So it's so funny Matt asked me for a walk-on song which I thought was pretty cool idea And I had two choices. Do I pick a song that's good or do I pick a song to just to troll the audience? And so I've had to listen to that Lego 2 song about 300,000 times So I feel like I would share with the audience. It's it's pretty good So I'm Pete Sheslock. I'm the VP of products for chaos search Anyone who has who's heard of chaos before that doesn't know who I am That's an important point because So no surprise we're brand new startup. We just launched in April timeframe. I just started there about a year ago and What we basically done is turned elastic s3 into an elastic search cluster And so it's it's a challenge that I've been very passionate about I'm a former operator I've ran a lot of elk and elastic search clusters and so It's a pretty cool product. I love to chat more about it But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. You can also find me on Twitter I'm at Pete Sheslock although in classic form. I don't really tweet too much about technology anymore I got a smoker because I'm a suburban dad and it's mostly just Pete's meat tweets. So All right, let's get this going all right, so I Was a technical operator for a very long time running infrastructure running on Amazon I was at a lot of different startups most you probably haven't heard of before Although dying dying DNS is kind of like the one that people have heard of before poor went out for dying oracle kind of killed That one's sorry oracle But I made this change over to to the product side and I got to do this So who here has sorry, sorry Maddie, but sorry pager duty Who here has pager duty or some sort of way it gets paged for their job just quick show of hands, right? So this feels as good as you think it does when you're just like duh leet And what's great about being in product is I've yet to run into like a 2 a.m. Product emergency Like I need a PowerPoint like ASAP at least not yet So what am I here to talk about today? So 2013 which in some ways feels like a lifetime ago, but in other ways seems like yesterday I actually submitted a talk to my first dev ops days ever went to it was dev ops days Austin and you know Tweet it out. I was so excited you know hashtag. I was doing the Twitter, right and What I noticed is that everyone was talking about like I need to hire dev ops and here's how you hire these dev ops These elusive unicorns But then no one talked about well How do you keep them happy and how do you keep them at your company and not going somewhere else? So then I got the email that like hey your talk was accepted. This is great And I was really excited But it's classic fashion for me is that now I'm freaking out because I'm actually have to put this talk together And in my classic chess lock move. I finished the talk of the night before I had to give it So 2013 again seems like a really long time ago Solomon at PyCon talked about Docker for the first time That same year. I mean can anyone imagine a world before Docker? It seems like you know lifetime ago and so I Created this talk and and the whole point of it was not only attracting the talent but Keeping them happy keeping them there But I think what's the most interesting this is actually a slide from the old deck and it's it's aged a little bit If you notice it's actually four by three instead of widescreen because no PowerPoint support widescreen But I actually didn't say dev ops on here. I said system automation release engineering operations I was very anti the concept of dev ops as a job title and even from some of the talks here You can see one of the things where people kind of you know do dev ops wrong is when they're like, oh, we built the dev ops team It's a dev ops problem, right just a brand new silos. I was always very very annoyed with the kind of title of dev ops so What I've basically done here is kind of went back to this old slide deck And basically say hey what aged well what didn't what have I learned in that time since that time I've probably interviewed hundreds of engineers across three different companies and built out a couple of sizable engineering teams And so I really wanted to just go back and say like okay What were some of the incorrect assumptions that I had and you know just share some of the learnings? So I always like to make it a little bit of a disclaimer here is that there's just no one true way There's no one way to do it and actually you need a lot of different methods and techniques in order to recruit and retain Because every time every company is different This is again, it's based on my personal experience and conversation at events like dev ops days and just from like books and blogs or whatever But also like I've been wrong a lot and I have screwed up. I've hired the wrong people. I've let go good people I've had good people quit. I've just screwed up a lot of times and that's actually honestly a really great way to learn But the most important point is that you just can't keep everyone at your company Eventually people are gonna leave and they might leave because of simplistic things like I'm gonna get some more money over at this place They might leave because like you just are not giving them a challenging job or they want to grow in their career Or they want to completely change, you know, I changed a job recently to be a product person You know, I was never gonna get that at my previous company So the biggest thing though is that your employees are your biggest investments and this should be very obvious But the time it takes to hire to train to bootstrap that losing them is a massive hit to your business So in the past I talked about recruiting is really hard When you work for companies that no one's heard of and I've worked for a lot of companies that no one has heard of before So I was really trying to think you know, is this still the case? You know and it's really getting strange to be rewinding back just six years ago But back then there weren't a lot of companies as many as today that were like going all in on cloud I got really lucky and started out a company that was on Amazon in 2009, which was a little too early for Amazon But you know if you wanted to do cloud stuff, there's only a handful of places But now like everyone's doing the DevOps with the Kubernetes in the cloud and you know It's like everyone's doing it So there's there's not really like you got to go to this place if you want to do this type of job You know it and and back then two people just embracing like chef and ansible and puppet, you know Now we're in this like post configuration management world So the kind of key thing that I really realized is like I just don't believe that your company's name recognition really matters as much Anymore just because what you do and what everyone else does from a technology standpoint is is largely the same And a good example of this is how many people in this room are either researching and implementing or you know Kind of curious about Kubernetes, right? It's it's a lot of people. It's it's most of the audience, right? So if you wanted a job doing Kubernetes, guess what? I'm sure there's someone here that will hire you for that So I think there's a simplistic view of of why people join a company and stay at a company It's the team the technology the money and I kind of even joke sometimes that it's like if you get two of the three You're probably happy at least from my own perspective if I have two of these three things like really good money awesome team technology sucks I'll survive But if you don't have at least two of these three, it's probably going to be a little bit painful So how has recruiting changed in the past few years? So the bad is still bad I saw this on Twitter a little while ago. The bad recruiters are still bad. It's a volume business So it's it's really hard to read this. I'm just gonna Just read real real briefly it says hey Angela I've honestly never heard of any of the companies you've worked for she's worked with Google and class pass I think she's the founder of class pass, you know, and and I've never heard of the school you went to but people tell me they're okay She went to UCLA I Almost didn't write this email because I'm really busy, but I figured why not. I'm just like good. God. This is terrible. So You got a treat recruiting as the long game Many many years ago, and this is actually longer than that conference talk. It was probably more like eight years ago Some friends of mine in the Boston area. