 What am I talking about? DevOps plunking. So this is a cave out of Australia. This is really a talk about environmental boundaries and context in situational awareness. But caves are a good example of this. I've been having a lot of fun reading up on caves lately. So the thing you need to remember is the system is constrained by its environment. You don't think of elephants as swimmers. Lots of large four-legged animals are actually really good swimmers. Horses can swim. Lots of things swim, you throw them in water. They have to because otherwise they drown and die, which is about adaptation. So caves, like mountains and valleys and islands, a lot of species that live in there evolve in isolation. And sometimes they turn into elephants. No, that's not true. These are actually in there to mine salt with their tusks. A lot of herbivores don't get all the minerals they need in their diet, so they have to find it somewhere else. But they're troglosines. They visit the caves. They don't live there permanently. When you think of caves, you really think of these guys, right? Those are troglophiles. They're cave lovers, it's the bats. And bats are really cool. They have winged mammals. It's a lot of bats. They can't live in all caves. And this is a big DevOps takeaway for me, right? A lot of DevOps work is about transition and handoffs. They leave it down and come back at night because then they're always in the dark. They figured out how to live in the cave and go outside and it not be a problem. And when they get home, they poop all day long. This guy is actually standing next to a mountain of bat guano. That is nothing but poop. This actually ends up replacing the sun in this ecosystem. They don't have light. And something has to do something with the poop. So these cockroaches come in and a lot of bugs in this ecosystem evolves and eventually get troglobites where that crab and that crayfish, they're fully adapted to that environment. They cannot leave anymore. Environment's changed and you should not over-adapt. This is a blind cave fish out of Mexico. Eyes are expensive, they burn a lot of energy. It's been in the cave so long, it just got rid of them completely. But it can't get outside and enter the bright light anymore. And you gotta be careful about this in your own organization. If you don't get out to events like this, if you're not involved in your local community, you're gonna start assimilating maybe too much. Starts to make too much sense. And then when the environment changes quickly, like here where you had a roof collapse and now sunlight can hit that guano and you end up with this really neat garden inside where this cave once was because even mountains move over time, right? It takes a while and you don't have to change but survival is not mandatory. There's your dimming slide for anybody playing DevOps Bingo. What else is there? Is there another one? All right, I'm gonna talk about my model a little bit. So yeah, this is situational awareness. Here again, what you probably don't realize that Eagle's about to fly away because of the context. I had a pet rabbit and a pet cat. They got along great inside. If I put them in the yard, that rabbit would have killed it because of the environment it was in. So yeah, I tend to sort metrics into five families. This is a model I've been working on. I'm gonna do an open space if anybody wants to talk about it. I need more feedback. I can model the cave or your build environment but these are generally where I'm looking to measure things. So infrastructure environment, you're always bounded by this. Where's your cave at? Is that at a temperature where bats can live and there's plenty of food around? Is it way high up in something icy where nothing's gonna live? Because this can't happen everywhere. You've got instructions and recipes that are bounded. You could be by that environment. You could be making scones in a kitchen and you need certain equipment and ingredients. If you're trying to create a sunless ecosystem in the dark, you need a mountain of poop apparently. Then you've got integration, integrated performance. So you know what this thing's supposed to look like. Your instructions and your environment and you've got an expectation. How's that working out in real life? Maybe not so much. And these are newer ones. These last two are a bit catch-alls. How's it impacting people internally? Do you have good work-life balance? They look like they're having fun. Who's going to clean all that up? Right? And what about your external actors? What does that cake taste like when you finally get it out to someone? If you're not cash flow positive, if you're not making money, you're not gonna stay in business but your customers probably aren't gonna be happier if your employees aren't either. So that's all I got. Come talk to me at Open Spaces if you'd like to give me some feedback. Thank you. All right, thanks a lot.