Move Fast
Your wood cracks and splits the frothing waves as you dip and pull. The spirits flee before you. Breathing deeply, you ready your blood to take blood. You are the sinew that draws the oar. You are the gale that billows your sail. You are thunder and blade. You are a Viking.
Vikings lived with a passion for the simple, for the spiritual, for each other. They don’t have a good rap. And they don’t deserve one, but honestly, they weren’t that different from other warring groups that operated between 750 and 1050 CE, considered the Viking Age. They were just good at what they did. And what they did according to Neil Price, author of The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, was very entrepreneurial, albeit with a sort of pirate-modality, creating vast trading networks that pulled together the riches of the known world.
In their villages, Vikings were an organized, slave-based society, living a vulnerable existence in an unpredictable environment. They honored their gods and developed strong relationships with their ancestral spirits. Not everyone who died became an ancestor, only those who provided a model of exemplary Viking behavior. And what makes a great Viking in their own eyes? Someone who lived with no lines drawn between this world and the spirit world. Someone whose heart beat with the trees and animals around them. Someone who built a strong, hard body to carry him or her into terrible battle.
You could press a dozen flowers in the size of this tome—filled with every detail you would want to know about Vikings. Opportunistic and efficient, Vikings worked off speed in small windows of time. They raided during the season when estuaries were open, and they moved fast in those few months.“ In just nine years, the invading Scandinavian force (Vikings) had effectively destroyed all but one of the English kingdoms. By 874, only Wessex remained as an independent realm,” Price relates explaining the speed of Viking “longboat diplomacy.”
And Gather the Riches
So why did the Petro.ai Engineering Team call their recent initiative Viking mode? "It was a push we had in the team to transform our practices into a truly agile-based workflow,” Dr. Derek Ruths, Chief Data Scientist of Petro.ai explains. "And it worked. Speed and efficiency. A command of what we do and do it well.”
“Viking mode is small, fast iterations to improve usage of the platform,” Charles Connell, VP of Product adds.“One of the purposes of Viking mode was to ensure that we as a team are always hyper-focused on responding to user feedback. This requires very fast iteration cycles and getting feature requests and bug fixes out quickly.”
“Adding robust practices that build strength into the platform was another part of Viking mode.Testing consistently. Keep testing the platform, keep looking at the edge cases,” Ruths continues. “The platform is for our client’s success.There’s no substitute for a client being able to evaluate the performance of the system themselves.
“Now not all clients are going to have the bandwidth or the technical skills in house to do that. In those situations, I think it’s completely appropriate for clients to expect that the vendors are providing some evidence that the AI performs in the context that they’re operating within. Clients should be able to say, these are the kinds of wells that we drill, these are the basins we operate in, these are the operations that we run. The vendor should be able to come back and credibly say, here’s an assessment of the performance on these wells that resemble yours.”
Like the Vikings, Petro.ai is determined to have a platform that is rugged, strong, and focused on fast, accurate results.
