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Redwood is a state-of-the-art graphical interface that defines the look and feel of the new Oracle Cloud Redwood Applications.   In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald, take a closer look at the intent behind the design and development aspects of the new Redwood experience. They also explore Redwood page templates and components.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Developing Redwood Applications with Visual Builder: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/developing-redwood-applications-with-visual-builder/112791   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for this Best of 2024 series, where we're playing for you our four most popular episodes of the year.    Nikita: Today's episode is #3 of 4 and is a throwback to another conversation with Joe Greenwald, our Senior Principal OCI Instructor. We asked Joe about Oracle's Redwood design system and how it helps us create stunning, world-class enterprise applications and user experiences.  01:04 Lois: Yeah, Redwood is the basis for all the new Oracle Cloud Applications being re-designed, developed, and delivered. Joe is the best person to ask about all of this because he's been working with our Oracle software development tools since the early 90s and is responsible for OU's Visual Builder Studio and Redwood course content. So, let's dive right in! Joe: Hi Lois. Hi Niki. I am excited to join you on this episode because with the release of 24A Fusion applications, we are encouraging all our customers to adopt the new Redwood design system and components, and take advantage of the world-class look and feel of the new Redwood user experience. Redwood represents a new approach and direction for us at Oracle, and we're excited to have our customers benefit from it. 01:49 Nikita: Joe, you've been working with Oracle user interface development tools and frameworks for a long time. How and why is Redwood different? Joe: I joined Oracle in 1992, and the first Oracle user interface I experienced was Oracle Forms. And that was the character mode. I came from a background of Smalltalk and its amazing, pioneering graphical user interface (GUI) design capabilities. I worked at Apple and I developed my own GUIs for a few years on PCs and Macs. So, Character Mode Forms, what we used to call DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) screens, was a shock, to say the least. Since then, I've worked with almost every user interface and development platform Oracle has created: Character Mode Forms, GUI Forms, Power Objects, HyperCard on the Macintosh, that was pre-OS X by the way, Sedona, written in native C++ and ActiveX and OLE, which didn't make it to a product but appeared in other things later, ADF Faces, which uses Java to generate HTML pages, and APEX, which uses PL/SQL to generate HTML pages. And I've worked with and wrote training classes for Java Swing, an excellent GUI framework for event-driven desktop and enterprise applications, but it wasn't designed for the web. So, it's with pleasure that I introduce you to the Redwood design system, easily the best effort I've ever seen, from the look and feel of holistic user-goal-centered design philosophy and approach to the cutting-edge WYSIWYG design tools.  03:16 Lois: Joe, is Redwood just another set of styles, colors, and fonts, albeit very nice-looking ones? Joe: The Redwood platform is new for Oracle, and it represents a significant change, not just in the look and feel, colors, fonts, and styles, I mean that too, but it's also a fundamental change in how Oracle is creating, designing, and imagining user interfaces. As you may be aware, all Oracle Cloud Applications are being re-designed, re-engineered, and re-rebuilt from the ground up, with significant changes to both back-end and front-end architectures. The front end is being redesigned, re-developed, and re-created in pure HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using Visual Builder Studio and its design-time browser-based Integrated Development Environment. The back end is being re-architected, re-designed, and implemented in a modern microservice architecture for Oracle Cloud using Kubernetes and other modern technologies that improve performance and work better in the cloud than our current legacy architecture. The new Oracle Cloud Applications platform uses Redwood for its design system—its tools, its patterns, its components, and page templates. Redwood is a richer and more productive platform to create solutions while still being cost-effective for Oracle. It encourages a transformation of the fundamental user experience, emphasizing identifying, meeting, and understanding end users' goals and how the applications are used.  04:39 Nikita: Joe, do you think Oracle's user interface has been improved with Redwood? In what ways has the UI changed? Joe: Yes, absolutely. Redwood has changed a lot of things. When I joined Oracle back in the '90s, there was effectively no user interface division or UI team. Everybody just did their own thing. There was no user interface lab—and that was started in the mid-‘90s—and I was asked to give product usability feedback and participate in UI tests and experiments in those labs. I also helped test the products I was teaching at the time. I actually distinctly remember having to take a week to train users on Oracle's Designer CASE tool product just to prep the participants enough to perform usability testing. I can still hear the UI lab manager shaking her head and saying any product that requires a week of training to do usability testing has usability issues! And if you're like me and you've been around Oracle long enough, you know that Oracle's not always been known for its user interfaces and been known to release products that look like they were designed by two or more different companies. All that has changed with Redwood. With Redwood, there's a new internal design group that oversees the design choices of all development teams that develop products. This includes a design system review and an ongoing audit process to ensure that all the products being released, whether Fusion apps or something else, all look and feel similar so it looks like it's designed by a single company with a single thought in mind. Which it is. There's a deeper, consistent commitment in identifying user needs, understanding how the applications are being used, and how they meet those user needs through things like telemetry: gathering metrics from the actual components and the Redwood system itself to see how the applications are being used, what's working well, and what isn't.  This telemetry is available to us here at Oracle, and we use it to fine tune the applications' usability and purpose.  06:29 Lois: That's really interesting, Joe. So, it's a fundamental change in the way we're doing things. What about the GUI components themselves? Are these more sophisticated than simple GUI components like buttons and text fields? Joe: The graphical components themselves are at a much higher level, more comprehensive, and work better together. And in Redwood, everything is a component. And I'm not just talking about things like input text fields and buttons, though it applies to these more fine-grained components as well. Leveraging Oracle's deep experience in building enterprise applications, we've incorporated that knowledge into creating page templates so that the structure and look and feel of the page is fixed based on our internal design standards. The developer has control over certain portions of it, but the overall look and feel of the page is controlled by Oracle. So there is consistency of look and feel within and across applications. These page templates come with predefined functionalities: headers, titles, properties, and variables to manipulate content and settings, slots for other components to hold like search fields, collections, contextual information, badges, and images, as well as primary and secondary actions, and variables for events and event handling through Visual Builder action chains, which handle the various actions and processing of the request on the page. And all these page templates and components are responsive, meaning they respond to the change in the size of the page and the orientation. So, when you move from a desktop to a handheld mobile device or a tablet, they respond appropriately and consistently to deliver a clean, easy-to-use interface and experience. 08:03 Nikita: You mentioned WYSIWYG design tools and their integration with Visual Builder Studio's integrated development environment. How does Redwood work with Visual Builder Studio? Joe: This is easily one of my most favorite aspects about Redwood and the integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer. The components and page templates are responsive at runtime as well as responsive at design time! In over 30 years of working with Oracle software development products, this is the first development system and integrated development environment I've seen Oracle produce where what you see is what you get at design time. Now, with products such as Designer and JDeveloper ADF Faces and even APEX—all those page-generation types of products—you have to generate the page, deploy it, and only then can you view the final page to see whether it meets the needs of your user interface. For example, with Designer, there were literally hundreds of configuration parameters that you could set to control how forms and reports looked when they were generated —down to how many buttons on a row or how many rows to a page, that sort of thing, all done in text mode. Then you'd generate and run the page to see what the result was and then go back and modify things until you got what you wanted. I remember hearing the product managers for Oracle ADF Faces being asked…well, a customer asked, “What happens if I put this component here and this component here? What will the page look like?” and they'd say, “I don't know. Render the page and let's see.” That's just crazy talk. With Redwood and its integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer, what you see on the page at design time is literally what you get. And if I make the page narrower or I even convert it to a mobile display while in the Designer itself, I immediately see what the page looks like in that new mode. Everything just moves accordingly, at design time. For example, when changing to a mobile UI, everything stacks up nicely; the components adjust to the page size and change right there in the design environment. Again, I can't emphasize enough the simple luxury of being able to see exactly what the user is going to see on my page and having the ability to change the resolution, orientation, and screen size, and it changes right there immediately in my design environment. 10:06 Lois: I'm intrigued by the idea of page templates that are managed by Oracle but still leave room for the developer to customize aspects of the look and feel and functionality. How does that work? Joe: Well, the page templates themselves represent the typical pages you would most likely use in an enterprise application. Things like a welcome page, a search page, and edit and create pages, and a couple of different ways to display summary information, including foldout pages, though this is not an exhaustive list of course. Not only do they provide a logical and complete starting point for the layout of the page itself, but they also include built-in functionality. These templates include functionality for buttons, primary and secondary actions, and areas for holding contextual information, badges, avatars, and images. And this is all built right into the page, and all of them use variables to describe the contents for the various parts, so the contents can change programmatically as the variables' contents change, if necessary. 11:04 Do you have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We'd love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us on the Idea Incubator. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  11:24 Nikita: Welcome back! So, Joe, let's say I'm a developer. How do I get started working with Redwood? Joe: One of the easiest ways to do it is to use Visual Builder Studio Designer and create a new visual application. If you're creating a standalone, bespoke custom application, you can choose a Redwood starter template, which will include all the Redwood components and page templates automatically. Or, if you're extending and customizing an Oracle Fusion application, Redwood is already included.  Either way, when you create a new page, you have a choice of different page templates—welcome page templates, edit pages, search pages, etc. —and all you have to do is choose a page that you want and begin configuring it. And actually if you make a mistake, it's easy to switch page templates. All the components, page templates, and so on have documentation right there inside Visual Builder Studio Designer, and we do recommend that you read through the documentation first to get an understanding of what the use case for that template is and how to use it. And some components are more granular, like a collection container which holds a collection of rows of a list or a table and provides capabilities like toolbars and other actions that are already built and defined. You decide what actions you want and then use predefined event listeners that are triggered when an event occurs in the application—like a button being clicked or a row being selected—which kicks off a series of actions to be performed. 12:42 Lois: That sounds easy enough if you know what you're doing. Joe, what are some of the more common pages and what are they used for?  Joe: Redwood page templates can be broken down into categories. There are overview templates like the welcome page template, which has a nice banner, colors, and illustrations that can be used for a welcoming page—like for entering a new application or a new logical section of the application. The dashboard landing page template displays key information values and their charts and graphs, which can come from Oracle Analytics, and automatically switches the display depending on which set of data is selected.  The detail templates include a general overview, which presents read-only information related to a single record or resource. The item overview gives you a small panel to view summary information (for example, information on a customer) and in the main section, you can view details like all the orders for that customer. And you can even navigate through a set of customers, clicking arrows for next-previous navigation. And that's all built in. There's no programming required. The fold-out page template folds out horizontally to show you individual panels with more detail that can be displayed about the subject being retrieved as well as overflow and drill-down areas. And there's a collection detail template that will display a list with additional details about the selected item (for example, an order and its order line items). The smart search page does exactly what it says. It has a search component that you use to filter or search the data coming back from the REST data sources and then display the results in a list or a table. You define the filter yourself and apply it using different kinds of comparators, so you can look for strings that start with certain values or contain values, or numerical values that are equal to or less than, depending on what you're filtering for. And then there are the transactional templates, which are meant to make changes. This includes both the simple create and edit and advanced create and edit templates.  The simple create and edit page template edits a single record or creates a single record. And the advanced page template works well if you're working with master-detail, parent-child type relationships. Let's say you want to view the parent and create children for it or even create a parent and the children at the same time. And there's a Gantt chart page for project management–type tracking and a guided process page for multiple-step processes and there's a data management page template specifically for viewing and editing data collections like Excel spreadsheets. 