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Ned Rorem 90th Birthday Celebration at NY Festival of Song
Last night the New York Festival of Song saluted Ned Rorem on his 90th birthday year with a special concert at Merkin Hall. I was delighted to be there for the festivities. NYFOS co-director Steven Blier provided informative notes in the program describing the long relationship between Rorem and NYFOS, which has presented special birthday celebration concerts for him several times over the past few decades. All deserved, of course, as Rorem is one of our musical treasures. The maestro himself was present to enjoy the program and acknowledge the plaudits of the audience at the end.
Two excellent singers were recruited for the occasion: Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and tenor Andrew Garland. Blier and his co-director, Michael Barrett, were at the keyboards, dividing up the collaborative duties and joining together on the two-piano pieces. Performances of Rorem songs were interspersed with readings from his diaries, interviews, and articles, and there were interludes of songs by other composers who bore some relationship to Rorem as influences, mentors, friends and rivals. By sheer coincidence, it seems, all the composers on the program were, to some degree at least, gay, which turned it into a very gay-friendly evening indeed.
An event like this prompts the question whether any enterprising record label will take up the venture of a complete recorded edition of Rorem's songs, since he's written hundreds of them, many not readily available on current releases. (It would help if all the historical releases from LP days could be digitized and made available….)
Now that Carter is gone, Rorem becomes in a sense the dean of American composers, and it would also be great if instrumentalists and orchestras would take up his work as well. As a youngster first coming to grips with "classical" music, I was not partial to vocal music and so didn't really come into contact with his work until I picked up an LP that included his 3rd Symphony (Turnabout). I fell in love with the piece, and that led me to his songs and helped me to develop interest in the American art song repertory. Rorem's instrumental music is always conceived vocally, even if singers are not involved, since that is the modality for his musical thought.
The concert was being recorded, and I hope that it achieves a release to the public soon! I want to hear it again!!
Tags: Andrew Garland, Kate Lindsey, Michael Barrett, Ned Rorem, New York Festival of Song, Steven Blier


The Cheltenham Center for the Arts is dedicated to making the arts an integral part of people's lives, as well as supporting the artists who live and work in the vicinity. We accomplish this by offering inspiring instruction and programming that both meets the interests, and broadens the horizons of our community.
Since its founding, CCA has served as a venue for high quality classes, exhibitions and theater programs promoting regional artists and showcasing the work of children, adults and outstanding faculty in our community.


text: ===September=== {{newsitem|Travel giant Thomas Cook has ceased trading|September 23|An estimated 150,000 Britons abroad awaiting repatriation. Check your travel plans if booked through Thomas Cook.[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/23/thomas-cook-collapse-stranded-british-tourists-passengers-repatriation/]}} {{newsitem|Tear gas fired in [[Egypt]]|September 21|Tear gas has been fired to disperse protesters in Egypt, at some of the first demonstrations since President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi took power in 2014. Hundreds of Egyptians filled Tahrir Square in Cairo - a key site of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution - demanding his resignation. Demonstrations also reportedly took place elsewhere around the country. There have been some arrests, but other people remain on the streets. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49777287]}} {{newsitem|Bus bombing kills 12 people near [[Iraq]]i city of Kerbala|September 21|A bus bombing killed at least 12 people and wounded several others on Friday near Iraq's holy city of Kerbala, south of Baghdad, a statement from Iraqi security services said. Such attacks in the mostly Shi'ite Muslim south of Iraq have been rare in recent years, especially after the territorial defeat of Islamic State in Iraq in 2017 and the routing of its al Qaeda predecessors in the mid-2000s. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security/bus-bombing-kills-12-people-near-iraqi-city-of-kerbala-security-services-idUSKBN1W528R]}} {{newsitem|Bushfires in Queensland Australia|September 9|Peregian Beach and Marcus Beach residents have been told to evacuate in a northerly direction towards [[Noosa]].[https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/queensland-bushfires-full-list-of-bushfire-warnings/news-story/489c080c297ee4e275963838feebdfbb]}} {{newsitem|Hurricane Dorian a Category 5 storm|September 1st|Hurricane Dorian strengthened into a powerful Category 5 storm as it bore down on the [[Bahamas]] Sunday morning with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph. More than 20 million Americans could feel the storm's impact within a few days. Emergency services contact number for the Bahamas: http://www.royalbahamaspolice.org/services/reporting_emergencies.php More on the hurricane [https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/hurricane-dorian-update-category-4-storm-landfall-latest-track-path-models-forecast-2019-09-01/]}}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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The epic modern myth comes alive on Broadway through an innovative mix of animatronics, puppetry, music and stagecraft. KING KONG tells the story of an ambitious young actress named Ann Darrow and the maverick filmmaker who promises to make her a star. Together, they voyage from the bustling streets of 1930s New York to an uncharted island to capture the world's greatest wonder. At the center of this 21st-century theatrical reimagining: a 2,000-pound, 20-foot high gorilla and the woman who risks everything to help him.
Directed and choreographed by Olivier winner Drew McOnie (In the Heights), KING KONG features an electrifying new score by Marius de Vries (La La Land) and Eddie Perfect (Beetlejuice, the upcoming musical), and a book by Jack Thorne, the Olivier Award-winning writer of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Don't miss this exhilarating, emotional encounter with a legend that's always been too big to contain.
King Kong on the Thanksgiving Day Parade
King Kong - Now on Broadway
Broadway's King Kong puppet is a marvel of technology and stagecraft
Behind the Scenes of the King Kong Commercial


7 Result(s) for Real estate investing in Devils Lk, ND. The most recent discussion taking place in the area asks: Looking for Funding in the Ohio Area. There are 21 real estate investors in Devils lk, North Dakota.
IF YOU ARE A BUY AND Hold Buyer IN Ohio, Contact ME AND WE Will Talk!!!
Wholesale House in Florida. Comps are Around $80000-$85000. Selling for $63000.
I Have a Potential Deal in Place on a Cashflowing 62 Unit Apartment Complex.


To support our client base in maintaining their assets ATC have put in place a web based Return Materials Authorization system.This allows a user to login to request an RMA number and once approved by ATC staff.
Once the approval is given, the client can ship the product to ATC for repair. The RMA system will notify ATC of this and immediately start a workflow process that tracks the investigation and repair of the module.
The RMA system will confirm receipt of the goods by issueing an email to the orignator.Once the module is shipped, the RMA System will send an email notification to the originator.Being a web based system allows a client to check on the status of the module at any time 24 x 7 without having to send emails or make phone calls in an effort to find out status information of the module.
ATC believes this to be a better way to support clients especially those located outside of Australia who are on different time zones.
To request an RMA number, a client needs to have an account to access ATC's Member Zone.
Please Contact the web site administrator to request an account be setup if you don't have one. Click on the RMA System Tool Icon to lodge an ATC Module for repair and refer to RMA User Guide for instructions how to lodge an RMA.


Fate and destiny is mentioned quite often in the context of weddings, but nothing compares to Kalyna and Chris' love story. Their window to meet each other was so narrow, it's amazing that they were able to find each other. Chris happened to see Kalyna in a rec centre parking lot, and even though he missed his chance to say hello, he got up the courage to leave his number on her car windshield. Kalyna thought this was a joke, but called the number anyways, met up with Chris and his side kick friend, and before they knew it, it became something really special. A lot has happened since then, but everyone at the wedding would agree that it was truly wonderful to see these two tie the knot. Congratulations Kalyna & Chris!!


Scroll on for our ultimate guide to Halloween Movie 1978 Photos.
Halloween Movie 1978 Photos, Girls Halloween Costumes 2018. Boys Halloween Costumes 2018. Our Top 2018 Halloween Themes. Day of the Dead Halloween Costume Ideas 2018. Ahalooza.com provides a fundamentally better way for consumers to shop. Best Halloween stores offer licensed costumes, masks, spooky decorations and everything you need to throw a party while looking your Halloween Movie 1978 Photos.
Behind the scenes photos from John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween and it's 1980 sequel. Halloween theme by John Carpenter.


