Podcasts about hi i'm

Ah yes, season 4 said, "Hi I'm back"! Well, well, well, Monday Motivation is here and clear. Quote, song, message, and question! Press that play button and enjoy or don't, I can't tell you what to do.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/shandie/message

Hi I'm asking people if they can donate food to the NHS staff the suggestions on how to do it in this segment let's show our NHS that we care like they care for us thank you

Hi I'm 10

Hi I'm toaster and he's bath, welcome to the show

Talking with Ayesha Malik, aka "Hi I'm the girl who 'yelled' at Priyanka Chopra". Follow her on Ig @spisha

It seems like everyone, their mother, and their cat is starting a podcast these days. That being said, finding good advice for starting a podcast isn’t easy. With so many gurus and courses, it can be overwhelming for newbie podcaster.   That’s why we sit down with Janice Chaka, host of The Traveling Introvert podcast, who shares the stories, humor, and advice she gained from 2 years as a successful podcaster.   Unlike most “newbie podcast advice” people, Janice focus in this episode is content. Janice shares how she continually finds ideas for her podcast, and why goals (as well as boundaries) are important to your life as a podcaster.   Major Topics in the Conversation How do you capture ideas for future episodes? Why the first 7 episodes are critical to your podcasts;s growth Why your first goals should NOT be vague like “get more followers” How to set realistic (aka SMART) goals as a podcaster Why you don’t need to be on every social media channel to succeed Why follower count isn’t everything Finding the right-sized podcast mentor for you   Special Moments in the Episode [2:43] How Janice captures new ideas for episodes [3:34] What makes Janice’s podcast a success? [6:20] What tips would you be a newbie podcaster? [6:44} Where are some places new podcasters can get help? [12:00] What is your business’ pain point right now?   About Our Guest Janice Chaka is a podcaster, introvert coach, mentor, speaker, and founder of The Career Introvert. She is also the organizer and host of the Podcast Virtual Summit and the Get Your Podcast Started Facebook group.   Learn more:   Email   FREE resources   Janice Chaka on LinkedIn   The Traveling Introvert Podcast   The Career Introvert website   The Career Introvert on Instagram   The Career Introvert on Twitter   The Career Introvert on Facebook   Get Your Podcast Started Virtual Summit   Get Your Podcast Started Virtual Summit Facebook group   Other Resources   Podcast Movement Anchor Libsyn iTunes Pat Flynn’s course WhatsApp       *Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.     **Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any disease, physical or mental.   Any advice given on the Rich in Differences Podcast should not be construed as a prescription, a promise of benefits, claims of cures, or a guarantee of results to be achieved. The information, instruction or advice given by Rich in Differences Podcast is not intended to be a substitute for competent professional medical or psychological diagnosis and care. You should not discontinue or modify any medication presently being taken pursuant to medical advice without obtaining approval from your healthcare professional.   As a listener/reader, you must take complete responsibility for your own physical health and emotional well-being.   Transcript Below   [00:00:04.390] - Brooke Welcome to Rich In Differences with your host Brooke. Where we discover what works for you in life health and business. We are not legos and one size does not fit all. So, grab a good drink and come listen to different perspectives as we see what sticks for you.   [00:00:21.580] - Brooke Welcome to Rich In Differences and this is Brooke your host. I have with us Janice Chaka as our guest speaker for today. She's giving me the thumbs up because I actually got the name right.   [00:00:33.500] - Janice Yes you did. Nailed it as I said you would.   [00:00:37.060] - Brooke Thank you. Thank you. So Janice has a podcast called The Traveling Introvert. Could you tell us a little about your podcast. And how long you've been doing it.   [00:00:45.640] - Janice I have been doing it two years. Just I think it's time around now because something came up and I was like, oh it's it's been two years and a little bit about it. It started off, It's basically me ranting into the void for five minutes about whatever might have popped up in my life. Normally it's either HR related, travel related, or like running your business related. One of those three topics but super, simple, quick. People have said it's like having a quick coffee chat or like over the water cooler complain with me.   [00:01:16.990] - Brooke I could see that. Would you call yourself an introvert?   [00:01:19.420] - Janice Most definitely. I'm actually dreading the fact that when this comes out won't happened but I've got a conference coming up where normally I can go in and out of the conference and take breaks and they tell me "No actually we're going to livestream it. So no one can go anywhere."   [00:01:32.410] - Brooke  Oh no.   [00:01:36.300] - Janice Yeah.   [00:01:37.660] - Brooke Outside your comfort zone?   [00:01:38.970] - Janice  Oh yeah.   [00:01:43.330] - Brooke So is your podcast the same as it was when you first started or did it evolve over time?   [00:01:48.760] - Janice I like to say it has evolved as I have grown as a podcaster. However, yes we've got a tagline on the end that's slightly different and that's changed as I've pivoted in my business. I now get people who write in and ask me questions that I get to answer on the podcast. So that's changed. Apart from that it's still basically therapy and me venting into the void.   [00:02:14.830] - Brooke That's probably why so many people relate to it! I will be honest, that's what I'm looking forward too, I'm looking forward to getting people's responses and being able to answer their questions as well. So that must help with material and content creation?   [00:02:29.460] - Janice It does and then stuff just pops up every day and then your like, "oh I didn't see that coming". Well I'm gonna I'm going to talk about that. There's a podcast in that. Now my partners got to the point where they're like "Oh this thing happened. Your going to podcast about this arent you?"   [00:02:41.770] - Brooke Do you keep notes on your phone of all the different things that come up?   [00:02:45.970] - Janice Yeah normally. So I have a friend who I have an ongoing WhatsApp voice conversation with.   [00:02:51.480] - Brooke OK.   [00:02:52.130] - Janice So I will message her. Just because I'm better with audio, so it's saved and then I might make a note. I have a project management thing that I use and so I have a list of episodes. I could write "talk about so and so" and it will go in there. To answer your question, yes. Always have a place where you have notes because ideas and stuff come up randomly so you should have one single place where you always put the stuff.   [00:03:15.160] - Brooke I think mine's just notes on my phone, and it always happens and I'm driving too. So it's the safest time for me to be making notes in my phone.   [00:03:21.500] - Janice Voice memos, voice memos rule.   [00:03:26.860] - Brooke  Yes. So what would you say has been the number one reason your podcast has been a success.   [00:03:33.660] - Janice Wait my podcast is successful?   [00:03:35.220] - Brooke I would say so. Come on now, if you have people coming in with questions, I would say it's somewhat successful.   [00:03:43.240] - Janice Well I'll tell you what for the first three months I didn't tell anyone it existed, it was just for friends. Why is my podcast successful? I think it is because what you listen to is kind of what you get. It's also like when people coach with me I'm very much like if you want sunshine and flowers and unicorns. I'm not that person. Here's my podcast, this is what it sounds like, this is what you get. If you don't like it, now's not the time to sign up. I think it's been successful because a couple of things happened one I went to podcast movement and Glass box were running this competition and I won the competition and so I got free advertising for a week. That helped.   [00:04:20.320] - Brooke Oh wow that is awesome.   [00:04:23.030] - Janice Yeah thanks. Glass box.   [00:04:24.320] - Brooke Yeah.   [00:04:25.720] - Janice So now I use them religiously. I also think I've gotten better at telling people. I have a bag, a swag bag that I walk around with and so people are like well (the Traveling Introvert) that's an oxymoron. Introverts don't travel and then I have to go and school them and then we come back and listen to the podcast.   [00:04:41.800] - Brooke Aww nice, that's clever.   [00:04:47.430] - Janice Yeah I don't know, people seem to like it. Thank you people I appreciate you. It's real, it's just me and I think people get value from it.   [00:04:55.390] - Brooke Yeah, I could see that totally. So when we first talk you mentioned the concept of pod fade which is something I actually had never heard of. So I imagine if I've never heard of it others have probably not heard of it either. So would you care to describe what pod fade is?   [00:05:11.290] - Janice Oh I wish I had the dictionary definition. I'm sure Urban Dictionary has this somewhere but basically when your podcast starts you're all excited and you pump out a bunch of episodes and then life happens. And you slam into that like a truck. And you're scared to sort of get back on the horse again. And so there's maybe seven to ten episodes out there, something happens and then you stop podcasting and now you've taken a break. You're scared to go back because you think your listeners will be mad at you or you get overwhelmed or whatever it is.   [00:05:40.570] - Janice  And then you stop podcasting and there's some statistics with Anchor and with Libsyn. Anchor is a free site that you can use, I think over 64 percent stop after seven episodes and then with Libsyn I think it's a huge percentage. So if you go and look and I choose for example Itunes is which is the graveyard of podcasts you'll see a lot that are still new and noteworthy but haven't actually done anything for the past year.   [00:06:07.750] - Brooke That's weird.   [00:06:09.790] - Janice They say their working on that. So it might be fixed but it's been an ongoing process. Because people are like "I want to be on new and noteworthy" and the rest of us are like no it's not a thing.   [00:06:19.750] - Brooke Yeah ok. So if someone wanted to start a podcast what would you recommend in order for them to avoid the pod fade?   [00:06:29.290] - Janice  One thing? Because I could go on about this.   [00:06:31.600] - Brooke I mean you can give as many tips as you want, I am listening. Right here.   [00:06:39.280] - Janice Most people who start it might deal with their business, some people start as a hobby and that's that's awesome because then you're just rambling on about Game of Thrones or whatever it is that you're doing and your goal is much easier if you're doing it as a hobby. If you're doing it with regards to your business your business goals and your podcast goals should intersect in some way shape or form. Or why are you doing it? With those goals they should be a way to measure them. Make sure to measure. We all forget about the smart goal thing all of the sudden when we become podcasters "I want listeners" and that's not a goal. I mean it can be a goal but that shouldn't be what it is. Can we have someone email you and ask you a question? It doesn't have to be a huge audacious goal. It could just be someone's listened to me and I've provided value and so they've felt compelled enough to get out their phone and actually sent me an email like that takes more effort, that's more than a ticking like or follow that's actual commitment. Keep it whatever works with you, I was super stoked when someone emailed me. It's like someone actually listened to me and they e-mailed me from the other side of the world, because that's the other thing people forget anyone can listen to you anywhere. So we tend to make a podcast very focused in a specific geographical area and you don't have control of that. You can't be like only people in the US can listen to your stuff or only people in the UK.   [00:07:54.750] - Janice Yes to stop pod fade make sure that it fits in with your lifestyle not the other way around. Most people will find that their podcast take over their life with editing or social media and all that good stuff. So beforehand do an intro or test episode where you fiddle with everything and figure out what works. Figure out: how you want your sound to be, whether you want music in between, jingles, intros, outros, how long all of that takes, how long the editing, takes how long your social media takes, and then you'll know exactly how long each episode is gonna take you and then you look back at your life and your calendar and your like. Uhh. And don't do that "I'm gonna make it work" thing because that doesn't leave room for error, children, hurricanes, life, getting a new job because that sucks you up for 90 days too.   [00:08:37.840] - Janice And the systems and workflows write down everything that you do. It can change over time. But when you're recording, OK I have to switch this on, this toggle has to be this setting, I need to check all of these things to make sure it all works. When you have it all written down there's less decision making for you to do and less time for your brain to be like. I don't know. I'm confused. So workflows systems automate as much as you can. Don't go and try and be on every single social media platform. Pick one, do that for six months and get it down, get it automated get a system then move on to the next one. We have enough hats on as it is as podcasters. But the main thing is the goals. Because if those two don't work and then you come back six months I was like Well I don't have 18 million followers how do I get more followers. And it's not necessarily the amount of followers you have it's how engaged they are and how invested they feel in the podcast.   [00:09:27.490] - Brooke All right then that was a lot. I liked all of that. I'm going to have to go back and write all these down when my microphone can't pick it up. All right. So if someone wanted to start a podcast where would you recommend they start?   [00:09:45.340] - Janice All right so there's two schools of thought here. Obviously I'm going to say you should come and join my podcast group. That is what I should say.   [00:09:53.080] - Brooke Yeah.   [00:09:53.200] - Janice That's the "get your podcast started" group on Facebook and now on Facebook you can personalize it so you literally just look for "get your podcast started" groups and it will magically appear. A lot of people go with Pat Flynn because he is the O.G. of podcasting and he has a course and it's all free and it's all him. But he also has a huge team behind him, and production, and money. Not everyone has that luxury. Try and go with someone who is in line with what you're doing or has done what you've done and it's just a little bit ahead of you. Not like all the way up ahead of you so they're making the same mistakes that you have made and it's in recent memory rather than oh I did this thing like five years ago when I talked to the president of X Y and Z.   [00:10:32.150] - Brooke I like that. Then it's a great piece of advice. Getting someone who's just a little ahead of you. So they do remember what you're going through because sometimes I do feel like a lot of people who are veterans do forget. And then they have great advice but the advice is for where they're at. It's not for where a new person is at and I feel like that's easily forgotten sometimes. What is the one thing you wish you knew when you first started running a business?   [00:11:00.830] - Janice I suppose to be prepared for this and I thought about it and there's so many things. The biggest, biggest, biggest thing and I'm not really a huge mindset believer but we go through our lives starting at school, and we get told what to do. WeSome of us go through university, we get told what to do. We have a job, we get told what to do. But if you're a business owner yes you have clients who tell you what to do. But you actually have the power to tell them no. No that's not how that works. And we forget this and we feel beholden to the paycheck the money that oh they're gonna ruin my reputation and all these other things but I wish that earlier on in my business career in my life I realized that I could push back and I could say no. And it's almost a self worth thing. Because you're scared to say no to the money, you're normally in such a stage where you want the money and so you say yes to everything and that ruins you quicker than anything else because then you're not happy when you're working and that's one of the things you want to be. I mean you don't want to be over the moon happy but you want to be okay working. So when becoming your own boss and treating your business like a business remember: you are the CEO, you're the strategist behind your business.   [00:12:03.800] - Brooke Absolutely. So what is one fear or thought that keeps coming up for you as a business owner?   [00:12:09.050] - Janice We kind of talked about this earlier, my newsletter. Not my zone of genius. I have a list. Technically I have a list for my podcast as well and that's a whole other thing. I know kind of what I want to write but part of me is like how personal do I want to get? Because I don't, I'm a very private human being. But people keep going on about the no trust thing it's like how much is too much and how much is too little? How often to write. Because I committed to messaging every Thursday and I committed to doing a rolling stock of different topics but right now I'm really focusing on this one topic. So all I want to do is write about this one topic. Do you guys mind? So I'm getting feedback because sometimes as often as you might be asked hey click this link or this link some people just read the email and don't respond to you or give you feedback. And as business owners we want to get better and we want to do stuff that works for you. But if you don't tell us and communicate with us we're not gonna do it. So every time I get a feedback form from any company that they specifically like ask "hey Janice we want you to give feedback". I will do it because that's what I would want as a business owner.   [00:13:10.400] - Brooke Awesome. Thank you. So how can people work with you these days?   [00:13:14.880] - Janice So having said that email is my choice communication. People message me on Facebook and I'm like "I'm not on here." I even have a message on my Facebook page if you message it says "Hi I'm out helping other introverts, I check this maybe twice a day, email me." Email me at: Janice@thecareerintrovert.com you can find me at thecareerintrovert.com,  Facebook: careerintrovert, LinkedIn: Janicethecareerintrovert anything careerintrovert appart from like Snapchat, I'm there. The best way to contact me is email though and if you want to work with me this is what I do. I help people launch their podcast, less overwhelmed with goals, with systems workflows. Because one thing about podcasting is you want to be consistent and the only way not the only way but my way of doing that. There's many ways to do. The thing is to have systems and workflows in place and obviously record in advance so you have a batch of stuff so that you can still live your life and it fits in with your lifestyle. I had someone ask in my group the other day "why are your podcast episodes so short" and I was like "because it fits in with my personality which is short and sweet." It fits in with my lifestyle. I travel a lot so I need to batch record and I'm going to do that like five minutes here five minutes there and then be done with it. I didn't want to spend a lot of time editing there were lists of things I didn't want to do. So that's how my podcast is the way it is. So I help you with all that I help you with workflows, I help you with systems, I help you with your goals and making sure they're in line with your business and your podcast and all that good stuff. That's pretty much it, amplify your voice. Mainly introverts but I also work with extroverts because I like people.   [00:14:52.820] - Brooke I was going to ask you where can people follow you. But you kind of answered all that in the first question as well. I would probably say because your a podcaster the best way to kind of get to know you and follow your work is probably through your podcast.   [00:15:04.020] - Janice Oh yeah.   [00:15:04.900] - Brooke So all of this information is going to be below in the show notes: where to find her, how you can work with her and all of that. You don't have to go find your pen and paper right now. I believe that is it Miss Janice, I think we answered all the questions I have written down here.   [00:15:18.530] - Janice Thank you.   [00:15:19.530] - Brooke All right Pop Tarts that is all for this week. Remember send in your thoughts, your feedback, your ideas, your questions and your drink of choice whether it be alcoholic or nonalcoholic. And be sure to send in the recipes so you can be featured on the show. And don't forget to subscribe. So you can be around for when I feature you on the show and to get some good content. Here's to another week. Cheers.  