14:55 Nikita: You mentioned that there's a design system behind all this. How is this used, and how does the customer benefit from it? Joe: Redwood comprises both a design system and a development system. The design system has a series of steps that we follow here at Oracle and can suggest that you, our customers and partners, can follow as well. This includes understanding the problem, articulating the vision for the page and the application (what it should do), identifying the proper Redwood page templates to use, adding detail and refining the design and then using a number of different mechanisms, including PowerPoint or Figma design tools to specify the design for development, and then monitor engagement in the real world. These are the steps that we follow here at Oracle. The Redwood development process starts with learning how to use Redwood components and templates using the documentation and other content from redwood.oracle.com and Visual Builder Studio. Then it's about understanding the design created by the design team, learning more about components and templates for your application, specifically the ones you're going to use, how they work, and how they work together. Then developing your application using Visual Builder Studio Designer, and finally improving and refining your application. Now, right now, as I mentioned, telemetry is available to us here at Oracle so we can get a sense of the feedback on the pages of how components are being used and where time is being spent, and we use that to tune the designs and components being used. That telemetry data may be available to customers in the future. Now, when you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can access the Redwood pattern book that shows you in detail all the different page templates that are available: smart search page, data grid, welcome page, dashboard landing page, and so on, and you can select these and read more about them as well as the actual design specifications that were used to build the pages—defining what they do and what they respond to. They provide a lot of detailed information about the templates and components, how they work and how they're intended to be used. 16:50 Lois: That's a lot of great resources available. But what if I don't have access to Visual Builder Studio Designer? Can I still see how Redwood looks and behaves? Joe: Well, if you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can log in and work with the Redwood reference application, which is a live application working with live data. It was created to show off the various page templates and components, their look and feel and functionality from the Redwood design and development systems. This is an order management application, so you can do things like view filtered pending orders, create new orders, manage orders, and view information about customers and inventory. It uses the different page templates to show you how the application can perform. 17:29 Nikita: I assume there are common aspects to how these page templates are designed, built, and intended to be used. Is that a good way to begin understanding how to work with them? Becoming familiar with their common properties and functionality? Joe: Absolutely! Good point! All pages have titles, and most have primary and secondary actions that can be triggered through a variety of GUI events, like clicking a button or a link or selecting something in a list or a table. The transactional page templates include validation groups that validate whether the data is correct before it is submitted, as well as a message dialog that can pop up if there are unsaved changes and someone tries to leave the page. All the pages can use variables to display information or set properties and can easily display specific contextual information about records that have been retrieved, like adding the Order Number or Customer Name and Number to the page title or section headers. 18:18 Lois: If I were a developer, I'd be really excited to get started! So, let's say I'm a developer. What's the best way to begin learning about Redwood, Joe? Joe: A great place to start learning about the Redwood design and development system is at the redwood.oracle.com page I mentioned. We have many different pages that describe the philosophy and fundamental basis for Redwood, the ideas and intent behind it, and how we're using it here at Oracle. It also has a list of all the different page templates and components you can use and a link to the Redwood reference application where you can sign in and try it yourself. In addition, we at Oracle University offer a course called Design and Develop Redwood Applications, and in there, we have both lecture content as well as hands-on practices where you build a lightweight version of the Redwood reference application using data from the Fusion apps application, as well as the pages that I talked about: the welcome page, detail pages, transactional pages, and the dashboard landing page.  And you'll see how those pages are designed and constructed while building them yourself.  It's very important though to take one of the free Visual Builder Developer courses first: either Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and/or Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio before you try to work through the practices in the Redwood course because it uses a lot of Visual Builder Designer technology.  You'll get a lot more out of the Redwood practices if you understand the basics of Visual Builder Studio first. The Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio course is probably a better place to start unless you know for a fact you will be focusing on extending Oracle Fusion Applications using Visual Builder Studio. Now, a lot of the content is the same between the two courses as they share much of the same technology and architectures. 19:58 Lois: Ok, so Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio…all on mylearn.oracle.com and all free for anyone who wants to take them, right? Joe: Yes, exactly. And the free Redwood learning path leads to an Associate certification. While our courses are a great place to start in preparing for your certification exam, they are not, of course, by themselves sufficient to pass and you will want to study and be familiar with the redwood.oracle.com content as well. The learning path is free, but you do have to pay for the certification exam. Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. A quick reminder about the short survey we've created to gather your insights and suggestions for the podcast. It's really quick. Just click the link in the show notes to complete the survey. Thank you so much for helping us make the show better. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 20:58 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Cybersecurity Today: Microsoft Office 2024, Data Breach, CrowdStrike Fallout, & Ford's Privacy Concerns In this episode of Cybersecurity Today with your host Jim Love, we discuss Microsoft's decision to disable ActiveX controls by default in Office 2024 to enhance security, the data breach at SlimCD affecting 1.7 million credit card owners, CrowdStrike's ongoing response to the July IT disruption, and privacy concerns over Ford's new patent application for in-car conversation monitoring. Learn about the implications and what these developments mean for IT professionals and end-users. 00:00 Introduction and Headlines 00:24 Microsoft Office 2024 Security Changes 01:50 Major Data Breach at SlimCD 03:51 CrowdStrike's Crisis Management 05:35 Ford's Controversial Patent Application 06:54 Conclusion and Show Notes

Car rental company Avis discloses data breach Microsoft Office 2024 to disable ActiveX controls by default Wisconsin Medicare users had information leaked in MOVEit breach Huge thanks to our sponsor, Vanta Whether you're starting or scaling your security program, Vanta helps you automate compliance across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more. With Vanta, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating your security posture with a customer-facing Trust Center. Over 7,000 global companies like Atlassian, Flo Health, and Quora use Vanta to manage risk and prove security. Our listeners get $1,000 off at Vanta.com/headlines.   Get the story behind the headlines at CISOSeries.com

In deze aflevering bespreken we de nieuwste updates van Microsoft Learn. Microsoft heeft Copilot en Microsoft 365-content toegevoegd aan Learn, en er zijn nu 30-daagse plannen beschikbaar om binnen een maand een examen te kunnen halen. Daarnaast behandelen we de impact van het uitzetten van TLS 1.0 en 1.1 in Azure. Skill up on Copilot and Microsoft 365Microsoft voegt nieuwe leerplannen en Copilot-functies toe aan Microsoft 365 op Learn.Link naar artikel 30 Day Plans on Microsoft LearnMaak gebruik van 30-daagse studieplannen om je technische vaardigheden te ontwikkelen.Link naar artikel Azure support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will end by 31 October 2024Azure stopt met de ondersteuning van TLS 1.0 en 1.1 tegen het einde van oktober 2024.Link naar artikel Microsoft 365 admin center will support continuous access evaluation (CAE)Het Microsoft 365-beheercentrum zal doorlopende toegangsevaluatie (CAE) ondersteunen.Link naar artikel ActiveX disabled in Office 2024ActiveX wordt uitgeschakeld in Office 2024, wat invloed heeft op oudere oplossingen.Link naar artikel Entra ID support for SSH connections in portalEntra ID ondersteunt nu SSH-verbindingen binnen het Azure-portaal.Link naar artikel Azure Public IPs are zone redundant by defaultAzure Public IP's zijn nu standaard zone-redundant om hogere beschikbaarheid te bieden.Link naar artikel

Redwood is a state-of-the-art graphical interface that defines the look and feel of the new Oracle Cloud Redwood Applications.  In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald, take a closer look at the intent behind the design and development aspects of the new Redwood experience. They also explore Redwood page templates and components.  Developing Redwood Applications with Visual Builder: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/developing-redwood-applications-with-visual-builder/112791 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we discussed how Visual Builder Studio can be used to extend Oracle Fusion Apps.  Lois: That's right, Niki. In today's episode, we will focus on Oracle's Redwood design system and how it helps us create stunning, world-class enterprise applications and user experiences.  00:56 Nikita: Yeah, Redwood is the basis for all the new Oracle Cloud Applications being re-designed, developed, and delivered. To tell us more, we have Senior OCI Learning Solutions Architect and Principal Instructor Joe Greenwald, who's been working with Oracle software development tools since the early 90s and is responsible for OU's Visual Builder Studio and Redwood course content. Lois: Hi Joe! Thanks for being with us today. 01:21 Joe: Hi Lois. Hi Niki. I am excited to join you on this episode because with the release of 24A Fusion applications, we are encouraging all our customers to adopt the new Redwood design system and components, and take advantage of the world-class look and feel of the new Redwood user experience. Redwood represents a new approach and direction for us at Oracle, and we're excited to have our customers benefit from it. 01:44 Nikita: Joe, you've been working with Oracle user interface development tools and frameworks for a long time. How and why is Redwood different? Joe: I joined Oracle in 1992, and the first Oracle user interface I experienced was Oracle Forms. And that was the character mode. I came from a background of Smalltalk and its amazing, pioneering graphical user interface (GUI) design capabilities. I worked at Apple and I developed my own GUIs for a few years on PCs and Macs. So, Character Mode Forms, what we used to call DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) screens, was a shock, to say the least. Since then, I've worked with almost every user interface and development platform Oracle has created: Character Mode Forms, GUI Forms, Power Objects, HyperCard on the Macintosh, that was pre-OS X by the way, Sedona, written in native C++ and ActiveX and OLE, which didn't make it to a product but appeared in other things later, ADF Faces, which uses Java to generate HTML pages, and APEX, which uses PL/SQL to generate HTML pages. And I've worked with and wrote training classes for Java Swing, an excellent GUI framework for event-driven desktop and enterprise applications, but it wasn't designed for the web. So, it's with pleasure that I introduce you to the Redwood design system, easily the best effort I've ever seen, from the look and feel of holistic user-goal-centered design philosophy and approach to the cutting-edge WYSIWYG design tools.  03:11 Lois: Joe, is Redwood just another set of styles, colors, and fonts, albeit very nice-looking ones? Joe: The Redwood platform is new for Oracle, and it represents a significant change, not just in the look and feel, colors, fonts, and styles, I mean that too, but it's also a fundamental change in how Oracle is creating, designing, and imagining user interfaces. As you may be aware, all Oracle Cloud Applications are being re-designed, re-engineered, and re-rebuilt from the ground up, with significant changes to both back-end and front-end architectures. The front end is being redesigned, re-developed, and re-created in pure HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using Visual Builder Studio and its design-time browser-based Integrated Development Environment. The back end is being re-architected, re-designed, and implemented in a modern microservice architecture for Oracle Cloud using Kubernetes and other modern technologies that improve performance and work better in the cloud than our current legacy architecture. The new Oracle Cloud Applications platform uses Redwood for its design system—its tools, its patterns, its components, and page templates. Redwood is a richer and more productive platform to create solutions while still being cost-effective for Oracle. It encourages a transformation of the fundamental user experience, emphasizing identifying, meeting, and understanding end users' goals and how the applications are used.  04:34 Nikita: Joe, do you think Oracle's user interface has been improved with Redwood? In what ways has the UI changed? Joe: Yes, absolutely. Redwood has changed a lot of things. When I joined Oracle back in the '90s, there was effectively no user interface division or UI team. There was no user interface lab—and that was started in the mid-‘90s—and I was asked to give product usability feedback and participate in UI tests and experiments in those labs. I also helped test the products I was teaching at the time. I actually distinctly remember having to take a week to train users on Oracle's Designer CASE tool product just to prep the participants enough to perform usability testing. I can still hear the UI lab manager shaking her head and saying any product that requires a week of training to do usability testing has usability issues! And if you're like me and you've been around Oracle long enough, you know that Oracle's not always been known for its user interfaces and been known to release products that look like they were designed by two or more different companies. All that has changed with Redwood. With Redwood, there's a new internal design group that oversees the design choices of all development teams that develop products. This includes a design system review and an ongoing audit process to ensure that all the products being released, whether Fusion apps or something else, all look and feel similar so it looks like it's designed by a single company with a single thought in mind. Which it is. 06:00 Joe: There's a deeper, consistent commitment in identifying user needs, understanding how the applications are being used, and how they meet those user needs through things like telemetry: gathering metrics from the actual components and the Redwood system itself to see how the applications are being used, what's working well, and what isn't.  This telemetry is available to us here at Oracle, and we use it to fine tune the applications' usability and purpose.  06:25 Lois: That's really interesting, Joe. So, it's a fundamental change in the way we're doing things. What about the GUI components themselves? Are these more sophisticated than simple GUI components like buttons and text fields? Joe: The graphical components themselves are at a much higher level, more comprehensive, and work better together. And in Redwood, everything is a component. And I'm not just talking about things like input text fields and buttons, though it applies to these more fine-grained components as well. Leveraging Oracle's deep experience in building enterprise applications, we've incorporated that knowledge into creating page templates so that the structure and look and feel of the page is fixed based on our internal design standards. The developer has control over certain portions of it, but the overall look and feel of the page is controlled by Oracle. So there is consistency of look and feel within and across applications. These page templates come with predefined functionalities: headers, titles, properties, and variables to manipulate content and settings, slots for other components to hold like search fields, collections, contextual information, badges, and images, as well as primary and secondary actions, and variables for events and event handling through Visual Builder action chains, which handle the various actions and processing of the request on the page. And all these page templates and components are responsive, meaning they respond to the change in the size of the page and the orientation. So, when you move from a desktop to a handheld mobile device or a tablet, they respond appropriately and consistently to deliver a clean, easy-to-use interface and experience. 