The students designed furniture for the urban spaces of Science City during a four weeks workshop. Afterwards the furniture was fabricated at the assistant professorship for Architecture and Digital Fabrication. Depending on their orientation the furniture works as a communicative seating area, a bench or a private armchair. By rolling the furniture over the campus it can be freely arranged into a multitude of different configurations. Thus the users playfully engage the design of their environment.


Chancellor Masrour Barzani met today Deputy Secretary-General of the European External Action Service Jean-Christophe Belliard. Both sides discussed regional developments and bilateral relations between Kurdistan Region and the European Union. On Iraq, Chancellor Barzani welcomed the recent progress in Erbil-Baghdad relations, and encouraged Mr. Belliard to play a stronger role helping both governments settle disputes according to mechanisms outlined in Iraq's Constitution. During the meeting, they also reviewed ongoing negotiations between political factions over a new KRG Cabinet. The EU Ambassador to Iraq Ramon Blecua also attended the meeting.


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You are here: Home » Property News >> Mumbai » Mumbai's old development plan to remain in force till Aug-end
Mumbai's old development plan to remain in force till Aug-end
The city's new development plan (2034) will now come into force on September 1, the state government said on June 22. Till then, the existing development plan of 1991 will continue.
A Development Plan has two parts: the actual sheets that show the land use by using various colours and the rules used to implement the land use. Failure to upload the DP-2034 sheets on the BMC website has meant that the public has not had access to the changes that have been made. Aware of this glaring omission, the government, in two notifications issued on June 22 evening, said the period for submitting suggestions/objections for the Excluded Plan will be 30 days from the date the BMC uploads the DP sheets on its website.
In the Development Control and Promotion Regulations- 2034, there are 70 regulations. To this the government made 165 changes called as Excluded Plan (EP). Since the EP changed the character of the draft DP-2034 as sanctioned by the BMC general body, the Maharashtra Regional Town Planning Act requires that the government invite suggestions and objections from the public. The Sanctioned Plan of DP-2034 was to come into force from June 23 but will now be kept in abeyance.
"It's a timely move else we would have had to refer to three sets of rules: 1991 DCR, the DCR 2034 published by BMC and DCPR 2034 as desired by the state government. It would have completely stalled all work," said architect Vilas Nagalkar. Early this week, various bodies such as MCHI-CREDAI, PEATA and NAREDCO met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis requesting him to delay the enforcement of DP-2034 till the EP is sanctioned. While government is hopeful it will be done by August, N Shende, director Town Planning, recently said it is likely to be finally approved by the year-end. PEATA members, however, said it is more likely that it will be done early next year. Yomesh Rao, a member of PEATA, said the government should not have rushed with the sanctioning of DP-2034. "The BMC must take time in carrying out changes to the DP sheets. The changes made require change of zoning, changing the colours on the DP sheet and this must be done meticulously," he said.
Clara Lewis, Economic Times, Mumbai


during this incisive and really notable e-book, Ian Burkitt significantly addresses the dualism among brain and physique, idea and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the psychological and the fabric, which hang-out the post-Cartesian world.
Drawing at the paintings of up to date social theorists and feminist writers, he argues that idea and the feel of being someone is inseparable from physically practices inside social family, even if such energetic adventure could be abstracted and elevated upon by using symbols. Overcoming vintage dualisms in social inspiration, Burkitt argues that our bodies are usually not basically the constructs of discourses of energy: also they are efficient, communicative, and invested with strong capacities for altering the social and common worlds. He is going directly to ponder how such powers might be constructed in additional moral different types of family members and activities.
Quine and Davidson are one of the best thinkers of the 20 th century. Their impression on modern philosophy is moment to none, and their impression can be strongly felt in disciplines corresponding to linguistics and psychology. This ebook is dedicated to either one of them, but additionally questions a few of their uncomplicated assumptions.
During this brilliant selection of essays masking a extensive diversity of fields, from Darwinism and the worldwide inhabitants explosion to poultry observing, distinct scientist and thinker Sir Julian Huxley issues out new frontiers for clinical examine and reaffirms his trust within the intimate connection of the sciences, rather biology, with the urgent social difficulties of the current and destiny.
Russell Hardin provides a brand new explication of David Hume's ethical and political conception. With Hume, he holds that our normative perspectives should be scientifically defined yet they can not be justified as actual. Hume argued for the mental foundation of such perspectives. specifically, he argued for sympathy because the mirroring of the mental sensations and feelings of others.


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Graphic Art & Design
Elephant Printable Coloring Pages
MakinBacon
Dumbo Big Fun Book to Color ~ Li'l Sweet Elephant (2011)
The Smurfs Printable Coloring Pages
The Smurfs are a wonderfully simple creation of Belgian cartoonist Peyo, who launched the lovable blue characters in 1958 via a comic strip. Over time an entire community of Smurfs emerged, with over 100 characters now part of the storyline; all...
Fun Penguin Printables
Penguins are one of the most affable birds there are in the world, and among all wildlife rates among the top as far as approachability and desirability of people to interact with. That of course appeals wonderfully to children, who probably...
Grinch Christmas Printable Coloring Pages
It seems because the Grinch had a big change of heart at Christmas, starting off as a villain but then transforming into a hero because of his decision not to steal Christmas, children and adults have an affection for the character, whom they...
Christmas Word Puzzle, Word Search Printables
Word games are a lot of fun for both children and adults, and during the Christmas season they offer some enjoyment for families and friends when included in the activities when visiting one another. To that end I've collected some great printable...
Thanksgiving Coloring Pages, Printables
Printables are a wonderful way to to express oneself during the Thanksgiving season and day, with numerous Thanksgiving designs and themes being offered for free on the Internet. Included in the Thanksgiving themes are Pilgrims, Indians, turkeys,...
Elephants are a fantastic mammal, with some very interesting and distinctive characteristics that is attractive and fascinating to all that view and enjoy them. African male elephants are the largest of the species, standing up to 13 feet tall and weighing in at as much as 15,000 pounds or more.
Their long legs, huge bodies, big ears, extended trunk, and amazing tusks make them unique in the animal kingdom, and great material for photos and art.
Children are especially enamored by the giant elephants, viewing them with awe and respect when the see them for the first time, and afterwards as they digest the size in relationship to themselves. That's amplified even more if they are fortunate enough to hear the sound an elephant makes.
With that in mind, elephants are terrific material to use as coloring pages with children, and that's especially true in the early stages of coloring development, as they are large in size, even when used as illustrative images to color.
Printable coloring pages of elephants are readily available on the Internet, and I've gathered together a group of them here that can be immediately downloaded and printed out for the children in your life to use immediately.
Mama Elephant and Baby Coloring Page
As children relate to images of animals and their babies, this one of a mama elephant with her baby is a good place to start for a coloring page, as it will elicit comments from a child which can generate interaction and opportunities to talk about the giant animals.
After all, we don't only want to give a child something to do, but also create situations where we are able to spend time with them while they're engaged in their coloring activities. Of course there are times when we want them to color on their own, and they will feel the same as well. But for those times when interaction is part of the desired outcome, images like this are good starting points to launch a conversation with a child in a natural way.
More Printable Coloring Pages
Tinkerbell Online Printable Coloring Pages
For those familiar with the life and story of Tinkerbell, they know that when she saw the toy ballerina that she wanted to become like here. That's the premise behind this printable with Tinkerbell sitting there with a contemplative and somewhat...
Lion King Printable Coloring Pages
The Lion King is one of the most beloved animated films of all time, as the story of a young lion who lost his father and a throne, while eventually coming back to avenge the murder and retake his throne, is one that has captured the imagination of..
North Pole Printables, Coloring Pages
Every child imagines at times during their lives what it's like where Santa, the reindeer, and the elves live, and that makes for great opportunities to create terrific creations of what the North Pole would look like if Santa in fact did live...
Printable of Elephant Spraying Itself
One of the funnest things for a person or child to see with an elephant is when they extract water with their long snout and then spray it all over themselves. It's an unforgettable image when first seen, and one that we never grow tired of looking at.
With this elephant printable that is exactly what is going on with this happy elephant, with the humorous addition of a bird getting a ride on the trunk while the water is shooting out. The fish looking up from the water is another nice touch children will love.
This would be a good elephant illustration to color in for children of intermediate skills, as it offers the large body of the elephant as an easy canvass, but includes the foliage, water, bird and fish as additional objects to use different colors to fill them in.
If you have children of different ages and skill levels doing the work, this is a design that would satisfy most age and skill groups.
Big, Individual Elephant
Like the first elephant illustration, this is one that would cater nicely to new and budding little artists, for the obvious reason of having large areas to color in.
It's a little different in that it includes a little more detail, like a more defined trunk, ears and leg muscles.
Dora the Explorer Printable Coloring Pages
For over a decade the popular animated series "Dora the Explorer" has delighted children as the watch the wonderful little girl and her terrific and interesting friends interact with one another as they participate in all sorts of a
Coloring Page of Elephant Drinking Water
One of the more desirable practices of an elephant to see is when it takes up some water through its long snout. To see the water in a container quickly disappear from the extraction process is very cool.
This image of an elephant doing just that should provide children a compelling picture to color in, as the chatter about the actions the elephant is taking, and of course if they've seen one do this in real life, will no doubt remind you of that fact as they happily color in the elephant drawing water from the bucket.
Snowman Coloring Page Printables
Online Snowman Coloring Page Printables
There are quite a lot of snowman printable on the Internet coming in a variety of designs and ancillary subject matter. Some are made to cut out and build your own snowman, while others are built to fill in a blank snowman figure. We have one of...
Elephant and Ostrich Coloring Page
Finally we have a great printable of a mama elephant and her baby, along with an ostrich and several babies. This is a much more detailed drawing, one that any child would love to look at and color in.
There are a lot of elements in the drawing which will allow a child to use different colors with. There is some water in the upper left of the picture, the sky, some tree outlines, grass, fencing, and of course the elephants and ostriches.
Overall this has just about everything a child could want to color in, and it would be terrific for those looking for more of a challenge.
Elephant Printables
Elephants are wonderful material for printables to color in by children, and those here show a nice cross section of what is available out there.
While there is no need to go elsewhere for the larger, more simple elephant illustrations, if you want images of elephants with diverse animal types, just do a search including the name elephant and the desired animal, and add the word "printable" or "coloring page" at the end.
For example, write in the search box "elephant and lion printable," and whatever is on the Internet will be there for you to quickly grab.
Whatever the particular elephant picture you want, your children will be thrilled to color them in.
Birthday Printable Coloring Pages
A Mandala Menagerie: 10 Free Printable Adult Coloring Pages Featuring Animal Mandalas
by Jennifer Wilber0
Free Printable Coloring Pages for Kids
by Jamie Brock11
How to Create a PDF Coloring Page Without Special Software
by Rhonda Greene0
Fantasy Art Coloring Pages: 12 Free Printable Coloring Pages for Kids, Teens, and Adults
Moses Printable Coloring Pages
Shades and Tones of Yellow and Orange
by Greensleeves Hubs12
How To Create Beautiful, Realistic Face Shading using Digital Art Programs
by Kayness18