Hi I'm yoshiislander and you're listening to Vorthos Audio Files, the podcast where I read to you Magic the Gathering stories for your relaxation, while flavoring your knowledge of the multiverse.Welcome to episode 9, and the second installment of Magic Origins, a series dedicated to the origin stories of the founders of The Gatewatch, including Chandra, Liliana, Jace, Gideon, and Nissa. If you enjoy this series, you'll probably enjoy playing Magic with yours truly, live on Twitch, Sunday evenings, Pacific Standard Time, @yoshiislander. The link is in the shownotes.Our second magic origin story highlights the mage, Liliana. "For Liliana Vess, a quest of compassion becomes the first step down a long, dark path." Cue the story.Play Magic with me on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/yoshiislanderRead along FREE on the official Magic the Gathering site: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/uncharted-realms/lilianas-origin-fourth-pact-2015-06-17Support the show (https://www.ko-fi.com/yoshiislander)

Hi I'm new to this!!! My first time doing this so stay tuned for more interesting things

Hi I'm yoshiislander and you're listening to Vorthos Audio Files, the podcast where I read to you Magic the Gathering stories for your relaxation, while flavoring your knowledge of the multiverse.Welcome to episode 8, and the first installment of Magic Origins, a series dedicated to the origin stories of the founders of The Gatewatch, including Chandra, Liliana, Jace, Gideon, and Nissa.If you enjoy this series, you'll probably enjoy playing Magic with yours truly, live on Twitch, Sunday evenings, Pacific Standard Time, @yoshiislander. The link is in the shownotes.Our first magic origin story highlights the pyromancer, Chandra. "Even before she walked planes, Chandra Nalaar blazed brightly." Cue the story.Play Magic with me on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/yoshiislanderRead along FREE on the official Magic the Gathering site: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/uncharted-realms/chandras-origin-fire-logic-2015-06-10 Support the show (https://www.ko-fi.com/yoshiislander)

Hi I'm keeley and I need ideas for more videos and I am good with horse and dancing and cross country so subscribe to my channel and comment ideas bye!

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent="no" equal_height_columns="no" menu_anchor="" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" id="" background_color="" background_image="" background_position="center center" background_repeat="no-repeat" fade="no" background_parallax="none" parallax_speed="0.3" video_mp4="" video_webm="" video_ogv="" video_url="" video_aspect_ratio="16:9" video_loop="yes" video_mute="yes" overlay_color="" video_preview_image="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" padding_top="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" padding_right=""][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type="1_1" layout="1_1" background_position="left top" background_color="" border_size="" border_color="" border_style="solid" border_position="all" spacing="yes" background_image="" background_repeat="no-repeat" padding_top="" padding_right="" padding_bottom="" padding_left="" margin_top="0px" margin_bottom="0px" class="" id="" animation_type="" animation_speed="0.3" animation_direction="left" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" center_content="no" last="no" min_height="" hover_type="none" link=""][fusion_text] Watch the live interview below [/fusion_text][fusion_youtube id="https://youtu.be/o708eAahonM" alignment="center" width="" height="" autoplay="false" api_params="&rel=0" hide_on_mobile="small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility" class="" /][fusion_text] Transcription (was completed by automated process. Please ignore any speech-to-text errors) [00:00:22] Hi I'm Beatty Carmichael and welcome to the get sellers calling you podcast and I'm excited today to interview just a really neat and top producing real turd named Nick Kerley out of Redding California. So Next say hello. [00:00:40] Hey Beatty how you doing today. [00:00:42] Well I am doing super and I appreciate your time today. I know you are busy. And for those who don't know you written it is actually a client of ours and he does have he has a really unique business model that he's been doing. He's had tremendous market share with it. Very entrepreneurial. And so I just wanted to go through a little bit of your story and what you're doing. And have you share with the folks out there maybe some things that they can tap into and try to drive on too. So thanks for your time today. [00:01:18] No problem. Thank you. Glad to be here. [00:01:20] Yeah. So just a reminder also this is an Internet call. [00:01:24] So just please excuse any internet type of interruptions. But Nick real quickly before we get fully started I'd love just to hear a little bit about your real estate career and you're mentioning as you move to Redding you only knew two people and the story of how you got started. I just want to kind of have you share that with people real quick can you. First off before we do that tell me tell us first where you are right now so people understand. Because I think you mentioned you have a big company. You have a lot of agents your brokerage kind of. Who are you right now and then we'll talk about how you got there. [00:01:59] Oh sure. All right. So we're a real estate broker. I'm going to California real estate broker I have a team of agents that that work here. We're an independent company and we last year we did about twenty four twenty five million in transaction volume that equated to about 60 transactions sides. That was myself another agent and a full time transaction coordinator. We we are probably the number three or four agent in our chefs the board of MLS. And we we have a system everything here is systematized from from the sharpening of the pencil to the to the handing over of the keys. So it's it's it's definitely a full system operation. [00:02:50] Well does I think is the thing that's been so impressive because when you and I started working you had your whole system built out. [00:02:57] So I want to get there in just a moment but tell us how you got started you were just mentioning before we started the recording showing up and writing and all you knew to people and now a few years later you're just a song you know got this great powerful business going so tell us how what happened on that. [00:03:15] Well we I've been in real estate since 2002 for so just over 17 years. I was from Southern California and the rat race of Southern California and and the wife and kids. When that starts to hate your life you start to wonder where you want to where you want to end up and where you raise those kids. So Redding is a beautiful town. We're surrounded by mountains where our backyard is Lake Shasta. We have Mount Shasta behind that. It's just an absolutely beautiful place if you ever have an opportunity to come visit here. If you're an outdoors person you you can never get tired or bored. So it was a perfect spot to land my broker at the time actually lived here with his feet on say and I knew both of them because they were originally from the same local town in southern California came up to visit them fell in love with the town way back down put in my 30 day notice and moved up pretty much 30 days later. So when I got here though I didn't know anybody and if you know real estate it's less about what you know and it's more about who you know. The good thing was is that I had the experience I knew how to run a transaction I knew how to write and offer. So on and so forth but I didn't know any people. I literally went out and doorknocked. I picked the neighborhood. I said I picked the only way I picked it was I said to myself I would like to live here. This was it this was a pretty neighborhood and I just started knocking on the doors. Luckily I didn't get shot or ran off. I had an excellent coach my former broker and been in the business for thirty five years was a top producer so he helped me out with getting some things going. Some marketing pieces but that's that's basically how I got started here and Redding was just door knocking and giving everybody extraordinary service. And once that happened and the business started to snowball and get bigger and bigger. [00:05:11] Now how long ago was that when you came to Redding. [00:05:14] I came here in October of 2013 and I'm sorry. [00:05:19] I was about five years. [00:05:22] Yeah. Yeah. We're going we're going on the five years now. Every year I've grew my business. The first year I did eight transaction sides which is not bad if you're an agent just starting out but you know 15 years in the business you're kind of wondering what's going on. Two years after that I was doing 32 transaction sides by myself hired a transaction coordinator and went up to over 60. [00:05:47] That's really amazing. And. And you found a niche and there in Redding that you really pushed into. Tell us a little bit about that. [00:05:58] Yeah we. And this is this kind of bleeds to. How. [00:06:01] How I met you Beatty but we do a lot of residential income properties a lot of apartment buildings the commercial side. I had a property management background down in southern California. So when I came up here it was very easy for me to fill right into it. I know that that niche I know that market I know how to sell that product. I know what buyers are looking for I know what sellers are looking for and I knew what to watch out for. So because I was new to town I exploited that and now we we sell probably 20 to 30 percent of the market share in an apartment buildings in the in the Shasta County area. [00:06:40] Wow. That seems like a lie. I mean 20 to 30 percent is a lot anywhere you go. What what's your key. I mean how are you. I mean do you go meet the owners so you can get their business or how is it different from residential retail sales and what are you doing. [00:06:57] Well you know direct mail is incredibly effective. When I got in the business in 2002 you'd go out to your mailbox and it would be like pulling out a phonebook because you had so much mail even in a couple of days. Then the Internet came along and email account came along and all of a sudden that mailbox the stack of stuff went lower and lower and lower. Fast forward now to two thousand and 19 and my wife goes sometimes to the mail every other day sometimes once a week. So what I'm getting at is the mailbox is a great place to share your business and that's what I started doing I started doing direct mail. I had excellent content for those apartment owners and apartment buyers and they they just started calling me. So Trent transfer that to the single family home business which we have a lot of success in but we also wanted to gain more market share but also it's a it's far more competitive. There's a lot more agents that are involved in single family homes than there are an apartment. So that's why I knew that direct mail was a 100 percent success. I believed in it wholeheartedly. I just wanted to not reinvent the wheel when it came to the content and what it was that got the homeowner to call me. And that's where I found your company and found you guys. [00:08:17] Hi I'm glad that you're here. I'd like to go in that direction. I'm not really I'm not trying to make this a pitch for what we do but I would love just from your perspective so you built a business with the residential income properties and you built it off with direct mail and now you whining and you've got 20 to 30 percent market share there. So now you're wanting to build a second income with your single family homes. So tell me a little bit about what you know how and how did you find us and and what you're excited about with what we're doing for you. [00:08:54] Yeah that's a great question especially if you have any newer agents that are listening to this because when I first got into the business I must have signed up with every single program everybody that said that they can they can bring me business and all I had to do was one transaction that day for itself. So when it came time to find a marketing system I really go through the Internet you know referral talking to talking to people outside of my market to try to find what really worked. And I interviewed a lot of other I guess companies or services and you know a lot of people want to sell you the bells and whistles online and online is the place to go and a lot of people might have success there but my success stemmed from direct mail. So when I when I stumbled upon you guys and started doing my research before making that call I noticed that you guys were just as much of a proponent as of the direct mail as I was. It's important though to understand especially as a as an agent that direct mail is not instant gratification. It does not happen overnight. Sure you can send out your first postcard and you could get a call and that's fantastic but it's going to take some months of commitment and some repetitiveness in order to gain that reputation in the mailbox. But once you do do it and you stay consistent with it. E. Almost like it's like you push through the threshold and then and then it just compounds on itself and then the phone starts ringing for you rather than you constantly having to ring on the phone. So that's that's kind of the short story of how I kind of funneled down going through some other places that. [00:10:41] That were that weren't really the same mentality that I had and found you guys very interesting. [00:10:47] So now there are a lot of people that send out postcards now. You know we postcard is this for us. It's a delivery method to get content there and we use it as you know but we're not using it with you in your particular area. [00:11:00] But we push that out through Facebook and we push it out through other forms. But what is it about us that caught your interest. [00:11:09] Because I'm sure you looked at all kinds of other companies that do postcards but you weren't interested in whatever they did. What culture interest with what we did. [00:11:19] It really is the content and the organization of how it's all put together and the science behind it really. I mean I'm the kind of person that when I'm selling a house I want to find out what or how buyers have previously found the house they bought. I want to I want to study that because those statistics are important. So then you know where to spend your marketing dollars. I mean if they if they found it on the dry driving by the house and seeing the sign you want to spend some money on your science you know you also want to be in other places like the Internet and postcards. But my point is is that when I came to you guys you guys had studied what worked and I found that so many other companies out there they were just using these bland postcards that really had no effect on the end user. And you guys were the opposite of that you scientifically if you will found out what the consumer is looking for what they want to know and what is going to compel them to to to call. [00:12:20] That was also coupled with a technology that you guys have that must be proprietary because I've never seen it anywhere else. And and how it works on the back end. I had no concern. I never I didn't care how it worked. I just I cared that it did work. So once we started using that system and I've already used you guys as program we just got started in this. I'm already seeing that that technology that you have where the sellers basically raise their hand and tell you that you know they're thinking about selling it works. It's pretty cool. [00:12:56] That's cool. Hey I want to share one other thing for the folks listening because you and I just finished doing an interview for your farm now your farm is like four or five thousand homes that we're targeting there. [00:13:09] But talk to me just a little bit about the interview and just the whole process I just kind of bring people up to speed. So Nick and I just finished doing an interview where I'm asking him questions. [00:13:25] He's responding as the realtor giving his homeowners in that farm an opportunity to meet him because the hardest part and breaking into a new market especially like a farm is them getting a chance to meet you. [00:13:40] So talk to me a little bit and just what you what excites you about that video. Because I know you put a lot of effort in in preparing for it. We actually recut it again after you watch the first one. So give me an idea just what you see in it. [00:13:54] Well you know it's great. I mean you know people these days they don't necessarily want to talk to the sales person until they have enough information to where they want to ask a question that becomes very difficult process for the salesperson of course because you know you're not going to be able to engage that seller until you meet with them so that you have that impasse there. [00:14:16] How do you how do you bridge that gap. So working with you I thought it was a great idea. But but folks out there have to understand that even though I've been in the business this long I've never I've never demand one that does video. I kind of come from the old school of you know maybe like meeting somebody at an open house or doing door knocking. But in today's technology people are on the Internet they're watching videos and other agents are doing it. [00:14:41] So even if you're uncomfortable about it I would say step out of that comfort zone. You know trust trust Fadi and his team with their system and go with it because it gave me an opportunity to do some answer some really great questions that a lot of sellers have before they decide to welcome you into their home and kind of establish that that ice break to where even if they only watch it for five minutes they still know that I'm a human being I'm the person and you know and it gives me that opportunity to to go to the next step which is hopefully an interview for the job. [00:15:19] I love it. Hey if you don't mind I'd like to whine backwards just a little bit and go back to residential income stuff a little bit. [00:15:29] I'm real curious about that because that seems like like a neat niche market that probably most agents don't go after. Do you find that it's a real competitive market or aren't non-competitive. [00:15:44] It's that's a loaded question. [00:15:45] I mean it's a it's a very competitive market. On the broker side with brokers that know what they're doing. You have to be careful in their residential income side because say for instance you have a four unit apartment building. Well that's one property but there's four doors in there there's four there's four many houses in there. [00:16:05] So you have four inspections you have four tenants that you're working with. You know you have financing that you have to understand how it works taxes. You also have to understand the expenses and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of moving parts. So on the broker side there's not a large volume of agents that do it but the ones that do are very good. They're very skilled and they know what they're doing. So you have to have that same level of confidence and education in order to compete at that level. On the other side the buyer and the seller you know these are people that own income property and you have to have a usually a minimum 25 percent down in order to purchase them. So they're there they're of high wealth usually of high education and they expect a certain level of professionalism and they expect you to know what you're doing and you're going to have to be able to deliver on those on those expectations. [00:17:01] So it is it is very competitive in that sense and the buyers are entrusting you to go out there and find them the right property. And if you don't do that they're definitely going to find somebody else for it. So go ahead. All right. That also being said if you are good and you and you do and you do know what you're doing. It's also not where a lot of other agents are. So in this day and age you're better at being a specialist at one or two things than trying to be great at a whole lot of things. [00:17:36] I fully concur on that. And we used to offer services to our clients in all rare realms of different things. And I realized you can't you can't be a Master Ball. [00:17:50] So narrow it down to where you can be a master of. How do you so. So the dynamics of this residential income is obviously it's not for every agent but for those who are intrigued with the idea. Can you give some some basic steps on what do you do or how do you get started. I love the fact that you're sharing it's lot more moving pieces so it's definitely a more process driven sale or transaction. Can you do just educate a little bit more on how you get started and what the opportunity is. Does that make sense. There's probably a lot of things along the way. [00:18:30] You're listening to the get sellers calling you podcast to increase sales from past clients and sphere of influence or from a geographic farm. [00:18:38] Learn about Agent dominator we guarantee your sales in writing or give your money back. To learn more. Visit our web and get sellers calling you dot com and select agent dominator from the menu. [00:18:49] And now back to the podcast. [00:18:53] The best thing to do to get started is to start. Start small. I mean. Yes. I mean it as a real estate agent that makes money off of commissions. You may see an apartment building out there that's you know one million or 10 million dollars and say that's where I want to go but it's better off to start. Start off small you analyze a duplex analyze it try plex for plex analyze that property so you can educate yourself on exactly what the local laws are for your tenants and what leases and how the contract works. As far as selling those types of properties