07:58 Nikita: You mentioned WYSIWYG design tools and their integration with Visual Builder Studio's integrated development environment. How does Redwood work with Visual Builder Studio? Joe: This is easily one of my most favorite aspects about Redwood and the integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer. The components and page templates are responsive at runtime as well as responsive at design time! In over 30 years of working with Oracle software development products, this is the first development system and integrated development environment I've seen Oracle produce where what you see is what you get at design time. Now, with products such as Designer and JDeveloper ADF Faces and even APEX—all those page-generation types of products—you have to generate the page, deploy it, and only then can you view the final page to see whether it meets the needs of your user interface. For example, with Designer, there were literally hundreds of configuration parameters that you could set to control how forms and reports looked when they were generated —down to how many buttons on a row or how many rows to a page, that sort of thing, all done in text mode. Then you'd generate and run the page to see what the result was and then go back and modify things until you got what you wanted. 09:05 Joe: I remember hearing the product managers for Oracle ADF Faces being asked…well, a customer asked, “What happens if I put this component here and this component here? What will the page look like?” and they'd say, “I don't know. Render the page and let's see.” That's just crazy talk. With Redwood and its integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer, what you see on the page at design time is literally what you get. And if I make the page narrower or I even convert it to a mobile display while in the Designer itself, I immediately see what the page looks like in that new mode. Everything just moves accordingly, at design time. For example, when changing to a mobile UI, everything stacks up nicely; the components adjust to the page size and change right there in the design environment. Again, I can't emphasize enough the simple luxury of being able to see exactly what the user is going to see on my page and having the ability to change the resolution, orientation, and screen size, and it changes right there immediately in my design environment. 10:01 Lois: I'm intrigued by the idea of page templates that are managed by Oracle but still leave room for the developer to customize aspects of the look and feel and functionality. How does that work? Joe: Well, the page templates themselves represent the typical pages you would most likely use in an enterprise application. Things like a welcome page, a search page, and edit and create pages, and a couple of different ways to display summary information, including foldout pages, though this is not an exhaustive list of course. Not only do they provide a logical and complete starting point for the layout of the page itself, but they also include built-in functionality. These templates include functionality for buttons, primary and secondary actions, and areas for holding contextual information, badges, avatars, and images. And this is all built right into the page, and all of them use variables to describe the contents for the various parts, so the contents can change programmatically as the variables' contents change, if necessary. 10:59 Do you have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We'd love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us on the Idea Incubator. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  11:19 Nikita: Welcome back! So, Joe, let's say I'm a developer. How do I get started working with Redwood? Joe: One of the easiest ways to do it is to use Visual Builder Studio Designer and create a new visual application. If you're creating a standalone, bespoke custom application, you can choose a Redwood starter template, which will include all the Redwood components and page templates automatically. Or, if you're extending and customizing an Oracle Fusion application, Redwood is already included.  Either way, when you create a new page, you have a choice of different page templates—welcome page templates, edit pages, search pages, etc. —and all you have to do is choose a page that you want and begin configuring it. And actually if you make a mistake, it's easy to switch page templates. All the components, page templates, and so on have documentation right there inside Visual Builder Studio Designer, and we do recommend that you read through the documentation first to get an understanding of what the use case for that template is and how to use it. And some components are more granular, like a collection container which holds a collection of rows of a list or a table and provides capabilities like toolbars and other actions that are already built and defined. You decide what actions you want and then use predefined event listeners that are triggered when an event occurs in the application—like a button being clicked or a row being selected—which kicks off a series of actions to be performed. 12:38 Lois: That sounds easy enough if you know what you're doing. Joe, what are some of the more common pages and what are they used for?  Joe: Redwood page templates can be broken down into categories. There are overview templates like the welcome page template, which has a nice banner, colors, and illustrations that can be used for a welcoming page—like for entering a new application or a new logical section of the application. The dashboard landing page template displays key information values and their charts and graphs, which can come from Oracle Analytics, and automatically switches the display depending on which set of data is selected.  The detail templates include a general overview, which presents read-only information related to a single record or resource. The item overview gives you a small panel to view summary information (for example, information on a customer) and in the main section, you can view details like all the orders for that customer. And you can even navigate through a set of customers, clicking arrows for next-previous navigation. And that's all built in. There's no programming required. The fold-out page template folds out horizontally to show you individual panels with more detail that can be displayed about the subject being retrieved as well as overflow and drill-down areas. And there's a collection detail template that will display a list with additional details about the selected item (for example, an order and its order line items). 13:52 Joe: The smart search page does exactly what it says. It has a search component that you use to filter or search the data coming back from the REST data sources and then display the results in a list or a table. You define the filter yourself and apply it using different kinds of comparators, so you can look for strings that start with certain values or contain values, or numerical values that are equal to or less than, depending on what you're filtering for. And then there are the transactional templates, which are meant to make changes. This includes both the simple create and edit and advanced create and edit templates.  The simple create and edit page template edits a single record or creates a single record. And the advanced page template works well if you're working with master-detail, parent-child type relationships. Let's say you want to view the parent and create children for it or even create a parent and the children at the same time. And there's a Gantt chart page for project management–type tracking and a guided process page for multiple-step processes and there's a data management page template specifically for viewing and editing data collections like Excel spreadsheets. 14:50 Nikita: You mentioned that there's a design system behind all this. How is this used, and how does the customer benefit from it? Joe: Redwood comprises both a design system and a development system. The design system has a series of steps that we follow here at Oracle and can suggest that you, our customers and partners, can follow as well. This includes understanding the problem, articulating the vision for the page and the application (what it should do), identifying the proper Redwood page templates to use, adding detail and refining the design and then using a number of different mechanisms, including PowerPoint or Figma design tools to specify the design for development, and then monitor engagement in the real world. These are the steps that we follow here at Oracle. The Redwood development process starts with learning how to use Redwood components and templates using the documentation and other content from redwood.oracle.com and Visual Builder Studio. Then it's about understanding the design created by the design team, learning more about components and templates for your application, specifically the ones you're going to use, how they work, and how they work together. Then developing your application using Visual Builder Studio Designer, and finally improving and refining your application. Now, right now, as I mentioned, telemetry is available to us here at Oracle so we can get a sense of the feedback on the pages of how components are being used and where time is being spent, and we use that to tune the designs and components being used. That telemetry data may be available to customers in the future. Now, when you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can access the Redwood pattern book that shows you in detail all the different page templates that are available: smart search page, data grid, welcome page, dashboard landing page, and so on, and you can select these and read more about them as well as the actual design specifications that were used to build the pages—defining what they do and what they respond to. They provide a lot of detailed information about the templates and components, how they work and how they're intended to be used. 16:45 Lois: That's a lot of great resources available. But what if I don't have access to Visual Builder Studio Designer? Can I still see how Redwood looks and behaves? Joe: Well, if you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can log in and work with the Redwood reference application, which is a live application working with live data. It was created to show off the various page templates and components, their look and feel and functionality from the Redwood design and development systems. This is an order management application, so you can do things like view filtered pending orders, create new orders, manage orders, and view information about customers and inventory. It uses the different page templates to show you how the application can perform. 17:23 Nikita: I assume there are common aspects to how these page templates are designed, built, and intended to be used. Is that a good way to begin understanding how to work with them? Becoming familiar with their common properties and functionality? Joe: Absolutely! Good point! All pages have titles, and most have primary and secondary actions that can be triggered through a variety of GUI events, like clicking a button or a link or selecting something in a list or a table. The transactional page templates include validation groups that validate whether the data is correct before it is submitted, as well as a message dialog that can pop up if there are unsaved changes and someone tries to leave the page. All the pages can use variables to display information or set properties and can easily display specific contextual information about records that have been retrieved, like adding the Order Number or Customer Name and Number to the page title or section headers. 18:13 Lois: If I were a developer, I'd be really excited to get started! So, let's say I'm a developer. What's the best way to begin learning about Redwood, Joe? Joe: A great place to start learning about the Redwood design and development system is at the redwood.oracle.com page I mentioned. We have many different pages that describe the philosophy and fundamental basis for Redwood, the ideas and intent behind it, and how we're using it here at Oracle. It also has a list of all the different page templates and components you can use and a link to the Redwood reference application where you can sign in and try it yourself. In addition, we at Oracle University offer a course called Design and Develop Redwood Applications, and in there, we have both lecture content as well as hands-on practices where you build a lightweight version of the Redwood reference application using data from the Fusion apps application, as well as the pages that I talked about: the welcome page, detail pages, transactional pages, and the dashboard landing page.  And you'll see how those pages are designed and constructed while building them yourself.  It's very important though to take one of the free Visual Builder Developer courses first: either Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and/or Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio before you try to work through the practices in the Redwood course because it uses a lot of Visual Builder Designer technology.  You'll get a lot more out of the Redwood practices if you understand the basics of Visual Builder Studio first. The Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio course is probably a better place to start unless you know for a fact you will be focusing on extending Oracle Fusion Applications using Visual Builder Studio. Now, a lot of the content is the same between the two courses as they share much of the same technology and architectures. 19:53 Lois: Ok, so Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio…all on mylearn.oracle.com and all free for anyone who wants to take them, right? Joe: Yes, exactly. And the free Redwood learning path leads to an Associate certification. While our courses are a great place to start in preparing for your certification exam, they are not, of course, by themselves sufficient to pass and you will want to study and be familiar with the redwood.oracle.com content as well. The learning path is free, but you do have to pay for the certification exam. 20:29 Nikita: Thanks for those tips, Joe, and we appreciate you joining us today. Joe: Thanks for having me! Lois: Join us next week when we'll discuss how model-based development is still alive and well today. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 20:45 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Maps are great tools for telling the whole story in a newscast. Showing the viewer where something happened makes the viewer understand the importance of the news story in their region or the world. It is possible to design map templates and provide them to the MOS users to create their own maps. MOS users can select a map style, plot an end location and render maps as a total self-service workflow, and never compromise the quality of the station's brand. Watch this video to see how easy self-service map graphics can be. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

Ross Video XPression MOS workflow is possible in a variety of Newsroom Computer Systems. The Associated Press and their ENPS system is no exception. In this video, watch XPression integrated with the ENPS newsroom MOS workflow. The XPression MOS Client shown, here in ENPS 7, allows NRCS users to select templates, add content and drag-and-drop the completed graphics into the scripts in their running orders. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

Using simple tricks, XPression designers can create templates with options to reduce the number of templates required to produce a newscast. Rather than build variations of the same template for each position on the screen, or animated or static templates. By entering in an L for Left-Side or R for Right-side, two OTS templates can become one. Make it easier for your busy newsroom staff to select the right templates and reduce the number of templates they need to browse through. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

Producers trying to review the XPression items in their newscast have come to love the BROWSE function of the XPression MOS ActiveX plug-in. However, the one complaint was the thumbnail view was too small to proofread some of the graphics. Well, but those reading glasses back on top of your head. We made the thumbnails even larger in XPression 8.5 or higher. Now it is even easier to proofread the graphics in the Browse tab of the XPression MOS plug-in. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