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts We're all getting together kind of randomly for lunch and drinks and and whatever and we finally decided hey Let's all get together instead of these kind of little one-off meetings and just you know Network and just chat and we do it like once a quarter So and honestly, it's kind of blown up into a full blown meet-up Although I'm kind of busy and I've got kids so scheduling this meet-up. It does not happen quarterly And we don't do presentations.  This is specifically for operators but it's a very wide kind of group of people and The joke here is that it's not there's a slack channel to and and people Have figured me out which is I started this yet as like a networking thing But it's also like Pete's personal recruiting vehicle that whenever I join a new company I'm just like sliding into people's DMs on slack and it's like hey like I'm at this new place It's really cool You know But that's a big point which is being a part of your networking community Because there's a whole group of people that are on the market right now And there's no recruiter that will ever get to them and for most companies They'll never get to them because by the time you hear that they're available they've already got their next job lined up and it's because you need to start recruiting those key people years in advance Some of the best people I've ever worked with I started recruiting at least two or three years in advance It's a real long game. So those relationships really matter building those relationships Networking in your community even broadly to you know, the rise of remote work is huge You don't have to just focus on Chicago or the city you're from Because by the time you hear that they're they're like hey I'm gonna be moving out for my new thing and like everyone comes out of the woodwork It's like no they've already got their next role kind of figured out But that old way of spraying prey emails to candidates. It just doesn't work anymore So I just killed a whole bunch of time talking about hiring and and everyone's like wait a second I thought you're talking about retention, but you can't keep the right people If you don't hire the right people if you hire the wrong people into your company There's nothing that's gonna make them happy But also those wrong hires can be extremely destructive for not only your organization But your sanity as well and they can cause all your best engineers to leave and can really cause a bigger problem and there's that concept of well You know the brilliant asshole, right?  It's really embarrassing to even talk about But sometimes you just have no other choice. So what what is a checkbox hire? Basically, these are the people that you're like I need someone who's got Amazon experience How about some chef maybe some Golang some Ruby and there's just a list of checkboxes terraform blah blah blah And you find that person and they check every box. Oh, this person's gonna hit the ground running There's no ramp time. Nothing like that The problem is is that they are experienced in everything you need So they're gonna come in and they're gonna actually not learn anything new and I guarantee you in six months They're gonna be bored out of their mind. They've already solved those problems other companies And it's extremely hard to keep them happy And if you just don't have anything new you're like, hey, sorry Like we have two years of like work that is in this checkbox that that you were hired for now again a little bit on them They should ask but mostly on you is that you know if you're just going straight check boxes And this is kind of a classic recruiting tactic that people are just like I'm just hiring for someone with like four years of Amazon experience, you know So I like to hire for a couple of really key attributes and they're a little bit high level But there's these tooth items intellectual curiosity and the aptitude to learn And what I've really found is that if you really keep it just to these two items and again, they can be broad You find people who are curious you find people who like to learn these are the attributes you need because Almost every company I've started that I did not know anything about that technology you know and also to like Like look at Kubernetes for example when Kubernetes like Created there were no experts in Kubernetes You have to go figure it out and that means testing and trying and learning and everything else The technology will always change finding those learners those people that are really interested in diving in keeps people really happy and engaged so Who here has been a recipient of a white whiteboard Interview process is it basically the worst thing you've ever done It is terrible. I've been a part of those as well. I will never ever do a whiteboard interview So if you are a hiring manager Or you work for a large You know search engine-based company And in an Google Then you got to stop doing that right? It's a terrible way to hire people. It just pisses everyone off So what can you do instead though, right? Because in many ways you still want to gauge this person's ability on on the technical side And so what we did at a previous company is we actually created this really clearly defined project That's time box. It's aligned with the role Meaning it's not like give me a you know sort of this blah blah whatever computer terms I'm just a product person now, so I've like forgotten everything technical But it's like something that is part of their role and you time box it and you kind of see how far they can go So very specifically what we build is said build an API server So if you're like a DevOps person You know you think like well, why am I going to build an API server? well, guess what a lot of what you do is probably interacting with APIs and Building a very basic API server is actually a lot easier than you think it is And so what we've said is build an API server that responds to one endpoint only It can be written in any language and all it says is just when you hit that endpoint It just responds with the current time and we just said hey at four hours just stop right now There is something I desperately want to do and I've heard some rumors out there that there's companies solving this But I desperately want to pay people to do this task because it's for real hours of time But the tax implications of paying people that you're interviewing is weird I've heard some rumors too that like gift cards work and there's no tax thing So, you know, I hope to have an open space after if anyone knows more about this Let me know but I don't like the fact of giving people homework I'd really like to pay people for it because it's it's work, right? So then we also made an escalating difficulty as well where it's like, okay Give me another endpoint will do a time zone conversion and then another one was like deploy it somewhere You know so you think like okay Well, do they deploy it to Heroku? Do they spin up an EC2 instance?  