and if you start there and you know maybe you sell a duplex or a four plex then you go through that process you'll get confident just like you would order when you sold your first listing or your first house. After that you felt confidence so when you get there and you get the confidence and you also get the wherewithal of what it takes to process that transaction then then I would say start going to the next level and expanding your business. But most importantly what we do here is we advertise and celebrate every success. [00:20:05] Success begets success. So once you make that sale it's really important to share with all the other property owners out there that owns those similar properties. What you've just done and explain to them how you got this property listed or how you brought that buyer and that you have more buyers or you have the potential to sell more or more properties once you start doing that and you get that side type of success that community out there that owns those properties will know will know you and know that success and it'll start to compound more business. But I definitely don't want to trade that this is an easy niche to get in. This took me years and years of work and education and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So at the end of it we have 20 to 30 percent market share today but that didn't happen overnight. It happened by starting small and celebrating every success with all of those those owners and then in turn providing the result. You can't take a listing and then not sell it and expect other people to to hire you. [00:21:15] That makes a lot of sense. How does some appear to make a comparison between the residential income and the single family home. The marketing of it either the content or the delivery. [00:21:27] What's the basic difference and what are you see as your big takeaway be no take over bring over from residential income to then push into the single family home. [00:21:41] Well the marketing is a little bit different because the end user is it is a different person in a single family home. You're marketing a place where somebody is going to a buyer. You're marketing a place where somebody is going to have backyard barbecues they're going to have Christmas morning their Thanksgiving they're having friends over. It's in a very emotional place for them and they're you know they're going to make those memories there on the on the apartment side. You're you're marketing an income. I mean that is a second stream of income. It's an asset that grows wealth for the owner and also the maintenance that it takes to run it. So you're really you're on a on a more an emotional sale in a single family home and it's more a business sale on an apartment on apartments. Both of those combined in certain terms and ways. I mean there can be some emotion that's involved in apartments and there is also some business that's involved in single family but. But they are definitely different. [00:22:40] And when marketing each one you can market them with the same vehicle like if it's direct mail but your message definitely has to be different. I mean you wouldn't want to tell the investor this is a great place to live in and it's amazing place to have barbecues you know they don't care. They're not likely not going to live there. So and vice versa. You wouldn't tell somebody who's moving in a single family home that it would make a great rental. I mean they're not planning on buying it to read it. They're buying to live there. So if that makes any sense. [00:23:13] Yeah no that makes a lot of sense. I've got a crazy question now for you. What has been one of the worst things you've ever tried that failed. OK. Does that make sense. And because I want to find out what are you done that just actually doesn't work he said. Oh come on write that one off and then I want to find out what are the things you've done that absolutely work that you're going to stay focused on. I know postcards is one of them. But over here what's the point. What are the things that have failed the worst for you. Do you mind sharing. Oh sure. [00:23:45] I mean you know I mean we've done you know we've done raffles before that we thought we were. You know you spend money on free T TV and you've done raffles thinking that you're going to get a bunch of people in also you know really to some Web sites I've spent money on Web sites thousands actually on Web sites thinking that that's going to drive people to my Web site and I'm going to get those leads. You really have to be careful when you're doing Web sites to make sure that your money is well spent there. Those types of things have been unsuccessful. I would say any marketing that is unprepared has been unsuccessful. Another thing that I've failed at and this is probably going to be a little bit hard for some agency here because there are some agents that have been extremely successful is the cold calling. I never was good at cold calling I'm not a good cold caller. I just it never really worked for me. So that's probably one of the ones that I feel the most that I didn't spend a lot of money on it but I spent a lot of time in and you know that's why we don't do it. I just it doesn't work for me. And when I found that it didn't work for me I moved away and found things I did. [00:25:02] That's destiny. And is there anything besides the postcards that you found has been really good for you. [00:25:10] You know believe it or not open houses on the residential side have been really successful for us but we don't do a standard open house where you know the seller says OK you can hold it up on Sunday and we start marketing it on Friday. We go back and you know at least a week to 10 days before and start marketing that open house. We incorporate the neighbors with invites. We do tons of signage flags balloons that kind of stuff. And in that that has been been really successful at open houses and got away from a little bit. They're starting to come back into popularity just because I think people will enjoy it. There are the looky loos out there but there are people that are going to look at open houses and they're serious about buying. [00:25:57] So talk to me a little more about those open houses so you're marketing it to the neighborhood. Are you looking for neighbors who are thinking about selling to come look at the open house. Or are you looking for neighbors to tell their friends to drive buyers to it. [00:26:13] Well both in any successful real estate business listings is the key. It just really is you can ask any top producer anywhere in the world at any point in time. Listings are the key. But without selling those listings you'll never be successful. So we're looking for both. We want to bring the neighbors in for two reasons. We want to meet them to exhibit the open house and to tell their friends and family. But we also want to hear about any future movie needs that they may have. So it's a it's two part in our marketing is in that as well. [00:26:46] So when you when you do the one you do the open house. Can you give me some examples of things that are kind of a typical example of what you what you do in marketing it and then the typical example of what type of results are you getting out of it is it just selling it faster or are you picking up an extra listing or two for every open house that you that you did. [00:27:09] Both first of all you've got to have a good house. I mean it's got to be in a good location. There ain't here. If you're you know at a 10 acre property four miles out of town on some backcountry road you're you're not gonna have success. So you've got to have some givens there so that the House has to be in a good location. We picked them for a good location. You know open houses and the marketing that we send out. We it depends on the time of season. But I mean I've had as many as no exaggeration over a hundred people at an open house before. Wow I get a subdivision a hundred. I mean it was so overwhelming we almost couldn't keep track. So what is it. It was a really cool house. A lot of people wanted to come see it. So that was a contributing factor. But realistically our open house is an average anywhere from 15 to 25 groups which if you're a realtor and you've been in the business for a while that's that's pretty good numbers to have. And again it reverts back to these are in subdivisions you know they're in good locations. and that's been really helpful. [00:28:11] So those numbers go down as your home gets harder and harder to find. And if you don't prepare for it properly out of those open houses. If the House is price right I did an open house last year that the house was already sold before we had the open house. I mean because the house was so awesome but the open house created multiple offers those multiple offers did so well that I was able to advertise it to the neighbors and one of the neighbors was thinking about selling. He was so impressed with the open house we got the listing off of that. So those are the those are the things that makes them effective. The problem with open house in the negative connotation with it is is that most agents do them and they'll set up their sign and they'll sit in the house for two or three or four hours and the only one eats the cookies is them because no one comes by. They automatically check it off as a as an ineffective marketing tool. It doesn't work. It's only you know to appease the seller and I don't want to spend my four hours there just eating cookies. I eat enough already. [00:29:17] So you know it's a marketing that drives the business there. That makes it work worthwhile. So what specifically you mentioned like rather than just you know you have open house on Sunday you don't wait till Friday to market. [00:29:31] You're actually marketing a week or ten days earlier. Tell me what you're doing. [00:29:36] Well first of all we get a list of all the neighbors that are at least within the mild two miles around the house radius and we mail them all a personal invitation. It's just on a postcard it doesn't have to be in an envelope. And we send him a postcard as a personal invitation that says you're cordially invited to our open house at 1 to 3 memory lane between 1 and 4 on Sunday. Please come on by and extend this invitation to any of your friends family and co-workers. There will be a lender on site if you have any mortgage questions along with a license realtors and we'll have some beverages. We'd love to see you. So we start out with that as an invite. We do the exact same thing with Facebook. We do a Facebook post on there. We boost that and sponsor that and explain that there's gonna be an open house. Please share that post and kind of reiterate what we said in the postcard. We also advertise it on Craigslist letting the open house know we change it in our local board our MLS allows us to notate WHEN AN OPEN HOUSE is coming up. Then what happens is this ad goes across Zillow realtor dot com all of those major national Web sites and it shows that there's gonna be an open house on that day. So then leading up to the open house day we're getting signage ready to go putting out as many signs as we possibly can. We put out flags directional signs balloons and and that really stacks the cards in our favor to have a successful open house. [00:31:10] You know that's really as I'm hearing you talk. I'm going back to you're driving the business with a residential income properties. You're marketing that you're now marketing to four or five thousand home farm. [00:31:26] And I say the same thing happening with your open houses. You don't just sit there and hope someone's going to come by. You're actually marketing it and pushing the content out to dry people there. Sure I don't know. I don't more agents do that. [00:31:43] Well I mean I think you really want to get down to brass tacks. I think it's training. And in California you just have to pass a couple of courses and take a state test and then you get a real estate license. But that does not mean that literature doesn't explain anything on how to market yourself how to market a listing how to take a listing how to talk to a seller or a buyer to get them to want to work with you over the competition. So I think that many agents out there are poorly trained unfortunately. Secondly most people think that you have to have something else to do it for you like a computer especially all the more technologically we get the more these computers and suffered doing it for us good old fashioned shoe leather. We'll get you so far in this business. It's a people business and getting face to face will save you a lot of money. So I think that's what scares agents is they get into this business that you can be your own boss and be a small business owner without a whole lot of investment. But then again you may not have a whole lot of investment and you're worried about where to spend those dollars. So that's kind of for a new agent. [00:32:54] The older agents you know maybe they just didn't plan their career accordingly the way that that we were trained or I was trained and learned is you have to invest in what you sell very in the real estate business. You should be buying real estate throughout your career. If you don't then you might be in this business for 35 40 years. Still driving people around in your car in which there's nothing wrong with that but it's probably the biggest pitfall for most agents and brokers is they forget that they they have to invest in what they're selling and sets set money aside for that too. [00:33:33] So I hope that helps explain it. I mean for the new agent just get out there and use what your resources are which is your two legs in your mouth and and then talk to people whether it be through open houses or wherever a socially you can do that. And then you know for the seasoned agencies just don't forget to invest for your future. [00:33:55] That's really brilliant. And I just love the aggressiveness not that you're an aggressive person but you take an aggressive stance to say I'm going to market this if I want to spend my time sitting there I want to make sure a lot of people coming in. [00:34:08] Absolutely. Now do you are. So you're sending out a bunch of postcards. You're boosting post on Facebook and I know that's not all that expensive but you do have some costs involved. You mentioned that you have a lender usually there. Do you get the lender to pay for any of the cost as well. Yes. [00:34:27] The lender will usually provide the refreshments. They'll also do a Facebook post on their personal Facebook site whatever it may be. They what I always ask them to do too is you know all of the buyers that you have that are pre-approved in this price range. Please send them out an email letting them know that you know you're partnering with us to do an open house. So yeah we get that we get the lenders involved as well. Whatever they want to do as far as marketing. Sometimes when we're doing the the invitations they'll ask if they can be on the invitation and then we just split the cost of the production and stay with with the lender and they get their picture on there and they're happy to do it. OK. You'll find lenders that will be happy to do it. Just make sure that you abide by all your local rest bylaws and all that stuff you were going to split it down the middle to make sense. [00:35:25] So if I were to ask most agents on a scale of one to ten ten being highest where would you rate your success rate and effectiveness of an open house. Most agents I ask that to would probably say you know maybe about a two or three. If I were to ask you when you do your open house with all of that marketing behind it where would you rate that success loan where we're high. [00:35:51] I mean I mean even a broken clock is right twice a day twice a day so sometimes you don't you strike out even with all that marketing but very rarely. I would say we're at an eight and nine and sometimes a 10. It just takes a lot of preparation. It really does. But they're effective and we get a lot of business that way. For me in my position I don't as much have the time to do it personally anymore but the agents that we're bringing on that are just getting started and wondering hey what's the fastest way that I can get a transaction or a client. And that's without spending you know thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing. And that's the effective way to do it. [00:36:33] I love it. So in wrapping up is there anything if you could maybe give the top three things ok that you have found personally. That you know you know you got a seasoned agent out there listening to this or maybe an aggressive upcoming new one. But whether the top three things she would recommend someone do and why. To grow their business. [00:36:56] Well the top two first thing is get away Get get rid of everything that's costing you money and not bringing you in clients. Find out what that is. Look in your business and see where you're spending money and not getting any return. Cut that out as soon as possible. And the second thing is is find out what you are doing successfully and do more of that. Do you do as much of that as you possibly can. And the third thing is it would be. Find out what you want to do and find like for instance. I know this isn't a commercial for you guys but I wanted to take my business to the next level with a certain amount of marketing. So I found a partner to partner with that was successful at doing that. That took a huge workload and time out of out of my my day. They took on that time and I partnered with them to do it. So getting back to the three I would say no one find out what's costing you money and not bringing you any money in return. Find out what you're good at and and do more of that or try to structure your system and business around doing more exploiting that. And three seemed where you want to go and partner with a coach or a marketing system that can get you there without you know that you trust that you trust can get you there not something that you're just throwing money at and seeing if it sticks. [00:38:21] Now let me ask you one question on that because like I was talking to an agent recently he spent ten thousand dollars a year and this magazine that just goes out like once or twice a month. [00:38:35] It's all the agents in the area advertises there. So he feels he needs to be there. But I was asking him how much money how many listings or anything. I don't know. So when you know a lot of times you have agents that are spending money. Your first criteria was find where you're spending money that's not producing and cut it out. How would you advise on if they're spending money but they don't know if it's producing or not. [00:38:59] Well you you should definitely have a system. [00:39:02] So if you're doing like a magazine like that every single call inbound call that you get. You really should say no. How did you hear about us and that way you can track that and that would that would start. That would be my suggestion otherwise you know for instance like the postcards that we send out with with your company it automatically tells us that they they got the postcard from us. So that's that's you know that's something the technology can help you track that a lot better. But we don't invest in any marketing that we can't track. [00:39:38] You know I heard someplace and I think it's OK to walk through if you can't track it. It's not marketing you're spending money right. Yep. So you definitely got to track it. [00:39:49] Well Nick thank you so much for your time is there anything else. Before we wrap up that you would like to share anything that hit your mind that oh I share a thought share this. Anything like that before you wrap it up. [00:40:02] I think we covered it. It's a it's a it's a one man business or one person a small business. So I hope I didn't give out all of our secrets but I'd also hope that we gave some good content there for some people that are listening that it that it was helpful. So you know all I got to say is I really appreciate you having me on and and then allow me to do this with you and I hope that it was helpful for for everybody involved. [00:40:30] Well thank you again Nick. And for those who are listening or watching if you do like this please describe to our podcast you'll actually find us on iTunes and deterring. [00:40:41] And Google Play on the podcast if you're watching it on YouTube. Please like it. And you can subscribe there as well. Also check out our guest seller calling you dot Web site or Facebook page and like that. So you do want to learn more about what we do or about growing your business. You can learn more about us at get sellers calling you dot com. You'll see a tap at the top that says agent dominator that's actually the service we do to help people grow business. That's what we're doing with Nick. So Nick thank you again. And you have a blessed day. [00:41:15] Thank you. Appreciate it Beatty too. [00:41:20] If you've enjoyed this podcast Be sure to subscribe to it so you never miss another episode. [00:41:24] And please like our get sellers calling you Facebook page. Also if you want to increase sales from past clients and sphere of influence dominate a geographic farm or convert home valuation leads. Check out our agent dominator program. We create custom content that differentiates you from other realtors then use it to keep you top of mind with your prospects with postcards targeted Facebook ads email campaigns video interviews and more. And the best part is we guarantee yourselves or give all your money back. Learn more at get sellers calling you dot com and select agent dominator in the menu. Thanks for listening to the get sellers calling you podcast. [00:42:02] Have a great day. 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Hi I'm tyler I will start to do podcasts on my channel I'll be doing comic reviews and fortnite news.