The XPression MOS ActiveX plug-in provides advanced tools which allow journalists to utilize reposition and scaling functionality that can be exposed by the XPression designer. Finding assets for use in the XPression ActiveX is easy to do, using Streamline Media Asset Management. Assets can be selected, and repositioned to create the desired graphic by the journalist. Watch this video to see how this can help you to produce better graphics for your newscast. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

Using simple tricks, XPression designers can create templates with options to reduce the number of templates required to produce a newscast. Rather than build variations of the same template for each position on the screen, or animated or static templates. By entering in an L for Left-Side or R for Right-side, two OTS templates can become one. Make it easier for your busy newsroom staff to select the right templates and reduce the number of templates they need to browse through. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

Driven by customer requests, there have been considerable changes to the XPression MOS Plug-in. This item is being broken down into multiple sessions. Items included are: Improved Thumbnail viewing, inclusion of XPression categories and scene ordering from the XPression project. Thumbnails in The XPression Plug-in: The thumbnail view of available scenes (templates) can now be expanded wider than one column Thumbnails can now be scaled from tiny to very large in this panel If an XPression Project is created using categories and uploaded to the Project Server, the Categories now show up in the Scenes panel as a way to organize scenes and their thumbnails. The scene thumbnails appear in the same order the XPression Artist sets them in XPression Thumbnails are now visible and scalable (per user) in the Rundown Section of the XPression MOS Plug-in as part of Tile, Thumbnail or List view Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

In today's podcast we cover four crucial cyber and technology topics, including: 1. REvil ransomware crew site back online, no new victims claimed2. Microsoft says Internet Explorer being exploited via new Zero Day 3. McDonalds in UK accidently sends database credentials to contestants 4. Germany claims Russian responsible for hacking national elections. I'd love feedback, feel free to send your comments and feedback to  | cyberandtechwithmike@gmail.com

[Following is an automated transcript of Week 1115 podcast aired 2021-05-29] Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got these semiconductor shortages. What that means is various types of chips are just not available and it's been hurting us all the way across our economy. And that's where we're going to start the day with today. Semiconductors. [00:00:15] Man, this has been so bad, these semiconductor shortages, because what it means is we just cannot get the types of devices that we want because those raw components just aren't available. I was talking with a gentleman earlier this week and he was telling me how he has a special little app that tells him when there is a Sony PS five available for sale anywhere online. [00:00:45] It's gotten that bad. First of all, Why does he want a PS five so bad? I've never owned one or an X-Box or any of those gaming consoles? Since the original Nintendo, we had a we as well. Cause we had all the exercise stuff that went along with the week. But anyways, that's a different story entirely. [00:01:04] I'm sure a lot of you guys play a lot of video games, but. There really are not Sony  available. And we're finding much the same problem in even the car industry where some of these major manufacturers here in the U S have had to shut down lines. They've had, gone from three shifts down to a single shift every day. [00:01:30] And in some cases it's gotten even worse where vehicle manufacturers are only. Making vehicles of few times a week. It is incredible. What's been happening and there a number of reasons for it. This isn't just one reason, but it does bring up the real problem we could have with our critical infrastructure. [00:01:53] How critical is it that we have computers that can run our businesses, drive our cars, and fly our airplanes. I think it's pretty darn critical when you get right down to it. Yeah. You can probably get an extra year out of that computer, if you really need to many times that computer's just plain broken, you just can't use it. [00:02:15] So you do need to replace it. But in reality, we've gotten a little bit soft. We are not making most of the chips here in the U S anymore. Yes, it's us technology. But most of this is in Southeast Asia, particularly in Taiwan. And do you remember what's happening with Taiwan with the threats from China? [00:02:38] China is flying over Taiwan right now with military jets in Taiwanese air space, because China has never officially recognized that Taiwan is independent from the people's Republic of China. And do you know how socialists are? They're just going to go ahead and take that land. What would happen if they did. [00:03:00] Remember China really wants to get their hands on our top chip technology because that helps them in the military. It helps them with all of these facial recognition systems they have in China, the social credit systems that they have in China, by the way, all built primarily by us companies and sold to China to track their people. [00:03:23] Including the nasty things have been happening with the Wiggers over there. It's just absolutely incredible as well as Christian communities and others in China. So all of this tech has stuff they want to get their hands on. If they were to invade Taiwan, what would happen? The Biden administration. [00:03:40] There they've been a little soft on this. Unlike president Trump, who said, yeah, the Trump administration, we're not going to tolerate any of this. And the Trump administration shipped all kinds of military systems to Taiwan, so they could potentially defend themselves because we don't really want to get drawn into a hot war, but. [00:04:00] Oh, if they had taken over Taiwan, they would now have access to the U S technology on chip making. Now let me explain what that means from a technology standpoint, the chips that we have are.  into a wafer of silicone. I'm going to try and keep this pretty simple. And then, and that silicone is grown. Cause you think of a crystal or maybe think of a still-life tight or it's like titers to leg might that you'd find in a cave. [00:04:34] Those crystals are grown. They're humanly grown, and obviously you don't want any defects in them. So it's very hard to do to grow them. And we need those crystals for all kinds of things, including these solar panels that some people are so hot to trot about. I, Hey, I love the idea. Don't get me wrong. [00:04:52] It's just right now, again, with solar panels, like so many other things, don't think you're green because you. Are or putting up solar panels. You're not right. There's certainly other advantages to it, but you're not being green by doing that. But what really matters is how much power does that chip use in order to do a certain number of computations? [00:05:17] And how much heat is given off by the chip. Think again about the old Edison light bulbs that we've had and still have in some places and those Edison light bulbs, by the way, one of the original ones still burning in New York city and the fire department after over a hundred years, that one light bulb just incredible. [00:05:37] But think about that Edison light bulb, it gives off light. Sure. But it also gives off heat. And the same thing is true with. Anything electronic the movement of the electricity through that conductor or semiconductor create heat. Heat is a waste. That's part of the problem with Edison bulbs. It'd be one thing if they were giving off just straight light, the, but so much of that energy is used to generate heat that we don't want. [00:06:06] And then we have to dissipate that heat somehow, but that's another story. The same thing is true. When we're talking about these chips, the chips have a resistance to them. In fact, that's what a semiconductor does. It provide some resistance, so that resistance is going to. Do what create heat. So you feel your laptop when you're running it and so hot to get over time, the laptops have gotten faster and have actually created less heat, certainly poorer computational unit. [00:06:44] They created a lot less heat. What we're looking at now is if we can make these chips even smaller. We can decrease the amount of electricity they need, because it doesn't have electricity. It doesn't have to flow as far through the conductors or semiconductors inside these chips. So that's what the race has been over the years. [00:07:09] The race has been how small can we make them? And by making them smaller, You're doing a couple of things. You're making them faster because electricity has to travel less distance. Even though electricity is really fast. When you're talking about a billion transistors inside one of these chips or more, you are traveling through a whole lot of conductor and semiconductor. [00:07:32] So you can make that chip faster by making it smaller and you can reduce the amount of power it needs, because you're not going to be giving off as much power via heat and heat generation. And that's important for everything, but particularly important for our mobile devices. Look at your apple watch or your iPhone or your laptop or your desktop. [00:07:56] All of them need to consume less and less electricity as time goes on. So what we're talking about now are just teeny tiny measurement. We're talking about nanometers. So if you go online, you look up nano meter. Which is a foul. Yeah, there you go. 10 to the negative nine meters. It's a billionth of a meter. [00:08:21] Isn't that something looking it up right now, sell it a 1E-9.000000000. Give or take, and it's a unit of measurement that is being used now in chips and chip designs. And we're seeing these faster and faster chips getting down into the five nanometer process that is incredibly small, incredibly. [00:08:49] Fast potentially, but likely incredibly fast and uses a lot less electricity right now. We're seeing seven nanometers out of Taiwan and we're working on five nanometer, but we have such a shortage of chips right now that they're bringing some of these old 15 nanometer. Chip fabs online, even 22 nanometer. [00:09:14] I'm looking right now online at some of these old chip fabricators that are being brought online and China really wants to get their hands on some of this technology, because at this point anyways, they really can't get to the seven nanoliter chips. China right now. I think is pretty much limited to 14 nanometer. [00:09:39] So we're still, I had in that race, but because they're being made in Taiwan, these chips that we're using here in the us using us technology, and because we had the lockdown in Taiwan and pretty much worldwide, the whole supply chain got interrupted and these big car manufacturers just. Shut off the orders. [00:10:01] So there's no reason for the manufacturers to continue to make these things are a little reason for them to make them for the car industry in the current street, he thought we can just turn it back on and we'll have the chips. And of course they didn't, but it's also been compounded by the conditions in Taiwan right now. [00:10:19] Because the Taiwanese centers for disease control this week raised it's epidemic warning level and is strengthening their containment measures and making things even worse. Taiwan is in the midst of a severe drought. So they are. Rationing water in Taiwan. They're looking at cutoffs of two days a week. [00:10:42] And water reduction plans are expected to decrease supply to all major manufacturers by as much as 15%. So there you go. In a nutshell, that's why we care. Nanometers and we're talking about chips. That's why we need to start making them back here in the U S. And the good news, apple and others are doing exactly that. [00:11:03] Starting to bring some of this technology back from Taiwan, into the U S and I think that's going to help keep us safer in the long run [00:11:12]All electric vehicles are I think very cool. And some people give me a hard time because I am not a fan of it. [00:11:20] If you think you're being green, because you're not. And I went through the whole science behind that the life cycle of an electric vehicle is much more. Dangerous and hazardous and polluting in the environment. Then even a diesel truck is just to give you an idea of small truck. So that's, let's put that aside, but in reality, these things I think are potentially the future. [00:11:50] Now there's a lot of things we've got to take care of, for instance. Our electric grid is not set up for electric cars. Our electric grid is not set up for us to have windmills in our backyard or to have solar panels on our roofs. It's set up to have a main power station of some sort, whether it's nuclear, which by the way is green or whether it might be. [00:12:17] Be coal or natural gas or wood or trash. That's what the grid is set up for. So we have some problems there and there's another big problem. And that has to do with how much power one of these vehicles can hold, because I don't know about you, but having a, what is it? The brand new car that came out a Fiat or somebody and his electric vehicle and its range is 78 miles. [00:12:46]In some places that might be okay, but progress. The problem is I'll write, let's say I'll put up with stopping every hour to recharge these cars, unless it's a rapid recharger, you're going to be there for an hour and a half or more. And even with the rapid recharger, you're going to be there for a least 20 minutes. [00:13:07] Now Tesla had some innovative ideas on how to deal with that. Like the, I don't know if you ever saw it a battery pack, so you'd pull into the station and it would just trade battery packs for you. The idea was it's right in the center. GM has this concept of the roller skate, where the entire car really is built into this frame. [00:13:29] That kind of looks like roller skate. And then on top of that, Goes your car and there's some thinking maybe we can make it so that you can just swap out your rollerskate. Make it nice and simple and hopefully relatively inexpensive, but we still don't see the range on the vehicles. And as of yet, we haven't seen any huge forays by any of the big auto makers. [00:13:54] Of course, Nissan had it to leaf, which. Pretty well accepted GM had their entry. And I chuckled because it was in a lot of ways. It was a joke. And of course they're up with better stuff here in the future, but I want to play a little bit here. I'm going to play about 25 seconds worth of an ad. [00:14:12] And then we're going to talk about it a bit. [00:14:16] Unknown: [00:14:16] It's got a targeted 775 pound feet of torque. It's targeted to go from zero to 60 in the mid four second range. It's a driving experience. That's pure unfiltered exhilaration from the moment you hit the accelerator. Oh, and it's an F-150 introducing the all electric F-150 [00:14:40] Craig Peterson: [00:14:40] lightning. [00:14:41] So you noticed there were no mentions in there of no birds were harmed in January generating electricity here. And of course, a little tongue in cheek because of course birds are harmed in generate electricity, particularly windmill, but anyways, they're not going for the eco greeny. They're not going for the Prius driver. [00:15:01] You remember the stats on the Prius where they surveyed the drivers of Prius's. This was probably five. Maybe a little more years ago. And the number one reason they found people drove a Prius. 