Do they you know spin up 10 servers of Kubernetes and deploy it there? It doesn't really matter how they deployed or where they deployed it just it's like taking it to that next level like add SSL support etc, so We had one individual who didn't deploy anything didn't write any code But wrote 10 pages of documentation about their thought process on how they were trying to solve this problem And it was so clear and well written we hired them on the spot Because it didn't really matter whether or not they they completed it. It's like we want to see how you think how did you get through it? So from my previous slide I had this one which is losing people socks and you know spoiler alert It's still the worst it's really terrible and it cuts even deeper when it's something that's actually avoidable So why do we lose people in the first place? Well, I think there's these these items here that drive right and there's a great book by Daniel pink called drive And it talks about the three items autonomy mastery and purpose and I think These three items are really if you can have at least one or two. That's great to help Keep people engaged and happy right you have to feel like your your work is meaningful that you're becoming a master of it That you're becoming an expert that you have autonomy that you can you know derive value from what you're doing so I Had this slide about autonomy and I took a picture of my daughter on my computer because I thought it was hilarious It's like, you know, I and I said this line which are kind of bumped on when I read it again But I said, you know, I tell my kids what to do, you know, not my engineers But the reality is is that it's not a you know, hey, you do this you do that It's like let's have a discussion and let's let's understand what needs to get done and and how we prioritize that Because that's a great way to have people people feel like they have control of their job Is that they are help guiding the work they're doing there's nothing worse than having to continually support some dying piece of infrastructure And you feel like no one's listening to you that it needs to get improved So, you know back off you let them make mistakes you kind of course correct along the way and it's it's a back-and-forth process So of course this being a really long time ago. I said to my daughter. Hey, can we take take an updated one here? Just to show like how many years ago it was And it's actually not the same laptop. It's it's a totally different laptop But yeah, there's a lot of stickers on it and I was just really excited because she like never listens to me So it's like the first time that she was like, oh, yeah, I'll totally do that. It was like pretty it was pretty cool so I was like we have to capture this so You know you think to yourself well if I'm not telling people what to do How do we get what work done you try to line work with an owner?  Do you have that one-on-one weekly? So having a weekly one-on-one I think is huge and it should not be like hey, how's this project going it should start with hey How are you doing right? That's it, but it should also slide into the let's talk about the project Let's talk about what you're doing. Are you blocked? Are you having issues? Are you struggling? Do you need help? Do you need support? Do you need training? You know someone did a great talk yesterday about taking time at your job to like read a book and learn something I think that's awesome So mastery it means getting better at something that matters to you not to like the other person And there's a concept of continuous learning we always are learning new things We're always trying to get better and this is not just technical skills. This could be management training this could be You know leadership training this could be public speaking it could be writing There's a lot of things that people in a technical role honestly probably should get better at I mean I joke that I think more technical people should take a business class or a finance class Do you know how your company makes money? It's shocking how many engineers actually don't know Hop on if you're at like a company that sells a product go to one of your demos and watch how they Show your product to another person. You might be amazed or horrified And I just had a play I saw this picture online any of any piano players in here This is like perfect representation of when you become a master.  Oh, well, this is a big deal. It's like what has to matter to the person, right? so No one's ever said this right? I want to write code that no one ever uses It's just gonna go into a hole right completely wasted and writing code that is never used is extremely demoralizing And I've been part of projects where you spend all this time and effort to build this really awesome thing And then at the last minute they're like well We've had a shift in priorities and we're gonna put that on pause or we're gonna put that on hold And then that's code for like it's never getting done So open source projects and this is something I talked about six years ago, and it's even more important now They're not only great ways to give people ownership It makes it easier to recruit people later the costs are honestly pretty minimal although if you have a popular open source project It can be it can be a lot, but again the more popular they are It's a big recruiting effort for you benefits are just massive So how many people here have heard of a tool called sense you to monitoring monitoring framework so I've talked a lot about companies that I've never that people have never heard of before so more people in here I have heard of sense you versus the company that actually created it So there's a company called Sony and that I was working at we were very angry with Nagios very angry with Nagios It did not scale to handle dynamic workloads in the cloud and we were very early in the cloud And so we built this open source monitoring tool called sense you it's an open source project. It's now a company and they're doing awesome it's really cool and that helped engage these engineers that were extremely hard to find and kept them at this company that Went nowhere. I mean and how do you keep those people happy and excited? It's like working on projects like this and and that was helping us move the business forward So who here is actually a remote employee works from home every day. It's pretty good number actually So this was from my old deck. Do you want to scale in this economy? This was six years ago It's even harder now to hire people, right? And I think talent beats location every day of the week The manager of that person is actually responsible for their output does not matter location now And not everyone is great at working from home, and that's a different issue But it really doesn't and it shouldn't matter where people contributing from this was also from this slide You know six or plus years ago. It's kind of funny how like this aged really not well Like IRC sorry. No one really uses that anymore Skype I mean if you are at a enterprise that paid money for that you price will use it Google Hangouts is gone.  