University of New Orleans student Luis Tandalla won a $50,000 first prize on Thursday in a competition to develop innovative software to help teachers score student written responses to test questions. The Automated Student Assessment Prize (ASAP), sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, seeks to address the need for high quality standardized tests to replace many of the current bubble tests.
Tandalla is a senior mechanical engineering student at UNO. He is a native of Quito, Ecuador.
187 participants across 150 teams tackled the incredibly difficult challenge of developing new software that can score short-answer responses to questions on state standardized tests. Competing teams developed their systems over three months and shared their technical approaches through an active discussion board. Documentation of the winning submissions will be released, under an open license, to enable others to build on this competition's success and advance the field of automated assessment.


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King Krule 'Live on the Moon' (short film)
Before kicking off a tour of North America next month, King Krule has left our planet to perform "Live on the Moon."
The 30-minute clip finds the musician born Archy Marshall falling asleep at home only to wake up orbiting the Earth with his band in tow. As a press release notes, the lunar settings draw on Marshall's "continued fascination with all things cosmic."
You can watch Marshall and co. play through tracks like "Dum Surfer" and "Lonely Blue" as part of an eight-song set in the player below.
More King Krule
Apr 17 @ 7:00PM - King Krule Toronto @ Queen Elizabeth Theatre (Exhibition Place)
Apr 18 @ 8:00PM - King Krule Montreal @ MTelus (formerly Metropolis)
King Krule Reveals New Album 'Man Alive!'
King Krule has announced a new album titled Man Alive!, which is due out on February 20 via True Panther/Matador. The record by the arti...
King Krule Reveals New Songs in Short Film, Plots World Tour
King Krule has shared new music along with a short film and mapped out a 2020 world tour. The short film is titled Hey World! and featur...
King Krule Heads to "Biscuit Town" in New Video
King Krule is throwing some more weight behind his Mercury Prize-nominated album The OOZ. This time, it's via a new video for the LP's openi...
Mercury Prize Reveals 2018 Nominees
The Mercury Prize will once again be awarded to the best British album of the year, and the 2018 shortlist of nominees has just been announc...
Mount Kimbie Plot North American Tour, Share New Track with King Krule
After delivering their Love What Survives LP late last year, Mount Kimbie have announced plans to take the record on the road throughout Nor...


