 Welcome everyone. It's time for the next keynote presentation. Hi, my name is Murray Woodman and I work for Morphed, a Sydney-based Drupal agency specializing in GovCMS, design systems, distributions, and personalization. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker for today. 2020 has been a really tough year for us all. We've all had new challenges and it's fair to say our fair share of curveballs along the way. We've really had to adapt to the changing circumstances. This can certainly be said for our next keynote speaker who's had to handle running a Drupal platform. Introducing Nathan Wall, the head of GovCMS who's described the year of 2020 as being epic. Please join with me in extending a very warm welcome to Nathan. Over to you, Nathan. Okay, before I start my talk, can I just get an audio check? Lovely. Hi, Drupal Gov. Good day, Australia. And Kira to my government digital far now in Aotearoa. Now, unlike Lee, who opened Drupal Gov this morning, I'm not a Kiwi, but I did spend 12 fantastic years working in New Zealand. If you're watching from elsewhere in the world, a big welcome. If you'd like to connect, Twitter is probably the best for me. But if you're a member of a government digital team here in Australia, you can find me on GovTeams. When I was told the theme for the conference this year was adapting to change, I thought a lot about the kinds of change that I've experienced. I've been doing digital projects for government now for 24 years. I've moved countries twice to work on projects that I ended up loving. I've seen Drupal 6 become Drupal 7, 8, and 9s coming not far away for us now. And have it used to build so many like fantastic visually beautiful government sites. It's a big difference from what I first started working on all those years ago. Recently, being involved in delivering the project to re-platform GovCMS onto OpenShift or Kubernetes, wow, that was a good call. And reflecting on all of the new design ideas, the new approaches, the standards that have come about, and of course the significant changes in technology, devices, I just about lost my mind when my car downloaded and installed a software update over the internet. I thought the world's finally got modern. Some changes you instigate, others they creep up on you over time. Before I started with GovCMS, believe it or not, I had dark brown hair. Now, I'm not suggesting that GovCMS is the reason I have gray hair now. Rapid continuous change, I think personally, it can be fun if you're the person driving that change. Your team may have really well oiled processes and a depth of experience where dealing with change becomes almost automatic. If it's a similar, familiar thing, it's something that you can deal with easily. And when you've got an experienced team, instincts and muscle memory can take over. And that gives you a good feeling because I can handle this. But sometimes you risk not seeing more subtle changes. Sometimes you can sort of see what's going on with change so well, you can plan your moves like a game of chess. But what do you do when the rules of the game change once the pieces are on the board? I think this is a sentiment many of you are probably going to share. And I'm going to be polite. 2020, yeah, we are just, we're done. So let me tell you a tale in three parts. First, I'm going to show you some scary big numbers. Then I'm going to do a little reflection on how it really impacted the team. And then I'll leave you with some thoughts and things to share. How do I sum up 2020? Now, first, breathe, calm, have another coffee. And if you have to, count to 22,450. Let's go. We knew there was a wave of traffic coming for the platform. But seven times the amount of traffic we normally get, okay, this was insane. Even ignoring that peak, or maybe it's a shark fin. Our baseline amount of traffic has doubled pretty much overnight. We had hundreds of thousands of users desperately seeking authoritative information. Over the busiest period, sort of March to April, the SaaS platform alone served content for more than 110 million user sessions. Traffic spikes and patterns, like we've never seen on GovCMS before. This year alone is more than 500 million page views. But in March, it was 2 billion hits on the SaaS platform. It's the first time I've used the word billion in a legitimate sentence at work. We were watching closely as these numbers started to unfold. But I think they even caught us by surprise just how big they were and how quickly they were growing. And of course, throw in a global health pandemic that's turned everything upside down just for good measure. Why not? There were audible gasps. We did have people running to their laptops. And we decided it was time to open a virtual war room. When we go to Red Alert, it's all hands to battle stations. And yeah, it sometimes feels like that. We have collective experience and talent across a wide group. So the way we progress that is we get them all together in one place. Now, as a manager, I shouldn't need to lead from the front. But that's my first instinct. Armour up, lead a cavalry charge to victory. We had some really interesting engineering challenges with this sequence of events. And I couldn't do what my instincts were telling me to do. I didn't have the depth of technical knowledge. So all I could do was put the shields up. My role as a leader is to protect the team, to encourage