So all right. So now we have to talk about money Because this is a kind of key part of employee retention And I should just saw this on Twitter and I was like, hey, why do you like this company? I'm like because you pay me so I Hate this line and I've heard it before and again, maybe it's self-selecting I've worked at a lot of startups, but it's like hey everyone takes a pick up to come here You're gonna get so much value out of this. It's the classic like work for exposure thing You know, and I think the line is is you don't work for exposure people die of exposure The problem with a pay cut to work here is that if another company is gonna pay you more which guess what they will And if another company is willing to do an above market, which that's what they are now that above market Salary offer is now a massive bump who would not change jobs if you're talking 20 to 30 percent raise I think you'd have a really hard time doing that It's just a cheap way of doing business and it just opens the door if you underpay an engineer to like $80,000 a year going and that's the going rate for your city is maybe like a hundred thousand Again, there's always gonna be a company that will overpay to bring them on There is some company with more money than you and they will use it So basically you have to take issue of money off the table if the fact is is you can always go make more money somewhere else as Basically the receiver of the money. I always have to say to myself listen It's got to be enough where I just don't like think about it where I don't feel like I'm underpaid Of course, yeah, I sure it'd be great to have more money But you have to basically have it just be enough to just take that issue off the table now In the the talk pay open space we did the other day You know I had said if you show me a list of Employee salaries at a startup and it's pretty much any non-public startup I can look at it and tell you how long they've been employed there Almost guarantee you because the people that are at a startup when they come on board today are gonna get paid market Two years ago. They were paid a lower amount because you had less money four years ago even lower and startups are notoriously Notoriously bad at going back and correcting those mistakes and how many people have heard this one Which is like, oh, we can't give that engineer twenty thousand dollar raise. That's too much or oh, they're gonna get suspicious It's like no one's gonna get suspicious that you got a raise and you could guess what treat him like adults and say hey We've looked at the market. You're getting paid less than market and we're fixing that I feel like again as an adult I would be pretty happy about that So there's another really critical metric. It's the STPR Shit-to-pay ratio because I did say that There is someone who will pay you more for what you do today But what are you going to have to put up with to do it? So if you are gonna take that job for more money Just remember there's a ratio It's the shit-to-pay ratio, but at the end of the day underpay your engineers at your own risk And this is important today was important six years ago. It'll be important five ten years from now And and companies fall down on this so hilariously that if this is the one thing you do at your company You'll be beating out 90% of the market And you know you steal people say well, we just don't want to hire people for money They want to be here for the cause. Yeah, I'm here for the cause But I have got like a mortgage and kids that got to go to camp and 300 other things, right? Your company and what you do is probably not special You're oh, you're doing kubernetes on AWS cool. Oh, you're doing kubernetes on AWS. You know everyone's doing the same thing Then we have this my favorite one too, which is no no no no we underpay because you'll gonna have you get stock options You get rich here So I still got a bunch of slides to go through and I felt really bad for Matt that I was probably gonna go over So I can't stop too long here to laugh at that one But here's the deal about stock options and you need to ask yourself these questions And if and if all of them are yes Then yeah, this is probably a good one But first off are you a founder because guess what your founders probably have when the company starts? Well, they have if there's two founders they have 50% of the company and when investors come in Maybe they have like 40 or 30% and you can see when all these startups file their s1 Guess what? There's two people maybe three that hold a single percentage at that point unless you're like crazy like slack or something Where you know and some of these companies that have grown really fast, right, but Further down, I mean in a startup It goes like the founders and then the next hire if you got 1% of that company that would be crazy From there if you're like an engineer, maybe you're the first engineer you get 1% next engineer Maybe like half a percent maybe a tenth of a percent and then at some point they just go we're not even doing percent Here's like 10,000 shares, which just means nothing So also were you granted restricted stock most likely you were not you were granted stock options or instead of stock options But if you were granted restricted stock, that's actual stock. It's stock. They give it to you But why don't companies do that you have to pay for it or they have to gift it to you? Basically, which is basic income and there's not a lot of people when taking a new job that are willing to have to pay 1020 or some thousand dollars to buy the shares in And the reason why this exists for founders is that when you start a company value of the company is zero Those options have no value and they can only go up from there But when you come in anytime after they will have a value Does that grant have protections for change and control and that means if the company gets acquired Do and you get fired do you get all your shares? That's an important thing you have to keep in mind new CEO comes in you get fired. I've seen that clause put in I've seen salespeople do that one where it's like well, listen if a new CEO comes in they're gonna bring in their salespeople So I need to have that protection Is there a convertible note? Don't forget there's debt on company and there's all these different ways of dilution And debt always wins and this is why I kind of joke more business more tech people need to take a business class because if you understand How businesses get funded you'll find out that it's really easy for those shares that you think you have a lot of to just get diluted to nothing This is my favorite one. There's a concept of liquidation preference, which is it's if money goes into a startup It's the VC saying well we want to take that money out first and pretty often it's like a 1x right I put in ten million dollars You get sold for a hundred million. I'm gonna take ten million out and then the 90 is now split up between all of us including me But sometimes if your company is maybe not doing too well, maybe that preference is 2x or 3x. I've seen 4x So it's a really easy way that if you say I'm gonna put in ten million dollars, but I want a 5x multiple Okay, cool. We got sold for fifty million dollars I'm gonna take all that money and everyone else gets nothing including the founders So there's just countless examples and you can Google it see all the different ways that your stock options are just not Gonna work. So again, there are just too many reasons you're probably not gonna get rich in a startup But that doesn't mean that you can't make money in other ways And if you work for a public company with RSU's actual stock literally none of this applies It's a public company. It's real stock. It's real money. You're giving it You can sell it and you can take the cash and run So, okay, I did all these things you said Someone left anyway. Guess what? Congratulate them. That's pretty awesome Ask them for their honest feedback And and I'll be honest on