get more resources from his team So we had to make sure that but back to the the the concept of building the team make sure people are drinking the Kool-Aid You want those people who are gonna be talking about it telling everyone they meet about it This is great, and then they can tell their manager the manager gets information show them more results from that team So it kind of worked out quite nicely it did and we had spread as well like you know You're walking down the hallway and people would come up to you and just say like hey man What's cloud ops about you know I want to know more about this and I want to get involved So it's I think we started with a group of about four or five people initially and now in our weekly meetings You know it's up to about 20 25 people So it's it's a good. It's good in that respect Yeah Or they were So yeah, so it was HP Healy and OpenStack. Yeah Sort of it was it was it was Healy and OpenStack, and it was the operations orchestration layer for the automation So we just use those two pieces really and The reason that was done was due to support right? It was a lot easier for us to get support from a vendor like HP then it was to figure out who's going to Solve the issues from upstream. Yeah Yeah, yeah, how to sell OpenStack to an enterprise. Yeah, just get the backing Just a quick technical reminder Could you just repeat the questions that people are asking for the people listening remotely? Sorry, what was that? Just repeat the questions that the audience are asking so people can hear Yeah Microphone So you mentioned there are lots of challenges in making ACI and neutron working together and your suggestion is probably not to do it. Oh, no, no, no that Definitely not not not the suggestion is that's not the answer What what I was trying to say around the integration points with ACI and neutron is that we needed to know what those points were And we didn't know what that was and the idea is that we should have Integrated Cisco we sort of installed Cisco ACI made sure networking team knew what they were doing with SDN Which they which they do now, which is great And then when we introduced OpenStack to the max made sure that they understood what neutron was for and then Understood how the two took talk together and work together So definitely it wasn't a don't don't ever integrate the two because I think it's a fantastic integration It was just how do we do that? Yeah, and which points do we use? Yeah? Cool Did you guys think about the front end for all the integration between AWS and OpenStack and what it means for the rest of the company Not the DevOps that's going to use the system Yeah, so the the front end kind of question that was that was a part that we didn't really show in the in the slides, but we had a Self-service platform in place for that so it was all catalog driven So that people could log in with their normal AD credentials to a shopping cart kind of experience and go I want to stand up a server or I want to deploy an application or I want to deploy a service We made it so that it was super simple for them to do right not saying the rest of the business with idiots Because that's definitely not the case But you you want a nice shiny UI really at the end of the day to start spinning these things up and make it easy for people Otherwise, they're not going to use it. Yeah, so that's how we handled that that rest of the business kind of problem Cool. Thanks. All right. Thanks so much for your time guys. Cheers


Good morning, all I'll try and get this done very quickly because I know we all really want to go and get coffee and morning Morning see but I remember on my demo. I put like demo on it Full disclosure. I forgot about that until like a couple of days ago. So to keep true of that I don't know if anyone's really noticed but we've got these lovely people over here doing sign language So I would like to know what is a sign language for good morning? so Sorry for the delay So it's this good and morning morning So good morning, and is this for clapping? Yep So let's try this for today instead of clapping. Let's just do this yep, and If I go too fast, or if I just go massively opt-off it just do that as well It'll make it a lot easier But let's get actually to the talk so There we go Hi, if you've not heard I'm Tremaine Light drink coffee Pretty much. I can't stop my day without a coffee if you see me without coffee I'm normally very alone and very angry also love being outdoors That's why I love we put a photo of me on a rock Once again, that's just me. It's like really went to a park. It's not actually hiking. I can just took a bit too much effort Also, if you want to follow me T pen 9 on any social platform That's my username So today, I thought I should have skipped it for I did but today I'm going to talk about five things I wish I knew back when I started to actually do development It was a quite a while ago. So There's a lot of stuff that wish I knew the main one is imposter syndrome It is real guys like it's something that I didn't notice I had until I started attending word press meet-ups and actually talking people in the community where Like I look at what I was doing and I never actually