Host Intro (Damon Edwards and John Willis)

Damon Edwards: Welcome back, everybody. Hope you've enjoyed the day so far. I know I have. And we're ready for our next pair of lightning talks. John, who do we have coming up?

John Willis: So we've got two great ones: Helen Beal, who I love, and then J. Paul Reed, who's always amazing. I think for these, it's going to be interesting because one of the things I love about Ignites or lightning talks is they don't always have to be sort of DevOps and technical. They actually can be something else, or they can skip boundaries. So it'll be fun.

Damon Edwards: Yeah. I think it also shows that, talk to the people virtually around you, the DevOps community, especially the DevOps Enterprise Summit community, is full of very interesting people with diverse backgrounds and interests and hobbies, so it's always a fun time to find something new.

John Willis: Yep. A lot of boundary spanners, which I think is really always fun. That's one of the great things about our community.

Damon Edwards: Always fun. Well, here we go. Here's our next pair of lightning talks.

Helen Beal

Hi, I'm Helen Beal. Welcome to my Ignite talk for DevOps Enterprise London 2020. Today, I'm going to be talking about Kingley Vale, which is a national nature reserve in the UK, where I live and where I volunteer.

One of the hardest things about lockdown has been not being allowed to visit Kingley Vale, where I normally spend a lot of my time. Here is me with a bucket of cow feed. I'm trying to move some cows around the reserve and explain what they do there a little bit later on. But they rather like the yew trees, which I'll talk about, too.

This is one of the views. This is the view south from the top of the reserve out to the Solent. It has incredible views. A very, very steep climb up a hill. But you do get rewarded with these views out to the Solent and there beyond the English Channel, and there beyond France.

And this is the view the other way into the Surrey Hills, and deep in the distance you can see a National Trust home called Uppark. And you can see our beautiful British countryside here. It's looking a little bit wintry.

Here you can see the actual map of the reserve. Earlier on, you'd have seen the map of the UK. Hopefully, those of you with eagle eyes would have noticed a big red pin pointing out exactly where we are, which is near Chichester on the south coast of England. And this is the reserve itself.

It's very famous for many things, partly its archaeological monuments. So here you can see some Bronze Age barrows on the left, and then you can see on the right what they look like today, and note the sheep on both of them.

There's also lots of Iron Age and other things. These are the sheep. They join us every winter from the National Trust, and they're here to help us graze the grassland, basically. We have some chalkland, which is one of our SSSIs, Special Sites of Scientific Interest.

And these are our cows that also help graze down the sward in order that our very fragile chalkland plants can survive against the stronger plants that these animals help us graze down. This is what would've been on the land many, many years ago in those Bronze Ages, as you saw.

Other history: during World War II, we had a number of Canadians on site that were there hidden, ready to do a reverse ambush. But we've got lots of ordnance still on the site, so you can see some there and see a man who's about to blow some up, and the cow's extremely unbothered.

I mentioned the yew trees. This is one of the things that the site is most famous for: huge yew forests, very old yew trees. You can see the size of them there, 500 to 1,000 years old. Very poisonous trees, although interestingly, not the red berry. You can eat the red berry quite happily, but nothing else.

This is Arthur Tansley, and you can see on the bottom left the stone that we have in memoriam to him and the plaque on it there. He is the founder of nature conservation in the UK, and the reason that the reserve exists. He recognized that this was for human wellbeing.

This is some of the tech that I use when I'm on site. So this is a little module that plugs into my phone that auto-detects the bat species. You can see a couple of quite rare bats there, Daubenton's and Bechstein's. We're particularly interested in those. All bats are protected in the UK.

We also have lots of amphibians, well, as many amphibians as you have in the UK, so there's some tadpoles. We're particularly interested in newt spotting. So we go in and do newt surveys and turn them over and do belly prints. That's how you tell whether one newt is not another.

We also have three species of deer on the reserve. Again, we have cameras on the reserve, so some more tech that we're using. Particularly interested in where the deer are grazing, again, because it protects those plants. Sometimes the deer get themselves into trouble, so here's a little baby deer that had got caught in a fence that's going to the vets.