this one Don't ask it for the feedback unless you're ready for it because you may not like it But you should understand what the reasons are while I'm leaving because you're a terrible manager, right? As we've talked about many times your terrible manager. That's why I'm leaving Okay, but hey this role is new and different and I just wasn't gonna get that here That sounds awesome because guess what if you've been in this business for long enough It all comes around again, right? There are people that I've worked with 10 20 years ago that I still work with that I've come back around I've worked with in the past This stuff lasts forever, but wish them the best on their new role stay connected with them because guess what two or four years From now, maybe you're gonna hire them again So the other thing I always like to talk about here as well is the concept of a counteroffer Which is if someone comes to you with an offering hand and they're ready to go again My personal opinion is I never offer a counteroffer and that's maybe Unpopular opinion. I know some people use it as a way to get more money, which you should absolutely do that You know always try to get the most for what you know what you're doing there But the problem I always have with a counteroffer is that person is already kind of mentally there, right? They're looking at the paper and they see that that dollar amount or maybe the opportunity there They're mentally there And it gets weird if you've ever taken the counteroffer and stayed it's weird. It's always weird, right? So I never offer I never extend them out You know, I've had engineers get upset because they thought I was going to But if it comes down to a money thing honestly again as a manager I feel like I want to know that in advance and I've had some good success where I've had an engineer say Hey, you know, I've been here for a while, you know, I'm looking at the market I think it's a little bit higher if you were at the talk pay thing There's a spreadsheet that I believe is going to be shared use that information to help you get raised But I think that's something that is different than I'm changing jobs So I think if someone's leaving I just can't provide them with what they want So at the end of the day people I think really excel when they're excited About their work when there's high levels of trust across across the organization They've got that personal ownership that responsibility that they're making something better and that that responsibility to actually affect change in an organization So just to really distill it down, you know people need to be challenged There needs to be ownership across the employees high levels of trust on both sides You have the trust that they're gonna get the work done and they have to trust that you're gonna kind of get out of their way But also if you're a manager, you're kind of the like, you know, the shit umbrella, right? You got to kind of keep keep it up there to help your engineers do what they need to do And get it completed that doesn't mean hide everything up here It means, you know making sure that they're not distracted context switching all over the place But the biggest thing on this one is if you continually give like the worst work to that one person because they They will take it with a smile on their face and they'll do that work Don't be surprised when they leave Because they'll just they'll just ghost. I mean they'll just be gone I think it works until it doesn't and and it's it's it's pretty bad So but at the end of the day, you just treat them like adults and it seems like such a basic thing It's like I'm gonna treat these adults as adults But it's funny how oftentimes companies spend all this time and energy and money hiring these really capable intelligent individuals into the business and then micromanage them to the end of the day, you know These are highly paid professionals. You have to treat them like the skilled adults there are so For open spaces later, I'd love to talk about Stock options if you're thinking about going to a startup if you're at a startup I've been through this so many times. I've learned the hard way many times on all the different ways things that you might want to say so You know keep an eye out for that later. I'd love to chat more about stock options and and and can help anyone out with That that's all I have. Thank you very much


Yeah, yeah I went to a place, it's called the Pijock in Iraq and basically this outbuilding was only run by about say 18 blokes and they were, we were guarding the prison and from 11 o'clock at night till 5 o'clock in the morning a fucking gate of hell would open and they would come from everywhere they'd be like monkeys they'd be just piling up running everything it got to the point where one day one night it was overrun and we were getting overrun from northwest east south everything they would come from everywhere and it got so bad we were pissing on the barrels of the machine guns the gym piece because they were getting so hot we were pissing on the barrels trying to cool them down we're using um we went out of gun oil so we started using cooking oil to to fucking lube them up stuff like that and I remember when you on tour you have a sap phone to ring your paradigm phone it's called and you have it um and you get a little card with the number on it and you get a certain amount of minutes each month you get a new one you just type in the number because you have eight minutes left and you can ring your misses and where the sniper hide was when me and my mate were the phone was just down there and like it was red like the bat phone and um we were we were getting yeah we were getting smashed and um I'll climb down and I phoned her up and I said I love you but yeah I know she says I love you too let's go everything's all right everything's all right and I said to her uh I'll ring you in the morning promise you I'll ring you in the morning she was going you're all right everything's fine she goes what's what noise it was a bit of drama at the moment I said everything's fine then I'll put the phone down and I rang in the morning


Hi, everyone, I'm David Wilcox, the program leader for Fedora at Lyrasys, and I'm joined here today by Aaron Griffith, who is the program coordinator for Fedora at Lyrasys. And today we just wanted to provide an update on what's been going on with Fedora 6.0 and talk about how we are working to bring the community forward to this new version of the software. So the roadmap for Fedora in 2021 is pretty simple. Really, we're just focused on releasing version six, which has been in the works for about two years. It's a pretty major update to the back end of the software. And at the same time, we're really committed to releasing robust migration tooling and documentation in order to support the community and being able to move forward to this latest version of the software. And that is a big part of the sort of third point here. Once the software and the tooling has been released, really a lot of our focus is going to be on making sure that the community can use the software migrate to the software and come forward to version six of Fedora. So Fedora 6.0 has several benefits. We're just going to cover things at kind of a high level here. The main ones are providing enhanced support for digital preservation, which is something that our community has asked for for some time, as well as improved performance and scale, particularly relative to version four and five, as well as making migrations easier and also making sure that we can have fewer migrations into the future. And these are all things that we have heard from our