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InfoQ Homepage Presentations Graceful Degradation as a Feature
The next QCon is in London, UK, March 2-6, 2020. Save an extra £75 with INFOQ20!
Graceful Degradation as a Feature
Lorne Kligerman talks about graceful degradation as an engineering goal which can be confidently tested with Chaos Engineering. By purposely causing failure of one service at a time in a controlled environment, one can safely observe the effect on the end user, whether that's on a laptop browser, a mobile app, or the result of an API call.
Lorne Kligerman currently leads the product team at Gremlin, helping companies avoid outages by running proactive chaos engineering experiments. He last worked at Google Cloud as a Product Manager on App Engine, empowering developers to build applications on a fully managed and resilient platform.
Software is changing the world. QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.
Kligerman: I work as the director of products at Gremlin, and I am really excited to talk about chaos engineering and building these features into the product, into your mindset, into the workflow from the beginning. I'll start off with a little bit of a story. A couple of winters ago I was out snowboarding in California. I went to Lake Tahoe with my wife and some good friends. We're at the top of the hill, we were really excited to get there. There was 8 to 10 feet of powder, big storm. It was everyone's dream to ski down these hills with that powder, see what it was going to be like.
We get to the top of the hill, we got some good photo bombers in the back there, everyone's really amped up. We have different ability levels, I'm feeling a little bit ambitious. It's the first one on the day, let's see what we can do. I say, ''I'm going to go through some trees. I'm going to see what I can do. I think I'll be ok. I'll take the more adventurous route." Other members of our group weren't feeling that yet, so they took the green, even the blue runs. We said, "Great. We'll meet at the bottom and we'll tell everyone about how it went. We'll work up to a more adventurous run together."
I head off on my own and I start making my way down. Everything's going well. Of course, halfway down through the trees, I catch an edge and I get stuck. I get buried in snow. I don't know if everyone's anyone's been buried in snow before, this was my first time. It's pretty interesting, you put your arms down and the snow goes right to your shoulders. You're kind of stuck. You start to panic a little bit and then you say, "You know what? I'm going to survive. I can breathe, I'm good to go." I pull my phone out, I can see a bar or two of service. I send a message to the group to say, "I'm good, I'm all right. I'll be down in about 10 minutes. I've just got to unbury myself." I put my phone back in my pocket and after I hit send, I keep going.
I get to the bottom of the hill and I go to the lift where I'm supposed to be. I see a lot of people with panic in their faces. I see one of my friends going and talk to the lift. I see my wife looking for a ski patroller and I'm all excited because this was actually pretty fun and everyone looks at me like they're really mad, really upset. I'm, "Well what's going on? I let you know, I told you I was ok. I was going to get to the bottom. Everything's great." I pull my phone out of my pocket and of course I get this message. I get "message not sent, touch to retry." That's not very helpful, is it? Thanks for letting me know. It probably didn't let me know right away. When did it let me know? I'm not really sure. I didn't know there was a bit of reception up there. I looked at my phone at this point and there was a decent amount of reception at the bottom. That message was still just sitting there ready to go. After talking everyone up that everything was still ok, that we should do it again, back up we go.
We Expect Technology to Just Work
We really expect technology to just work, and why wouldn't we? However, we do live in a world where things inevitably go wrong. Technology is ingrained in all aspects of our lives. Whether you're an engineer working on an API or relying on an API, whether that's an internal API, an external API, whether you're using enterprise products to get your job done, or whether you're using a consumer app on your phone, on your watch to listen to music, to talk to your friends, to talk to your family, there are all these different aspects of technology that are in our day-to-day lives and we expect it to just work.
In the eCommerce space, we're quite familiar with this, we're quite familiar with things not working. There are days that things can go wrong more often and that typically happens when you most need the technology, you most need that to work, especially in the eCommerce space. These things are happening more and more often and not only is it frustrating, but it's costing a lot of money. It's costing hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars.
There are a few headlines here, but I'm sure we all heard of the recent register outage with Target recently. I think it was about a two-hour outage and it cost the company about $50 million. It's not just unfortunate for the company, but all these people trying to purchase what they needed - are these household supplies, is it pet food? Is it some sort of medication? Is it that TV that was on sale that they really wanted to get, that's going to double in price again? The frustration is starting to bubble over.
That's getting frustrating. It's a lot of friction in play, but it's not really interfering necessarily with how we're getting by, but that can start to happen as well. Thinking about how finance is moving into the cloud, into technology, every company is really becoming a technology first company, which is awesome. I think it's amazing, I think that's where we need to go in order to build great applications that we rely on for the general public, for our business, and the whole workflow in between. How do you feel if you got a letter in the mail telling you that your house was foreclosed on? You made all your payments on time and that's probably a little bit startling. What if you can't get money out of the bank to pay someone back or to buy an item, to go to that restaurant that only accepts cash, and now you're stuck? You've got to run to an ATM, and it still doesn't work. All these sorts of things. This is only going to get worse and not necessarily better.
What happens when we start relying on services with the government, like healthcare, like retirement? What happens when the DMV is entirely hosted online so you don't have to go to that place, which we all love? What happens when that starts to break down and we can't renew our driver's license? All these things are really affecting our day-to-day lives more. Something even more pertinent today in our day-to-day is we're hearing about airline incidents. We're hearing about ticketing counters going down, the check-ins not being available. Then something even more significant with the 737 Max issue; it's becoming very serious. This malfunctioning software which we're not thinking about how is going to fail and what we can do when it does fail, is going to start to become a tragedy.
When lives are on the line, it's more than inconvenience. It's more important to make sure our systems will continue to work. I don't think I have to keep banging on this. It's somewhat obvious now that technology is fragile, it's going to break. This is inherent because of our complex systems and how we're building them. But when it does break, we really shouldn't have to notice. We shouldn't have to know right away. Maybe if some catastrophic failure does happen - the response doesn't come back, the data isn't going back forever - we should tell our users about it. How often is the failure really catastrophic? How often can we not handle this gracefully and give the customer a good experience?
We really need to plan ahead to keep our users happy. We can't do this after the fact. We can't really do this once we build the feature, build the product, get it released. We have an incident, we have an outage, we see all these errors piling up, and we figure out what happened. We fixed that root cause. We push a fix, everything's good to go, and you say, "We could do a lot better with our user experience. We can do better with the workflow. We can do better with the API errors that are coming back." Then you've got to go back and fix that and design that, and talk to your product people and talk to your design people and keep working on that, which is important. But if we can get ahead of this, then we will be in a much better place.
There are several studies that have shown that 75% or more than that of apps on mobile phones are only used once and then never again. That's across consumer, enterprise, everything really. You don't have very long to gain that trust from your customer, from your user. As soon as you burn that trust, you're gone. They're going to go look for an alternative to your product.
Why Are Failures So Common?
Why are these failures so common? Why are they happening so frequently? I think we've been gaining a lot of really good insight at the conference around different types of architecture, the amount of complexity, the different ways that that failure could occur. I want to touch on a few of them that I've seen that have been very relevant to me and my day-to-day.
A year and a half ago, I went on this big bike trip in Europe. I tried to cycle a bunch, it helps to keep me fit and also happy when I'm sitting at my computer all day. I trained for this trip for about three, four months, something that I'd never done before, to go bike in the French Alps. I took a flight through London, Heathrow to Geneva. At that carousel off comes my duffle bag, but no bike box. All these other people, they get their bikes, I have no bike. This is a problem, I've got to go on a bike trip, there are two more days until it starts.
I stand there, I go talk to the nice lady who is helping me try to track my bike and my box down. After a while I say, "What can we do about this?" I pear around at a terminal and this is what she sees. This is what she's working with. She's typing these three letter codes. Not sure if anyone's familiar with the backend system to airlines. I am only enough from watching these people try to figure things out, but it's pretty antiquated. It's pretty legacy. These monolithic applications are under the hood and on top of them are these flashy UIs, these nice apps we all have in our phones that tell us when to board the plane and when our bag should be picked up. Not that it could be picked up, but it should be picked up.