70% of the time in fact, was they drove a Prius because of what they thought other people would think of them. [00:15:23] So there they are driving this car that they're driving it for one reason, because they, I think it's going to make other people think that they're just fantastic people. I obviously I disagree with that. I think that's little bit of a problem, but what is what they're doing here with that Ford commercial is they are working on mainstreaming. [00:15:46] Yes. Electric vehicles. Can you imagine this a 700 plus foot point foot pound torque in a sub $40,000 truck? It's just amazing. And you can even use the batteries that are in this truck. Of course, there's a lot of batteries in that truck to run power tools while you're out at a work site. Which I think is a great idea. [00:16:12] And you can even use it to power your house. They have a special adapter you can use to hook up to your house so that you can get up to three days. They say of electricity in your house. If the power goes out, No mention in here of, any of these greeny things, right? Oh, none of oases talking points are in that ad. [00:16:37] At least I didn't hear him on, did you guys hear them, but this is going to be amazing. This of course is Ford's best-selling vehicle, the F-150 and I drove one for years. It was very handy with the horses and chickens and everything here. And I'm looking forward to this thing coming out. I don't think I'm going to buy one, by the way. [00:16:58] They've also got this Mustang mark II, which is this electric Mustang thingy. And then they have an electric transit van. And the reason I don't think I'm going to buy one is it just doesn't have the range. Now you can get better equipped lightening trucks in that sub $40,000 one. You can also go ahead and get bigger batteries. [00:17:22] You can do a whole bunch of things, but this range is a combined output here, a 426 horsepower estimated range of 230 miles. And the extended range of this F-150 lightning is going to get an even. Bigger horsepower rating, 563 horsepower and an estimated range of 300 miles. And 775 foot pounds of torque, which is just stump polling. [00:17:56] It's absolutely amazing. So I don't know about you. I'm not in the mode for pain, 60 ish grand for an electric truck that is only going to take me 230 miles. That, but maybe that's me. And then looking further into the stats on this thing, it can do a bunch of towing. It can have a 77, a hundred pounds of towing. [00:18:22] You can get Reduce cargo, excuse me, reduce cargo course. If you're getting the bigger battery and looking at an illustration of the F-150 lightening, what they're doing is similar to what GM had proposed way back with the roller skate. The entire drive train is underneath the truck. And it's just like an old frame. [00:18:44] You remember, trucks used to have frames now? The F-150 is, I think still do have frames underneath, but the whole bottom of the truck is one piece. If you will, obviously there's little pieces to it, but one major component and then the cab and bed and everything else just sits right on top of it. [00:19:03] It's amazing. Now with this truck, if you connected to 150 kilowatt fast charger, you're going to get 41 miles in 10 minutes. So how long does it take you fill up with gas? Probably about 10 minutes. How long is it good for? It was my car 400, 500 miles in this case that 10 minute stop. At the fuel station is going to get you 41 miles. [00:19:29] And if you can find the, just the 50 kilowatt fast charger, it's going to take you 91 minutes to get 41 miles of range. It's not there yet, but it's very obvious that Ford is aiming for the truck driver. And more particularly if I was a construction guy and I was taking my truck out and I needed to plug in tools and I don't have to drive very far. [00:19:56] I look seriously at that new F-150 lightning. [00:20:00]President Biden .  I've got an article in my newsletter this week about what he's been doing when it comes to the hackers, China, is it Russia? What's going on? He's been blaming. It looks like. Russia for some of the hacks that China has actually been carrying out, but no matter what the bottom line is, we are getting hacked and this is a very big problem. [00:20:28] We have to modernize our technology strategy. Because this ideological divide between these authoritan or authoritarians, whether it's a dictatorship like the socialists have in China, where you have chairman Mao, who is chairman for life now, or Putin. President Putin, who is president for life over in Russia. [00:20:53]It's absolutely amazing. They are coming after us. And so is North Korea, of course, again, socialist dictator for life over there as well, Iran not so socialist, but a very fascist in many ways, which is typically a form of socialism anyways. We need to be able to protect ourselves. It's a real problem, frankly. [00:21:18] 1947 world war two was over and George Kennan, R yeah. Kennan introduced this concept of containment and that containment concept was used throughout the entire cold war. And of course you probably know what that is. At least, excuse me. I hope you do. But today we don't have that cold war anymore. [00:21:45] What is it that we have? Why would China be attacking this? We know, for instance, a China comes after our intellectual property and they w they come after it because it helps them militarily. If they know what we're doing, what we're ordering. What's going on that we know they come after us as well, because they want to cause some havoc. [00:22:11] There's no question about that. Some of these other smaller countries come after us because they need the hard currency. Ultimately they want to trade in those Bitcoin for us dollars, which of course can be spent here. But. This whole system that we have right now is really on the brink of a new economy. [00:22:34] Look at the technology we've been using. Look at the number of people that have been working from home. We're sitting on the edge of three simultaneous bubbles. Right now we have the housing bubble. We have the stock market bubble and we have the cryptocurrency bubble and we've seen downs in all of those just over the last week or so. [00:22:56]We'll see what happens, but there's no denying that they're bubbles are home values adjusted for inflation, have not been higher than the last 100 years as an example. So there's a lot for us to look at. And when these bad guys are under the same types of financial pressures we are under, because, collapses tend to be worldwide. [00:23:21] What are they going to do? What's ultimately going to happen? Here is what president Biden thinks should happen with these two executive orders that came out really It, it has to do with federal government supply chains. And that is people who obviously are selling to the feds. And I want you to think mostly about department of defense here, and we deal with the department of defense contractors and tightening them up. [00:23:50] But in getting them to the point they should be at. And there's a lot to be concerned about it from that standpoint, but they have been releasing some details over the last few months, really. They started in April this year, and they're saying that because of the supply chain problem that we had with solar winds, they are now. [00:24:15] Pushing out some rules that require the people who sell to the federal government to keep a certain level of cybersecurity. We've talked a little bit before about CMMC, which is. Again, it's a cyber security maturity model that's out there and they are requiring certain federal contractors to meet that. [00:24:40] We've also talked about some of the NIST standards, which is the national Institute of science and technology. In fact, we talked about their password standard and how a year and a half or so ago, they changed the way we need to do passwords. And if you don't know what that is, have a look at my. A special report on passwords. [00:25:02] And I go through that in some detail, but there's an executive order on American supply chains that came out in February and it's leaning pretty heavily on these newer emerging technologies, including secure access to semiconductors. And we talked about them earlier in the show today, the high capacity batteries. [00:25:24] Because again, if we're not innovating. In the, you name it. But in end in the automotive field, we're going to fall behind what's important automotive. We just talked about it. Last segment here. Batteries. So it's covering batteries and materials that are used to create them. So they both of these orders address the need for us to really work closely together with our allies economically, as well as national security. [00:25:55] But that's exactly what we've been doing. Isn't it? What it really boils down to in my mind is democracy versus authoritarianism. It was so funny that they called president Trump and authoritarian a decade, her right. He was liking to Hitler constantly. I thought if you brought him up, you automatically lost the argument. [00:26:18] But in reality, now we're seeing more of a hands-on from the federal government more authoritarianism. And I got a question whether or not that's what we really want. Do we need a digital politic. This guiding doctrine, that places digital considerations at the forefront of our national strategy. Is this something that should be handled by the state or the businesses involved? [00:26:47]We've seen all kinds of mixed. Pros and cons to each one of those strategies over the years, we know government controls, centralized government control, ultimately causes serious problems serious as in the deaths of over a hundred million people in the last century alone. So I'm not sure that's the best idea. [00:27:09] And I have to say work. I With defense contractors, even not really a defense contractor, someone that makes something that's sold to a defense contractor. Having a one size fits all cybersecurity policy, a cybersecurity czar, and these executive orders pushing everything down does not make sense. It doesn't make sense for a real small company that makes a wiring harness to have to meet the same. [00:27:38]Cyber security requirements as a big BAE systems, they don't have the time. They don't have the money. It can cost a million dollars over the course of three years for even a small company to meet these federal standards that are required. If you take a contract from the federal government or from one of these contractors. [00:28:04] So you are a subcontractor, all of those requirements that are put on that huge military contractor, all of those requirements get pushed down to you. So this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'm very concerned about it. There's a bipartisan bill. That's moving right now called the democracy technology partnership act. [00:28:26] And they're trying to get some collaboration and innovation amongst democracies. I think it's good now that there are rules in place that have changed, that allows competitors to talk with each other when it comes to cyber security. [00:28:43]Internet Explorer was Microsoft's first major foray into the internet browsing world internet browsing didn't really take off until almost the mid nineties. And it was really cool. I remember when I first started using. Web browsing and websites and building them with NCSA mosaic. Oh my gosh. Those were the days heady days back then. [00:29:09] And we were just thinking about everything that could happen, how great it would be. And there were no hackers to speak of online. You didn't have to worry about drive by downloads or so many of the other problems that we have today. And Microsoft took that NCSA mosaic browser code base and created something. [00:29:33] They called internet Explorer. Now the history of internet Explorer, frankly. Is rather interesting when you get right down to it. Internet Explorer. Yeah. It's been around for a long time, but in genetics, Explorer was one of the worst browsers out there for a very long time. It was just terrible. [00:29:57] And one of the things that Microsoft did that really got. With the whole internet community upset with them is they built it right into their operating system. Absolutely. They used the code here from again, mosaic, which was this early commercial web browser back in 2003. It, the whole project started in 1994. [00:30:25]I'm looking right now, Wikipedia. I remember these things happening. It's just nuts to think about how far it's gone, but they took internet Explorer and they bolted it into the operating system. So the operating system now supposedly was dependent on internet Explorer. Now it's an interesting concept to think about if all they have to do is maintain a user interface. [00:30:51] That's web based for the operating system. That's really cool. Microsoft internet Explorer is some 5 million lines of code that is a lot of programming to maintain. And then on top of that, of course you have all of the user interface code that's sitting there in the operating system. So I think this is my suspicion. [00:31:12] What Microsoft is trying to do is make their life a little bit easier. But by doing that by hard wiring in internet Explorer, into the operating system, they ended up making it so that other companies like the Firefox guys, Mozilla, they could not run independently on inch, on a windows. And a third party, like Dell could not decide, Hey, I don't want to use internet Explorer because Google's paying me to install Google Chrome. [00:31:43] So I want to put Chrome on windows. So you just couldn't do any of that. So they got a whole bunch of flack. The industry came after them and because of that, so did the department of justice. And the United States versus Microsoft case, very fundamental. And it was absolutely, it was essential, I think because Microsoft never would have done anything about this, but they developed Microsoft this thing called ActiveX technology, which is a security nightmare and remains one to this very day where you could effectively as a website. [00:32:25] Tell the internet Explorer to do almost anything you wanted to do. And there were bugs after bugs. I don't have a count. It might be interesting to see what the actual count would be, but it was, it had to be in the thousands of bugs that were fixed security bugs that were fixed and internet Explorer because of active X and because of some of these other things. [00:32:48] So it's just been absolutely terrible. One of the questions I get asked most often to this day. What do we do when we don't want to use internet Explorer or more commonly, what is the best browser to use while I'm online? And the answer to that kind of varies. It depends, right? That's the answer, but as a general rule using Firefox is a good idea. [00:33:20] Now, one of the things I like about Firefox for an individual or for a, an extremely small business, like a small office home office, where you're not tying into a corporate network at all. One of the things that's really good is Firefox. Uses a version of DNS, which is the main name, service. It's what your computer uses in order to find websites online, Firefox uses a version of DNS that is. [00:33:50] Encrypted and protected so that your internet service provider cannot see the website names you're looking up and cannot intercept it. And that's the bigger thing. You don't want it to be intercepted because one of the major hacks, and this is affected millions of people. Homed and businesses. [00:34:10] One of the major hacks is let's just go in. We can hack the router and then we'll change the router DNS settings so that it uses our DNS and our DNS by the way is great because it redirects you. If you think you want to go to bank of America, it takes you to bank of America dot China. Okay. A fake site, not a real site. [00:34:31] And you may not even know. You may not even be able to tell unless you look really closely. So that is a big plus for Firefox as well as it has all kinds of anti-trafficking technology. Anti-malware technology built right in, they've just done a bang up job. The reason I do not like it for bigger businesses is that same. [00:34:54] Feature that DNS feature because what we do when we go into a business, and one of the things we do is we change their DNS servers to use some commercial DNS servers that we have from Cisco that get updated minute by minute for the sole purpose of trying to stop the bad guys. And they're very good at it. [00:35:16] It stopped being ransomware just by DNS. If you're using Firefox inside one of these networks, the problem is Firefox is going to try and hide the DNS request. So it was not so much as I care that they're being hidden, except that might be going to a malicious site. It said, I can't see any of them. [00:35:36] And I cannot tell your web browser or your computer not to go to that website because that particular site or that particular internet server is actually malicious. So there's the two sides for Firefox. So if you're a regular little home user, get Firefox, it's free. It's a great little browser. If you are a business, you can still use Firefox with things like Cisco's umbrella. [00:36:04] But what you need to do is turn off the DNS over HTTPS or TLS in which gets a little advanced. You can probably find it. If you'd duck, duck, go search it online. And that'll get you the answers you need. So turn that off so that all of your DNS requests are going through the filter, whatever it might be. [00:36:24] A Barracuda has a DNS filter. I don't like Barracuda. Don't think I'm endorsing them, but it's better to use the Barracuda DNS filter. If that's all you have, then nothing. Let me tell ya. And then there are also free DNS servers that are going to be fantastic for you to check them out. I talked about them this last week. [00:36:44] I got a lot of emails, open dns.com open ope, N D N S the letters, DNS domain name service, or. Dynamic name server or whatever you want. How are you going to remember it? Open dns.com and there it's easy enough. You just set it up on