community that they've wanted. And so a lot of what we've been doing with version six is trying to respond to those needs. So one of the major new features of version six is the adoption of the Oxford common file layout. And this is really just a simple open standard for how to organize the content in your repository using a fairly simple file and folder structure that supports digital best practices. And this is an emerging standard that goes beyond the Fedora community, but one that we think really satisfies a lot of the needs of our users. And that is seeing fairly broad adoption in other digital preservation contexts. So in terms of the current status, we're making really good progress in December, we released an alpha build of version six, and in February we released a beta and this beta is feature complete. And so we anticipate over the next few months to be able to get to a full production release, certainly within the first half of this year, once we've done sufficient testing and validation and acceptance in the community. And so this work is also supported by a grant project that we've been working on since September. This is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And the focus of the grant is helping the community move from version three of Fedora to version six. This is a $250,000 grant that is taking place over 18 months. And the challenge that this grant is trying to address is that most Fedora installations are still running unsupported versions of the software so version three or even earlier than that which has not been supported for some years. And while software does tend to come and go. What's really important here is the content so there's lots of cultural heritage and scientific research information that's in these repositories. The content is at risk the longer it sits in this aging infrastructure, lots of things can go wrong. Once these systems are no longer supported. And if they fail, all of that content is at risk. But at the same time, migrations take a lot of time and effort and so there's been a major roadblock in the community for a few years now, and being unable to move forward to a more modern supported version of Fedora. Because the migrations have taken so much time and effort. And so the goal largely of this grant is to bring the community forward to, as I said a modern supported version of Fedora and this coincides really well with our overall goal for the program so it's really convenient that this grant came in when it did. So we're able to work on the grant while still supporting the core mission that we have for Fedora this year. The process for the grant is fairly simple. We are working with pilot partners to upgrade and migrate their repositories and focused on developing testing and refining migration tools. And we're going to produce some documentation and best practices and package everything up into kind of a toolkit that we can then share with the community. And then get them to test it and give us feedback on it before we eventually host a dedicated migration training event at the end of the the grant period. We're currently in the first phase of the grant which is the pilot phase began in September and runs roughly through to May. And again the point here is to document the migration and upgrade process, go through it with pilot institutions, as well as detailing things like metadata mapping decision making remediation those kinds of things with a goal of eventually producing a toolkit for the community. So we're working with a couple of pilot partners, the University of Virginia which has fedora with a custom front end on it and then Whitman College which is an island or a user so these both have fedora three repositories in the back end but different front end so we're able to sort of run these pilots in different scenarios and help a broader swath of the community be able to benefit from the work. Phase two will start roughly in June running through to September. And the idea here is to take the toolkit that we've produced share it with the community solicit feedback and iterate as needed. And then finally the third phase, which will begin in the fall. So here is to host a roughly two and a half day migration training workshop that is intended to be free to attend, but the grant will provide some travel funding for folks that want to travel and attend the workshop might not otherwise be able to that just with a coven situation, we may need to have this workshop a little bit later than plan perhaps in the spring rather than in the fall, but that's still to be determined and that's something we'll work out over the next few months. And then finally, there's quite a bit of opportunity throughout this grant process for feedback iterations evaluations. Certainly once we organize the workshop will be soliciting feedback from attendees but also from folks that are trying out the the toolkit and and other materials that will be developing such as workshop content. And of course, once the grant ends we still intend to provide ongoing support, and this is largely accomplished through membership funding. So fedora is a community supported open source program that is funded, almost entirely through membership and we have members all over the world that use the software and funds staff positions and our ability to provide training and support software releases to the community. And of course, with budget cuts related to COVID this has been a challenge certainly in the last year. We've lost about 20% of our membership funding and are working to try to build that back up again. But membership is really crucial and the only reason we're able to still provide a similar level of services the same level of staff as we have past years really comes down to the grant support that we're getting at the moment but of course the grant is temporary. And so when that runs out we're going to need to build membership back up or else risk losing staff time and be unable to provide the same level of value and services to our, to our community so this is really critically important we're trying to get the software releases out on time support the community and adopting and migrating to to fedora 6.0 to really demonstrate the value of the program, but we're also working on things at a community engagement on the community engagement side of things. And for that I'm going to turn it over to Aaron who's going to talk a bit about coming into the program as a new as a new employee and working on the ways that we're engaging with our community. So thanks David. Yes, I'm Aaron and I'm the community program coordinator at fedora. When I first started I didn't have really any clue about digital preservation or about repository management. I come from a background in retail management so I knew engagement and I knew people, but those actually turned out to be really two good assets for me coming into this role. As a insider, when I was onboarding what I learned was that there was very little of what we were doing that was actually speaking to people like me so that really became part of my focus was trying to make fedora accessible to everyone and generate content that was going to be accessible to people of different levels so we wanted to, excuse me showcase our work and make sure that everybody could have access to it. So the first thing that we needed to do was actually just organize our content. In the past communication had been kind of ad hoc we were just recreating and repeating what we'd already been doing in the past. Some of it was working some of it wasn't we've been using multiple outlets to try to connect with our users in our community, and we