really knew That I thought that I didn't know what I was doing for those that don't know what imposter syndrome is Here's the nice definition of it the psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and Has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud That's it in a nutshell. I Feel it's something that most of us have had In our early stages even maybe even today that we have all thought that we were an imposter and scare that somebody was going to say Hey, you're not a real developer or hey, you're doing this and you're not really looking at Yeah, but it's something I feel it we should as a community just embrace Where even if we're a page builder if we're doing a Projects we're all Developers in a way. We shouldn't be looking at it as One's a developer. Oh, this person's using this tech. That's not what I'll do is this person's using this tech I'm not going to use that tech that person's not a developer where I think Google did actually had a campaign for it saying like Am I a real developer or something if anyone remembers what the hashtag was shouted outs as I just forgot about it even I put it on my notes but Imposter syndrome is real number two Don't do cheap projects. They're not worth it They're going to cause you a lot more pain than they're actually worth doing Especially when you're doing sites for under a thousand It's going to cause a lot more problems than it is actually good. I remember back when I started I was in high school So $300 seemed like a lot to me back then but these days that looking back at it destroyed me as I Was doing work for like 20 30 days and getting paid only a couple hundred dollars for that work Where now I'm looking at it, and I'm getting paid for the same quality of work in the same level of time About two three thousand dollars more an hour contracts need them Even for small day projects have a contract have a piece of paper that actually says What time you're going to deliver it what you're going to deliver with and everything that you need to deliver to that client Even if it's just a simple piece of paper saying I will deliver this website with this function with this plug-in Deliver at this time, and I'll post it on this platform Having it all documented and signed has a really good open relationship with your client So then you're not handing over the project and it's going to find coming back to you saying hey I thought I was going to get this Well having a contract means that you can go back and say Well, no, we've agreed on this terms conditions. We agreed on this spec. We agreed upon this plug-in last well second last one is a Work-life balance. It is very important to actually have the ability to not just work and work and work and Work and then sleep and next morning you work work work and sleep Which? Let's be honest here. Who has that former lifestyle? We've got a couple I Think some people are too scared to put their hands up It is saying that I've looked back at only very recently and worked out that I had really no life Other than work and other small commitments Where it's like that I now look at the same that I want to have a lot more better achievement at and a lot more Oomph in doing last one is I Want to have a lot of time for questions, which I? don't know if I'll have but We have to have the big like inspirational things so dream big Don't limit yourself to what you can do right now Limit yourself to what you can do next no matter what you do each project have go into it increasing What you can do by 10% so if you are Building a website. What is the next step today? Take you to the next level. What is the small? Maybe like single extra 30 minutes. Can you add to that project that can improve you as a developer and then do it Even if it doesn't work it doesn't actually go into the final product You're gonna eventually just keep building yourself up to become the next level of developer or next Achievement or will size hit the mic Sorry audio tech guys, but I just had to have that slide that's and I want to have some more times for questions so that I can actually have a better engagement of Any questions or any feelings that anyone has in the crowd anything they want to talk about even just personal statements That's open for anything You talked about work life balance. Yep. What do you think is a good work life balance? Well, I like to limit myself about eight hours a day of work and Then I like to somewhat just switch off So after the eight hours, even if it's I work in the day of relaxing the day working the night I like to have the ability so that even though I'm a freelancer. I Still have the ability to go home and fully switch off Where I know a lot of times back on just to be just freelancer. I would go to work Go home go to work go home and we went on my home I've run my laptops we're planning emails or finishing that projects or studying for the next projects Where then you've just pretty much like you turn off for a little bit, but you're only turning off by like 30 or so percent So where I see is always having it is that you are actually working even though you're a freelancer So you get that like office Like nine to five feeling if that makes sense Any other