I said, ''What can we do? This is pretty urgent.'' She said, "I can tell Heathrow that there's a bike missing, we should send it.'' I'm, ''Everybody at Heathrow?'' She said, ''Yes, I'll tell the whole Heathrow ground crew to look for a bike box.'' I said, ''Great, then we'll know? We'll know that somebody's coming back.'' She said, ''No, there's nothing in the software that lets them do that. There's no way for them to message us.'' Well that's also great, but not great. There's no solution to this problem, it's a very big legacy system. I've talked to people who work on this stuff and they say, it'll really be like changing the engine mid flight on a plane to swap in a new system. It's very hard and we've gone a long way from where the technology was before and where it is now.
Testing is very important. We all know we can write automated unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests. There are really good applications these days to help us test our UI that can automatically click on things, make sure we have the right user flow. This is really testing what we tell it to test. It's telling that if we click a button, it will do what we expect it to do; that our integrations, our third party APIs, are responding as we expect them to. It's testing those base cases and some of the edge cases that we've thought of, but not necessarily everything, because it's somewhat impossible. It's not feasible to know of everything that's going to happen. Failure testing is something that helps you get there. It helps you understand what is going to break when the real failure actually occurs.
Of course, there's the complexity of the scale that we're working with. I think there was a really good talk the other day about microservices, and I think a few different talks about what best practices there are today, how to implement them and all that sort of stuff. That's not something I need to convince people of; that's how things are done today. Things today are moving as well in more complex ways with containerization, orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, we have service messages coming in. Everything is changing so rapidly that the complexity of everything talking to each other is just growing at an enormous rate. All these systems are very fragile, and while there might be one little error case here and there, it all propagates. It all builds out on each other and it becomes a state that we see in all these incidents at a very high rate, and we're having to try to deal with them on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day, week by week basis.
Our co-founders both worked at Grumman, both worked at Amazon and Netflix. We like to call these the microservice death balls. These are from about seven years ago, they are real. These are a tiny portion of what they actually look like today. It wouldn't be an interesting thing to look at. It would just be a blob on the screen. I worked previously at Google on the cloud product, specifically on app engine, and it was the same idea. We relied on hundreds of dependencies within the company. While you might not work at a massive company - I'm at a smaller company now and I quite enjoy the speed we can work at and all work together - but your system still looks a lot more like this than it does in a monolithic environment from years past.
How are we still able to delight with all this complexity that is also bound to fail? One more perspective - you zoom even farther back and the internet is just really one of these systems. It's massively large and super important that everything connects to each other well and there isn't a breakage halfway through. It's really no longer the days when the failure is inconvenience. It's now really critical to our daily lives that all of this works as designed.
What Can We Do about It?
What can we do about it? How can we get better? This really comes into designing for failure. Design for failure - the graceful degradation of your systems. Starting at the beginning, thinking of this as a culture and a practice, we'll never be in a good place again. If we're just dealing with the outage, figuring out why, with the talks that we've already heard today, outages and incidents, how to deal with them, how best to handle them, how to learn from them. That's going to continue and it's probably going to get worse. How do we get better?
A couple weeks ago I was visiting a couple of friends in Denver, in Colorado. I have this great perk in my job where I can work remotely. I was over there for the day, for the weekend. Took a long weekend, worked on the Friday, loaded up my laptop to run a team meeting, working as the product manager there at Gremlin. I loaded the meeting up, everything seems fine, internet connection is great. I start the meeting and I got 10 other faces on the screen. About five minutes in, the inevitable happens. Everyone's face starts to freeze, people's voices start to be choppy. I got all these pings on Slack saying, "We can't hear you. We can't see you. What's going on? Maybe you should do this. Maybe you should do that." I start panicking, I mute to see if there's static on the other end. What's going on? I unmute again.
Quick clip - that hide your video button. Everyone's looking for that button right away. Does that help? Does it not help? Someone else pings me and says, "I think your machine is really overheating. You should probably close all your tabs." Who knows what the problem is? You're panicking. I'm getting in the way of my team doing good work. I'm getting in the way of this meeting and what happens next? I've got a pop up asking me how I'm doing. I'm not very happy. I don't think a thumbs up is a not very happy situation.
What could we have done better here? How could the design team and the implementation be done in a better way? Why is it my responsibility as a user to turn my video off? Why shouldn't it just happen? I don't think there's even a way to turn other people's video off. What is the key feature that needs to work for this meeting to take place? It's really around my voice. It's around voices. I need to hear what people are saying and they need to hear me. Why can't we just degrade into that state and not interrupt anything everybody else is doing? It's this kind of mindset that will help us build better applications.
Designing for Failure
What is our key user story, what's that feature that is most important to the user? This is not just the product manager's job. It's not a designer's job, it's not just an engineer's job. It's really everybody's job. I can define a feature as a product manager, as a user story. A designer will design a cool way to interact with it in the UI. An engineer is going to implement it and it will involve API calls. It'll involve timeouts, it'll involve all these sorts of things, all these tests. It's really everyone's job to think about at what point that key feature needs to work.
This is something that as every person in their role should know, you should ask. If everything was to fail, what's the single most important thing that needs to work? Do I want to buy that airline ticket? Do I need to enter my frequent flyer numbers? Do I need to select my seat as doing the video call on your productivity app? You know what needs to work, and what is ok if it doesn't work? A lot is ok actually if it doesn't work, if you think about it, if you walk through your use cases.
While I was in Colorado I lifted up my phone and saw that the game was about to start and said, "Great." However, we had made a really nice reservation at a restaurant that we had to get to, and we were going to go and everything was great. Halfway through, I didn't know what was happening with the score. Pulled up my phone and this is all I get. I'm, "Hold on a second. That really good story you were telling me, just hold it because I need to know. It's the third quarter, what's going to happen?" This is again, a good example where there was some connectivity and not the best. I had opened my phone probably five times in the last hour, and there was a good signal. I wanted to know what happened. Some of this could be happening in the background.
Also, spinning forever is not great. Loading screens really are not graceful. What does a loading screen tell you? What's it for? It's there to tell you that something is coming. When is it coming? Loading bars, they're a little bit better. I could argue that they're also not great. That bar sometimes moves really slowly, really fast, really slowly. That really also doesn't make us very happy. Then sometimes it gets to the end and nothing happens or it crashes or the inevitable it starts again. Is that very helpful? Not really.
Inject Failure
Once we've thought about how to design for failure, we need to test it. We need to make sure that our design is actually implemented and in place. How do we do that? We really need to see that that failure has happened. This is done by injecting that failure, by breaking things on purpose. This gets us into the concept of chaos engineering, which really are these thoughtfully planned out experiments designed to reveal the weaknesses in your system. Big companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix, and many others have been doing this for a long time. A lot of other engineers at different companies, small companies, medium size, are really starting to practice this. They're starting to learn about it and put it into place.
We have a long way to go. We have a lot of work to do. It's not just about causing the failure to see what happens. It's about thinking about what to expect before it happens, and what did I design to happen when it does take place? There's more than just running that experiment, running that attack. There's a lot of pre-work to think about.
Getting into a little bit more detail, injecting the failure is something to really do one service at a time. Start with that initial test, a pre-production environment, one server, one instance, one service, one dependency. Make sure that critical functionality is still in place. You can still buy that ticket, I can still send that text message, I can still select my seat, I can still listen to that music, the stream of that one song is still in place. Then start breaking something else and systematically go through the different services in your system.
There are a lot of failure modes that you can inject, that you can use to test with. These are just a few that I find are quite interesting and quite good to start with. Of course errors - errors sound simple. What happens when you get a 400 back 401? 500, 503? You can make up your own error codes. There are some that are supposed to be standard, but are they actually? What happens to your application when you get a certain error code back? Is it as expected? You can black hole the traffic, you can just cut it. What happens when that request goes out and nothing comes back? Am I ready for that? Not just waiting for an error response, but actually nothing happens at all, when I don't get an act back when I send that request.