Part of one of our mentoring session where we cover the alternatives to the standard, "Hi I'm so and so, I study x, and I want a job.

After coding live at Lean+Agile DC 2018, Ben Scott of Ippon Technologies joins Bob Payne to talk code craftsmanship and getting proper feedback from the business side.  Ben explains a way to quickly build a quality demo from scratch – creating the first demonstrable piece of value.  Bob and Scott walk through their opinions on (shudder) best practices, living in ambiguity in agile methods, and bridging the gap between IT and business. Bob Payne: [00:00:03] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne. I'm here at Lean+Agile D.C.. I'm here with Ben Scott and we're listening to "Stand in the Place Where You are" by RBM played on the music fiddle version which is really disconcerting for me. It's like Fugazi. You know elevator music which is definitely elevator music. But country elevator music. So Ben we were talking earlier about lots and lots of things but you were talking about sort of your experience here trying to do live coding and talk. What was your what was the gist of your talk? What were you talking about with. Ben Scott: [00:00:56] So, let's start with the problem statement: Whenever you start a project from scratch mainly it's really hard to get good business demos and keep the business interactive with getting proper feedback. You'll see a lot of demos with terminals. Hey let's see what my code can do and you have to look at log statements or use post postman to demonstrate APIs. And then the business kind of glazes over it. And I think a lot of issues stem from developers trying to recreate everything internally. Someone has to provide a demo that even started a presentation with zero code I could provide a business level demo with a front end application backend with database usage deployed to the cloud. All within the same presentation within 45 minutes. So that was kind of the gist, some people really liked the felt it really demonstrated well what could be done now. They're probably unsure how to adopt down to their own organization but it's mostly a show that it is able to do that and you don't have to buy it. It's FREE.  Ben Scott: [00:02:14] It's opensource a tool that I use is called J Hipster and I think overall great.  Bob Payne: [00:02:23] Yeah I mean for those of us who've been familiar with play or Rails or any of the generative frameworks you know that it was not should not have been surprising but I realized how how painful it is for most organizations to get to that first demonstrable piece of value.  Ben Scott: [00:02:50] Yes.  Bob Payne: [00:02:51] It is a little a little insane.  Ben Scott: [00:02:53] It is. The key differences are with J hipster is it really tries to adopt the enterprise level technology. Bob Payne: [00:03:00] You see the full stack you've got full size containerized deployments.  Ben Scott: [00:03:05] You can you don't have to but it sure does generate Docker containers. I use the docker file to let you generate a Docker container from your code. It will generate your CD pipeline script. It supports multiple privacy circles C.I. Jenkins obviously and a few other really really kind of handhold you through the whole process of getting a code from scratch all the way to diploid and ready. It can't do anything about your business level code that's on you right. But all the bootstrapping and plumbing it generates according to best practices of the time with us.  Bob Payne: [00:03:45] I winced on the inside. I don't like the phrase best practices but best that I'm okay with. Ben Scott: [00:03:54] Yes well it's always a big debate. What is best practice. Like for depending on where you are which technology you're using and your opinion because it's a hotly debated topic Your Domain Driven Design or you don't. Some people really love it some people hate it. Yeah that type of thing.  Bob Payne: [00:04:12] Yeah I try to stay away because people always ask us for as consultants are always asking for the answer and there really only is know fee here given your situation. Here are a few options that we've seen people be successful. Yes you know and you know I always sort of try to steer people away from that. Like calling people resources. There's a few you like hot button words that I can't make can move resources around us our projects exactly rituals and scroll to find that I hate things that that pull it out of the somewhat grey world that we actually live in.  Ben Scott: [00:05:05] Yes I actually like to prefer I prefer to live in this ambiguity. I don't like to define what scrum is definitely. I don't like too dear to a Agile philosophy per se or implementation whenever somebody dresses. Hey what is ads out to you. To me it's you delivered a piece of software that was correct at the right time and how you got there might differ based on the people working in your company. Yes we might use Scrum or not. It depends if it's a good fit with that place and sometimes it's now or sometimes they just decide as long as we do what scrum says we are agile and we just get away from what they really mean.  Bob Payne: [00:05:50] Yeah. Defer to authority. There is a good strategy.  Ben Scott: [00:05:55] So I don't like to prescribe things.  Bob Payne:[00:05:57] Yeah.  Ben Scott: [00:05:58] When we hire Scrum Masters always ask me what's your process. What tool to use. You know you use Jira. I don't prescribe - you use what you like to use right.  Ben Scott: [00:06:07] Well your client will let you use yes whatever you is best for your situation which will change.  Bob Payne: [00:06:15] So how do you so I know you've been doing a lot of technical coaching coaching. What do you what do you find most rewarding. Because sometimes it's it's you know it's it's a tough slog sometimes and there are always those little nuggets that just say yeah you know that will keep me going for a few months banging my head against this team or this wall or whatever. Ben Scott: [00:06:43] So I really enjoy bringing upskilling developers on where they lack and I'm not a awesome developer. I'm a very niche developer who understand the agile practices so I can do their job testing frameworks Cucumber, or perform sensing as a Gatling I know how to do them and the basic forms right and the tools to know how to use them. Eventually it clicks at first like I don't want it. It is what QA is for but eventually it clicks and it's really fun to see a click. Likewise I work a lot with the business side on bridging the gap between developers and the business we actually start working together instead of the whole campus. This is the business that we need to take to go on like what we need is. Of course we do to this refactoring. We need to adopt this technology or just trying to bring them together so they actually work as a team and we'll stack clicks which is much harder than it was going developers. Bob Payne: [00:07:40] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:07:41] That's that's really fun.  Bob Payne: [00:07:42] Yeah that is. Yeah. We like speed we have that sort of mission of making people's lives more valued fulfilling and productive. It's kind of our or our mission if we can do that on an individual basis or you know we health and organization so that it helps the folks. But it all fundamentally comes down to you know people people in interactions and you know hopefully making a you know a decent world for them to sort of grind away at the code code is an unforgiving.  Ben Scott: [00:08:21] Yes we'll spend days looking for that tiny little mistake.  Bob Payne: [00:08:27] Yeah yeah. So what's the other big dogmatic thing you're railing against. I don't know that you're actually railing against any big dogmatic things but you seem like the sort of person that might. Ben Scott: [00:08:41] There are some things I'm very strict on and it's is code craftsmanship to the detriment of sometimes I'm actually delivering value and I understand that. But there are times to be fast and dirty. You have a production bug.  Bob Payne: [00:08:55] Yep. Ben Scott: [00:08:56] There's a feature that needs to go to the market right away. OK we can do that fast and dirty. But if that's every time there's a problem.  Bob Payne: [00:09:06] Right.  Ben Scott: [00:09:06] And at that point I don't have any issues slowing everything down and I guess focus on craftsmanship. Let's focus on actually teaching what solid principles mean because over time you're going into being faster more maintainable code. The sustainable pace and that takes time to learn. It might take six months a year to really get there. It's a huge investment and it's the responsibility of the entire organization to to foster that. So just like we have the Center for agile excellence or you go to an agile coach organization talk about processes.  Ben Scott: [00:09:39] You should have a software craftsmanship as well a new way to mentor the developers. And that practice that's probably where I'm the most strict on.  Bob Payne: [00:09:51] OK yeah no that's ... Yeah. That's a good place to be strict I think. I often think of the three things that can make a great team. It's discipline, continuous improvement, and play the long game you know not the short term gain necessarily but product delivery is is not project right now. Ben Scott: [00:10:16] And I completely understand there's times we have to go really fast for whatever reason it is. Maybe there's a bug that's costing thousands of dollars. When it's in production.  Bob Payne: [00:10:23] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:10:24] And yes. Quick and dirty fix but then think about it and fix it again the right way. Bob Payne: [00:10:30] Yeah. Well everybody. It's interesting because that the current understanding where the current sort of popular understanding of technical debt is that it is a bad thing and you know when they first started talking about it Ward Cunningham and and you know some of the folks on the first XP team actually used it in more the financial term debt. Sometimes you do take down. You know you go fast to be quick and you might incur some debt. You got to pay it down. Always cost a little bit more to pay it down. But sometimes that's the right decision. But when you're paying off the credit card with another credit card you're in drips.  Ben Scott: [00:11:20] That compounds quickly. Bob Payne: [00:11:21] Then You need to re platform the whole thing. Ben Scott: [00:11:26] And then it just never ends.  Bob Payne: [00:11:27] Yeah. Bob Payne: [00:11:28] And that's what the craftsmanship comes in play because if you instill those values when you build a new software and maybe you'll be a little bit better and last longer.  Bob Payne: [00:11:36] Yeah. So is IPPON primarily you know do you or most of the folks steeped in XP stream programming and.  Ben Scott: [00:11:47] So I would say most of us are what I would consider like Premier consultants as far as developers. Most of us are developers. So in that sense we're a bit different from most agile consulting companies. We focus a lot on the engineering aspect of agile versus the process and most of our developers don't always subscribe to Agile values. They like to get their stuff done and they're like good code and beautiful aspects that don't always adhere to delivering to agile way which is fine. But you couple that wish people would truly understand agile and you've just multiplied yet the actual value of it. It's like the cross-functional needed agile deep expertise to guide the ship but you still need a technical deep expertise on what good coding practices look like. Yeah and we also like to embed with our clients. We don't always like to take the whole project and then deliver at the end. We like to develop right and while we could develop we'll pair with them or we'll teach developed practices how to test and how to automate the whole thing and the whole the whole package. I think that's where our values will be different than other places. Bob Payne: [00:13:07] Yes. And we've you know at LitheSpeed we've been happy to be able to partner with the guys periodically because we focus primarily on the people in the process and you guys can focus on the technical chops.  Ben Scott: [00:13:25] Yes. Bob Payne: [00:13:25] Yeah. I'm primarily a PowerPoint engineer and there is no PPT unit.  Ben Scott: [00:13:34] No I'm really bad at PowerPoint.  Bob Payne: [00:13:39] I wouldn't say I'm good. But the reason I'm not very good is because there's no there's no unit test framework to how to get good. I was talking to somebody earlier because I I was when I was developing you know I got immediately test infected like TTD like real TDD not the ATDD or BDD. Not that those things are bad but that thinking and design process of TDD was an amazing force multiplier for me as not a terribly great developer. It allowed me to focus know where I was know that I hadn't broken something else because I couldn't keep every esoteric detail from the entire system. Ben Scott: [00:14:38] Yes.  Bob Payne: [00:14:39] In my head some people love that they loved the challenge of I've got every single detail in my head. But that doesn't scale. It does and test.  Ben Scott: [00:14:52] It's a good thing you brought TDD like I have my own opinions about it. And you're right. Some people love us some people hate it. And to me there's a lot of focus from the process scores to do TDD when developers aren't ready for it. Bob Payne: [00:15:06] Yeah yeah yeah.  Ben Scott: [00:15:07] Just like everything will be fine if you just do TDD.  Bob Payne: [00:15:11] Yeah I don't believe that to be true. Everything will be fine if you have engineers that are that are that really you know there I sort of look at the code and you can see the thought process of the developer in the code and that is much easier for me to read to read tested code than it is to to create an elegant you know you start throwing in some Lambda's there and we're we're we're parked. I mean because I struck part of my psychosis if you will. And I think it's reasonable to call it that around TDD as I started in Lisp and I don't know if you've ever tried to debug lisp or scala. It's probably easier now and in scala but there's just the interpreter. Back when I was doing this so you had a command line and you read in a file and something pops out and it is the most amazing black box in the world because it's just it's interpreted. It's a functional language and 42 is the answer, right? I forgot the question we asked in end. So unless you knew that those little pieces worked. Yes pull that out throw it into an interpreter and see if it give it some some values in and see if it makes sense because all it takes is a misplaced pen. It could be anywhere and it will usually evolve out to something that still works.  Ben Scott: [00:17:04] And I guess where I differ what it is like or I'm strict on tests in the same commit as the code.  Bob Payne: [00:17:11] Yeah.  Ben Scott: [00:17:12] I don't prescribe to. You must write a test first. Bob Payne: [00:17:15] Sure.  Ben Scott: [00:17:16] But it must be in the same commit. Yeah that's that's kind of where I differ. And some people are really good at writing tests first. Some are not. Bob Payne: [00:17:24] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:17:24] But everybody should be able to write before or after, there's not. Never does ..That's Not allowed. Bob Payne: [00:17:31] Yeah I think it's a reasonable place to be strict. I think for me just I. Bob Payne: [00:17:39] I loved Arlo Belshee. I think it was our Arlo Belshee that coined the term test infected because some people either are or are not. And it's like you know that zombie strain virus. And I don't know which side is the zombie in which is the not here but I think the TTD folks are probably the zombies. But if you were when you find yourself on one side of that divide I think that the folks that actually like TTD and I know it is not universal. It's it's one of the more powerful and least used agile engineering practices.  Ben Scott: [00:18:15] Yes. Bob Payne: [00:18:16] I mean Pairing, people say they pair, but nobody pairs. I mean not like. Ben Scott: [00:18:21] Well not like extreme program where you must pair. Right. We like to pair for occasions like right. Here's a difficult piece of code. Let's work on it together or for mentoring. We'll pair for code reviews the type of thing we'll do some pairing for writing prose not so much right. How hard is it to write Pojos. You know it's so many people go down this rabbit hole to we test the setters and getters like I don't care. Like ok. Probably not. I'm OK. But really how long would it take you to actually do it if you said if everybody said we need to.  Ben Scott: [00:19:09] So. So interesting thing. So the debate by just writing a piece of code using reflection finds a perjures sets the value gets the value a certain done. So all my pages are tested automatically. Bob Payne: [00:19:25] Yeah. and now with generative frameworks it is it is relatively easy. I was cured of that debate because I'm not a great programmer. When I misformatted the way I created a Java date. And so when I made and I always know how to make your assertion not against the same constructor that you used. So I use distracted at this other date class add some other stuff in and misuse the constructor and when I assert it against the string format it value, i'm like "Well that's not right." And I don't know that I would have found that regular regular test or I would have I would have found like f'd up dates in the database or in the persistence layer or in the front end and I'm like I might not know. Then I've got a whole different problem but because I knew it I found out early that it didn't work like the debugging. For me it was just so much so much easier. Ben Scott: [00:20:36] And eventually you have to use common sense. You look at your POJO like well maybe I don't need to test every single one of them. But if you're serializing a date you should test that because for whatever reason it's so strict that the date format it will kill you application is different for might just use a whole AI behind it to be able to extract data and decide what date it is.  Bob Payne: [00:21:00] You guys likes you know you guys like screw up the order of the month and the day like what is this? Ben Scott: [00:21:05] It has Slashes no slashes. Bob Payne: [00:21:07] Dashes no dashes, dots..  Ben Scott: [00:21:10] Or you add milliseconds and you expect no milliseconds and it still won't truncate it'll just die right there. Bob Payne: [00:21:17] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:21:17] So testing that. That's a good test. Typically also have a serialization test if it's data layer i'll serialize or deserialize back to the object, validate, but I might not validate.  Bob Payne: [00:21:30] You know that was that it was more important when he had to write her own serializer. Ben Scott: [00:21:37] Well I don't write my own serializer but I do write my own test for the annotations like for date format for example did you do the right format right. Does the precision matter or those type of things you have and I'm working on a project right now that for whatever reason the order matters. The order should not matter but whoever was sending it to they got that code where the order of your serialization matters and they can't just construct the object they actually validate it in its raw format first.  Bob Payne: [00:22:05] Okay. Ben Scott: [00:22:06] So then we have to validate that we send in the right Json format but in the right order each field. It shouldn't matter. At least in my opinion it should not matter.  Bob Payne: [00:22:15] No. But yeah well unless you want strong coupling in implementations which I'm shocked at how many are organizations really like strong coupling. Ben Scott: [00:22:33] I'm not sure they like it or just live with it. Bob Payne: [00:22:36] Yeah it's Like oh my god. It's like it's like the old Korbo or SOAP. Oh man. Ben Scott: [00:22:42] This is how we've always done it so we will continue. Bob Payne: [00:22:44] Yeah. Yep. So what else would do you. What's interesting to you in what hobbies do you have besides like? Ben Scott: [00:22:56] Kids.. Does that count as Hobbies? Bob Payne: [00:22:58] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:22:59] It takes a lot of my time - it's fun time, it's really interesting and enjoyable to watch and grow. But I did find my most of my hobbies dropped away little by little. Bob Payne: [00:23:10] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:23:13] When I did become a parent. Bob Payne: [00:23:16] I picked up new hobbies like I had never watched soccer before because I didn't like sports because those were the people that beat up the geeks. And now I'm doing like Magic the Gathering which I avoided in college like the plague. Ben Scott: [00:23:43] I never got into that. Bob Payne: [00:23:43] Because I was more of a punk than a D&D. There's a reasonable Venn diagram there. But but. Now I'm going to Friday Night Magic with my son. Ben Scott: [00:23:55] So that's a very fun but very expensive game. Bob Payne: [00:23:59] It is. Like you know a lot of people like do sports gambling. I think that's even worse. You know. Ben Scott: [00:24:06] Yes. Bob Payne: [00:24:07] Liaisons in a Russian hotel. Let it get very expensive very quickly depending on what you're doing. Ben Scott: [00:24:17] And I also do gaming video games typically do single player story type games. Bob Payne: [00:24:23] Oh really? given your military background. You've had enough First Person Shooter.. Ben Scott: [00:24:31] We'll it's more that to play online takes dedicated time whereas a single player. I can stop anytime. Pause and walk away. Bob Payne: [00:24:39] Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:24:40] I find that sometimes as a parent it's really hard to get an hour dedicated time. Bob Payne: [00:24:43] Oh yeah yeah. Ben Scott: [00:24:44] straight to play, it's like no I cannot help you to do anything because I'm in my game. If I'm doing single player I can quickly pause and do something else. That's how I mostly got into it. Ben Scott: [00:24:54] Before kids I was mostly into Dota. Bob Payne: [00:24:59] sorry? Ben Scott: [00:24:59] Dota Which is a different type of game. Bob Payne: [00:25:02] OK. Ben Scott: [00:25:03] League of Legends. Very similar as the birth of League of Legends. Was one of the first of those types of games.  Bob Payne: [00:25:11] Okay. But that's when I decided it would be hard for me to play because it requires 1 hour blocks.  Bob Payne: [00:25:19] Oh yeah. Yeah. Ben Scott: [00:25:22] Couldn't dedicate that anymore.  Bob Payne: [00:25:23] I know, yeah. So there's there's probably a game waiting for me this evening when I go home. So let's see. But. Ben Scott: [00:25:35] Let's see what else now spend time with family. Every Wednesday we have. Bob Payne: [00:25:42] Long walks on the beach and. Ben Scott: [00:25:43] Ah.. Not that, Just cook and eat and and drink and be merry. Revolves around food, and every Wednesday we have big family dinner.  Bob Payne: [00:25:55] Wednesday? Ben Scott:[00:25:55] Yeah Wednesday just because weekends are crazy. We also do on weekends. But we found that doing it in the middle of the week it kind of cuts the week and half. Bob Payne: [00:26:04] Yeah. You talk about work a little bit the stress and excuse to escape the daily grind of get up go to work. Come back do homework or other things. It's another event middle of the week that's a bit unusual but yeah it works for us. Bob Payne: [00:26:22] Yeah Wednesdays are not that exciting, it's dessert day. So. Ben Scott: [00:26:26] I like family Wednesdays. It's fun. Bob Payne: [00:26:29] Ok cool. We'll have to we'll have to do dessert/Dota/. Ben Scott: [00:26:37] Well I haven't played that game in so long i'd probably be terrible at it now. Bob Payne: [00:26:41] It's ok. You're better than I am  Ben Scott: [00:26:44] Probably. Bob Payne: [00:26:48] Thanks a lot, Ben Really appreciate it.  