questions, I think it's great that you Underscore needing a contract. Yep. Can you dig into that a little further? How do you actually manage that process of getting them to sign and what do you have in the contract? Because I know that parts pretty difficult and sometimes they actually come back with their own contract or want to strike pieces of yours out Yeah, so pretty much it varies on what your project is But I like to have a very Uniform concept where my contracts start with a brief Description of what the company is and what we actually do and then pretty much I didn't just define what the project is like what platform What's the website or what's the app and pretty much to find that and then actually go in and scope out the project So I might have For example, if it's a website, I might have these are the pages. I'm going to do these with what's on me on those pages I'm going to be supplying the content the images You have to supply this or this and then pretty much I then say it's going to take me X amount of hours It's this much per hour And then pretty much I have it like as a blanket statement I get two reviews and then after that you've got to pay For an alley rate and then I pretty much have a rule of thumb that you pretty much sign it when you do deposit So that pretty much as soon as they receive it most of the time they sign it where occasionally I've got couple that sign it a couple of days after but I've been pretty good most my clients are happy to sign it and A lot of routine ones just sign it by default. I think there was a quick. Yep That's a second Firstly, thank you for your presentation. It was really really helpful with the tips there going back to the imposter syndrome topic When you're going to do that next big thing say something like a speaking presentation or a really big project bigger than anything You've done before how do you practically deal with the imposter syndrome that can creep up in those circumstances? Yeah, so that's a very good question It's made that I really do not know about until like a couple months ago, but pretty much what I look at it now is If I feel I can like if I can feel I can do it I do it But if I know I can't do it I can't do it which I explain a lot more about pretty much the sums up one better say but Pretty much what I look fully at it is Like you've got those things where like if you're invoices like if you're sending a proposal to Apple That is saying that's a lot lower chance to it But if you like going to a cafe meaning for client a lot of that stuff I feel is just you just have to go into it knowing that you are the best that you can be Like go into it knowing that even though if you don't think it just go into it thinking that you are The next level like you are the top developer and Just embrace it like don't think about it and I just do it in a way like the pose that Contract pose that project just go in and do it and if it goes down It goes down, which is if you ever want to learn how to face rejection Do door-to-door sales? it helps a lot like we laugh, but Who really answers the door actually size that's hanging up with that like I did it for two weeks That's how I learned how to face rejection But yeah, so pretty much just go for it and aim to be your best and if they reject you move on to the next one We can take one more question. How about something at the very back? No, okay. I was one at the very very back So I'm just wanting you guys to get some real late exercise here I feel like we've only been going up to like the fourth or fifth row, sir You quoted a figure of up a few thousand dollars as As the sort of the bottom limit as to the sort of projects you do how did you come up with that figure? Well pretty much I worked it out as what would I want to wake up? So if I knew I was working on something how much would I want to wake up to do? So if it's a project that's three hundred dollars, I know that's gonna take me 15 minutes So I'm not really gonna go wake up and go yeah, I'm in for this I want to go and make this blog article today or I want to add a photo to this web page Where if I do it at a thousand dollars a client's gonna come out to me and say Okay. Yep. I'm gonna add this this this to it just so that it makes it worth its while a bit more as Also, so that thousand dollars is more of a limit on my alley So you can't just hire me for 15 minutes. You got to hire me for an hour. If that answers your question Yeah Well, those are some great and useful tips Yeah, and I can definitely second the the whole get in a contract sign for absolutely everything you do So that's that's a key takeaway. And so thank you very much to me and please give them a warm. Thank you