people to stand up and guide them safely along their journey. I thought about this a lot. And the best analogy I've come up with is I needed to be the air traffic controller, not the pilot landing the plane. And it was essential that I didn't micromanage the team needed space for some creativity. The priorities and expectations of the team were known. They've handled incidents and issues before, but not like this one. So they needed time and space to figure out what the solution might look like. Again, my role as a leader here was to front the conversations with stakeholders, to look over the fence every now and then and see what the team was doing to seek out their advice. I didn't have the depth of technical knowledge. And I wanted to help the team articulate their progress, to acknowledge their success. And if the outcome was actually a failure, to better understand what might have caused that and what our next options could be. It became pretty clear that this is not what normal looks like. You know the story about building the plane while you're flying it? We at GovCMS had been thinking about spikes and changes in traffic and how it would affect the platform. We'd anticipated that some sites would surge from time to time. After all, we do government stuff. So all it takes is one event to be front page news and a single site gets a burst of activity. And it could be a pretty big spike over a short period of time. The platform was implemented to deal with this. At a big scale, even the best built Drupal website still needs some infrastructure that can scale in behind it. And we also have some additional layers in our caching strategy. Drupal on its own can't live up to that kind of scale easily. What we didn't quite anticipate, though, was that need to play whack-a-mole. At this kind of scale, size matters. The rules of the game had changed. The little things that weren't previously a problem were now a problem. And we had to change some of our priorities, but we didn't change our approach. Our change playbook still held true. We had a backlog of issues. We spent some time refining them, looking at what some reasonable acceptance criteria might be. The team worked on a solution. Then they figured out how they were going to best implement it. We measured that impact. And it was kind of rinse and repeat, iterate. We're in the middle of navigating a let's face it, a fairly major crisis. And it had an unexpected positive side effect. Our war rooms would usually only be active for a few hours, maybe a day if there was something to follow up on at the end of the recovery or response to an incident. This time around, our war room was open for weeks. And I was very conscious of the personal and professional pressure that the team was under. We usually do our war rooms in person with white boards and over the shoulder problem solving. But then I noticed something interesting had happened. We'd switched to a virtual space. We had to. And that meant that managers like me and the exec that I report to could observe the conversations that the team was having pretty much real time. And they didn't have to interrupt the flow of the team. The simple fact that the team was sharing information with themselves gave us most of the information that we needed. I found that personally reassuring. It gave me a much stronger sense of we can handle this. Everything's on track. We can deal with this. I was still thinking though, how long could we sustain this? So this leads me on to some thoughts about the team and what we've ended up doing. Our biggest challenge, avoiding isolation while being in isolation. Small side note, audio we show as issues aside, etc. Is anyone else like weirded out by virtual conferences? I am a little bit. I'm the biggest introvert in the world. And yet here I am talking to a computer monitor. I still find it a little odd. And I'm hoping it doesn't put me off my game. But given I'm an introvert, what does it say when I'm craving interaction with other people? What about those people in your team that are huge extroverts? You know you have them. Suddenly their only interaction is perhaps with their partner or maybe their dog. We worked hard to just keep people connected. And it was simple things like cameras on when you're talking. Encourage a bit of interaction. If you were getting silence in a meeting, silence was not exactly endorsement. So encourage people to participate if they weren't really joining in. When change happens, do you sound the retreat or do you turn and defend yourself? Your perspective on change could come from a variety of places. It could be a challenge and an opportunity. You can choose to be threatened by it. You can embrace it, move with it, learn, adapt, grow, and then hopefully find some time to look back every now and then and learn. How you react to change can also be heavily influenced by your culture, your own unique situation, your own life experience. Not everyone is going to have the same reaction. In a, dare I say, more normal situation, you hopefully have time and headspace to figure out your plan. But how do you remain focused, though, when your first thought is escape to safety? I decided I was going to take back control over 2020. I acknowledged I didn't have all the answers, both to myself and to my team. And I was going to be okay with that. I had a job to do, and I was bloody well going to do it. Hunkering