your ad drought or, and you're off and running. So that's my general favorite. [00:37:10] If you want something that's more secure, you can take a look at our friend, the epic browser, epi C. It has been very good in the past, and I assume it's going to continue to be pretty good in the future. Microsoft's newest ed edge browser. I think there's been three different browsers. They call ed just under what Microsoft, they call them all the same thing, even though it's entirely different code basis. And what were there? Seven different versions of windows that were entirely different? I was just, ah, drives me crazy. The current version of the edge browser from Microsoft is based on Google's Chrome browser. So keep that in mind, if you're using edge, Microsoft is looking over your shoulder. [00:37:55] Google may be looking over your shoulder as well. A little bit. The edge browser also uses Google chromium base, but they've gone through and Labatt itemized it pretty seriously. If you're on a Mac, you can even do this on a windows computer. The fastest browser, generally speaking is safari, which is an apple product and it's available for free S a F a R. [00:38:18] I. And it also like most apple products doesn't like you being tracked. And so it has a lot of anti-trafficking stuff. Built-in. And it also not this too. The safari browser has a whole bunch of anti-malware stuff built in. So whether you're using iOS on your iPhone or I panned or Mac iOS or windows, you can get safari. [00:38:46] And I had recommended that. So Fari frankly, is the browser I use for a little bit more secure stuff. And then I also use opera, the opera O P E R a browser. You might want to have a look at it as well, but if you're looking for ease of use and compatibility, I think you're probably about right. Sticking with the Firefox browser. [00:39:09] I do use that. So I actually use all of these browsers in different circumstances. I also use the brave browser and others. I just don't want to confuse you guys. Firefox stick with Firefox and you're probably going to be pretty well off on rare occasions. Firefox is not going to work for you. And in that case, you might consider a Google Chrome or the edge browser. [00:39:34] If you're using a cloud-based to service a website that is obviously a website for something you're doing. And it does not work with Firefox. It might not even work with the default on the Microsoft edge browser. And that's because that website might've been poorly coded, had not written right. And requires the old Microsoft engineer Explorer. [00:40:04] If so you can turn on compatibility mode so that the edge browser will act just like the insecure bug ridden internet Explorer, but try and force the vendor to upgrade their site so that it works with modern browsers rather than having to stick with that old piece of software. That's dangerous as can be internet Explorer. [00:40:29]I have always been fascinated by it ever since I saw people who were communicating, using computers and it, I always thought it just. It would be so wonderful if we could help people out, particularly people who are locked in who have a brain that's functioning fully, and yet their body isn't cooperating, they can't communicate, or they can't communicate well. [00:40:54] And of course, that comes to mind. Of course, one of the greatest scientific minds of our generation, Stephen Hawkins, who was in a wheelchair, he was unable to move. And later in life, other than just a little bit with his face and mouth, and he used that to communicate. And it's just an incredible thing. I can't imagine being in a position like that. [00:41:19] So when I see these technological advances that help people out, even in a minor way, I am just overjoyed, really overjoyed. So we've got to, I want to talk about right now. One is a brain implant that ARS Technica is John Timmer was talking about here about a week ago. And he was talking about robotic arms. [00:41:42] Now you might've seen them before. There's various types of robotic arms and they have different types of functionality depending. Right. Well, one of the problems that we've had with robotic arms is how much force can you put on them? I, again, I remember the first time I saw someone who had lost, uh, the forearm and of course the hand and he had on one of those kind of captain hook things, appliances with a rubber band on it to close it. [00:42:13] And he was able to pull one of the muscles in his arms in order to open it and close it. I thought, well, that's really cool. Those have advanced now, and there are projects with 3d printers. I forget the name of the company. I had them on my radio show. Maybe a decade ago now been awhile and they were selling 3d printers. [00:42:34] And when you bought their printer, they would give you the plans to make a specific artificial prosthesis for. Child that couldn't afford one. So it might be for a leg or an arm or so I guess something else. And you bought the printer, they would provide you with the material that you needed as well as the design specifically for that person. [00:43:01] And that you could print it up. It might take a couple of days and you ship it off. And many of these kids were in Africa. There are some here in the us, and of course in Russia, and this was, I thought an amazing project. It was just so cool again, because they're helping these kids get a little bit of mobility. [00:43:21] Then we came out with some of these robotic arms that can be controlled through your brain. I don't know if you've seen these. Arms, there's been also some major advancement in just thinking about moving a cursor on a computer screen and the computer can track your brain enough to be able to move that cursor around. [00:43:46] And basically what you're doing is you've lost a limb or you've lost mobility. You think about moving your hand or a leg, and usually it's your arm and your hand. And that can be picked up. Of course, that's per person, that's programmable per person. Then they figure out what the pattern is in your brain. [00:44:06] And then they tie it all in so that now you can control a cursor on a computer, which means you can communicate. Robotic arms a little bit different because what you have now is something that can reach out. These things have all of the joint and the flexibility and functionality of a regular hand, except for. [00:44:30] The feedback loop and that's been really important. How do you know if you are actually touching something? How do you know if you're squeezing it too hard? Like that egg and early robotic arms? It was very visual. So you watch that arm and you'd see, okay. It now has a grip on that ball or that pencil or whatever you pick it up and you all visual. [00:44:58] And so you're able to pick it up and you know that you've got it. Maybe you don't know how hard you're holding it, but that's okay. You had to track the arm visually as you moved it around and estimate really when you had that grip, that was strong enough on the object by looking at it. And obviously that's just an incredible improvement over a missing limb or potentially paralysis, but it's not very intuitive. [00:45:25] And the question is how do you make things intuitive for the brain when they're obviously foreign? We're going to talk about an extra thumb here in a minute too, but this is just absolutely phenomenal. It's called propyl. Yeah. Prope re O ception proprioception. And it's a sense that we have, this has been difficult to reconstruct that ties the sense of touch and pressure and. [00:45:55] Knowing where something is. So you can close your eyes. And on the side of the road, when the police offers is there and close your eyes, hold your arm out and touch your nose. Right. Hopefully you can do that. I'm doing that right now, here in the studio. I'm touching my notes with my eyes closed with my arm, starting out fully extended. [00:46:16] That's the sense we're talking about. That's very, very difficult. How do you build that in? Because we've been able to build in a little bit of sense of touch feedback for these arms, a little bit of pressure feedback, but we haven't been able to really understand how the brain processes, all this information that's sent by these sensory nerve cells in the hand, in order to let you know where it is. [00:46:42] And what it's doing. So for this new research at team and planted two electrode arrays into the part of the brain that specifically handles information coming from the skin, and they're able to activate these electrode and produce the sensation of something, interacting with the Palm of the hand, as well as the finger. [00:47:04] So they've made a whole lot of progress here, and this is very cool. They were able to tie it into a robotic arm. They got a study together, got some funding for it. And they got a participant who had been paralyzed from the neck down. And this doesn't save as male or female, but. Default gender right in English. [00:47:29] As he sold, say, he'd been controlling this robotic arm for about two years by using brain implant in the motor control region of the brain. And he could successfully use the arm even without sensation. He'd gotten pretty good at it. Uh, so for these experiments, they had some different tests because they wanted additional, tactile feedback. [00:47:53] They wanted to be able to somehow tie into this perception that your body has, of where your body parts are. Have you ever tried to tickle yourself? Usually it doesn't work. Right. But a third person or a second person tickling you may, it's definitely going to work. That's all party, these same systems. So they come up with a whole bunch of tests. [00:48:16] I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the tests, but they did say that having a sense of. Touch and the ability to understand where that arm and hand were in space, dramatically improve performance. And that makes sense. Hold on a sense to me, it w it really increased or decreased actually the time it took to pick up something to move something, to drop it in every case. [00:48:43] So. I am pretty darn excited about this, and I hope it's going to be able to help a lot of people very, very soon. This is the university of Pittsburgh medical center, by the way, that's been conducting these experiments. Now there's another one I want to talk about. And I thought this was really cool. I saw this about a couple of weeks ago. [00:49:02] I think it was, and this is a robotic extra thumb. What they did is they placed a robotic thumb on a hand underneath the little finger. So if you're looking at your hand right now, I got my left hand out in front of me. I've got my thumb here on the far left side. I've got my four fingers pointing up and on the right hand side opposite where your real thumb is, they put. [00:49:30] An extra thumb, like a robotic thumb that can, can bend up and down and a little other lateral movements. This study, I think was phenomenal. And there were 36 people that were part of the experiment. This was at Danielle Clode, university, college, London, and her colleagues. Uh, and it's, it's phenomenal. So when we get back, I'm going to play a little bit of audio. [00:49:57] That is from a story over there in the UK about this. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this thumb and the. Impact to the hat on the brain. One of the things I think it was fascinating to me anyways, was it did change the brain in unexpected ways, basically the brains of these people. And this was determined by cat scans and watching the activity when they were moving their hand, the brains were changed. [00:50:27] Two, if you will, uh, look at the hands and as more of a single unit than individual units. I thought that was really fascinating and that extra thumb became part of the brains understanding of the hand. So this is the kind of thing we can be looking forward to. Now, this one is it's kind of cool. It's kind of fun. [00:50:53] We're going to find a lot of different uses for, and it's part of what's fun is what they did in the experiments. So we'll talk about that as well. Hey, I want to point out if you have questions about cyber security, I might have the answers for you and you'll get those answers in the form of some stuff. [00:51:13] Special reports. I wrote, if you subscribed to my email list, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, and I'll make sure I send them all to you and get you on the right track. [00:51:25]this is augmenting a human and I think this is the future. We are going to be augmented. And how many movies have been made about that movies where they're saying model? Yeah, we'll just tie basically Google into your brain and have Google site into your brain. [00:51:41] That have as a thought. And you'll get a response from Google, which I think is scary. Look at Google now and how they're tracking you. Imagine if they get a copy of every one of your thoughts, but things like this that make us super human. I think are going to become more mainstream. So Google, for instance, had the Google glass, you might remember that these glasses type things that you wore, Apple's done some work on something similar. [00:52:11] And the idea is they can project in front of you an artificial reality. Maybe that our official reality is just telling you to turn left, to get to grandma's house or where the best food in town is. Or maybe you're playing a game. All of which are cool. This that's going to happen. This is really something that is going to happen. [00:52:30] And it's going to talk to you with a set of speakers that are right on those glasses. And it's going to be, I think, potentially amazing not reading your brain, but helping you to navigate a, read an audio book to you, do all kinds of things, and you can already get Alexa. Which is, of course Amazon's digital assistant in a lot of different configurations from your car all the way on out through these little mobile devices. [00:52:59] In this case, we're talking about a third thumb and that third or second thumb, I should say, it's really a third one because you have two hands, right? Two thumbs, but a second thumb on one hand. And the pictures I'm looking at from the experiment had it on the right hand. I don't think it really matters, but it's opposite your normal thumb. [00:53:20] It's not a fancy thing. It doesn't look human. It's close to the wrist. W on your hand, but it still is on your hand and you control this thumb and how it moves based on why our wireless sensors that are on your big toes. So you wiggle the toe and you can move the thumb in different directions and also have it clench the grip. [00:53:49] And these experimenters gave the thumb to people for about five days and the participants were. Told to use the thumb in regular, old things in the world. So they use it in the labs, of course, and they wanted the participants to really push the envelope about what was possible. And they didn't want the lab to just think of all of the different experiments they wanted the participants to think of things. [00:54:17] Maybe they hadn't thought of. So I'm looking at a video that's really cool people think of this guys. You can hold a cup of coffee and stir it all with the same hand, because you use that third thumb to grab onto the coffee and then your right thumb and forefinger. In order to stir the coffee. I think that's cool. [00:54:42] There were other people did things like bloom bubbles, right? You hold the little bottle of the bubble soap, water. And in the fake thumb. And then again, use your fingers to hold the little thing that you are blowing into. So it's really cool. And it did change the brain. What this showed us, I think more than anything else was our brains are capable of controlling limbs and dependence pended, GS dependencies. [00:55:14] Yeah, appendages. There you go. That, that you don't normally have, and it leads him into think about cats here in the Northeast. I don't know if you've ever noticed cats with a thumb. Have you ever noticed that it's really a Northeast phenomenon? And apparently the captains of these old boats loved these cats because they could go on the ship and chase the rats and kill the rat and hold on really well in the heavy weather and even climb up on the ropes because I had a thumb, we had a cat like that. [00:55:52] And it wasn't the brightest cat one, a Fox caught it when it was in our yard one time, but that cat could pick things up off the floor and using the thumb. Now, cats don't normally have a thumb, but some of these cats here in the Northeast, they have a thumb. It's a real thumb. They really can pick things up. [00:56:12] So they, this experiment proved that we can, as humans control an appendage, like an extra thumb. So let's play a little bit here about what happened a little bit of the report. The [00:56:26] Unknown: [00:56:26] additional thumb could cradle a cup of coffee while the same hands, four fingers held a spoon to stare