I'm now joined on the sofa by researchers from the University College London, so welcome. Who are you and what are you exhibiting today? Well, I'm Professor Tamar Macon. We're actually now in Cambridge University, MSc Commission Brain Unit, and together with Danny, who's been my collaborator for the last four years, we run research on augmentation. So, motor augmentation aims to enhance people's bodies, suppressing beyond the flesh and blood limitations that we were born with in order to allow people to do more with their bodies. And Danny, who would introduce herself with this look. Hi, I'm Danny Claude. I'm a designer, and I designed the third thumb, which is a 3D printed augmentation device for the hand. It's controlled with the toes, if you guys can see. So, we've got pressure sensors underneath my big toes, and I'm doing the two degrees of freedom of the third thumb. The third thumb was my graduate work from my masters at the Royal College of Art, where I made my first prototype. I'm now probably on prototype 350, and started collaborating with Tamar after she saw it online, actually. Wow, what a cool collaboration. So tell us more about how it works then. So you've got your thumb, your toe is what's controlling it. Yes, yes, so I've got little pressure sensors underneath my big toes inside my shoes, and this speaks to these kind of little computer chips around my ankles, which then wirelessly connects to up here.  And then that's connected to motors on the wrist, which is controlling this is some. But yeah, design everything myself and 3D print everything. So we're actually on our stand, we've got our 3D printer that I print all the thumbs with. Great, amazing. So why did you want to come up with something like this? What was the inspiration? Yeah, so I designed prosthetic arms as well. So I worked with the alternative limb project also, and I really wanted to understand what it was like to, I wanted to investigate the relationship that forms between the wearer and a prosthesis. It's a really unique product, and it's kind of really unique relationship forms. And I wanted to experience it for myself, so very much just wanted to try it out for myself first, on my master's project. And then I didn't realise how much of an impact it could have in neuroscience research. So prostheses are either robotic or non-electronic devices or items that we have on our bodies that represent a new limb or a replacement limb, right? Yeah, so the two main areas I guess are congenital one-handers, so people born with one arm or no arms, or people who have suffered a loss of an arm. And those are very different kind of people to design prosthetics for, and we actually researched them in the lab as well. Yeah, so how does your research sort of interact with yours? So when I first met Danny, I got a great big funding grant in order to explore what happens to the human brain when we start controlling a body part we've never had before, because there's very rich, complicated questions. For example, if you use your toes in order to control a certain thumb together with your hand, is your toe going to become more like a hand? And then if you need to use it again, it's like a toe. For example, when you're walking home, are you going to be a bit more clumsy? So there's lots of questions about how the brain adapts to controlling this new body part and how it finds a way to do it very efficiently. And with that question in mind, I was looking for a collaborator. And for me as a neuroscientist, I wanted a technology that is very versatile, so people could do whatever they want with it, not just what we can do in the lab. And really important for me that people can take it home with them and use it throughout the day. And the only technology that was at that level of versatile readiness was coming from Danny. So what sort of findings have you observed, then, in terms of how people's brains adapt to having, in this case, a third thumb? So we've learned so much since starting to work with Danny. One really important result for us is that if you use your thumb, Danny can demonstrate, if you use your thumb together with your hand, you can grasp objects with various fingers and configurations.   In other studies, we were trying to understand how the brain learns to create this collaboration between the toes and the hand, and we've learned that it comes up with really creative ways to substitute the information in this gap between the feet and the hand. We're running a lot of research with fMRI to look at how the brain responds, and here we're really lucky because Danny has designed for us a thumb that is MRI-safe, so we actually put people in the scanner and see how they control the thumb. If it's the first time they control it, if they control it after they've learned to use it and become experts. And how long does that learning take? So this is what we're studying in diverse society this week. So we set up a little challenge, which is can anyone learn to use the thumb within one minute or less? We've got two sizes. I've made some kid-sized ones as well, especially for the Royal Society. And we've got some later ones as well. So far we looked at, I think, 400 visitors, and only three out of the 400 was unable to learn to use the thumb within a minute. Wow, gosh, so will you take that data and make that scientific and publish this research? Absolutely. This is where we really get to benefit from the Royal Society, not just by exposing people to our ideas and the importance of this technology and introducing people to this really novel technology and consequences on the brain, but we can also get a little something back for the scientific community. Absolutely. So what have some