really didn't have a plan for it. So what David and I did with we laid everything out on paper wrote it all down, and this inevitably led to the creation of our monthly communication strategy as seen next year. So this is a high level snapshot of all of our communication pieces it shows who's responsible for the content creation, when they're distributed where they're distributed and who's responsible for distributing it. So this really sets the framework for what we're doing to engage the community every month so obviously there's flexibility within that we can change the order around, but this is really the standard for what we're we're trying to accomplish. So I'll just run through it really quickly here for you. So every month we release a newsletter which is a recap of the events and the successes that we've had through the community over the past month. We also like to shout out our partner communities like San Vera and island aura, and let people know what's going on there. We also put out a, I am a last grant blog post so David writes that and it gets posted to our blog to keep the community updated on what's going on there. We also have committed to releasing a monthly demo video on our YouTube channel. So, in collaboration with the tech team and some volunteer committers we created a list of features that we thought would be exciting and fun for users to view, especially with fedora six coming up so close we we pulled the feature list from new things coming in fedora six so that our users could get a sneak peek at it as well as refer back to it after the software is out. So what we did is what's kind of fun for me as we did a general interest blog post so once a month, we try to do something a little more high level, a little easier to read a little more fun to give people a new way of looking at fedora so we showcase some different repositories, what people are doing with fedora. Most recently we just did a little meet the members blog post where we introduced people to some of our governance members. So this is really meant to showcase fedora in a different light for people. So through the creation of the calendar, we actually realized a few things and one of those things was that there were things that we were trying and doing that were not successful. So we're a small team we have limited resources, both time and money, and we really wanted to focus our approach on doing fewer things but doing them better. So what we did is we ended up ditching some of our low return channels in lieu of making quality items, you know, over quantity. So I think a lot of times people just think they should try everything and hope that something sticks. But when you're on a tight budget like this, it's really important to make sure that you're getting the best bang for your buck. So that's what we did. We really streamlined our efforts into the channels and places that we knew we would get the best return. And so one of the other things we're actually fortunate enough is to have some really great partner communities like san vera and island aura. We've been working with them collaboratively over the past few months to share best practices, learn from each other and we use this analogy of raising all boats. You know, we're really in this to help each other and see how we can draw on the resources that we have so that we can collectively do better for our communities, because that's really what it's all about. It's our communities and our users. And so lastly, one of the coolest things about me being new to the community and new to this industry was that I got to bring some really fresh new ideas and try new things. So this past holiday we actually did a really fun little engagement activity with our community members. We called it festive fedora frenzy and it was essentially a little multiple choice trivia game that we sent out every day for the days before the holidays, where people could answer questions they gained points and inevitably they got entered in a draw to win a prize. So it was kind of silly and it was something new never been tried before, but what it was it was meant to really reconnect people with fedora in some way and on a different level. So we got some amazing results from the participation in the activity. People really seem to enjoy it so that's a, that's what we're in it for is we're going to be trying more things like this, because our community has told us that you know they really enjoy it. So based on that, I want to show you some of the plans we have for the future so looking to the future based on what we've tried we are working with logo designer to come up with a brand new logo for fedora six so this is meant to represent us moving into the era of fedora and as such we're going to create this logo and its launch will coincide with the release of the software and we want to make this available to our users on things like shirts and mugs etc things like that. The other thing that we want to do is have a launch party for fedora six once the software is ready to go. And so what this is is really meant to be recognition for our contributors and all of the people that have helped get us to this milestone. So a celebration for all those involved as well as for the software itself. It's really important that we give recognition where recognition is due these people have worked very, very hard to get us to this point and it's definitely something that we feel we should be celebrating. And the other thing that we are planning to do is offering workshops on a regular basis, so that we can provide training opportunities to get the community more involved. So fedora six has some great new features and the aim of the workshops is to make sure that the community can successfully adopt the software, use it and be actively engaged with it so these are going to be offered regularly and at the needs of the community, so that they can, you know, continue to adopt and use the software. The reason that we're doing all of these activities is really for our users. It's important for us to let them know that we're here to support them and making sure that Fedora six is successful, and that we're securing our user buy in and our community buy in and adoption. We want to make sure that the community is seeing value in the engagement that we're offering through the training and the recognition and the support that we're providing. So we can get our community members engaged with us, the more that we know that Fedora will be top of mind and and that's really what what our goal is here. We want to make sure that we're giving our users what they're asking for. And so with that I'm going to pass it back to David and he will just wrap up for us here. So hopefully it gives you a sense of what's going on with Fedora this year, releasing Fedora six releasing the migration tooling, working on the grant to support migrations and adoptions and all the great work that we're doing on the community engagement side to make sure that for users are engaged and plugged in and have opportunities to use the software to get training when they need it to participate in community events together. We've included a few links here and we'll share the slides. So you can follow along with some of the things that we're working on such as the monthly blog post for the grant. You can join the conversation in Slack. And if you're not already a member, you can help us out by joining and supporting us so that Fedora can continue to be successful and sustainable into the future. Our email addresses are here if you want to get in touch with us and you can reach out anytime. Otherwise, thanks very much for your attention.