Carlos Rojas, Director of Technology and Operations at Fannie Mae, sat down with Bob Payne at Lean+Agile DC 2018 to discuss Business-Driven Agile Engineering.  Carlos shares thoughts on Fannie Mae’s trailblazing Agile transformation – from prioritizing agility-supporting corporate shared services (recruiting, contracts & procurement, and facilities), to machine learning and a mantra of “Automate Everything.”    Transcript Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Start there. Carlos Rojas: [00:00:02] OK. Bob Payne: [00:00:03] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne. I'm here with Carlos Rojas. And Carlos you're talking about transformation. We were chatting you mentioned how to how to use shared services. So tell me a little bit about your your your talk here today at Lean Agile DC. Carlos Rojas: [00:00:24] Absolutely. So couple of things to highlight right. One is you go and change a culture, Most people start with the processes. Most people start with their methodology and then they say we're Agile. And I think that part of making it a transformational for an enterprise you know when you're talking about 10000 people when you're talking about 300 product teams that are developing software you know you have to take into account what we call the corporate shared services as well. You know think about the recruiting recruiting efforts. Think about the procurement. How do you write your contracts. Right. Think about your facilities you know. Do you have an open space that will be a reflection of what your mentality looks like. So you have to account for those things. Otherwise you know you end up with a great process but the culture is not impacted by what you're doing. So that's one of those things that I encourage companies to always think about. Bob Payne: [00:01:16] Yeah. And we just I just recently talked with Jose from from from Fannie. And I know you guys are doing a very large transformation over there lot of DevOps. We do some some training with you guys.  Bob Payne: [00:01:34] And I'm am extraordinarily pleased to see how how big the transformation has been over it over Fannie because I worked there on a couple of early Agile projects in the early 2000s and it was it was bureaucratically painful to do it. Carlos Rojas: [00:01:56] I know exactly wh at you're saying. It was six checkpoints hundred twenty five deliverable is about nine months for a single release just to put a line of code in production. Now we've made a huge progress in terms of you know time time to market an average of about 30 days a month. We've got some project teams that are ready to deliver every two weeks. But again it comes down to Hey we incorporated our corporate shared services into the mix and then we think we we we instigated this concept of automation you know everything so far as he wasn't even called them up so to begin with. How do we automate it. You know if it doesn't make sense if it makes sense. How do we automate it and that's when we come up with this concept of that paved road so far as the pay really was. What tools are we going to use that will help us expedite or automate some of those controls that were holding us back. Right. So great transformation. Tons of work behind the scenes but you get the point here is we haven't finished. We're not done yet. Bob Payne: [00:02:58] And lean, Lean never sleeps. Carlos Rojas: [00:03:03] Exactly exactly. So right now for example one of our key you know tunnel vision eye vision items that we're trying to chase is agile engineering practices right.  [00:03:15] How do we turn code that is maintainable how do we create applications of 19 applications that are going to help us with you know a cloud-ready approach not necessarily how do we go about the methodology what tools that we use now but how do we make that an engineer solution that is like the ultimate driving machine for us. So we're trying to look for that not perfection but that high performing team that will look into those proses areas that we'll tap into the business for example that's not a mission that's going to help us have more quality right provisioning of environments that's going to help us get faster at some point in time I think that we're going to be looking at how do we do infrastructure as code so that we have a fully blown solution where you build your own servers if you deploy your own servers as development team and you're responsible from beginning to end.  Bob Payne: [00:04:11] Hundred percent audible and nobody has the password to production exactly one per cent cut off. It's not the engineer. Carlos Rojas: [00:04:20] Exactly. But at least you can know who what when and you're not having a checklist to do it. It's all part of a creation of the solution right. Software.  Bob Payne: [00:04:30] Yep yep you know I think it is. It's ironic and oddly a common theme and I don't know whether it's me or just the folks that are coming up to talk on the podcast today but almost every one of them we've talked a little bit about governance and how how this drives you to be more governable auditable reduces risk profile you know rather than being a risky play to be able to deploy twice a week or once every two weeks or it actually improves your risk profile considerably makes you much more audibly compliant with the controls. You say you have in place. Carlos Rojas: [00:05:23] Yeah. You know it's interesting you mention that when I started my journey at Fannie Mae I ran a governance organization over SDLC and I was in charge of connecting with at risk partners like legal audit you know Architectural Review Boards change control boards and all of that. And instead of fighting through the system what we did is we partner up with all of the governance groups and we said you know you can do it the way you're doing it. But what if we do it this way and let's just compare let's explore let's figure out if there's a better way and if there is a thought that if it doesn't work on the exploration says that this doesn't make sense then we just go back and keep doing it the way we used to do it. I guess what the answer was always yeah that works better than the way we do it and we get more data. Thank you. So they were actually embracing it and promoting it for us.  Bob Payne: [00:06:12] Yeah. I don't know if you're familiar with Mark Schwartz from Citizenship and Immigration Service. He's sort of a firebrand CIO and he said when he first got there you know coming from Silicon Valley like you don't tell the CIO it can't be done. But what he got to government is people would say well you can't do that because of the far no federal acquisition of election. Bob Payne: [00:06:39] And he said first he was angry and then he said I'm going to become the expert on the far and and what he what he did was that same approach was like ah here's what you wanted. You know here's the safety that you want from this regulation. And here's how we do it better. Right. It's sort of you know  Carlos Rojas: [00:07:02] The approach works. You know where you partner with the groups that are supposed to be the roadblocks or supposed to be the longest pole in the tent. If it works you know. Bob Payne: [00:07:12] Well it's, They're there to keep the organization safe safe. Carlos Rojas: [00:07:19] Yeah you know if you don't do it it goes against what you're trying to accomplish anyway because you're not just trying to produce code faster you want it to be reliable maintainable with quality compliant. Right. So. So it's a matter of just you can argue whether the legislation is right. Bob Payne: [00:07:35] But you still need to comply with it. Carlos Rojas: [00:07:36] Exactly. But sometimes the legislation or the government has the right intent. It's how we approach it. Bob Payne: [00:07:42] Yeah it usually does. Carlos Rojas: [00:07:43] Exactly. So you know hopefully for those teams that are struggling with you know the governance aspect of this I'll also just take one thing at a time. Bob Payne: [00:07:53] Yeah. Carlos Rojas: [00:07:54] Because you know I've seen people trying to cover it all, oh we're going to fix all these problems right now you can use your theory of constraint was the biggest one. I just tried. Bob Payne: [00:08:04] Protects the constraint, concentrate on that one. Carlos Rojas: [00:08:07] Yeah. Did you read the goal. Carlos Rojas: [00:08:10] Absolutely. That's what I got that from. Bob Payne: [00:08:12] Yeah the Hurby or the Brian in the Phoenix project. Yeah. Put water where the fire is and in small increments it pops up. Yeah great. Bob Payne: [00:08:27] So what are you looking forward to over the next couple of years getting accomplished. Carlos Rojas: [00:08:33] So it's a phenomenal question. Bob Payne: [00:08:35] It is also a journey it's not an end point. Carlos Rojas: [00:08:37] It is a journey. It's not done so I'll say maybe three things that we're looking at right. So one is becoming a high performing team in terms of all the agile engineering practices. So really just looking under the hood and figuring out do we have the right automation and we have the right you know called brunching do we have the right techniques that are engineering techniques that will create a great product. That's one. The second thing that we have started working on is the AI machine learning so introducing much learning to our software development lifecycle. Bob Payne: [00:09:09] Okay  Carlos Rojas: [00:09:09] Right so right now we've been using some regression basic algorithms with machine learning to be able to look at the data on the history of releases that we have so that we can do two things one we can predict when a release is going to fail interesting. And then the second thing is if it fails you know we can start looking at the deployment scripts. Figure out hey this might be that two or three things that the reasons behind why that release is failing. Right. So we're piloting some of that solution right now. And I think that aspect is cloud. How do we turn these applications to be called cloud ready right when we know in some cases we have monolithic applications that have been around for 23 years. Carlos Rojas: [00:09:49] How do you take that and move it to the cloud and get the benefit of it not just a lift and shift, but saying Hey lets triangle that application that are more functionalities to micro services I think those are the three components that we're going to be focusing on the next two years. Bob Payne: [00:10:02] Yeah the the predictive analytics side that's very that's very interesting to me and I'm super curious how that sounds complex but it is probably something that I started while I had a sort of field career as computer architecture free I so far as I was doing that and then decided to go to procreate. So it doesn't sound that complex. I think the interesting thing for me is that you need a reasonably large dataset for that to be able to to really start to bear fruit. But I'm excited to hear you guys would have it so.  Carlos Rojas: [00:10:52] So we have a reasonable amount of data on releases that go back you know years okay. But interestingly enough when we started training our morals we use a subset of six months. And when we started with that subset of data we identified about 150 fields that were important and then we had the model train for a few weeks and then we test that we said let's just see that confidence level and we put real data against that model and then our success rate was about 10 percent. It was really bad. It's no surprise right. So instead of saying instead of saying let's get more data more fields more of features we say let's take those hundred and fifty and gotten our way down to 50 and then we have a smaller subset of fields and we have a smaller subset of data for 3 months and then we trend the model again. Carlos Rojas: [00:11:56] And then now we can tell you that we're you know successfully predicting with a 90 percent certainty certainty rate. So we went back to the model with less data less data elements are more precise data set and our success rate went up. Bob Payne: [00:12:12] Well I mean look at you know what we're starting to see genetic markers for you know in biology that have a very large effect. So once you find the targets I think I think that level of that that that is amazing that you were able to how long did it take you to go from 10 to 90. Carlos Rojas: [00:12:36] So it was about a 12 week project. But then thinking about thinking about the project I'm thinking about the data said it took us about 6 weeks. So I would say you know quarter a quarter and a half worth of you know. Bob Payne: [00:12:49] That's amazing, are you using, what are you using back end engine? Carlos Rojas: [00:12:52] So we're using TenserFlow. It's an open source from Google, using Python to write the scripts and to be quite honest with you because we're exploring our capabilities are just basic you know we're not building a beautiful website that people can access. We're just enabling the developers to say hey gone check this page and then you know pick your acid I.D. your application I.D. and some information on the model is going to give you the answers. So it's basic. Right. It's still in the exploratory mode. We've done a couple of good successful use cases and now we're trying to roll it out to the company. Bob Payne: [00:13:28] I am I've been pleasantly surprised at the resurgence of Python. Bob Payne: [00:13:37] I was in some of the early Python conferences Python back when they were here in Northern Virginia and D.C. and now running into it in the large corporations that they also have micro Python which runs on a microcontroller. So you can you can you can do hardware programming. You were always able to buy it you needed a heavy heavy thing. Now they're doing you know arm processors isn't super lightweight. Carlos Rojas: [00:14:12] But the difference is you know the user experience at the end of the day you know when you started developing maybe you know in my case 20 years ago with Cobalt or C++ or even Java. Right. You have to have some sort of computer science background to be able to kind of like and understand that and and do something with it. Nowadays with Python, It's more of a English type of you know development where you don't have to be computer science guru to learn it and apply it so I think that's why it's being so helpful for the adoption of those techniques.  Bob Payne: [00:14:49] I mean it was, there was a certain, well there's a whole philosophy around you know Python and you know people people do argue whether they achieve that but they wanted it to be an easy learnable right. You know part LAMDA part object part you know and be able to drop down to the metal pretty quickly with assembly or see you know the whole idea that you could tie in those when you needed to if you needed to program and see were able to easily tie it in with Python. Carlos Rojas: [00:15:30] Exactly. And to be quite honest with you we're leveraging some of the open source you know libraries to execute on some of the you know projects that we have.  Carlos Rojas: [00:15:43] So it's not like we're building something from scratch anymore right. So that's helpful as well. Bob Payne: [00:15:48] Yeah. Well great Carlos. Thanks for coming in. It's a pleasure chatting with you and I wish you guys all the well you don't need luck all the hard work in the world.  Carlos Rojas: [00:16:02] Thank you for having us here, appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much. Bob Payne: [00:16:05] Thanks.  