Another reason we have those SSSIs are orchids. So you can see a number of different orchids here. We have a really amazing display during the spring of various different species, of frog and bee and early pyramids and all sorts of different orchids.

And lots of butterflies. So we have about 38 of the 59 species of butterfly that are in the UK. So here you can see a peacock's on the top, and there one particularly friendly one sat on my Matt's shoulder.

We've also got these other ones. So this is Hippocrepis comosa, which is a plant, one of our rare chalkland plants, the horseshoe vetch, and this is a caterpillar. It's a chalkhill blue caterpillar, and this is one of my favorite butterflies that I'm particularly fascinated with. You can see just a bit of thumb there, so you can see how big that butterfly is.

Here are the adults on the right, making sure that we've got some more butterflies next year. A very unique color, this milky blue. They're very lazy butterflies, only travel about 20 kilometers. Some of those butterflies you looked at earlier actually migrate from Africa to the UK.

And this is the yellow meadow ant. This is one of the anthills with some wild thyme over it. And I've put this in here because the chalkhill blue butterfly larva has a relationship with this yellow meadow ant. The yellow meadow ant takes the larva and puts them inside the nest and looks after them and saves them from predators.

And this is the life cycle. So we are about to go into the season now of the butterfly being on the wing in July, just as we've finished ours. I hope you enjoy the conference very much and enjoy talking about software life cycles, too. Thank you for your time.

J. Paul Reed

Hello, DevOps Enterprise Summit, London virtual edition. My name is J. Paul Reed, @jpaulreed on Twitter.

Do you do retrospectives, postmortems? Do you maybe have a problem management team that does incident reviews for you? How about ever gotten a speeding ticket? Well, if so, then this lightning talk is for you.

So our story starts in beautiful and sunny Daly City, California, which is just south of San Francisco, at the Daly City In-N-Out. Now, the Daly City In-N-Out is objectively one of the best In-N-Outs because it is co-located with a Krispy Kreme Donuts, so you can get your burgers and donuts all in one convenient location.

I had just picked up my mom, actually, at the airport, and we decided to have lunch at the In-N-Out there. And so I was turning left out of the parking lot after we'd eaten to get back on the highway and go home and start hanging out and doing fun stuff. And so I roll up to this intersection. Of course, it's a beautiful day. My mom and I were fat and happy on our cheeseburgers, ready to go explore the sights of San Francisco.

And as I turn out of that intersection, behind me, I spot in my rear view mirror, this. And by the way, this is actually a photo of the Daly City police officer who pulled me over, and I include him in the deck because he has probably one of the best names I've heard for a police officer. This is Officer Directo of the Daly City PD.

So he doesn't make any chitchat, small talk, none of that. He's not, Did you know what you did wrong? Nope. He said, Did you see the sign? And I was like, What sign? So he's like, License and registration, please. So he takes all of that and goes back to his patrol car, starts running it all, comes back to me with the ticket, and I'm like, what just happened? We are having cheeseburgers, we're happy, everything's going well, and then I owe the county $238? What is going on? Definitely a downer for the day.

Well, so let's go back to this intersection. I'm going to be quiet and I want you to take a close look and see if you see anything weird about this particular intersection.

So some of you may have seen just how many right turn only signs did I supposedly not obey? Are they about the same intersection? Why are there two? Do they just really not want you to do that? That was weird.

So I looked a little closer and it turns out that these signs are different signs. They have different font, they have different dimensions. They're affixed differently to the infrastructure there. And so this sort of posed a question for me like, well, what should a right turn only sign look like?

So of course, I pulled the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and went down this weird Byzantine rabbit hole of what signs are supposed to look like and what the fonts are and what the proportions are and where the signs should be put, affixed, and all of this kind of stuff. And it turns out that this particular sign, it hasn't been street legal for over 15 years. It's actually been superseded by this particular sign. You can see it there. R-11 California R has been superseded by R3-5R.