down didn't mean cutting myself off from my community and peers. And I wouldn't be afraid to seek support from others and the wisdom and guidance from a mentor. I'm very fortunate to have the boss that I have. Those of you that know her, Sharon Clarkson, she's the mother of GovCMS. She's my coach, my mentor, and my best friend. Yes, I do have a best friend at work. I spoke to Sharon knowing full well that I was going to get clear, honest, and straightforward guidance. She's going to help me regain a little bit of perspective and make sure that we were heading in the right direction. There were some details we had to focus on. And her advice was something like this. The platform must not fail. But it's not that simple. She went on to say, we're running a whole of government platform, and we're hosting a number of high-profile, high-traffic sites, and we're providing information to Australians. That's our day job. And that hasn't changed. But our tolerance right now for failure has changed. If we were to do something that cut off information, cut off access to some critical information that people really needed right now, that would be a much bigger problem. So we need to be more careful about how and where we're innovating, how and where, what changing we're putting in. She coined the phrase, you know, informed caution. It was don't do things crazy, but also keep doing something. Sharon and I have worked together on previously on some pretty epic things, including the response to the Christchurch earthquakes. We had something in our collective experience to draw on. And we both agreed that if a plague of locusts come, our public service careers are done. I did say to Sharon, no, here we go again. While I was preparing this talk, I came across this image. Now, I'm not a religious person. So for me, this is not a question or a challenge of faith. But I do appreciate the insights and teachings of others. If only I'd seen this image seven months ago. It feels like a lot longer than that sometimes. I had to keep reminding myself several times a day, we got this. I got this. I deal with change all the time. Crisis situations and emergencies. Yup, been there, done that, got the t shirt. So I can handle this. It was really vital that we had the right people involved. It would have been very easy for us to just throw up the shields and then try and fix things in complete isolation. But that's not how we like to work. And it's even more important when you're dealing with the bigger issues. So wherever we could, we involved, I don't want to use the word customer. So we involved our agency teams that use our services, both their business and their technical teams. We had our service providers in the room as part of that war room exercise. They had the engineering experience for the platform. We had our operations team in the room. We provide a SAS distribution for some of our Gov CMS users. So it's that team that really understands that application. And our leadership team was looking at things from a government's perspective, not to make sure that we had, you know, ridiculous process, but it at least had some process. Real time and as needed communication. Pretty much like you would do if you were in a sprint. We built on the tools that the team would be using for other ways or for other things. It's an adaptation there. Check-in time every day was just like an agile stand-up. But it was about the team, not about our progress. Restructuring our meeting times. Again, that wasn't about making sure people were working. We could see that. But I was trying to help keep them connected. Our leadership team also put heads together pretty regularly, kind of like what you would do with backlog grooming. Are we working on the right things? Have new issues popped up? The thing I missed most was the over-the-shoulder listening, the conversations that would happen around you. And bumping into people in the kitchen. The most interaction I've recently had in my kitchen is with the fridge. We also knew that we needed a Plan B. And I'm really, really lucky that we didn't have to rely on Plan B to any great extent. We put measures in place so if we had to, the team could operate in smaller independent cells. We worked with agencies to figure out who was most affected and perhaps most at risk. Having teams using a common set of tools like Drupal meant that if we needed to, the public service could move resources around from one place to another. If you can publish content on a Drupal site over here, with limited training, you could publish content on a Drupal site over here. And yeah, we did help a few teams do some things quickly. Either they didn't have capacity or capability. So roll up our sleeves and give them a hand. But even just having those more direct lines of communication helped. The assistance was going to be there if someone pulled the alarm. Now I'm just going to pause and reflect for a little bit. Getting ready for today, I've actually reflected a lot. And a significant intake of coffee helped. Here are a few of the things that came to mind. The core ethos of GovCMS still holds true. We have two major principles that drive what we do. You're not allowed to break someone else's stuff, and you must share. Well, holy mother, mother of all data centers, holy Amazon, mother of all data centers, pray for us now and in the hour of our outage. We managed to do a 