Then latency. Networks are inherently unreliable. If you don't agree, we can have a good conversation, but networks will always break. They're only in your control until the point where that request leaves your network, leaves your application, and anything is possible. It's also about how much latency is ok, because there always will be some. You can start with 100 milliseconds, 500. Get to a second, two seconds, five seconds. For your application, depending on if it's needing that realtime response, if it's a video call, versus sending a text message or purchasing a ticket, getting confirmation back that it's happened, maybe a second is ok. You need to decide yourself what is sufficient and what is not, and report that back to the user. If it's ok to wait five minutes to tell somebody that their seat has been selected, then you can simply say, "We'll let you know soon." You don't even have to let the user know there was an error. Their expectation is really only what you tell them, so to be thoughtful about what you're describing is really important.
Degrade Gracefully
This is all around gracefully degrading. What is that experience you want your user to have, to have the best experience? Have little friction. Another example - using text messaging as I find, whether 1 in 15 messaging platforms out there, they're all different, they're all frustrating. They all kind of don't work. I guess that's why there's so many. I find that Google Hangouts these days gives me the most trouble. If there's not perfect connectivity that message doesn't go through. There's a lot of friction there. It's not something we need to put on our users.
There are a lot of dependencies. We know that and there's always just going to be more. Authentication, the data where it's coming from, where's the static content, where's the dynamic content, where are we storing things? Where are we cashing them? What are the different features? When a dependency fails, do we really need to tell the user? How about two, how about four? I worked on AppEngine way back at Google for quite some time, and of course we were reliant on all the internal Google services. There were a lot of instances where one small dependency would fail. Not in Google, not even the Google auth system, but some small storage system. By no control of ours, the system would go down, we'd see failures, we see errors, our customers were unhappy. That's something that we do need to think about and that we do need to be conscious of.
. Let's look at a couple of actual examples. I'm going to pick on my favorite sports website from Canada called TSN. Let's look at what the website looks like. It'll refresh in just a second, you can see it load. This is on a fast connection, I will say. If you're paying attention, that that wasn't the best. You could see the banners show up slowly and the top bar. I think the ad was the last thing to show, it moved everything down and that's frustrating as well. I don't know if any of you are like me, but when I'm using my phone and I would say half the time when my finger comes to that screen to press a button, whatever I was trying to press moves away. It happens constantly because things are loading, things are dynamic. Dynamic is great, we're not blocking, but when I don't get to press that button that I want and I go into a whole another workflow, that's quite frustrating.
I'm going to add some latency here. In the Chrome dev tools actually you can add latency to any web page you're looking at. I'm adding two full seconds of latency here or refresh. If you watch what happens, we see a couple of spinners. The content comes in, something else may happen. Some more bars come in, the ads come in, we still see some white space down there under the main header. This is two seconds of latency. It's providing a pretty degraded experience. I was actually looking at this on the airplane on the way here from San Francisco and it was even worse than this. I thought it was broken so I just kept rehabbing. I just kept hitting refresh. Even working in software for many years, of course my first instinct is to refresh, turn it off, turn it back on, even though I know what's under the hood. There are unreliable networking issues going on and I'm not sure where we're at.
Let's look at blocking one of the requests. We're going to block one request that provides one of those little video boxes. You can again do this in the Chrome dev tools, it's very small at the bottom. You can see that there's a spinner. The video that I was blocking out, we lost it. The whole screen got pushed down. I'll scroll down a little bit and there we are. We just got an infinite spinner. I've just blocked one request out of probably hundreds. If you take a look at your dev tools these days and look at the network requests going on when you load any website, I'd say there are hundreds of requests going on in the background, they're all concurrent. Some of them block, some of them don't, but the spinner has stopped because my recording stopped. A file would be too big, but that goes on forever. I never know as a user if that's coming or if it's not. The other things on the site look to be working, but that's not. I'm none the wiser as to if I'm ever going to get to see that video.
One final example. I'm going to block a more serious request, a JQuery request that responds to provide a lot of content. We do a refresh here. You'll see that requests are the page start up and it just stops pretty quick. That's where we're left, that's all we're going to see. Our drop down on the top left there doesn't look very good, it's pretty broken. The whole site is pretty broken. The only content we really get is that main headline and that's about it. Yes, it's unlikely that that request will fail a on a consistent basis. What if it does? Unlikely is not never. We do have some content here, we just don't have the rest of the content. So what content is important when one request, one major request, starts to fail? It's important things to think about because you will have outages, you'll have incidents that caused some of these issues.
Here's another dependency failure that I keep referencing over the years, and not to pick on Amazon, but it is a good example. A bunch of years ago, I think 2017 AWS S3 went offline. I forgot how long - somebody can probably tell me to the minute because you were probably working on a system and had to deal with this. It really shines a light on what data we're putting in S3 and we can have a big conversation about that and with where there is a backup. Really, what is more interesting to me is that Amazon relied on the content in that storage environment for their status page.
Their status page that told you that S3 was up or down was down because S3 was not available. That's not great either. They had to go to a different platform. At least we have other tools out there, social media. They went to Twitter to let people know that their system was down and that their status page was down. Status page for a status page. It starts to get kind of meta, and it starts to really let us see where these failures can come into play. I think they could eventually put a toast bar at the top, but that was about it. It wasn't worthwhile fixing their status page while they fixed S3 – so in terms of priorities and where the functionality really lies.
Delight Your Users
I keep talking about delighting your users, giving them a positive user experience, reducing the friction that they have to go through to use your application, to accomplish the tasks that they've set out to do. A couple examples - there are a few actually - about how this is done right, how it's done well. I'm a big fan these days of WhatsApp, in comparison especially to other chat platforms that I've used. I've been traveling on a sailboat recently, about 100 miles or 80 miles off the coast. Had very poor reception but I was still able to have a video chat call. That's pretty unheard of with other platforms. Not going to name any names.
Netflix is quite good at this too. A lot of people that I work with now have worked at Netflix previously in their careers. If you're looking through a Netflix system where if the recommendation service or the curated lists of videos or movies or TV shows that they think that you would like to see, are not available, you can still see some general content. You can still see the show that you've been bingeing for the last week and you need to see that last episode. You'll still see that show on the list. You'll still be able to watch it. You're none the wiser that some of these other systems are failing underneath the hood. They just don't see it obviously. There's also no reason to tell the user all the time. Do they need to know? It doesn't need to get into their mind that something's there. There is an issue, we're taking care of it by the way, but still go do what you're doing. It just doesn't need to be top of mind.
We've been working with a customer more recently who knows that their system is going to fail when there's a certain amount of traffic. I won't ask for a show of hands but if you can think about a certain part of your infrastructure, a certain part of your stack that you're more uncomfortable about, there probably is one. There's probably one that will fall over a certain point of time, a certain amount of traffic. If you become extremely successful, which is a great thing, your technology may not be able to scale with that usage. We've been working with a customer who knows this and is getting ahead of that by treating different groups of users in a different way.
Their number one priority is to onboard new users as easily as possible. They want that flow to be great, to be delightful. The users that are already on their platform, it's ok if there's a little bit of latency, it's ok if there are a few seconds delay if they're doing certain actions. They're consciously doing that. It's not ideal that all your users don't have the best experience. If you can consciously treat one experience a little bit differently than another, at least you're getting ahead of the game and you're preparing for it.
Positive Business Impact
Moving from the world of engineering myself into product management, there's not only frustration with users and usage, but there's really a big business impact with all of this. As we launched new features and products, it's an exciting day. We've defined what we want to do, we think it'll have a big impact. We get it out the door after a lot of hours of engineering, testing, iterating user feedback and we've defined what these success metrics should be. I would say it's common practice to define what we're going to look for, how's it going to go, how many users are we going to get, what's our goal, what's our strategy around releasing this new thing?