of the public's reactions been to suddenly having an extra thumb? It's been good. The reactions are always quite fun. It's always the little kids that are really not quite sure at the start, but they absolutely love it by the end. We've had lots of questions. We've also got a 3D printer printing, and everyone picks it up so well, and I'm really enjoying it, which is great. What sort of questions have people asked you? I've kind of been more about it by the 3D printer, and I can't think of anything on my head. So for us, people are really keen to understand if we want to control the thumb directly with our thoughts with the brain. And to this I say, I really don't, because if we want to create invasive technology, we need to first get into the brain, because unfortunately the technology that we have right now that is non-invasive just doesn't pick up enough information, and I'm really not keen to cut people open. And what's more, I think there's so much more we can do with our bodies that we're not exploiting for technologies such as rehabilitation technologies, that I think we have a lot more to explore before we need to give up and go into invasive solutions. So I, for one, am really excited to tell them your brain controls your trolls, so therefore the brain controls the thumb. Absolutely, just going via the toes. So what is your hope then for this research for the third thumb? What are you hoping to achieve? Well, I've taken it to a couple of different conferences. One in particular was REACH, which is kids with upper limb difference. So I actually kind of gave the thumb to lots of different kids with different kinds of hands. It kind of helped to extend the functionality of their hand to working perhaps with patient groups like that. We're also excited to perhaps explore stroke patients as well in terms of either augmenting their hand that they have the best control over or additionally help with rehabilitation in terms of the control of the thumb as well. Also, temporary immobilisation such as breaking a wrist. We have options for augmentation like crutches when you break an ankle, but when you break a wrist there's not so many options. So we're excited, especially with all this research, we're getting that it's so easy to pick up so quickly. It would be great for those temporary groups as well. In terms of the hardware, you mentioned this is one iteration of the prototype that you've been developing over a long period of time. What are the challenges in terms of creating something like this? I've spoken to a couple of my robotics friends and even if you're working on something like this, which is kind of on the low end, because it's in terms of money, because I'm 3D printing everything myself, but as opposed to 100,000 pounds worth of robotics engineering, we still suffer with the same problems such as motor strength over size, battery power and size, and especially wearable components as well. Everything has to be external to the body as opposed to with the prosthetic arm designs, you get to hide everything within this area, which is usually used as empty. We've got the socket here, then the hand, and then there's more space internally. So augmentation and wearable technology is always so challenging, and then obviously making sure the body fits everything. Would you like to try a mechanic version? We've just got a little manual one. By 10, like so. Perfect. So this is just to give you a sense of how it feels like to have an extra finger. It's quite comfy. The pulleys you have here are to control two main degrees of freedom. So it's across the hand and up and down. Yes. Got you. It's flexion extension across the hand and abduction towards the finger. OK, so that one goes that way, and this one goes this way. Amazing. You did both at the same time. So imagine this would have been normally controlled with your toes. Yeah, I got you. I'm surprised that people can learn this in a minute. That's very impressive. It's much easier, much more intuitive with the toes. Really, the brain could sort of... That's really interesting. Yeah, because at the moment my other hand is involved in controlling. Doing something very non-intuitive for the hand. Yeah, exactly. But it moves really nicely in these... Sorry, and try to meet your other fingers as well. So that's kind of one of the main tasks, which is finger opposition, because we want you to collaborate with the digits. We find that people, when they first try, they really just want to focus on using the thumb by itself, which is obviously something we don't normally do with our fingers. We always kind of work together, two or three fingers together to do something. Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful. It's really nicely made as well. I love these. Oh, thank you. The kind of hinges here, really clever. Yeah, so it's all printed in one piece. Wow, really. And it must be quite quick to print them as well. Yeah, about eight to ten hours. Very impressive. Yeah, which is quite quick for 3D printing. It doesn't sound very fast. Wow, thank you so much for coming to show us this. Yeah, and good luck with your research. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. Thank you. Thank you.