Modern Agile stickers everywhere are helping Modern Agile stick.  Dean Chanter of Capital One recalls his Accidental Experiment with Modern Agile (cake for every release!).  Bob and Dean talk through the power of the laptop sticker, evolving and “upskilling” ScrumMasters, and Lean roots.   Transcript Bob Payne: [00:00:05] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne and i'm here with Dean Chanter and Dean you're from, You're at Cap One.   Dean Chanter: [00:00:11] Yeah, Currently at Cap One.   Bob Payne: [00:00:14] You're doing some work with scaled Agile and you're saying you sort of accidentally started applying Modern Agile. I'm super curious about that journey.   Dean Chanter: [00:00:25] I did it was very interesting so I joined Capital One about seven months ago, was with Intel for about 13 years before that, and when I first got to Capital One everybody had a Modern Agile sticker on their laptop there was actually a bunch on my desk. So I just slapped one on my laptop. I had heard about it before I got the Capital One but Intel was a big SAFehouse and so that was kind of how we did things there and made a lot of sense and so, maybe three or four months ago, my gallbladder decided that it no longer needed to be in my body and so's listening to Josh's podcast and listen to things and he and John Cutler were talking.   Bob Payne: [00:01:02] Okay, yeah I've had Josh on my podcast.   Dean Chanter: [00:01:04] Yeah. So Josh asked John -he's like What do you think about Modern Agile. What do you mean to you. And John was like you know what. It really makes me feel like we can try anything and we don't have to stick to one framework another. And I realized then that some of the things I have been doing it kept on with my teams was just that right. I had a lot of teams that were Scrum Teams and Kanban teams and we had ARTs so we had you know single teams but they needed... They were looking for a refresh right.   Dean Chanter: [00:01:37] You know some new ways of thinking about things that we brought in things like product discovery. We started looking at cycle time. Right. We just we started celebrating everything. Right. We had cake for every release we had you know just how.   Bob Payne: [00:01:54] Dangerous when you're a real DevOps...   Dean Chanter: [00:01:56] Exactly. Exactly. Well that was one of the things we went from releases that were on average and they say average because it wasn't a true cadence of about six to eight weeks. We're now releasing twice a week. OK. You know just because of trying to setting audacious goals right. Right. Using that we want to really use more frequently. Right. And once we set that goal we started working through the different things and different challenges that it takes to get through. We actually even if we don't have content for release on a particular day that we're supposed to be released, we'll still do the release. The reason is is because it allows us to go through those motions right and should identify more ways to we found things by doing that that maybe we should leave - blue green releases right. So maybe we should leave green up a little bit longer so we could fail back if we need to. Eventually, you know the goal there is eventually getting to where we could do continuous delivery if we wanted to.   Bob Payne: [00:02:56] Yeah. That's great. So I'm so curious how you got the big batch of stickers. Did Josh come to CapOne and.   Dean Chanter: [00:03:03] He did.   Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Okay.   Dean Chanter: [00:03:05] So Josh came to camp while he was a keynote speaker. CapOne does a technology agile conference internally once a year.   Bob Payne: [00:03:13] I've spoken that years back yeah.   Dean Chanter: [00:03:15] I wasn't there for that yet but that's how the stickers ended up on my desk. So.   Bob Payne: [00:03:21] Yeah I have been doing a series of of of talks using modern agile as a sort of framework to look at Lean and depending on where I go and how how I either call it. "No one gives a shit about your practices" or "disrupting the cult of the cult of practices". I'm a scrum trainer but fundamentally believe that scrum is a starting place and the goal is not to like do scrum. The goal is to get into this. You know this idea of experimentation learning and changing and and so you know I was an old XP extreme programmer guy. So you know I've known Josh for a long time and you know that talk really. It was actually that sticker was the deflowering force.. It's probably not appropriate to say but I had always had Virgin Macs with no stickers on them until that one made it on my last Mac.   Dean Chanter: [00:04:31] That was the first sticker I put on my cowpat on issue laptops. Have it if you have a habit of putting stickers on stuff for me is like yeah I'm fine. I agree. I agree. You know that's actually one of the things so I do manage a group of Scrum Masters right, and ScrumMaster is fhe title that Capital One gives them you know I looked at, look at them more than just that, right? They're team coaches, I've got a couple that work as a scaled coach right? As well, and so-   Dean Chanter: [00:05:05] That was one of the things that we spent a day together back in March you know kind of strategizing you know our improvement areas that we wanted to go with the team right. And so that's one of the things that I mentioned to them right is that you know if you look at it from that Modern Agile lens you know then I'm asking you to balance that coaching and the delivery right and ,. And one of the things we talked about is like sometimes as you know agile coaches all too often want to wait for that big moment and that big huge coaching opportunity, that next retro or their next delivery, right? So one of the things I talk to them about is sometimes coaching in the moment and being a player with your teams is actually the best opportunity for that coaching moment. I actually got one of my Scrum Masters now who is actually a performer on the release. So since we've got teams that are applying good DevOps practices right the teams are the performers on the release and so she's actually the performer. What.. and the reason for that is that it allows him to have an extra person separation of duties or his since she's not coding that she can have that access to that prod environment. But it's a lot harder to identify a lot of areas of waste that the teams were seeing because she's got that different lens.   Bob Payne: [00:06:20] And when you get when you get even further down the dev ops path you'll be able to deploy without access to prod.   Bob Payne: [00:06:27] Exactly. Have an auditable..   Dean Chanter: [00:06:33] Yes. That is the goal.   Bob Payne: [00:06:35] Yeah.   Dean Chanter: [00:06:36] But in the meantime it's allowed the ScrumMaster to provide value in ways that they haven't in the past.   Bob Payne: [00:06:43] Right, You know just you know I like to poke at stuff. It's kind of what I do.   Dean Chanter: [00:06:50] Oh yeah.   Bob Payne: [00:06:52] So you were working with. Well my friend Beth Wong.   Dean Chanter: [00:06:58] Yes. So that's another interesting thing. So Beth and I are actually kind of paired together with the teams that we're working with. OK so where I'm providing that more tactical delivery focused management of the scrummasters, Beth is actually paired with me as a true coach. Right. And so she doesn't have that accountability to the product. And so she she and I are able to do things that having a single RTE in a scaling house wouldn't be able to do. So Beth is able to run workshops and you know she was able to bring in someone and worked with them and that's how we started our lean product discovery is because I was able to stay focused and she was able to coordinate those types of workshops. Another thing that Beth is is able to do. She's actually run in a technical coach and so that's one of the ways that we're accelerating that automated release goal that we have for this.   Bob Payne: [00:08:00] Yeah. Yeah. I loved working with Beth and I know she's she's excited to be the guys now.   Dean Chanter: [00:08:05] So yes it's a great partnership.   Bob Payne: [00:08:08] Yeah. Super. So what else is exciting for you lately?   Dean Chanter: [00:08:13] I mean definitely as we're evolving you know our scrum masters you know and what we call upskilling them. Right.   Bob Payne: [00:08:21] So we've got some folks on my team that you knew six seven years ago as CapitalOne went through its original agile journey right went to see some class and you know they're great at following those rules.   Bob Payne: [00:08:35] You probably are not aware of. In 2005 they started a huge agile journey.   Dean Chanter: [00:08:43] I've heard that.   Bob Payne: [00:08:44] It's been swept out and then.   Dean Chanter: [00:08:46] Exactly as a multiple and in depending on what Capital One is a large organization depending.   Bob Payne: [00:08:52] Are we talking card?   Dean Chanter: [00:08:53] So I'm in card, right. Exactly. So different journeys there but the teams I've been working with I've been five or six years is kind of about as far as they can look back.   Bob Payne: [00:09:05] Right.   Dean Chanter: [00:09:05] And so again kind of going back to that me asking my team to be that more player coach. So we're looking at different ways of kind of seeing the way the teams work right. Right now they're working through Mary Poppendick's original book.   Bob Payne: [00:09:22] Yeah.   Dean Chanter: [00:09:23] Right. So one of the interesting things about me and my journey started with Intel and so Intel being also not only a product development team but also a manufacturing to Jamie Flinchbaugh in the intel years and years ago long before I started there.   Bob Payne: [00:09:40] Right right.   Dean Chanter: [00:09:40] And turn into a lean house.   Bob Payne: [00:09:42] Right.   Dean Chanter: [00:09:42] And so   Bob Payne: [00:09:44] Lean manufacturing. It's always ironic to me that many of the organizations that do really amazing lean logistics are lean manufacturing and I'm not saying this about Intel because I don't actually have firsthand knowledge. They look at agile they're like you know we can't do that. That's not it's not you know it is really ironic that it is they do have the same same roots.   Bob Payne: [00:10:10] You know clearly manufacturing is a different is a different thing than product development.   Dean Chanter: [00:10:18] Right.   Bob Payne: [00:10:19] And. But but lean product development has also been around for you know almost 75 years.   Dean Chanter: [00:10:27] Exactly. So and that's where my journey started right. Is is in then so. It's almost like if you talk to the folks at Toyota about Lean manufacturing right now. What is lean? this is jus t what I do. So, at Intel, for me that's what it was right. You know I.   Bob Payne: [00:10:43] They don't fetishize lean in the way that scrum teams fetishize Scrum.   Dean Chanter: [00:10:47] They don't.   Bob Payne: [00:10:53] My Precious Scrum.   Dean Chanter: [00:10:53] Exactly. Exactly. And so you know I you know we you know when I was running a team.   Bob Payne: [00:10:57] I'm the agile golem.   Dean Chanter: [00:10:59] yeah yeah yeah exactly. So when I was running at my first team team ride of developers and we had daily stand ups and we committed to you know we committed to the goal for that day and the next day we talked about you know how we go towards that goal right. Even if we were working on a bug right. We didn't commit to finishing the bug. We committed to the experiments that we were going to run that day. Right. So when I transitioned to Agile you know it just kind of made sense for me right now come in the CapitalOne that I think it's kind of flipping the coin. I feel like that's a lot of the things that we're working through as a team evangelist. At least in my area is bringing some of those thought patterns.   Dean Chanter: [00:11:41] Identifying the waste and running experiments right and less about any one particular process or and other. Metrics is another thing that we are bringing and doing which has been very interesting as well.   Bob Payne: [00:11:55] Cool experiment to learn rapidly.   Dean Chanter: [00:11:57] Absolutely.   Bob Payne: [00:12:00] And in fact the only one I have a little trouble explaining to executives is the make people awesome, because they don't care. Many of them don't. If they could go to the boards and saying yes we're we're we're we're selling the customer crap, we're torturing people and we've got higher revenues you know.   Dean Chanter: [00:12:25] And that's definitely a shame but.   Bob Payne: [00:12:27] It is. It is. But I've I've enjoyed I've enjoyed you know Josh's poke in the eye and you know I think it's going to stick.   Dean Chanter: [00:12:41] I think so too.   Bob Payne: [00:12:42] Yeah because it's a sticker because he often makes a joke how do you make. How do you make an idea stick? Turn it into a sticker.   Dean Chanter: [00:12:50] Turn it into a sticker I haven't heard him say that but I like that. Well I like what he's been saying lately. right. He was at LeanAgile US in February and I got a chance to see his keynote there right. He opened the keynote. Are you curious as I say that's what I took back to my team. Right. You know are we curious? You know and another one of the things he said there is I know have you identified a ceremony or practice on your team and just gotten rid of it to see what would happen. Right. And that's another one of the challenges that I gave to my team as well.   Bob Payne: [00:13:24] Yeah I mean you know Toyota doesn't.. They'll throw stuff out left and right that you know. Lean is the machine that eats itself to make itself better.   Dean Chanter: [00:13:37] Yes.   Bob Payne: [00:13:37] And I don't think Agile is there yet but that's that's one of my goals. So I really love you know he framed it in a way that pulled together many of the thoughts and conversations a lot of us had been having. And so I'm happy to carry that torch for him for a little while.   Dean Chanter: [00:13:58] I almost kind of I don't know if it came on the cusp of or maybe there has something to do with it but I feel like a lot of the fights that you see you know on Twitter or blog spaces you know around Scrum vs Kanban, estimates or not... I feel like a lot of that has calmed down recently. I don't know if it's if there's a correlation there. But at least for me that's what I see.   Bob Payne: [00:14:25] I think there's more correlation than causation would be my guess. I think people are just worried about you know foreign policy being run on Twitter. So no estimates or mob programming thing is just..it's like Oh my God I can't believe we were arguing about that stuff.   Dean Chanter: [00:14:40] Yeah maybe.   Bob Payne: [00:14:46] So thank you very much for coming in and appreciate it and hope you have a great talk.   Dean Chanter: [00:14:52] Yes. It was fun.   Bob Payne: [00:14:53] Great.  

Agile didn’t work as your silver bullet?  Not a surprise, according to Very’s Dan Fish, Product Manager & Agile Coach, and Gabe Weaver, Chief Product Officer.  Dan and Gabe joined Bob Payne at Lean+Agile DC 2018 to talk Agile methods, holacracy, and the hard work required to solve organizational impediments after adopting Agile. TRANSCRIPT: Bob Payne: [00:00:01] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne, i'm here at Lean+Agile DC. Why don't you guys introduce yourself since.  Dan Fish: [00:00:08] Sure. I'm Dan fish I'm a product manager and agile coach at Very. Gabe Weaver: [00:00:14] And I'm Gabe Weaver I'm the chief product officer at Very  Bob Payne: [00:00:17] Excellent. So you guys are here talking about why agile might not be the silver bullet everybody everybody's been making it out to be. And you also do Holacracy at Very so I'm excited about both of those things. I like to blow stuff up and I love you know experimenting with self managing teams and strategies. So those are a couple of things I'd like to talk about. So what sucks about agile? Gabe Weaver: [00:00:51] I don't think it's necessarily that it sucks. I think companies suck. Dan Fish: [00:00:58] Honestly it's very subtle ,  Gabe. Gabe Weaver: [00:01:00] Yeah. No but but really if you look at some of the some of the data that's coming out stated the agile from today's seventeen's survey is a 4 percent in the company's report that it's not actually enabling them to have more market agility to respond to changing market conditions adapt and really move more quickly in business. So if you start to like peel back the young into why that is it goes pretty deep but I think a lot of it goes back to the construct of how we structure organizations Dan Fish: [00:01:31] Yeah. And I'd say it's sometimes too much of a silver bullet or a you know it's like a salve you can sprinkle and everything will kind of go away. And the work really comes in after you've put some of these processes or or roles in place you know where do you go from there and how do you solve the organizational impediments that are there. That's the hard work and that's the real I think substance behind this sort of movement of responding to change and empowerment and bottom up stuff. How do you how do you actually make that happen particularly at large organizations that are used to top down management or centralized decision making and yearly budgets. Those are the hard problems to solve. Bob Payne: [00:02:10] Yeah. Dan Fish: [00:02:11] Rather than just you know what's you know a sort of a small scope problems that are just affecting one team. I think we've kind of seen them seeing that and solve that in a lot of ways that they are not. Not completely but it's you know how do you change the organization. How do you change the mindset and the culture and culture gets undervalued a lot Bob Payne: [00:02:29] Yeah. So culture gets undervalued. A lot of talk a lot of talk about culture but not a lot of work and culture is fundamentally hard work. You know the old adage that culture eats strategy for lunch so you know if you want to create an agile environment that the current culture in the organization is going to resist resist those changes even if there are changes for the good. So I think the culture gets absolutely undervalued and the agile practices get overvalued. I  Bob Payne: [00:03:12] Absolutely. Bob Payne: [00:03:14] I mean I get a rash when people .. I get a lot of rashes. Dan Fish: [00:03:20] Sounds like a personal problem. Bob Payne: [00:03:20] It really is. I should care less. That would be easier. But you know I see people talking about you know the scrum rituals and like these are their meetings they're not rituals there's nothing. Bob Payne: [00:03:34] You know if if if Taiichi Ohno came back to life and saw that Toyota was using the same processes that they that he and Demming came up with. You know 75 years ago he would freak.. He would freak out, he's like you you do not understand what we were going for there because the practices and processes are subordinate you know to getting stuff done creating value for our customers following work flowing value through the system. I mean the practices are just- they need to change and evolve then people were they put agile in here. They codify it make it a little precious little thing and then they don't change the intake to the three year strategic plan. One year funding competitors come out with new stuff. Well we're on the strategic plan will react to that in three years. Gabe Weaver: [00:04:33] Yeah I don't even ant to get started on scrum and my disdain for it. But I think what's really interesting is that most companies treat is a way to gain efficiency. So but really what it is in the heart of it of where the Agile Manifesto came from was enabling people to work better with people in a more efficient and sane way. Bob Payne: [00:04:56] Right. Gabe Weaver: [00:04:57] That's more stable basically but the opposite is happening whereas companies are valuing processes over people and it's not sustainable and it's not working. Bob Payne: [00:05:09] Yeah. So I won't lay it all out. So I live in that tent so I'm on the inside peeing out rather than the outside peeing in... So I do a lot of scrum training but I always start it with. Here's lean. Gabe Weaver: [00:05:25] Yes. Bob Payne: [00:05:26] Here's- it is OK to start with scrum scrum is not the goal. I really put in some slides recently with Bruce Lee. But. So. So it's discipline. It is continuous improvement in playing the long game. You can start there. But once you get disciplines then you can start to improvise in the system and then at some point when you get really good the systems fall away right. And ultimately you should be tying back to lean and lean eats itself. Yeah it never does it never sleeps it it's the whole goal is to change yeah. Dan Fish: [00:06:11] One thing I like asking Scrum teams that have been doing it for a little while is how a scrum become an impediment. How does how does the framework of scrum and the rigid roles of scrum become an organizational impediment for you. I've seen some really strong mature teams move beyond scrum you know and get into continuous flow and it's so a beautiful thing because they've kind of taken the best elements of it the mindsets and the cultures and and the and less about the rigid rigid ceremonies or you know sort of straight lines of separation Bob Payne: [00:06:43] Even the roles of product owner and development team in the scrum masters the you know the arbiter between those two opposing powers. Well what if they're not opposing and they're both working for the same thing you know like Motley Fool you have these little micro feature teams and there's a few engineers and business folks and they're just building value right there. The distinction is getting a go. Dan Fish: [00:07:16] Yeah the guys at Gilt have a nice way of saying it which is this was in response to the Spotify movement from to you know 10 years ago or so. Bob Payne: [00:07:21] Right.  Dan Fish:[00:07:22] You know tribes and guilds just great stuff. Gilt had a nice paper saying we we think that stuff is cool but you know some of it's an antique pattern you know in particular separating prioritizing of work and doing the work right. Right. How do you separate those two things. Fundamentally it's you know that they really didn't believe in that I think. I think there's there's truth in that. I also think though there is you know a personality there is a you know a right of someone to say yeah I care about the business and where it's going. Up to a point and I just want to focus on doing a great job and I think I think I think there's a balance there.  Bob Payne: [00:07:55] Well everybody has you know their particular proclivities are specializations and that's OK. This idea that we should somehow be you know there should be a level of homogeneity is .. i don't think Generalizing specialist means that, right? And I don't know that that's something that it's not some pure beautiful thing you know some people are going to have a deep interest in the the customer in the business somebody is going to have a deep interest in breaking shit and they're going to be really testers and some people are going to be really interested in building stuff but when they Windu people can have a rich dialogue and make better products make better decisions make faster decisions. I think that's the goal. Scrum can be an enabler. Josh Kerievsky calls it sort of the training wheels foragile in you know you can't always ride with the wheels on forever right. Gabe Weaver: [00:09:00] Yeah. My observation I've noticed is in our projects even trying to get our clients to participate in their own product development. They hire us to build that is how often do business owners or are onsite customers or whoever the sponsors actually participate in regular weekly meetings with the team provide ongoing regular feedback and unlike a predictable cadence and more often than not it doesn't happen they don't they don't see the value of it and it's hard to shift that mindset and think beyond anything else. That's part of the primary reason why scrum why XP why anything will fail and does fails because there isn't that healthy participation from the business with the actual team building the product. Sure that was such a good game because it reminds you of a George Carlin joke about voting where it's like you know you don't get to complain about who's elected. If you don't vote right. Right. And George Carlin's like oh I sat home on Election Day. You know I don't want any part of this. I'd say one of the things I've seen over time consistently is that separation between the sponsor and the team doing the work. I know whether you know I did product development for years at Very, we're consulting for for for companies. But the problem is when you have a sort of proxy product owner right or something better than the team who doesn't have budget authority doesn't have sort of that that level and they're the ones though privatizing the backlog. Also for our ally that separation can be a real a real killer. Dan Fish: [00:10:35] And then you lose empathy right because then the person who has the budgetary responsibility doesn't have the empathy of how hard it is to build software or other organizational challenges and impediments. Bob Payne: [00:10:44] Yeah but also if they if they're making decisions without the information they're flying blind you know as well I mean it just is. You know it always surprises me when they don't care how hard it is to Bill will you'll care when it's late or we've gone over budget Dan Fish: [00:11:02] Or their expectations are wildly off because they haven't engaged right. And that's where they get to sort of sit back and you know kind of sit in judgment of it without actually participating. I think that's frustrating. Gabe Weaver: [00:11:12] Yeah that's one of the interesting things is another survey by Gardner. Basically 51 percent of organizations have no plans to establish refactoring as a core principle and how they build products and software. And they're not. They're not investing in the long term and stability and they want to go faster quicker. And I think that's where even a lot of business owners they don't want to hear that it's going to go slower or they don't care. They want to get to market quickly but they don't realize that by doing that they're actually short circuiting the speed later on and rendering more or less useless. Right. Oh by the way we're running a free platform the whole thing and you can't have new features for eight months. I think the only opposing force there is you know is there some over optimization there. Right. Dan Fish: [00:12:00] Is is is creating in a really sophisticated tooling and some of the you know test driven development stuff you know doing that too early before you know your product market fit. I could see that being an opposing force. But I think once you've gone to market right once you have customers once you know you're going to be around for a while right. You want to be sure that all of the stuff you put in place before you know is at a certain level of maturity. Gabe Weaver: [00:12:25] We disagree a little bit. Bob Payne: [00:12:27] So for the folks that came up test infected the TDD is not only free it go you go faster because it's not a testing it's not a testing activity. It's a thinking activity. But Dan Fish: [00:12:47] Sure I got a different way which is you don't actually need bulletproof Hice high scalable high you know responsive software when you have no customers. Bob Payne: [00:12:54] Right. Dan Fish: [00:12:55] Right now that's all trying to say there. Bob Payne: [00:12:56] There are people that absolutely agree with you and there they are well respected. So Dave Thomas a pragmatic programmer Dave says you know I don't write many tests anymore. I don't know that he does a ton of production code anymore either but Gabe Weaver: [00:13:15] He's also like elevated past level mastery and some some other force of nature that is amazing. Bob Payne: [00:13:22] Me i'm just trying to ..i'm doing the best I can. I need a crutch right. I'm not a free climber. I need to attach my ropes as I get up the walk on the one I'm talking about. But I only see the tests there to help the cycle ocracy. Dan Fish: [00:13:45] That's a good one. Bob Payne: [00:13:46] Yeah. So how's that working for you? Dan Fish: [00:13:50] Peaches and cream Bob Payne: [00:13:50] And you know some people say What if I don't like peaches and cream when the holaocracy revolution comes, You will like peaches and cream. Gabe Weaver: [00:14:03] I will say it's not perfect but it's better than what alternatives there are. They are well documented and easy to adopt an organization. Yeah it's certainly a little bit heavy handed and it feels that way. But once you do it for a while you realize the intent behind the heavy handedness is to protect everyone from waste and it's almost like a kind thing where you have efficient meetings instead of it being nice human you have very human interactions. But when you go to like a tactical meeting which is basically a stand up is very quick fire very rigid about the process because you don't want to have 20 people cross talking in a room Bob Payne: [00:14:41] And when you just starting out like scrum you need rules. Yep yeah I mean I see that those sorts of structures as supportive of instantiating the first first steps. Gabe Weaver: [00:14:55] I think the most important thing about it is there's no rule in the Constitution which is kind of what we adopted. You can't change the constitution. Right. So. So the board of our company ratified the Constitution and basically ceded their authority to governing the organization according to the rules. Right. But it can be updated and changed and evolved over time. And I think that's the whole intent behind it just like it's continuous improvement in software. You apply the same principle as the organization and you can change it to how you need needed change but we're trying not to do that until everybody understands the responsibility of self-management. Bob Payne: [00:15:33] Yeah until you can do it well until you can demonstrate that you can execute it's what qualifies as an I'm not pointing at you guys... You can take a you know what qualifies you to say this way who would be better until you've least tasted what you know the ability you can't deliver. You can't improve your delivery. Right. So but I don't think you need to go too far down the line. You know you don't have to be the perfect scrum team before you start making minor macro level changes to the process that takes you off scrum so be it or it takes you out of the official official ocracy. You know you've got to make contextually appropriate choices and and it's your your team your company. This period of time this competitive landscape and assume that it will evolve in the same way that Toyota evolved and maybe they're at some plateau. But I suspect they'll have disruptive change that they'll want to adopt. I will say it was not perfect.  Gabe Weaver: [00:16:44] We had our our company wide meet up a couple of weeks ago and I reiterated the fact that everybody in the company is considered a partner. Yep and everybody's empowered to make changes and improvements. And it's actually the responsibility of every partner within the organization to do that and that's the evil that is. Bob Payne: [00:17:03] And That's the thing that's sometimes difficult for folks they don't want the responsibility of changing the system. Gabe Weaver: [00:17:09] But we've been pretty good about hiring to let people know what they're coming into. And the interesting thing is we haven't had any voluntary turnover in three years. Gabe Weaver: [00:17:18] And it's not just because of velocity but I think it's more because of the shift in how we're approaching people and putting people first and organization like we made it clear we're happy to ditch it if it doesn't work but only do it if there's something better to go to that keeps the same spirit of putting people first in empowering people and allowing people to become their ideal selves. Dan Fish: [00:17:40] Yeah and I see some of the things that have really resonated with me and with hypocrisy is transparency. Yeah you know that's one of those things put people put on a white board or a slide. It's hard to actually do right. How do you give transparency to organizational strategy and performance and things like that Bob Payne: [00:17:56] And gain alignment in a non-centralized system. Dan Fish: [00:17:58] Absolutely. Particularly if things aren't quite maybe baked right that idea that there's a kernel of an idea that needs to be developed a little bit more and that's when you know if there's too much sort of transparency to it it can die or die quickly before it's ripe and so getting that right balance you know that's not easy either. That's not some idyllic paradise that we're swimming in every day. Right. So that's something we we've been spending a lot of time in the last six months to really figure out OK how do we get enough transparency to things that are happening on decisions in progress or big strategic shifts. And I think that's really important when you want an engaged team and you treat your people as good or better as your customers. I think that's that's an important piece. Bob Payne: [00:18:34] Great. Well I am excited to see companies going down this path we're.. at LitheSpeed we're kind of you know thumpin away and taking maybe more experimental using some techniques from some from Buurtzog and some from Morningstar. But yeah congratulations and it's going to be fun. Gabe Weaver: [00:19:00] I appreciate that Bob Payne: [00:19:01] Will not be peaches and cream. May you live in interesting times.  Gabe Weaver: [00:19:04] Maybe some vanilla ice cream on the side. Bob Payne: [00:19:06] Yeah. Excellent. Thank thank you very much for coming in. Thank you VERY much. Gabe Weaver: [00:19:13] I see what you did there. Dan Fish: [00:19:13] Yeah.Thank you. It's a pleasure.