What is not done as well, I've noticed in the practice, is really identifying how that product launch is going to land. Were those success metrics achieved? Were you successful? If you have not been successful, why not? Almost more important than if you hit your goals, is to understand why you didn't hit your goals. Did people just not like what you're doing? Typically, that's not the case. I would say typically what is the case is that there was friction involved. What you wanted your user to accomplish was not possible. You should be able to see that in your metrics and your monitoring in your analysis. Where there more errors in a certain case than you expected? The 30% or 40% of a user trying to sign up and not complete that flow. Sometimes its usability, but more often than not, there was something that got in the way. What was that, and how can we make it better?
As we think about this as well, getting ahead of the game is super important to do this early, to think about designing for that failure early in order to maintain our release velocity, if we want to keep going. I've heard numerous times in the track today and other meetings and other talks, when do we talk about doing this testing? When do we get started? When do we make time and space for this? If you're doing things after the fact, the amount of time that you're spending is going to be way higher than the amount of time that you spend initially being proactive.
That's always a very hard conversation to have. It's hard to say, "Don't worry, we're going to save you 100 hours later by doing this for 10 hours now." As an example of designing features in a better way, which I've really seen the industry come towards, making sure everybody agrees, doing a technical design, signing off on that technical design. We are doing a lot of planning, but we're not necessarily planning for all of these different cases that can cause a lot of time and outages at a later date. We're going to spend less time in war rooms; not our favorite thing to do, and of course, we're going to deliver that positive user experience.
To summarize, there's a lot involved here, but to go through this workflow, hopefully this is something that you can take back with you and you think about as you're implementing what you're doing today. You're just about to launch something; don't stop the launch, don't necessarily block it, but think about what is a failure case that could happen? How will something get in the way? Is that going to stop my users from using the feature in its entirety? Because a lot of times things really do get in the way in a bigger way than you expect. Designing for that failure, injecting that failure to see what happens, making sure your system does degrade gracefully so that can provide that delight for your users, is really what this is all about.
That's the main point that I wanted to convey, what I'm pretty passionate about, especially working at Gremlin. We're hosting a conference later in September called Chaos Con. We're going to have more content, we're going to have practitioners come talk to us, tell us how they're doing this, how it's working, how it's not working, and how it could be better. We'd be super excited to have you there and to have more people there.
Participant 1: As engineers, we spend the majority of our energy getting the happy path to work to get the new feature out the door. What's the best way to instill the resiliency mindset in engineers, especially more junior engineers?
Kligerman: To repeat a little bit, how do we get that mindset in our engineers as we get features out the door, to think about those failure cases? To me it's really about relating to them. I tried to show you some examples today about things that get in the way and yes, these were some consumer apps, a little bit on the enterprise world. This relates to us in our day-to-day. I tried to talk to our engineers as though, "When was the last time you used a piece of technology and it really frustrated you?" They could probably tell me in a second. Then we go back to the application or the feature that we're building and we talk about it.
We say, "What happens if the network just degraded really quickly? What happens if the internet was cut and it comes back in about 30 seconds?" Making it somewhat personal and getting them excited to release a feature that they're proud of is really a big part of it too. Engineers, product people, design people, anyone involved needs to be proud of what they're getting out the door. You probably won't be very proud if you get it out the door and next week you're sitting in a war room trying to fix it. Then coming up with that use case, that does pose a problem and is going to delay a launch by a few or a week or two, that's also ok. Creating that safe space to say, "We've come up with something, it's not just a bug, it's not a unit test that's failing. It's not an edge case we missed, but there's a pretty big failure scenario here and that's really going to give us a bad reputation and a bad user experience." Being ok with that is really important.
Participant 2: At the very beginning of the presentation you used a cell phone not being able to send out a message as an example. What would you say would be a better user response? What I'm trying to get at is, let's say you're on a mountain and you can't send it out. Just to apply it to another scenario where if something fails, it just hard fails then? What's your take on this?
Kligerman: I have a few different takes on it. The phone knows a lot of things. Your phone's been on for a long time, you probably don't reboot it very often like I do and then everything starts to fall apart even more. Your phone knows where it is geographically. It knows where the service is, it knows how strong the signal is. What I would do is look at the signal strength for the last X number of minutes to understand the state of where I am and my surroundings. In that, you can determine if this is something that you expect to hard-stop at. If I haven't had signal in an hour or two hours, then it's probably ok to tell the user "this wasn't sent" right away, you're not within the range of civil mil, whether it's cell towers or Wi-Fi.
At the point in time when I hit that button, I did see a little bit of a bar and I saw a spinner and I was starting to get cold in the snow and I put my phone back in my pocket. Understanding the scenario of where you are and what it could do and putting some logic in there, and not just saying, I got an error message back, couldn't send it, can't send it, and that's it. There's no context. You could let a user know, "Hey, by the way, you haven't had signal for two hours, do you want to try to send this when possible?"
Maybe give the user an option, as opposed to just saying, "no, it's never going to happen." Really thinking about the options that you can give to the user and the state that that feature should be in when you have great service, zero service, and maybe something in the middle. You don't need to deal with a million different cases, but there's a sliding scale here. It's not just working or broken, and that's where I think technology is today; it works or it doesn't, and that's not great.
Participant 3: Chaos engineering is obviously good, it's the right thing to do. As engineers, you want to do this. I'm sold, a lot of people are sold. A lot of times practically this isn't done. Why? It's about the cost, it doesn't come for free. There are a lot of costs. Then people try to wait, "Ok, this is going to fail once in X number of months and I'll just bounce it." It just works once, you bounce it. How do you measure benefit here and say it makes sense to invest time in this?
Kligerman: I think we talk about that every day with our customers and our prospective customers. How do we measure the effect of chaos engineering, essentially? Also, I think the first part of your question was what is the value of starting to do these experiments and these attacks? The first part I would say is that it's true. Some failure cases are quite rare. You can call them Black Swan events, once in 10 years, once in 5 years, maybe, maybe once in a year. If you spend 10 hours in a war room for something that happens once a year, maybe that's ok. What if you have one of these unusual events once a year, 50 times, and what is the root cause?
You start going down this analysis path and more often than not, you have a root cause that's causing different types of failure. If you were to get started and run a few of these attacks on one of your dependencies, two, three, five, you start to notice pretty obvious fixes that you could make, and changes you could make to make your system more resilient. It's a common question. However, what we've observed and what I've observed is that a lot of the failures happen from somewhat obvious things that you discover when you start to run the basic types of chaos engineering attacks. Then getting into the weeds, it's something that you definitely can get to a little bit later, but to measure that, again, it's really about what is the downstream effect? What is the number one metric that's important to you? If you're an eCommerce business, it's likely dollars. How many dollars are you losing? If you're Netflix, how many videos cannot be watched? How often are they interrupted? Again, it comes down to a user base type of thing. You're going to lose customers.
It's looking at that and looking at the number of outages that caused those failures and the volume of it to running some attacks and discovering these issues that are going to prevent those outages. Sometimes they're a little bit hard to correlate, but as you start getting into the practice and running things more often, you start to see that number go down. You see the dollar loss go down, the amount of hours and meetings in war rooms go down as well. We've started to talk to our customers about scanning their calendars and looking at the results of them to see how often people are in these war rooms and are trying to work on these incidents and outages and do these postmortems and learnings. There's a lot of expensive time. You've got to identify those key metrics for your business, whether it's time spent on employees or dollars lost on your product, and watch those and see them get better.
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Lorne Kligerman
This content is in the Culture & Methods topic
Chaos Engineering
InfoQ
QCon New York 2019
Popular across InfoQ
Kelsey Hightower on Extending Kubernetes, Event-Driven Architecture, and Learning