Okay, sure, right turn only, but something else seemed weird. You'll notice that these arrows going into this parking lot, and this parking lot is the Daly City Department of Motor Vehicles, by the way. It also says right turn only on the street, the arrows there. So is that sign referring to the parking lot or what?

Who owns the sign maintenance was another question. The picture on the right was taken about six months later in the dark, and you'll notice the sign is even more obscured. On the left, the day of, it was obscured somewhat by the tree. So whom is responsible for making sure that we can see that sign?

Finally, you'll see the markings on the pavement. Somebody seemed to have painted a right turn only arrow, but then it was painted over with a just go forward arrow. And there's no double yellow lines on the road that would indicate that you actually can't cross across the lane there.

So what are some takeaways? Well, in the context of an incident, when you roll up on scene, things may not look as what they appear to be. The officer and I both had different views of reality, and neither of them was in fact fully correct.

When conducting an incident analysis, how close you actually do that analysis to the incident actually matters. If I hadn't returned later in the day, about two hours after I'd gotten the ticket and taken all of those photos, I probably wouldn't have had as strong data to make a case that there's some weirdness going around with how these signs are.

And finally, I love this quote from Dr. Dekker: if it made sense to one practitioner, it's probably going to make sense to other practitioners, too. Of course, when I went back, I saw all sorts of people turning left out of that intersection.

So day of, go to traffic court. My case that day was the only case a judge did not make a ruling on. She actually said, I need to take this case under advisement. And I was like, I don't know what that means. Did I win? I don't know. But it turns out, boom, found not guilty, and didn't have to pay that ticket.

So practice those incident analysis skills because you'll be surprised where they come in handy. My name's J. Paul Reed, @jpaulreed on Twitter.

Closing Remarks (Gene Kim)

I think today's program is about as amazing as we've ever done here at DevOps Enterprise. And believe it or not, I think day two will be as good or maybe even better. In the morning, we'll have Patrick Eldridge and Janet Chapman from Nationwide Building Society. We'll have Andrea Hausmann and Duncan Lowie from Credit Suisse, and Scott Prue from CSG.

In the afternoon, we'll have David Silverman, co-author of Team of Teams, and Jon Willis from Red Hat. I'll be in the networking sessions tonight in the Slack channels and in all the various networking formats, so I look forward to seeing you all there, and I am looking forward to seeing you all for a great day of programming in day two. Thank you so much.

Closing Logistics (Conference Host)

It's the end of an amazing first day at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, and the great thing about it is it's not over yet. Stay tuned for more opportunities to connect, share, and learn with each other.

Now, you probably attended some great sessions today. Well, we want to hear about that. Please enter your feedback for the sessions that you did attend. That feedback is really valuable to the speakers and the programming committee. Feedback is a gift. Sharing is caring. So go to the website and enter your feedback.

Reminder that we have the session slides and the videos available. The videos of the keynote talks are available after they air, which means that all of the keynotes for today are already available, and the videos of all the breakout talks over all three days are also available now. The slides are available for download, both on Dropbox and on GitHub.

And just because we're not together in person doesn't mean we can't have a happy hour. Yep, we have a happy hour. Navigate to Network in the top level menu to get more information about how you can connect with attendees, sponsors, and IT Revolution authors.

Some of the IT Revolution authors are hosting an Ask Me Anything session. We have hosted tables and a general happy hour. Thanks to our sponsors who are serving as table hosts tonight. As I mentioned, some of the IT Revolution authors of some of our favorite books are having an Ask Me Anything session. Check out the general Slack channel to see which authors are doing that.

And then one final parting thought, a lesson that we have to learn from donuts and croissants. Yeah, hear me out. So imagine you're at the virtual happy hour and you're engaged in a discussion. You've got a drink in hand maybe, and you're talking with the group about the day. And a new person joins that discussion. Well, how does your group feel? Does it feel closed off and unwelcoming of new conversation? Closed off like a donut? Or is it like a croissant, more open and welcoming of new people and new topics and new contributions?

So the lesson that I want to leave you with as we go into the happy hour is don't be a donut. All right. With that, have fun at the happy hour.