 So, hello, my name is Jeffrey Sykes. Today I've come to talk to you about an issue of serious gravity. Thanks. There's going to be some more of those. I'm the director of technical operations at VML. We deliver connected experiences for folks. So a few qualifications. First, I'm not an astrophysicist, so this metaphor may collapse in on itself. And second, I'm trying to distill for us what's been a five-year journey. So let me talk about some of the problems that we faced. We were spending about 65% of my team's time on release management. We were building and deploying code across .NET, Java, front-end, PHP, and other Ruby and other platforms. We were doing this with 10 different web content management systems and eight different database systems. One of the things that I realized that why release management is like a black hole is that it sucks joy, it distorts time, and it can cause your team to collapse in on itself. So I was looking for a great quote about release management, and I couldn't find one, so I made this up. Manual release management is super fun. I love it, and it gives you great joy and a real sense of fulfillment. I love scouring config files to make sure I update them correctly. I especially enjoy having my weekends and evenings destroyed. So the first thing is to admit that you have a problem, right? Like if you think that you're good with your manual release management process, you may have already been sucked over the event horizon. Okay, so once you've admitted that you have a problem, then the next step is that you have to begin to realize that how you deliver is not nearly as important as what you deliver, right? Unless you are delivering release management software, the process itself has no inherent value. When you realize that, you begin to realize that what you need to do is standardize on how you deliver not what you deliver, especially at a marketing company, we don't always get to pick text stacks, so you have to be able to standardize the process, not the what. And as you do that, you begin to realize that automating release management is a team sport. So you cannot do this with just ops, you cannot do it with just devs. It is a team sport that involves everybody, including QA and InfoSec. So there's some common pitfalls that you can run into as you're doing this. So control, configuration, and culture are three that I want to talk about today. So when we're looking at those, we want to make sure that in terms of control that we have the right people have skin in the game, right? Gatekeepers only keep what they have to keep. And when you're doing this, that you make sure you have time for QA and demos and that you don't just go through things too quickly. Sorry. And don't forget about configuration. Now, as an ops person, managing configuration files is not exciting, but you should treat configuration as code because configuration needs to be treated inside of source control. And if you don't account for how to move configuration and databases through, you'll never make it. But there's also cultural blockers. So one of the things that you have sometimes is a distrust of automation. So when you're dealing with that, you have to be able to figure out how do you build that confidence in? You also have to deal with it, not my job. Part of what we do is that you don't have enough time for automation. So the automation snowball is you take one task every week that you have to do. You automate it and use the time that you buy back from that to automate the next task. And this is a great tactic, especially when you're coaching people. But automation always leads to new discoveries, right? So you're going along. Everything looks great with your swordsmen. And then all of a sudden you start running into tanks and you suddenly realize that you're not doing as well as you thought you were. What's going to happen is automation is going to find new bottlenecks, right? So in our case, we totally destroyed our QA team. They had no time to do anything and they became the new bottleneck. What I can say with last year is we've been doing awesome stuff on automating QA and that has made a big difference. For us, the culture is more important than the tools, right? You're not even going to ever... I mean, which tools you use aren't going to be a big deal. Now, I still fight the, how do I want to use this particular tool? But the culture itself is the bigger blocker that you have to deal with. And finally, one of the other lessons that we learned is sometimes that you're staring at that little blue dot and you have to take a step back so you can see the entire picture. That's major importance for us. Sorry. And finally, manual release management is like a six-fingered man that killed your father. Like some things in life just cannot be tolerated. So my advice for you is just never give up and you got to keep going. Thanks.