in milk. While some participants use the thumb to peel a banana, blow bubbles, or even play the guitar to understand how the extra thumb effected people's brains. [00:56:40] The researchers gave them an MRI scan before and after the experiments. [00:56:45] Craig Peterson: [00:56:45] Is that cool or what. And you can find more online. I duck goat it, you can just duck, duck go a robotic extra thumb, and you'll be able to find the video and more reports on it, but we will see what ends up happening. With our appendages what are we going to be attaching to our bodies in the future? [00:57:07] We know we are going to be using those glasses like Google glass. We'll see what it ends up looking is it going to project right? Enjoy your eyes. What's going to happen here. We're seeing heads up displays in our cars where the speed you're going, the maps, et cetera, are projected right on. [00:57:25] The windshield. So you don't have to move your head a big direction, in order to see what's going on. So lots of stuff. And we're starting to understand the brain a little bit better when it comes to some of this stuff, dark side. My gosh a little bit of, a little bit about the dark web, because you guys are the best and brightest, right? [00:57:47] So the dark web of course, is that part of the internet that was created to keep things secret. No, not totally secret, but the identities of people posting things on the dark web are hard to determine. And it is in fact, something that is maintained by our military and was developed in order to allow people in other countries to communicate effectively with the CIA, with the military, et cetera, without. [00:58:19] Being caught by their government. So the dark web is a pretty secure place, but because of that, it's a place where people go to conduct illicit transactions. This is the place where the. The major site that was out there that it's called silk road was man, I can't remember how many billions of dollars they say went through the silk road website, but they were selling everything you can think of for drugs or drug running, a gun running some of these military weapons. [00:58:58] you name it? I don't even want to talk about some of the stuff that was being sold there on that website. Now there's other websites and taken over, but we caught that guy by the way. And all the transactions were in between. Coin. So those people that think that Bitcoin is somehow impossible to track you are wrong. [00:59:19] And those who think that the dark web is a place where you can go and really be anonymous. Again, you are wrong. More technically we're talking about something called the onion network, the Tor browser, and it is an interesting thing. So when we get back. We're going to talk about a court case, a really weird court case involving the dark web. [00:59:47] You've heard before about trust amongst thieves, this kind of throws it entirely out the window, shall we say [00:59:56]You might've heard of DarkSide. I mentioned them here on the show before. DarkSide is a bad guy, right? It's a group of people that got together who had been experts at ransomware. And so what they ended up doing is deciding, Hey, we want to make a business. We're going to do ransomware. And because we're so good at it, we're going to sell ransomware as a service. [01:00:28] And this ransomware is a service. All they did was they would take a cut of what you made off of their ransomware. They do things like provide tech support. So you ran some poor guy, some poor, small business, and that small business now is, a really hurting and you say Pay up sucker. [01:00:50] It's going to be whatever it is. I think most of the time for very small businesses, about $40,000 and you need to buy Bitcoin and you can't how to have a lot. I don't know. Why do I buy Bitcoin? So you contact. To the DarkSide, a webs support site, and guess what they do at that point? They can help you. [01:01:13] Okay. So go to this site. This is what you're going to see. Click on this. They have little user guides. They will help you when you're encrypted. Do you just give them the key and they'll tell you, okay. So use this key and this software to decrypt it. Just like a real business bottom line. They disappeared. [01:01:32] You might've heard about this. Of course, DarkSide attacked the colonial pipeline. And if you live in the Southeast United States, you were hit perk too. Darn hard by this, because that shut down over a thousand gas stations, they ran out of gasoline because it was not getting shipped via the pipeline. So off they went and a DarkSide said there, I think there's a little too much heat here. [01:02:03] At least that's what we were thinking. Initially DarkSide was trying to avoid prosecution. And so they shut down their website. Where was the website? Obviously? Wasn't out there for you on DarkSide.com. No, it was on the dark web while they shut down. And apparently they were not paying out these people that they were providing ransomware services to. [01:02:32] Isn't that kind of interesting. So Russian speaking person, you use the handle darks up for DarkSide support had XSS dot IIS. Guess what that is. Yeah, a recruiting site for these bad guys. Now, you're not going to be able to get there. If you're not on the dark web, you shouldn't be able to get there just in general, but he was trying to recruit him affiliates for DarkSide and DarkSide was the new ransomware as a service kid in town. [01:03:05]And it was looking for business partners until a partner could come along and say I have a hundred million email addresses or. I'm going to go after a company X like colonial pipeline. And so they become an affiliate of DarkSide. And as an affiliate, now they can send out the ransomware, try and get somebody at colonial to click on it. [01:03:29] And then once inside then DarkSide takes over and they go ahead and download important files from the machines that are compromised. That's part of the one-two punch that they were doing. And the punch that we saw that happened on Metro PD down in Washington, DC, where the bad guys got in down there and threatened to not decrypt stuff unless a paid up. [01:03:57]And then secondarily, you said. Since you're not paying that ransom, pay us this ransom and you have so many days, or we're going to start releasing information from the private police records. And they actually did end up releasing some of that information. All of that sort of stuff is part of the ransomware as a service. [01:04:16]This is interesting and DarkSide has made a bunch of money. There's some newly released figures from a company called chain analysis and they track cryptocurrency. Trading. Yeah. Guess what? It's not completely private. So chain analysis said the DarkSide netted at least $60 million in its first seven months. [01:04:44] That's a small fortune. Actually that's a pretty big fortune 46 million of it. Came in the first three months of 2021 and Darkseid made another $10 million this month with about 5 million coming from colonial pipeline. You probably heard about that. Colonial paid the ransom. And I saw an interview with the CEO of colonial, who said we didn't know if we'd be able to recover. [01:05:13] And it's basically, it's a small business, my words, small price to pay to know we can get back in business. So they made the 5 million from colonial and 4.4 million from the chemical distribution company known as Brenntag. And then last week, DarkSide went dark. And I mentioned that on the show as well. [01:05:37] And this guy, dark sub said that his group had lost control of the infrastructure and it Bitcoin. Does that mean that maybe Interpol the S somebody shut them down because. We have verified that there was a huge transaction where all of the money was taken out of their bit coin account. Okay, so the servers can the access to anymore the hosting panels to see panels been blocked and the hosting support service isn't providing any information, except quote, you ready for this at the request of law enforcement authorities. [01:06:25] Okay. Yeah. And within a couple hours of the seizure funds from the payment server were withdrawn to an unknown account. And Darkseid hasn't been heard from since now DarkSide is supposed to be paying affiliates 75% of ransoms that are less than $500,000. And that cut rises to 90% for ransoms higher than $5 million. [01:06:55] So DarkSide gets the money, right? Cause they're doing this whole thing. It's a service it's service provided to the bad guys out there, but apparently these affiliates have not been paid. Apparently the ransomware as a service provider of  did not honor its commitment and the affiliates, these bad guys, I feel so sorry for them. [01:07:22] Not they've been asking to be reimbursed from a deposit about a million dollars. The DarkSide was required to make with this website X access, which is one of these sites on the dark web, where they are setting up these deals. Okay. So there's three posts on the site. Where there are plaintiffs who have filed charges against the defendant against DarkSide. [01:07:53] So here you go, honor. Amongst thieves, DarkSide did not honor its financial commitments. It did not pay the bad guys. The ransomed people. Like they were supposed to they've disappeared and apparently their servers have been seized and all have DarkSides, holdings have been taken. All right. Interesting. [01:08:19] That's what you get DarkSide disrupted gasoline supply for the huge swaths of the U S about two weeks ago. And no doubt, the FBI brought full force of its might onto DarkSide. And I also know personally that historically the secret service has gotten involved too. [01:08:40]Electric vehicles. We've talked about a lot. I had a lot of fun talking about, of course, that great Ford electric vehicle in the first hour of today's show. [01:08:52] And they've got some cool looking cars, but they're coming out of everywhere. Now. You've got Italy with a few manufacturers that are now right. Pushing out the cars GM of course has had them for quite a while. The volt Nissan has had theirs. Ford has a couple, including the Mustang, the new electronic Mustang. [01:09:14] There is some good things to say about them. I love the technology myself. I prefer to have something that can go a long distance. I can't really have two or three cars right now. And they might make a nice little car. If I was commuting just a few miles or maybe if it was cheap enough, I would use it to run to the grocery store. [01:09:37] But looking at the cost of these vehicles like that, that Ford pickup truck fully maxed out, fully loaded. I looked it up. During the break it's $90,000. That's crazy money. And even though it starts at 40,000, well $39,999 95 cents. Even though it's a $40,000 start. That's a lot of money to pay for a car is especially with these batteries, there's next generation stuff coming out. [01:10:09] That's going to be just phenomenal. That's what I'm waiting for, but here's part of the problem. We're looking at electric vehicles and there's so many things to talk about, but electric vehicles do not pay the taxes that are used to construct our roads and maintain our bridges and our roads. [01:10:30] There is a per mile tax that is added on by the federal government and by the state governments. But it isn't computed as a per mile tax. It's computed as an add on to the price of gasoline and the price of diesel. What they're doing is they figure okay your fuel mileage may vary. And they had a big hit, of course, when fuel injectors came into cars, because they basically doubled the fuel mileage, but they say, okay, so the average car is getting 20 or maybe 25 miles a gallon and his pain anywhere from about 50 cents to a buck, a gallon in. [01:11:14] Road taxes and those road taxes are supposed to be used to build new roads, maintain existing roads and bridges by the states and by the feds. And again, that's a topic for another conversation. So how about electric cars? They're not buying gasoline, they're not buying diesel. So those vehicles are really putting a major dent in the road budget for the feds and the state government. [01:11:46] We've got states like California, Massachusetts, and New York who want to completely phase out any fossil fuel vehicles by 2035 and Washington state plans to follow the California rules and phase out sale of gas powered cars by 2035. But there's a huge hitch in those plans. How do you have these electric vehicles, including that Ford F-150 lightning hit the road? [01:12:18] Because gas sales will continue to decline along with the revenue from taxing them. It's a very big deal. So what do you do while there are some bills that have been moving in? All of those states had just named, including Massachusetts, where they're saying we need to charge people. Per mile when they're driving within our state, how do you do that? [01:12:48] Charging per mile means, how many miles they're traveling? You could certainly set up something like easy pass that covers the major highways, but the major highways are not where everyone's always driving. Think of the state routes we're on all of the time that have no toll ability. And of course, all of the side roads, how do you tax it while there are things that say maybe we use an easy pass type thing only on the bigger roads and we're charging by the mile. [01:13:21] That's just going to drive people off of those bigger roads that are meant for traffic onto the side streets. I've seen that happen before in my own town. There are other things that are being proposed that include having the car report on miles driven within a state. So the car would have to have GPS information would know when it has crossed state lines and then keep. [01:13:51] Tabs on how many miles it drove in the state and [01:13:55] then [01:13:56] Craig Peterson: [01:13:56] report that to the tax authority for you to be charged. How would that be to have at the end of the year, right? This additional tax burden based on how many miles you drove. Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. And then there are other proposals while we'll just look at all of the vehicles that are registered in our state. [01:14:16] So again, in mass it would be when you go in for that mandatory vehicle check every year at your birthday, we will read. Your car's mileage every year and we'll discharge you by the mile. They don't care if you drove up and down to Florida most of the year or out to Texas, or most of the year back and forth to California from mass. [01:14:40]All of that would be charged against you. So there are a lot of debates going on to try and figure it out. How can we make this work? The feds have a gas tax that hasn't changed since 1993. So the federal gas tax is 18. 0.40 cents per gallon. And then you have the state taxes and most states have increased their fuel taxes since 2010 to beginning to, to bring in more money and fix the roads. [01:15:15] But this is going to be difficult. Some states, including California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Utah, and Virginia have implemented road, user fees. A lot of questions there. It's so easy to collect a gas tax. It's hidden away in the price of the gasoline. Are they just going to put an extra tax on electricity and say, the average home is using so many kilowatts for their cars and do it that way. [01:15:43] We really don't know. We just don't know. And our roads I think, are going to suffer until we figure that whole thing out. We've talked about some of these big hacks. And I was talking with a client this week about the whole solar winds hack. And where did it come from and what did they do? The solar winds hack. [01:16:07] It looks like came in through Microsoft exchange server. There are a lot of patches out there for exchange server. If you don't have it. Pay close attention, try and figure that whole thing out. Okay. It this is a very big deal, but these reasons, cyber security instances in incident are really a reminder to all of us that public and private sector entities are being attacked from nation state actors and these big cybercriminals, like what we were just talking about. [01:16:44] Here's our big question, who was behind the solar winds hack. Remember we talked about it here. The reports coming out of the federal government in the U S were, that was Russian intelligence was to be hunted it's Poot and blame Puente. Oh no. It's a Russian. Hacker gang, nothing to do with Putin. [01:17:06]Maybe Putin was, giving them a little bit of a nod, it was a Russian hacker guy, gang. Things have changed a little bit. They announced here, but Microsoft being there. Microsoft announced in March that a detected multiple zero day exploits being used to attack the exchange se

This week's newsletter is late because my wife and I were gone all weekend for our 10th anniversary. I am chagrined and refreshed all at the same time. With that said, let's get into what happened Last Week.