good morning i'm actually on my way out to the woods and driving past this lake i couldn't resist taking a few photos to go with today's video this is why i like autumn it has nothing to do with the color it's the weather and i'm always a sucker for clouds drifting over the forest all right enough of this let's uh let's head out into the forest today's about high iso like 3200 in digital how close is that digital noise resemble film grain that's something i've been very curious about and as you may know when i'm curious about something i gotta take you along for the video this is something that i don't know why it's taken me this long to even study or test or or look at woe there video david to be clear you're not saying you've never shot high iso before you were a journalist for god's sakes you just never used this camera for that kind of work and you thought that high iso wasn't a good option for your nature and landscape photography thought it was something to be avoided you've never considered shooting that way on purpose or as a usable option for landscape work okay now they've got that clear to back to video david i rarely shoot above iso 400 or or or even above base iso i'm always with the tripod when i'm shooting film i'm shooting the slowest film i haven't really looked at what's acceptable for grain or what's acceptable noise levels for me so that's what we're out here to do today 3200 weird does it look like film grain we'll see i don't have a tripod with me i mean there's not much reason for it because there are times when i'd i'd like to be out with a lighter gear or i just don't want to carry a tripod around i'm not anti tripod anybody that watches this channel knows i'm pretty much glued to a tripod all the time i learn photography way back in the film days way back and back then grain was considered image quality bust you know grain got into your image that wasn't the good thing we considered that degrading the image and so we would do everything we could to get finer grain or not blow up our images so big we'd go to medium format large format and often it was to mitigate grain we didn't want to see it in the past i've said i'm not a big fan of green but something's happened over the last year or two and uh it's not that it used to be i tolerated it but now i'm almost wanting it in some of my images or at least a little bit even fine grain film that i use it still has a texture it still has enough grain in it to to know that it's there then digital came along and that made it easier to not have the grain then we had noise and we were still shooting at base iso and then the cameras got better and better but still i was judging the quality based on the amount of noise and grain in an image but there's been a real shift in my taste over the last couple years it's been gradual and i went from i went from medium format film to large format film thinking i wanted more resolution less grain and what i noticed was is i kept going up it kind of looked like digital to me it started looking too clean and it was silly to to shoot a big negative for me and not and try to get grain out of it i just felt like that was it's kind of weird and i ended up back at 35 millimeter because it didn't look like digital to me or at least i didn't think it did i bet you never get tired of seeing me climb over logs this old man his old bones just just don't do it like i used to way out here i stopped and made a few uh weather shots across the lake with the clouds in the hills and that should simulate a grainy sky for me i was actually quite fortunate to come across that because i thought i was just going to be in the forest where the grain might uh or the noise might blend in better so we're going to get a good test of it today now i just need to find a few images to uh to make i'll probably revisit a couple places i've already shot because i already know there's going to be something i can use to compare it and i've shot these places in film and digital before but not at high isos it's a little overgrown it's last time i was out here oh i'm sure you see my channel you might recognize these boulders i just love how they're kind of right out here in the middle of the woods i've got my camera set up to show monochrome jpegs and i have the yellow filter on it adds a little more contrast gives me a realistic idea what i'm getting here this is pretty uh liberating i have to say like i said i'm not anti tripod tripod is very valuable to me but to be able to kind of just move through the scene and and make photos as i go is that's pretty cool today's a good example it's it's really dark in here and even 32 hunters may not be fast enough to get enough depth to field luckily i'm i'm using a 20 millimeter so depth feels a little easier to get and i could i could even hold handholding and i could probably focus stack but i don't really want to do that today i don't want to mess with it but we are starting at 3200 f8 f11 in there that some poster gives me more light this is a quite a neat spot and i have some good images here so if i don't if these don't turn out i'm not that worried about it because i photographed this a number of times that we've got some images made with my old nikon d810 digital camera let's do a little pixel peeping woohoo to be honest i didn't expect to see a whole lot here that would make me question why i'm even shooting black and white film i just wanted to make sure i wasn't missing opportunities when i wanted to go light when i first opened up the raw files shot at 3200 i was well underwhelmed this old camera just doesn't blow me away at high isos but i didn't expect it to i would just sing a lot of color noise and unpleasant color shift in many of the files i had pretty much all but written off the idea that i would get film like results from these files but i pushed on and started the conversion process anyway using affinity photo and silver effects too on this first photo with a bunch of sky when you punch in and remove the color noise it takes on a much nicer texture even at 3200 i have to magnify the shot quite a bit to really see the effects in the future i may need to push the iso even more just to see how that changes the aesthetics of the image but i do find that the texture in the sky does have a film like feel to it when we get to the four shots what i'm seeing has kind of shook my world it's kind of challenged the preconceived ideas i had on what i'd see in this test not only do the images have a film like structure or texture to my eye the tonality looks remarkably like the film shots i get i'm seeing what almost looks like a glow in the lighter background areas and that may have to do with the depth of field dropping off combining with the noise structure but for whatever reason it really has that kind of film look to me the images are plenty sharp for my uses this really could be a good example of why you don't always need maximum depth of field to have a pleasing photograph when doing this test i did one shot at iso 5000 in the hindsight i wish i had a push that iso even higher because what i'm seeing is the 5000 doesn't look a whole lot different than the third 200 i was sure that third 200 would be beyond what i would consider usable when we get to the detail shots and we punch into the background the out of focus areas the grain or the noise does look more apparent but you've got to really magnify it quite a bit to to really see it it's a lot more apparent than the in focus areas in the lighter areas doing handheld shots of details really seem to be a real strong possibility i have to admit i'm a little surprised by what i was seeing in these images i'm reluctant to make any final conclusions to what i've been seeing this is something i'm going to have to live with for a while and kind of study these files i've said in the past that i like the look of my black and white film images better than my digital black and white i've also said it could very well be that i just don't know how to edit my digital black and white files to get the tones i'm looking for and after inspecting these photos i'm starting to think maybe the problem wasn't how i was editing the photos but how i was shooting the images in the first place who would have thought that using my digital camera with settings that should give me less image quality has given me the quality i'm looking for so does iso 3200 look like film grain well i think it looks more like film grain than i expected it to i think this little test has created more questions than answers for me but it has shown me that i shouldn't write off my digital camera for doing black and white photography that there might be a time where grabbing my d810 makes more sense than grabbing my film camera and thanks for coming along on this little trip of discovery hopefully i've shown you something that you didn't notice before or something that has triggered some ideas that you might want to try so until next time thanks for coming along for the ride