The Agile Toolkit Podcast I always say that DevOps in one sense is really an extension of agile principles out to everybody on the ship. -Jeffery Payne Bob Payne chats with Jeffery Payne, Founder of Coveros, at Lean+Agile DC 2018.  The Payne Cousins (not really) chat DevOps and tips for pairing developers and testers.  The discussion covers moving toward a generalized specialist model, testers showing up like a demolition crew, and the true meaning of pairing. [caption id="attachment_7988" align="alignnone" width="2024"] Jeffery Payne sits down with Bob Payne (not cousins..)[/caption] TRANSCRIPT Bob Payne: [00:00:02] Hi I'm your host and technical idiot, Bob Payne. Just struggling with the equipment there for a little bit, making making the the the big newbie mistake of hitting play instead of record. So I'm here at Lean + Agile DC 2018 and I'm here with Jeff Payne of Coveros. Jeffery Payne: [00:00:25] Your cousin right. Bob Payne: [00:00:26] Yeah. Cousin Jeffery Payne: [00:00:27] Yeah. Bob Payne: [00:00:27] Yep. So Jeff what what are you talking about here today since I am out here in the hall and not not in the talks. Jeffery Payne: [00:00:38] Yes I'm talking about dev test pairing. Okay so trying to get developers and testers to work together better. We find that that's one of the biggest issues we see on teams when it comes from engineering perspective. Bob Payne: [00:00:52] Yeah I mean I think the early agilists were a lot of XP teams that sort of did away with testers because everybody was considered to be a tester. I think it was also sort of a chemistry of the particular group of folks that were on that first team. And you had folks like Elizabeth Hendrickson, Lisa Crispin. A lot of folks sort of brought testing back into the Agil fold. Yeah what do you think the biggest problems you see with testing and agile teams or trying to get testers and coders to pair? Jeffery Payne: [00:01:31] Yeah I think obviously one of the biggest problems is that they historically haven't worked well together. They're kind of on different sides of the fence as a check and a balance in some organizations right. Jeffery Payne: [00:01:42] And and a lot of organizations even they prefer that their testers not even talk to their developers they want them to be independent speak because they think it's kind of like an editor if if you haven't seen it and then you review it another set of eyes you're not you know you're not influenced by the development. The other sort of clean room actually that's the traditional approach. Of course it's always been very late lifecycle and very manual right. None of those things work well on edge. All right. Bob Payne: [00:02:11] Well none of those things actually work well in life. It's not just an agile thing. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:16] So you know how do we change that? Bob Payne: [00:02:17] Shoot, it's not secure and doesn't scale. I'm glad we have 12 hours to fix this before production. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:22] Yeah, Exactly. Here you go have it done by tonight. So yeah. And so what we try to help teams fix that. Bob Payne: [00:02:30] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:30] Address those issues. Bob Payne: [00:02:33] What are you what do you think has been most beneficial recently for helping you in that in that quest of getting folks to pair together. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:42] Well we have some techniques and approaches that we like to use to try to get them to work together and also learn from each other because you know if you're moving toward a generalized specialist model on your teams we like that model. Yup and you want collective code ownership and you want a whole team quality all these you know motherhood and apple pie concepts that we espouse too. You've got to get everybody productive during the entire Sprint or whatever you're doing story development or whatever. And the only way you can do that is that people start learning from each other and cross fertilize. Historically you know I was a developer developers aren't great testers for a number of reasons. Jeffery Payne: [00:03:20] Just you know out of the gate they're not very good testers and testers oftentimes particularly if they are manual testers they don't have a very strong technical background they don't know code they can't write automation right. Those two things together don't work very well. So we've found that by pairing Dev and test they can help learn from each other and become stronger teammates and collectively on the code better. Bob Payne: [00:03:43] Now do you find that tools like cucumber or other. I don't know if you're running into teams using fitness but are early on fitness is one of those tools cucumber most recently specked flow help bridge that gap so that testers can blow out those scenarios a little more directly after the fixtures are done or even before the fixtures are done. Jeffery Payne: [00:04:09] Definitely. Yeah I mean the the BDD oriented. Bob Payne: [00:04:12] Yeah Jeffery Payne: [00:04:12] Cucumber with Gherkin, kind of natural language approach is a great way to start moving particularly manual testers toward understanding how to automate without having to dive right in and start like you know trying to write good maintainable selenium scripts for instance or whatever. I mean it's hard to write maintainable any kind of scripts. Bob Payne: [00:04:33] Write would be better then record -those are a nightmare to maintain Jeffery Payne: [00:04:39] No doubt, or record any test is a bad idea because that's how they're sold often so. Bob Payne: [00:04:44] Right. Jeffery Payne: [00:04:45] That's how you know people think you're supposed to use those tools. We definitely like those kinds of tools that we think they help move a a tester toward being more capable of providing automation support. Bob Payne: [00:04:57] What sort of behavioral, I mean, You mentioned the word pairing. What does that mean when you say that because I see a lot of I see a lot of misuse of the word. I'm assuming you're not but the mis use of the word pairing Jeffery Payne: [00:05:09] I Might be, who knows. Maybe you'll tell me i'm wrong, Bob. Bob Payne: [00:05:11] And TDD, I see a lot of people misusing or not really understanding TDD. That's most common but Jeffery Payne: [00:05:17] Yes. Yeah. So I mean to me I'm basing it off of the definition of pair programming. Go you know getting two people together to work together collectively on some task. When you talk in dev test you're really either talking about those two people working together on code almost pair programming and one of our techniques is to use a dev test to pair program yet which is a little different right because one of them maybe doesn't actually know how to write code. So what does that mean. Right. In pairing. The other thing we use it for is to review each others tests. So if you're going to ask developers to do a unit test you want them to learn how to write good unit test meaning think through not just happy path but you know the errors and boundary conditions exceptions and all those kinds of things they usually inherently don't know how to do that a tester can by working with them help them understand how to do that better. Second if you're asking your testers even if it's manual to create tasks for integration for system for you know kind of the combinations of things across use cases and your business flows they often don't they often won't load the design. Well enough particularly if they haven't been involved in those activities they should be but often aren't. Jeffery Payne: [00:06:34] Yeah and the developer can help them think through and understand how does this software all pieced together to meet the you know the flow that we're looking for in our application and how users use it so they can help each other from a testing perspective we found. Bob Payne: [00:06:47] And one of the other things that I think a lot of a lot of testers can help with as well is what are the business rules like oh yeah if you're doing an under UI test which quite often happens in the developers domain you know what are the what are those conditions you know the happy path is easy and that's usually where developers go because they know the happy path works but they don't necessarily test those boundary conditions as or that or the business rules right if I had a whole bunch of J rules or other stuff I wouldn't test that through the UI right. Jeffery Payne: [00:07:26] Yeah no doubt. Bob Payne: [00:07:28] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:07:28] And to your point about a happy path. The other thing we've seen is not every developer's like this but you know a lot of developers consider what they're building to be a work of art. Right. They're like Michelangelo creating the Sistine Chapel in their in their mind. Yeah and they're all about creating this beautiful incredible thing that's going to last forever and just people are going to you and all over it even if it's just their peers. Bob Payne: [00:07:49] Yep. Jeffery Payne: [00:07:50] And then the tester shows up testers like a demolition crew. Bob Payne: [00:07:52] Yeah Jeffery Payne: [00:07:53] Right. They're trying to poke holes in it and figure out what's wrong with it and it's kind of like calling your baby ugly. If you're asked to test your own code because you know you might have every intention but in the back of your mind you might be thinking I don't really want my Sistine Chapel to have problems in it or look bad and changing that mindset is part of getting Dev and tests to work together to understand the best way if you want to build something great is to find any issues as fast as you can see eradicate them. That's really about what it looks like when it gets delivered yet not what it looks like. You know while you're making the sausage right. Bob Payne: [00:08:27] Yeah. I find a lot of people use the term Pairing and they're really talking about working together on just acceptance criteria or something like that that's necessary but not sufficient. I think that deeper level of the deeper you can go in interaction and an understanding the better off your team is clearly Jeffery Payne: [00:08:52] We've had good success getting developers involved in doing some exploratory testing as well. Bob Payne: [00:08:57] Sure. Bob Payne: [00:08:57] You know a lot of times testers get together and do you know session based exploratory testing across stories or whatever. What about the idea of just getting the Dev and test together for a story they're working on and having an exploratory testing session where they work together and explore the product and talk about it and identify bugs. Again that gets the developers a little bit more comfortable doing testing and knowing what to look for thinking critically about the app. And of course it helps the tester better understand the app because if they're they don't understand something about what they're testing they've got the developer right there they can ask Hey what was this supposed to do or how was this supposed to work. Jeffery Payne: [00:09:32] Now I think the story is maybe vague did we really build the right thing or are we testing it properly. That dialogue's very helpful. Bob Payne: [00:09:38] Yeah. What else is exciting in your your world right now Jeffery Payne: [00:09:42] Nothing Bob Payne: [00:09:42] No? Jeffery Payne: [00:09:42] Nothing. Well as you know we do a lot of DevOps work. Bob Payne: [00:09:47] Yeah sure. Yeah it's the new edge issue. Jeffery Payne: [00:09:51] Yeah exactly. Bob Payne: [00:09:52] Yeah. Actually you know we were going to be talking later with some folks talking about sort of you know in many ways Agile is sort of hit a ceiling and I'm hoping this will open up gaps where we can get to real real agility and real cause. All too often it's seen as a fix for the delivery team not right. Not a systemic change that can build better value faster. Jeffery Payne: [00:10:23] Yeah and I totally agree. I mean I think one of the mistakes that the founding fathers of Agile made is you know they were all about collaboration getting everybody to work together. But they forgot a key piece of the lifecycle which was delivery and release and production and production oriented. Bob Payne: [00:10:41] And actually intake in the business side. Jeffery Payne: [00:10:45] Exactly. You know it's funny this group that was all about collaboration and getting everybody on the same page left all these people out right by mistake. Obviously they were creating it as they went so I understand. So I always say that dev ops in one sense is really an extension of agile principles out to everybody on the ship you know involved in the software delivery process in the full lifecycle software. Bob Payne: [00:11:09] Yeah and agile and dev ops are both the you know great grandchildren of lean which was all about that base that whole process right. Jeffery Payne: [00:11:21] Yes. Bob Payne: [00:11:22] Yeah. You know this reintroduction of the concept of value streams and value team and stuff - It's like back to the future. Jeffery Payne: [00:11:32] I'm sure you've studied up on the history you know all the way back through Demming and you know all the way back to you know statistical process control and even beyond that I mean it's clearly standing on the shoulders of giants like everything we do. It's amazing how many people don't understand that or take the time to find that out or understand. Bob Payne: [00:11:50] And the idea that that actually Devops, Yeah there's a whole bunch of cool technical stuff going on, but it's about closing the loop to be able to learn. And my favorite Demming quote about that was learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival. Jeffery Payne: [00:12:07] Here's some great pithy comments. You know we're in this. You know there was an article I read that compared it to an extinct extinction level event you know where we've got you know Internet of Things and big data and and organizations being able competitors being able to go extraordinarily fast and learn and reintegrate that learning. The end for the many organizations that will that will mean their doom and not going to pretend that DevIps or Agile is any silver bullet in allowing them to survive. But I just know the status quo is not the strategy I would take. Jeffery Payne: [00:12:56] Yeah. Well yeah I mean if software is really eating the world which I think we would agree it is then you'd better figure out how to optimize how you build deploy deliver and feedback information fast because otherwise you are going to be out of business. Yeah eventually. Bob Payne: [00:13:15] So what's happening over at your company Coveros. Jeffery Payne: [00:13:18] Coveros, yes! So We're busy little busy little beavers helping people with Agile and devops just trying to get it right. And when we focus more on the engineering aspects of both of those things but I often get asked to you know help pull teams together and figure out how to make it all work. Bob Payne: [00:13:36] Yup Jeffery Payne: [00:13:36] But we really like the the engineering aspects as I call it you know Automation doesn't solve all your problems right. I always say a tool with a fool is still a fool. Right. So you have to know what you're doing and you have to collaborate work together. But automation can help and as long as you take that philosophy you can leverage test automation and then you see ICD Automation and other types of automation effectively. If your view is that automation somehow solves all your problems it's a magic bullet right. And it all you know takes culture or you know magically make it all work then you're going to be really upset right because it's not going to work so that's kind of what we're focusing on. Bob Payne: [00:14:16] Magical thinking is a strategy has also proved to be not the greatest.. Jeffery Payne: [00:14:21] Hope. Hope is not a strategy. One of my favorite sales books and I use that a lot. Yeah everybody says it's not grounded in reality I would say just remember hope is not a strategy. Bob Payne: [00:14:30] Yeah yeah yeah exactly. Well great. What what's exciting you coming up. What do you see coming down the pike in the next. You know what I know prediction is tough especially about the future. Jeffery Payne: [00:14:47] Yeah the future because if I could I wouldn't be in this business or I'd be retired long ago. Bob Payne: [00:14:52] Yeah exactly. Jeffery Payne: [00:14:53] Well I am I'm excited about. Bob Payne: [00:14:54] What do you actually see that's here. Jeffery Payne: [00:14:56] Well I was very skeptical at first but I am a little bit excited about what's going on with integration of A.I. into Dev and test. There are some interesting things going on around how you can leverage AI capabilities to build better tests for your applications. Do testing in a better way. So what actually look interesting. Are they going to scale or are they going to work right we've been talking about AI and you know robots take over the world forever which of course is not going to happen. Bob Payne: [00:15:30] The joke is AI is the next big thing and always will be. Jeffery Payne: [00:15:34] Yeah it's very true because you and I we probably are same same relevant age and we were coming up through the techie ranks. AI got really hot for a while. Bob Payne: [00:15:43] I was in the computer architectures for AI master's program so Jeffery Payne: [00:15:47] Yeah! It was hot hot hot, VR - the first VR systems came out and everyone was talking about these awesome things and how we were going to live in alternative worlds. And all that stuff and of course then like a lot of things that it didn't really happen and kind of disappeared but it bubbled along and now it's kind of popped its head up again. Bob Payne: [00:16:05] And so I'm not familiar with the uses that folks have been you know the application in the testing area what is the is this especially for like I mean if you look at big data you don't know what's in there necessarily. So you don't know know what to test for like where's the where's the current application of. Jeffery Payne: [00:16:33] Well there's a couple. One is of course everybody's trying to figure out how to even test AI-based systems whether it's B.I or or whatever it is you know how do we know the answers right. Right. That's the age old problem in the systems is you know how do you actually know whether what you got is true or not because you kind of need that testing right. But the other side of it which which we're more focused on is other ways to build better approaches to automation that analyze the product analyze what you're building and not completely write the scripts for you but take a step toward providing you test automation capabilities and scripting without having to do that on yourself. There are some new tools out on the market really small startup stuff that's trying to take a different look completely at how we create automated tests and how we maybe do that automatically. Yeah and the software is a really hard problem. Bob Payne: [00:17:37] Yeah I can I can I can extraordinarily easily imagine doing like really good deep progression by looking at sort of big data. Big data user behavior. You know we've kind of done that to heatmap. You know we really need this piece to be bulletproof because of risk. I'm sure there are folks out there that are mapping the the usage. But I could also imagine very easily just observe what folks are doing and and learn from that. I mean it's the way to go. [00:18:20] You know Al p haGo learned how to play go and meet you know with you know the vast majority of the learning in a system like that is not from the ruleset right. The initial ruleset it's actually playing another copy of itself Veriga and and and going through the database of previous games which for go is actually harder than chess but apparently it never played go. But yeah it sounds easy it's go go. How hard could it be. Jeffery Payne: [00:18:53] Just go right. Just go. So what. What's up with that. Just sounds a lot harder. four letters. Just kidding but Bob Payne: [00:19:04] It is four letters is twice as many. Jeffery Payne: [00:19:08] That's fine. We're just having a great time here right. Bob Payne: [00:19:15] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:19:16] So yeah that's what what I'm interested in that is just you know trying to take the dev ops concept to the next level. You mentioned round trip. Right. Which is you know a lot of people spent their early instantiations of automation just focusing on how do I get code you know from a change in their production as fast as possible with quality and stability as well. You have to balance those. But now I think the more sophisticated companies are saying OK well it's great to get there but what happens if you get there and something's wrong. What's the fastest roundtrip approach to fixing that and addressing that. Is it rolling back. Is it going roundtrip and coming through. You know because the the other thing that's and people say why is that important if we're not the kind of company like you know say and Amazon who's pushing code out every 11 seconds right. Jeffery Payne: [00:20:05] Why do you need that we need that for security and stability and performance service level agreements. I mean if you've got a problem in production it cost you money every minute every second it's down or that there is a risk out there with a security perspective you've got to figure out how to round trip change as fast as possible. And that's an exciting area I think has been under looked at. You know it hasn't really been the focal point of house is now I think starting to be. I mean this it is really ironic that the safest way to go is to be able to go fast. Bob Payne: [00:20:41] I mean Jeffery Payne: [00:20:41] Oh yeah. Bob Payne: [00:20:43] I mean the level you know I remember those days where company would have to fail over to their dark side and emphasis on fail right because it would be days hours just downtime before they could you know oh shoot the Oracle logs didn't replicate. Yeah. Or whatever. And in like extreme programming and some of the techniques there early on they were seen as risky and the real practice in the same way that drove up seems risky. If you're doing it the way you and I think they should be doing it. It's actually the least risky way of behaving Jeffery Payne: [00:21:37] Right. Yeah it is. Yeah of course there are some apps that you'd like to be able to push into production quickly but maybe can't ever fail. So you know you can't you know this you know the Amazon concept of roll something out there doesn't really work. Jeffery Payne: [00:21:53] Roll it back and tune it roll back out and you're kind of using your customer to test test and give you some time to live life critical for that. So there are certain ones that you need. You know just double down on your assurance process during your dev ops capability because it can't fail on the field.. For a lot of others you know. Bob Payne: [00:22:10] Well one of them one of the things that I've been thinking about because I quite often talked about high quality and the key is and someone came up to me and said what you're really looking for is expected quality. So and he had an example that was was a big oil and gas company and one of the things that they said is your labels are too good. He's like What do you mean said we need the labels to start to deteriorate immediately said we do not want to see someone pouring a lubricant into a cooking pan in Africa or in some other area where this is unfortunately a common practice with a brand spanking new company logo on the outside of that thing said is we actually need that to deteriorate. And I start to think about that because as you mentioned you know some fine you know I may not have critical transactions push something around or find a roll it back. You know that might be fine. You know canary roll out on Spotify right fine right. Jeffery Payne: [00:23:39] Yep. Bob Payne: [00:23:40] Canary Roll out on the firmware and in a medical device maybe not so fun. Jeffery Payne: [00:23:46] Yeah Bob Payne: [00:23:46] Because the Canary dies Jeffery Payne: [00:23:48] And it's a big Canary. Bob Payne: [00:23:48] . Oh yeah yeah Jeffery Payne: [00:23:55] Yeah. No. No doubt Bob Payne: [00:23:56] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:23:56] And that and that is something that I think people misunderstand about dev ops. [00:24:00] You know when I speak about DevOps at conferences I always well attended everybody's interested in the topic because it's hot Bob Payne: [00:24:06] Right. Jeffery Payne: [00:24:07] People have this perception and unfortunately senior management does that Dev ops means speed and speed alone. The goal no fast can I push things into production. Bob Payne: [00:24:17] But imagine a life critical system where you could have test automation every single infrastructure. Code line Change is auditable in and you can get that level of safety. We used to put two you know extraordinary manual testing. Jeffery Payne: [00:24:44] Yes it was very expensive. Bob Payne: [00:24:45] And it's prone to possibility of non repeatable results. Somebody makes a mistake. Somebody configurations off. And now with you know with tools that where you have immutable infrastructure you have software configured network you can actually know to some a greater degree of certainty than we were able to in the past that you have a Conformance Test system. And that adds a lot of safety. Jeffery Payne: [00:25:24] It does and it helps with regulatory is yes right. I mean the one of the under the under represented aspects of dev ops is CM Bob Payne: [00:25:34] Right. Jeffery Payne: [00:25:34] Because if you're doing it right everything you're dragging your entire manifest of your software your test your environments your even your rollback your recovery procedures your monitoring capability. Dragging that all the way through production in a way that you know where everything came from and everything takes and ties together. And that's what regulators want. Right. Bob Payne: [00:26:00] Those that know they actually want safety they don't care about the stack of documents they use sadly to hopefully inspect that you knew what you're doing. Jeffery Payne: [00:26:08] Want you to demonstrate that you have a process that delivers quality and they want to see that there's relationships between the various things that you're using to do that. And dev ops gives you all that if you do it right. Bob Payne: [00:26:20] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:26:21] If you do it wrong it just you know throws your code down through there and everything around it is changing constantly and you're never really going to get the speed or quality that you want. Bob Payne: [00:26:30] Yep well great so anything you'd like to close out with Jeff for Jeffery Payne: [00:26:36] Well just thanks for the chance to talk. I know you've been doing this a long time and it seems like a great podcast and we're really enjoying the conference. Looking forward to the rest of it. Bob Payne: [00:26:49] And if you can stand to hear me talk then they listen to some of the older ones I think Bob Payne: [00:26:55] Definitely. Jeffery Payne: [00:26:56] Ok cool Bob Payne: [00:26:56] I'll get some popcorn and listen to early one's .. I wish you had started it maybe five years earlier than that right. I mean. Bob Payne: [00:27:03] Yeah yeah Jeffery Payne: [00:27:03] If you had started like right around 2000. Bob Payne: [00:27:05] Yeah Jeffery Payne: [00:27:05] Then Bob Payne: [00:27:06] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:27:07] You know you would have had some interesting.. Bob Payne: [00:27:08] There's a there was some gap years as well. Jeffery Payne: [00:27:12] But Well thank thank you very much for having me. Bob Payne: [00:27:14] Thanks.