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An awful lot of numismatists in Sicily, II
Posted on 14 October 2018 | 4 Comments
So, after that bit of numismatic self-congratulation, let me take you back for the last time to September 2015 and the town of Taormina in Sicily, where I was then one of many gathered for the 15th International Numismatic Congress. You've seen some of the local antiquities, heard about the first two-and-a-half days of papers and visited a local castle, now it's time to return to the thick of the academic fray. But first, a party!
Party in the coutryard of the Palazzo dei Duchi di Santo Stefano
Indeed, the first thing on our calendar after descending from Castelmola and eating was not an academic session but a party put on by the Medieval European Coinage project, to celebrate its resurgence into activity since the previous INC in the form of the publication of the series' volume on the Iberian Peninsula and the near-completion of that on Northern Italy (which, much though I often doubted it, has in fact now also emerged, something I should probably announce separately too).1 By now you may well not remember that I am a part of that project still, but I am, so I was there to share in the glory. There were speeches, there was a strictly limited quantity of free wine, but mainly there was a superb setting.
MEC authors Bill Day Jr and Martin Allen looking very relaxed by the Cambridge University Press stand inside the Palazzo
It was a good way to wrap up the day. The next day was the last day of papers, however, and with certain obligations among them, and so for once I was up and ready right at the beginning. Here's how it all unrolled.
Thu./R7 Session 1
Alberto Canto García, Fatima Martín Escudero & Carolina Domenech Belda, "Monedas fatimíes en le hallazgo de dinares de la Calle Santa Elena (Valencia, España)"
Dorota Malarczyk, "The Early-Medieval Silver Hoard from Debicz, Greater Poland"
Vlastimil Novák, "Islamic Silver in the Newly-Discovered Hoard dated back to the 10th Century from Central Moravia, the Czech Republic".
I was in this session more for the people than for the material, I admit, since both Alberto Canto and Vlastimil Novák have crossed my reading or museum work before now, but the material was also interesting, of course. The Valencia hoard was 1374 coins running from the Umayyad period in the Iberian Peninsula through to the taifa era, abouut 850 to 1090, but its largest component was Fatimid quarter-dinars from Egypt, Africa and, especially, Italy (though singleton Visigothic and Byzantine gold coins were also among it, perhaps weirdly; I asked if it was weird and got two different answers…). The most common mint was the one local to where we stood, Siqiliya, and that certainly was unusual and possible illustrative. The Polish hoard was the second one to come off its site, the former one having been dispersed except for one coin in 1936, but in so far as can be told both were almost entirely dirham fragments, dating from c. 750 to the mid-tenth century, which is how these things seem to occur in that area. The debate here was over when they would have been cut up; were they travelling as wholes and then divided or were people actually importing fragmentary coins into Poland? Someone popped up here saying that silver in Muslim Spain was very often cut in circulation, because no-one trusted the copper coinage; I wasn't sure about this, as silver and copper don't easily match market values even when broken down. This turned out to be very similar to the hoard Dr Novak had to tell us about, however, except that that was a mix of Islamic and German coins, and more the latter; any silver coins would apparently do, alonsgide jewellery bits and bobs. We think of hacksilver and cut dirhams as a Viking phenomenon, often, but that kind of economy was apparently more widespread.
Then, after coffee, I had to scoot across town to show due team support for a member of the All That Glitters team who was presenting for us in the biggest room in the whole Congress, with my old colleague Martin Allen (pictured above) chairing. It was actually more or less impossible for any of the speakers to know who was there till afterwards, given the lighting, but this was who was at the front:
The speakers, in the theatre of the Palazzo dei Congressi
Thu./R1 Session 20
Thomas Birch, F. Kemmers, S. Klein, M. Seitz & H. E. Höfer, "The Character of Coinage and Development of Bullion Sources Across the Western Mediterranean from the 5th to the 1st Centuries BCE: the summary results from two years' analytical research"
Bogdan Constantinescu, Gabriel-Mircea Talmatchi & Daniela Cristea-Stan, "New Information on Monetary Arrowhead found in Dobroudja based on X-Rays Analysis of their Alloy Composition"
Rebecca Darley, "All That Glitters: The Byzantine solidus, c. 300-1092″
Marek Fikrle, "Czech Early Medieval Dinars from the Perspective of XRF Analysis"
Jon Anders Risvaag, R. Ulseth, O. Lohne, J. Lohne & T. Ernik, "Investigations of Bone-Ash Cupels from the Archbishop's Mint in Trondheim, Norway"
All the speakers here (except possibly us) had interesting findings to present, but of course we were there in the middle to call them into question, especially if they were using X-ray fluorescence, so discussion here got quite excited. The first team had used wet chemical analysis and some species of mass spectrometry, so they were safer from us, but were also being careful: they saw shifts in silver sources at the various mints of the pre-Roman Ægean, but also enemies sharing sources, and it seemed like some interesting maps might be drawn from this data, even if one might want some way of testing their maths against a known sample set before accepting the conclusions wholesale. I wasn't sure about much of the second paper, which seemed to be an attempt to argue for pre-numismatic money in the Black Sea zone, and it didn't escape me that they were thus arguing for the earliest known money anywhere, plus which their metallurgy was done with portable XRF machinery and I already knew what I thought about that. I shan't reprise what Rebecca said because you have my reports on the same experiments here already; I hope she'll forgive me. There are more of those to be reported on, by the way. Dr Fikrle, however, turned out to be on our side and refused to try to derive geographic metal origins from his sample: he was willing to argue only for having demonstrated relative change in silver content (though he still named some trace elements, but then, so did we at this stage).
Rebecca Darley presenting our work, in her own words
The last paper was perhaps the most fun, though, as they had a documented archaeological mint site to play with at the see of Nidaros, as it then was, in Norway, including lots of sixteenth-century crucibles complete with metal residue in waiting to be analysed, which they could do with wet chemical techniques. This showed the processes by which the mint-workers attempted to purify the silver they had to mint with, thus removing the very trace elements that other teams were looking for from their essentially recycled metal stock.
Martin Allen then opened a mischevious general discussion about whether XRF was good for anything, and while all could more or less agree that XRF results weren't comparable with each other unless the machines were all calibrated to the same baseline standard (which no-one ever reports…), beyond that opinions were quite divided. If there was a useful conclusion, therefore, it was probably about sharing standards.
Now, I'm not quite sure about what happened next. My notes from the next session have notes on only one paper of the supposed four, and I have no notes from the final session at all. I suspect that we may just have run out of tolerance for fine-grained numismatics, but this meant missing a session put on by my old Fitzwilliam colleagues. Still, I'm pretty sure I don't remember it, so I guess we must have cut and run. My last papers of the Congress, therefore, were:
Sanjay Garg and Nurussaba Garg, "Counterfeiting of Coins in Medieval India: A Survey of Contemporary Literature"
François Joyaux & Marise Blet-Malarquand, "La fin du monnayage annamite sous le règne de Bao Dai (1926-1945)"
Even that leaves out two other papers that were supposed to be in that session, and I only have notes on the former of these two, which found pretty much that as long as there have been coins made in India people are on record complaining of them being forged, or even trying to catch forgers at it; one Sultan of Delhi issued a token coinage so simple that sources from his reign say disgustedly that pretty much everyone was making them at home, and the fakes were eventually all bought up and then built into embankments or used as road-stone! As so often the scale of public endeavour in Indian countries surprises the Western listener, I guess…
So yes, that was in some sense the end, and not a bad end to make, either. I was in Sicily another day or two but that was actual holiday, not even medievalising, and so I'll leave this particular story here. Next post, some more self-congratulation (because I do have a backlog of that to get through still) and then I launch into the Chronicle of my first semester at Leeds. At least, if you can't have currency of content, lots of the content lately has been about currency, amirite? But stay tuned, and the timeframe will advance…
1. I should cite the volumes that we were in fact celebrating, and I will write something about them next post. They were Miquel Crusafont, Anna Balaguer & Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, volume 6: the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge 2013) and William R. Day Jr, Andrea Sacocci & Michael Matzke, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, volume 12: North Italy (Cambridge 2017). As you can tell, our celebration of the latter was just a little premature… But on such a night, all things seemed possible I tell you! Or something.
Keighley, UK
This entry was posted in archaeology, Eastern Europe, Islamic Crescent, Now working on..., numismatics and tagged al-Andalus, Alberto Canto García, All That Glitters, Bohemia, coin hoards, conferences, Dorota Malarczyk, Fatima Martín Escudero, forgery, India, Jon Anders Risvaag, Marek Fikrle, Martin Allen, Medieval European Coinage, metallurgy, Morava, Poland, Rebecca Darley, Sanjay Garg, Sicily, Thomas Birch, Valencia, Vlastimil Novák, XRF. Bookmark the permalink.
4 responses to "An awful lot of numismatists in Sicily, II"
Lance | 17 October 2018 at 6:17 | Reply
Hi Mr Jarrett.
A great article!
I'm a huge fan of the Medieval European Coinage Project, (got all the current published books).
With information scarce and by checking up on the websites, I was wondering how the rest of the series is comming along?
I realize there were many obsticles and hurdles in the series.
Are there any new volumes (in preparation) being released in the near future?
I noted that five volumes have no author either. Just curious about the progress of this great wonderful series.
Thank you for your time in advance.
Lance Casagrande
Aha! The subject of my very next post. Hopefully you can wait till the weekend for news? But I'm glad there will at be least one interested reader…
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Phoenix Suns' P.J. Tucker Arrested For 'Super Extreme' DUI
By Shawn Dwyer 07/29/14
The team knew about the charges when signing the restricted free agent to a multi-million dollar deal last week.
Super wasted. Photo via
Back in May, Phoenix Suns player P.J Tucker was arrested on suspicion of "super extreme DUI" by Scottsdale, Ariz. police, though the charges were kept under wraps until recently. That may have had something to do with Tucker signing a three-year, $16.5 million contract just last week.
On May 10, Tucker, 29, was observed running a stop sign early in the morning near an area of Scottsdale popular for its nightlife. Tucker was pulled over and, according to the police officer, he had "thick and slurred" speech and "watery and bloodshot" eyes.
The officer also noted a "powerful" order of alcohol when he interviewed Tucker, who told him that he had just left the W Scottsdale Hotel after consuming one beer. But during a roadside sobriety test, Tucker stumbled and fell into a nearby construction fence.
Tucker's blood-alcohol content was .201 on the initial breathalyzer when he was pulled over, though later he came up .222 on a subsequent blood test. Arizona has a legal limit of .08. A blood-alcohol level of .15 or higher is considered extreme, and anything .20 or higher is considered super-extreme.
Tucker has been charged with a stop sign violation and DUI, with the super-extreme status of the latter charge carrying a 45-day jail sentence if he's convicted. The Suns stated that they were aware of the charges prior to Tucker signing his contract last week, though the organization declined to comment further until the matter is resolved in court.
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