99.98% uptime. I'll take that victory. And as for sharing, well, did someone mention cake? Never underestimate the power of baked goods to help bring your team together. This is a statement you'll hear in so many different places. Do or do not, there is no try. It's part of our pop culture. For someone like me, who's a Star Wars fanboy, you grew up living and believing this sort of thing. But life isn't always this cut and dry. What's wrong with trying? We didn't always have the answer, certainly straight away. Many of the issues that had surfaced hadn't been important before. So it meant that our battle plan wasn't fully developed. So we experimented, then validated, and then iterated. And that outcome might not be as certain as Yoda perhaps desires, but it's still doing something. The team was still learning the new rules of the game. There had, however, definitely been a pretty big disruption. Was it time to throw out our change playbook? Well, no, it wasn't. We ran for the trees early in March. And the group that I work in was lucky that a good number of the team had worked from home periodically. But we hadn't done it at scale over a longer period of time. I was very aware that just as you could perceive barriers that might be ahead of you, if you're head down and if you're focused on the immediate things or running so hard, you're not sure which direction you're going in, you might not see some of the real barriers that will actually trip you up. So it's important to pause every now and then, lift up your head, look at your line of sight and check which way the wind is blowing. This wasn't normal, but it wasn't new either. We knew what to do and how to do it. It was just a question of scale. Our virtual war room was open for weeks instead of days, but it did its function. Reaching out to the community, we did some intelligence gathering. That helped us plan coverage, forecasted the impacts. It kept our team and our executive formed about known events and more planned traffic spikes. And I'm thankful that agencies did their best to share information with us in advance. Sometimes that was just 15 minutes warning via a rushed text message, but hey, it was better than none. And it helped us keep in front of the wave. Perhaps it's do it fast, there is always try, and if you stumble, try again. Now, that's not as punchy as a line in a movie script. I call it nuanced. We had to ask ourselves, where do we start? Can we adapt a solution for something that we already have and solve another problem? Should we start with a big issue that's got the biggest impact and then by fixing that, do we hope we fix some of the smaller issues? Or do we have to fix all of the little smaller issues and hope that it leads to a bigger solution? In the end, where we started didn't really matter. By testing, validating, retesting, measuring, monitoring, that narrowed down the variables. Some things worked and some things didn't quite work the way we would like them to. Small sprints, frequent retrospectives. I think sprints probably not the right word here. Maybe it's mad dash. I'm not talking a two-week period. This was happening in two-day, three-day cycles at most. I am biased, but I do think my team's pretty awesome. And sorry if I just broke the internet. Hey, Kat's in a keynote. These furry monsters are part of my team. They participate regularly in team meetings, and they frequently criticize my time management skills. Not enough napping in their view. You're on mute. Can you hear me? Your audio is breaking up. These are some of the most common phrases I've uttered this year. Not hearing conversations around me was personally really hard. As well as being an introvert, and I figure if I say that 10 times, you're actually going to believe me. I have Asperger's, and the way it manifests for me is I don't read people's faces very well when it comes to their emotions. They need to tell me how they're feeling. So I tried to make sure things like, are you okay? How are you doing? What's for lunch was talked about regularly in the team. I needed that input to help me figure out if the team was doing okay, because I had no idea if I was doing a good job. Seriously, I was making this up as I was going along. And eventually my team told me they could be better. Then they told me that I could be managing the team better. Quote, this second team meeting is a crock of shit. We're taking over the agenda and we decided we need some laugh time. Well, finally, my team had settled enough that they weren't just reacting. They were now taking steps to control their own situation. I cannot convey the sense of relief I had when I could step back into my introverted shell. For months, I had been taking things a little too seriously, trying to look after all the people around me. And I forgot that I needed time for myself to be a little silly. It's good for the soul. It's okay to not be okay about any of this. We set aside time during the week for silly games and informal team chats. And I laughed so hard I couldn't see for the tears. I also regularly asked the team, how's your week? And they had to answer with a gift. I really got to know my team better. And they confirmed that they're all weird, in a special awesome way. It was a great way to ease the tensions a little bit too. Asperger, survival technique, tick. What can I say to my team other than, I have no real words. So it's thank