Hi I'm 12 years old an I love making music and creating please listen and follow

Recorded LIVE on the streets of Bham, at Camber Coffee http://cambercoffee.com/On this episode, we are talking about alternatives to the mainstream operating systems and...this comes out of a recent rant AJ had with a few folks “If you don't like something- don't buy it! Companies owe you NOTHING *unless you are a shareholder*” Just in time for school to start up! Forget Hi I'm a Mac, Hi I'm a PC- what about the other offerings in OS out there.Canonical Ubuntu:* Other distros based off this (and Dabian) that gives different looks and functions* Ubuntu “Certified” hardware- turn key approach https://certification.ubuntu.com/desktop/ Elementary OS; https://elementary.io/ Endless OS; https://endlessos.com/home/* Made for developing countires but also has hardware: https://endlessos.com/our-computers/Chrome OS; for those who don't mind Google and have web-based needs (https://www.computerworld.com/article/2893364/chrome-os/is-chrome-os-right-for-you.html)* * *Tech That Caught our eyeHow about NOT the new iPhone (https://www.apple.com/iphone/). If you like it - great. If you don't- great. Does it really matter- nope. * Only thing to note out of the whole announcements; Apple now has 8 iPhones to choose from. SE, 6, 6+, 7, 7+, 8, 8+, X. So, to everyone on the internet...stop hating on something you don't have buy if you don't want to.Poloroid Originals: https://us.polaroidoriginals.com/?rfsn=550557.16c7b * * *Unscripted InsightsChris AJ * * *Connect with us* AJ: patreon.com/ajbarse (http://patreon.com/ajbarse) or follow me on Twitter/Instagram (http://instagram.com/ajbarse) both are @ajbarse. * Chris: Twitter/Instagram/Medium.com as @mnmltek * Quiet Conversations newsletter: bit.ly/quietchris (http://bit.ly/quietchris) * 100 Tech Tips - An ongoing project: www.100techtips.com (http://www.100techtips.com/)* Twitter Hashtags: #bhampodcast and #quietconversationsListen to us* If you're in the Bellingham area, be sure to listen to our show on KMRE 102.3 FM (http://www.kmre.org/bellingham-podcast-media-tech/)! * Thursdays at 9 am * Saturdays at 1:30 pmTalk to us* 201-731-8324 (tel:2017318324) (TECH)* Got a question about technology or anything else about life in Bellingham? Leave us a voicemail! * Ask us nicely! We may include it in one of our future shows.Subscribe to us* iTunes, Google Play Store, Soundcloud, Spreaker, or wherever else you podcast. And check out our website at bellinghampodcast.com (http://bellinghampodcast.com/)

Yaw ist am Donnertag geboren und liebt Mamas essen. Bei Liya gibt es nichts Umsonst. Viel Spaß mit der Episode. 
Abonniert, kommentiert und bewertet uns am besten mit ★★★★★ auf iTunes. Wir sind neuerdings auch auf Spotify! http://spoti.fi/2BKthKH Top 3 Gerichte: (Liya) 1. Ingera mit Timtimo,Hamli oder Shiro 2. Spiegelei mit Rahmspinat & Kartoffeln 3. Kitcha fit fit (Yaw) 1. Erdnusssoße mit Reisbällchen 2. Zwiebelrostbraten 3. Pho Suppe Tipps der Woche: Vor lauter unützes Wissen die Tipps vergessen. Aber Freitag 3 Jahre Freund & Kupferstecher. https://www.facebook.com/events/752989618204081/ Injeera: http://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.injeera-im-bohnenviertel-fladenbrot-fuer-alle.60ac06f3-2367-47ab-bd81-5947cfae745e.html Lied des Sommers: Angel - Hi grade Unnützes Wissen: Hägen Dazs: Der Name Hägen Dazs ist ein Kunstwort. Das Eisunternehmen wurde in USA und nicht in Dänemark gegründet. Gründer Reuben Mattus - Sohn deutsch-jüdischer Einwanderer - hat Hägen Dazs 1961 mit seiner Ehefrau gegründet. Sie wollten dem Namen einen dänischen Touch/Image geben, da Dänemark im 2. WK gut zu den Juden waren und sie aufgenommen haben. Frauenstimmen: Frauenstimmen sind an fruchtbaren Tagen höher als an unfruchtbaren. Das hat eine Studie der Universität of California ergeben, die 69 Probandinnen zw. 18-39 Jahren, immer den gleichen Satz: "Hi I'm a Student at UCLA" & Vokale wie "A", "E","O" haben einsprechen lassen. Anschließend wurde noch ein Hormontest durchgeführt. Dies hat gezeigt, dass an zwei Tagen VOR dem Eisprung, die Stimme der Frau deutlich höher ist, welches unbewusst für Männer wahrnehmbar ist. Zusätzlich hat eine Studie,welche an der Uni in Mexiko durchgeführt wurde ergeben, dass Striperinnen an ihren fruchtbaren Tagen, mehr verdienen.

@highhorseradio on twitter for any feedback or topics that you'd like discussed...   It's our annual "Super Friends Fun Day", which is the one day a year that we forget our adult responsibilities and meet up for a day off, it's a time to channel our inner child and just enjoy the fact that everybody's being all grownup and working , and you're not. The 1st time panel combination of Fred Nation, J Dot, Andy Establishment, LinQ and Leonard feature in this episode, and discuss their top 5 favorite movies of all time, whilst sipping beer from 10am to 6pm, which I'm sure you'll notice not long into the podcast (poor phoenix Ppardoshe missed out due to suburban Dad duties but was definitely there in spirit). You may also notice that our audio ain't up to it's usual standards, that's cause we are sitting on the verandah of an Irish pub with music, seagulls and patrons all contributing their little two cent's worth.   Like I just said, it's the first time you've heard seagulls on the High Horse with our ocean views from beachfront pubs. So come join the panel down on the "glitter strip" aka "cavil avenue", aka the "gold coast", right in the heart of the nightclub district, where you can catch a walk of shame or two, or the look of regret in a young ladies eyes, the smell of piss (urine & alcohol) dominates the air, along with the scent of debauchery from the previous night. Come along and get entertained whilst listening to entertainment, join us down at movie town for a 1st hear on our cutting edge podcast.   Let us make you feel nostalgic as we get lost in the epic fantasy land of movies. What I'm saying is, grab some popcorn and cozy on up with the panelists for this extra special broadcast of our liberated syndication. Get to know the members of the Horse on a pure and wholesome level with our favorite movies of all time.   "what if there is no tomorrow?, there wasn't one today!"..."I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"..."Anyone home mcfly?"..."momma always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never no what you gonna get"..." you can't handle the truth!"... they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!"..." yippee kiyay mother fucker!"..." there's no crying in baseball"..." you eat dog crap for breakfast geek!"..." Hi I'm chucky wanna play?"..."Cowabunga dude!"..." who are you?, I'm Batman!"..."you who, ill make you famous"..."one, two Freddy's coming for you, three, four you better lock your door"..." If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball"..." do you feel lucky?, well do ya punk?!"..."I'll be back!".   Download and subscribe to this unique podcast @ iTunes + libsyn.com (@frednations, @jdotgater, @andyestablish, @LinQage) Audio not the best due to background noise. However a fun listen for those who persevere.