you. I'm so proud of my team. And as public servants, we didn't let anyone down. To all of you, thank you for being awesome. We did it without yelling at anyone, either. Okay, there was that one time when my tabby cat sat on my keyboard and tried to brute force or more like but force my password. And yeah, I kind of yelled at him like a drill sergeant, but he forgives me. I remind myself every day that even in the darkest of times, good things do happen. And here's an example. A year ago, if you'd said to me that the public service would completely smash through barriers for working in a more flexible way and maintain, if not increased productivity and dramatically change how people manage and focus on their work-life balance, I'll be polite again. It would have been an eyebrow-raising moment, followed by a few choice words. So I ask you all to use this accomplishment as a reminder that change isn't always bad. Take a moment to reflect on what you've done and achieved. And thank you to everyone who worked hard to keep their team safe, both physically and mentally. 2020 has really been challenging. And okay, change, it's inevitable, but give me a break. This was like being in the eye of a hurricane for months. We weren't really in the storm, but it was circling around us. Intense stress levels, serious consequences. I mean, this had national scale and huge personal impact all at the same time. So I've counted to 22,450, and I found my happy place again. I'm ready for 2021, but I'm also perfectly fine if the space-time continuum shifts a little bit, like about two months. I'm actually excited about 2021. GovCMS as a platform continues to evolve. We can take the lessons of 2020 and make 2021 the year of greater resilience. Things like a movement towards the static web. That's an eyebrow razor for me as well, not in an alarming way. It's more, tell me more. The transition to Drupal 9 is the next big challenge that the community is going to face. If you're on Drupal 8, you can't relax, but it will be easier. If you're on Drupal 7, may I suggest a war room to get you started? You've got some serious planning and a much bigger, more complex project to do. At GovCMS, we're going to need some time to make this roadmap a little clearer. Before we dig in and sort out the detail, we've got some higher priorities, and that includes staff leave. We need to make sure that people take a break and they can recharge for a little bit. So some of this detail, it's going to take a little bit of time, and please bear with us. Thank you for sharing your time with me today and allowing me this moment of reflection and to share some GovCMS love. I hope this leads you to spend some time on your own reflections about 2020 and what the future may bring for you and your teams. If you need a chat, a piece of cake, or just to be silly with someone other than a teammate, reach out. Excellent. Thank you very much, Nathan. It's really, really interesting and informative and entertaining. I can't hear the applause, so I'm imagining it. That's right, yes. Now, I'm just going to check the discussion from... I'm just got a Murray online as well from Morph, just because we had a few technical issues earlier. I'm just going to bring him in now. So I'm just going to swap myself. Hi, Murray. Hi, guys. Can you hear me okay? Not yet. You can. All right. I've got the thumbs up from Nathan there. Cool. All right. We're going. I'm so sorry about what happened before everyone. You saw an impression of me doing the robot and not saying anything. It was a beautiful introduction, Nathan. I was totally setting the scene for your presentation. So yeah. But yeah, thank you very much for Nathan for that. It was great to hear all the ups and downs and the ins and outs of 2020. Sincerely hope 2021 is much better for you and no locusts appear. So thank you very much. Thanks, Murray. All right. We've got exactly a minute and 50 seconds. Do we have any burning questions that need to be answered or kill? Oh, there's a cat. Real cat in the keynote. Victory. Let's have a quick look. I'll see if there's any questions. This is the one that I tried to but force my password. So apparently there's lots of yes to the cat. There is applause coming through. Let's just try to find a regular attendee. Just trying to see if there's any questions. I think we may be, we may be good. Oh, hey, yeah. I've got one from Tim. How do you actually measure uptime? Okay. Let me answer that one really quickly. Tim, as multi layers to that, we have obviously various components in the platform that make up GovCMS. So we do measure things like uptime for the infrastructure, uptime for some of the supporting tools. And we also measure uptime for individual websites, but not every single page on every single website. Our main focus, as Sharon said, the platform must not fail. Okay. That's good. That's actually two people have asked that question. So that's great. Same question twice. Anyone else have any other questions except about the cats? Excellent. I think that's great. That's excellent. Thank you for your time, Nathan. Of course, anyone who'd like to speak to Nathan can do in the, into the meeting hub and just ask a request. What percentage of traffic was captured by the CDN? A lot of it. Okay. That answers that. So thank you very much for the lunch break and please enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Thanks, Akil.