Charles Fitzgerald is a Seattle-based angel investor with more than three decades of experience in tech who’s the managing director at Platformonomics, a consultancy that helps early-stage tech startups succeed. Prior to this position, Charles worked as a platform consiglieri at VMware and a VP of product management at Mozy. He also did a 19-year stint at Microsoft, where he ended up as general manager of platform strategy, and has served on the board of several tech startups, including buuteeq, Shippable, and Rec Room. Join Corey and Charles as they discuss what Charles worked on during his 19 years at Microsoft, including 16-bit Windows, 32-bit Windows, OLE, ActiveX, and .NET; what Charles invests in these days; how the big cloud players are so big that you’d struggle to catch them if someone gave you $100 billion; the three arguments IBM people made to Charles after he predicted they wouldn’t have a successful cloud transition in 2013; why Charles expects there to be more niche cloud offerings in the future; why no one will challenge the hyperscale cloud providers; how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the deglobalization trend; and more.

This episode is brought to you by me. If you like this show and want to support it, please visit my courses on Pluralsight and buy my new book "200 Things Developers Should Know", which is about Programming, Career, Troubleshooting, Dealing with Managers, Health, and much more. You can find my Pluralsight courses and the book at www.developerweeklypodcast.com/AboutDan Appleman is an entrepreneur, author and speaker on both technology and career topics. He is currently the CTO and a co-founder of Full Circle Insights, a Silicon Valley marketing analytics company on the Salesforce platform. He is a Salesforce MVP and the author of numerous books including the best-selling book "Advanced Apex Programming". He also authors online courses on Pluralsight.com relating to the Salesforce platform as well as other technology and career topics.Show resources:Follow Dan on TwitterConnect with Dan on LinkedInDan's Pluralsight coursesDan's blogFull transcript:Barry Luijbregts  0:17  Welcome to another episode of developer weekly. This week, I'm talking with Dan appleman, about taking charge of your technology career. Dan is an entrepreneur, author and speaker on both technology and career topics. He's currently the CTO and co founder of full circle insights as Silicon Valley marketing analytics company on the Salesforce platform. And he is a Salesforce MVP, and the author of numerous books, including the best selling book, advanced Apex programming. He also authors online courses on pluralsight.com, related to Salesforce platform as well as other technology and career topics. Welcome then you really are a living legend. It's an honor to have you on the show. Dan Appleman  1:46   I very, it's it's funny, it's funny, you should use the word living legend. When I got into Salesforce. I was at a conference and you'll people who knew me from the Visual Basic days would come up to me and and there was like, Well, what are you doing with Salesforce? And there was the sort of undercurrent like, what he's still alive. So I don't know about the legend part, but living knock on wood still still with us. Barry Luijbregts  2:10  Yeah, you've been doing all of this for quite a long time. And you've pivoted a couple times as well. Dan Appleman  2:16  Anybody who's been in technology, as long as I have had better have pivoted more than once, because, you know, let's face it, the technologies I studied on and learned on and practiced for the first decade of my career are museum pieces. Now, literally museum pieces, I can go to the when I go to the local Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It's a real trip because I walked through there and said, Oh, I own that one. It's like, Oh, I wish I owned that one. And, and so yeah. Barry Luijbregts 2:47  That's how it goes.So today, I wanted to talk with you about career because I think that's a super valuable topic, and way more valuable than learning about the latest and greatest JavaScript framework. This is something that everybody can take something away from, because you are also kind of an expert on career topics as you created a bunch of little side courses on it. A lot of them I actually liked a lot, and a lot of you. So, first of all, why did you get into the career topic?Dan Appleman  3:18  Well, um, so there, there were basically two reasons. One was I had just finished my finished my first Pluralsight course, on apex. And I was thinking, wow, you know, wouldn't it be great to write create a course that would appeal to, to everyone to every developer? You know, of course, like that would do well, and, and, and I think I know a few things about a career. So I proposed to, to Pluralsight. Let me do a career course. And their reaction was, well, we've never done anything like that before. I don't know if anybody would be interested in watching it. But I had a lot of faith in it. Because you Even when I would speak at conferences, I found that speaking truth about what it is to be a developer is all too rare. And if you do speak truth about what we're really experiencing as developers, that it resonates with people, and it's important, so I did that was my first career and survival strategies for developers now for technologists because I broadened it and, and I continued to do career courses ever since because I think they are you know, as you say, we tend to focus on the technology, but the career part is so important. Yeah. Barry Luijbregts  4:40  Because technologies are transient. Like you said, you know, they they comment they go away. So you need something broader to actually keep you alive within your career and your your working life. Dan Appleman  4:51  And and all of the career skills and soft skills. I call them multipliers because they take whatever technology skills you have They multiply, they increase the effectiveness of those skills. And they last forever, they don't become obsolete. So I think that thinking strategically about your career is important. And this is something that these are all things that I wish someone had taught me because I did not know, or do or think about any of this stuff. For the longest time in my career, I would sort of Corinne from opportunity to opportunity saying, oh, time for a new job, what's out there? I didn't think strategically at all. And I really, you know, looking back, if only somebody had talked about these things, it would have been, I think it would have been valuable. Barry Luijbregts  5:43  Yeah, it's definitely not a topic that's been taught in school or a formal thing. So that that's lacking. But luckily, there's now resources out there like your pro site courses, for instance. I think when you talk about career, the first thing you should start Thinking about is well, how do you define success in a career? When is your career successful? When when are you happy with what you're currently doing? So how do you define success? Dan Appleman  6:12  It's incredibly difficult. And, you know, it's really easy to say, Well, I'm successful, because I'm making more money or because I got a title or promotion or, or, or something like that. But, you know, how many of us really know what we want in life? Right? Yeah, we have opportunities and, and, and we follow them. But, you know, do we think about what is important to us? Do we think about, you know, things like work life balance and, and what we're passionate about, and, and all of these kinds of questions, and they're very individual. So it is important to take the time to think about those things. But that doesn't mean it's easy. It's not a case where you can go to someone and say, Hey, you know, well Think about what success means to you. And he sort of dropped blank because that that requires soul searching. And it changes over time. You know, things that I considered a success, you know, 10 years ago are maybe different from what I consider successful today. Barry Luijbregts  7:16  Yeah, absolutely. I have to same thing when I was younger, I'm still pretty young. Actually. When I was younger, even, I found, I thought that I would be very successful if I had, you know, a nice car, nice house and a nice salary. But now I don't care about that as much. I just want to be home for my family for for dinner for my kids. That's how I define my success. Dan Appleman  7:41  And as a technologist, that is really, really hard because everything in our culture says, you know, if you're going to be a software developer in technology, you have to keep learning you have to keep up we have this intense pressure, that any minute that you're not spending, you're reading a textbook or Studying or something like that is is puts your career at risk. And it's all too easy to sacrifice friends and family and, and hobbies and other things to that pursuit. Barry Luijbregts  8:14  Oh, yeah, I definitely did that when I was younger as well. I just learned and worked into evenings and weekends open source thing there a side hustle there, just to just to keep up Really? Yeah, it's it's a lot of pressure. And actually, I got I got burned out. Like, five years ago, I had a burnout because of it. And because of that I had, well, first thing was to actually identify that it was a burnout. That was very difficult because I just stopped being productive. I was tired all the time. couldn't really get out of bed. didn't really see a reason to get out of bed. or sad. It just started crying out of nowhere. And then I just, my wife also said, well, you you're burned out. You're done. So I changed my life. That's Basically what I did as in, I changed how I worked, I stopped my current job, I was a freelancer, I stopped working for, for a company that was, was not fitting my purpose, because it was very frustrating to work there. I think that was a very big thing. And I had a little control over what I did. And I worked very hard. So I stopped that. And I started plural sites, and make Pluralsight courses. Dan Appleman  9:26  And, you know, it's very brave of you to say these things, because, you know, it's not something that that most developers, you know, especially in, you know, still to this day, a lot of technologists are men, right. And that's a hard thing in most cultures for men to talk about. You know, and one of the, the, I suppose, more selfish reasons that I would like to see more women in technology, aside from all of the great reasons like opportunity and so on, is it might cause a little bit of a shift of that culture to to have a greater appreciation for Being Human as a technology worker, right, and not just a coding robot, a lot of us are. So this is something I noticed. And I noticed relatively early when I was on the speaker circuit, and I'd go to all these conferences. And you know, you've been to conferences, you know that a lot of the talks are about the latest technology, the newest technology, what's coming next. Right? And officially, everybody goes to these because we're so excited about the new technology, but I think, yeah, I think the unspoken thing and this is what I started speaking about in some of my sessions was, we're attending these things because we're terrified that we're falling behind. Right, and we're gonna miss something and it'll impact our job and, and so on. And it's okay to speak to that. Right, it's okay to acknowledge that and in one of the messages that you'll see in A number of my courses is that when it comes to learning technology, the bleeding edge, which is the newest technology is the last place you want to be, unless you are a speaker or a trainer, or someone who really makes their living. Talking about the very latest technology, you really want to wait, you know, six months or a year, because if you wait, other people will get rid of the bugs. Other people will be writing blog posts, it's become so much easier to learn it, it's more stable. The bleeding edge is a terrible place to be as a working developer, it's a very inefficient place to learn technology. So unless it's a technology like right now Apex where it is my job to be right at the leading edge for everything else. I wait a year. You know, I look at the technologies about a year old. It's it's just I wasted less time dealing with that. Barry Luijbregts  12:01  Yeah, yeah, definitely Me too. I just, although some technologies I kind of have to get into as a Pluralsight author as well. And I'd like to get into like blazer, for instance, which is a new thing. But for production purposes, I stay away from it as well. And also just for peace of mind, because I don't want to deal with all that. Dan Appleman  12:21  I went through when Microsoft came out with ole and ActiveX. And they took all the component models they had, they had a VB x component model for Visual Basic, and they created this whole new calm, ActiveX thing. And it took a long time for it to come out. And the reason was that they kept changing it. I mean, we build something and they break it, we build something and they break it. It was a miserable, horrible, terrible experience for people who were trying to adopt this new technology. It was, yeah, was that I think that's where I really learned that how awfully stressful and difficult the bleeding edges. Barry Luijbregts  13:04  And we I think we've all been there. So yeah, so we just were talking about defining success and purpose. That's important. So my burnout, I took that time as well to reflect on what I actually found important two things that I felt was important in life. And that wasn't money and learning in the evening and then being the best developer. But spending more time with my family was more important. So let's, let's switch it up a little bit. So there are lots of people that are wanting to start a technology career want to become a software developer, let's say, Where should they start? I get this question a lot. Like, should I go to JavaScript? Should I go to a boot camp? Should I go to school? What should I learn? How should I learn it? What should I do? What are your thoughts on it? Dan Appleman  13:54  So I'll give you a very brief summary. So one of the early Career courses one did in fact, I just finished updating and I think the update should be published within a couple of weeks is called Learning Technology in the information age. And what I came to realize is that learning is a strategic decision, right? People say Where should I start? It is actually not a simple answer, you know, people say you should learn C sharp or c++ or you should learn JavaScript. And that's doing them a disservice. Because when really has to think about how do we learn technology? And what are the different components of learning technology? How do you balance things like fundamentals first, you know, which can be very long lasting with, with general information and, and with skills as one of the things I note in the courses, you know, people, you know, the the way I describe it is, we sort of know the cliche, knowledge is power, right? As I told cliche, we're in the information age and, and that's actually not true. Because one of the consequences of the information revolution is that knowledge is cheap. And information is cheap. I mean, we have so much access to knowledge and information, it's been devalued. So knowing something actually has very little value. The ability to do things with knowledge skills are where there is still value. So that's one aspect of, you know, it's not what do you want to learn is what skills do you want to develop? And then when you think about how do you learn something while learning isn't just I know JavaScript learning is this mix of fundamentals and information and skills and, and curation, which is, you know, what is the order? That's what the question you're being asked is, what is the order? What Where should I start? That's a question of curation, which is all important. So the answer the reason answer to that person is, you're about to invest a whole bunch of time learning technology. It's worth your while to spend a few hours to learn about learning technology to think about how you want to learn technology to think about to create a strategy. And, and that's what that course does. That course is all about, Okay, take a moment. We're going to spend a couple of hours now. And we're going to talk about learning itself, and all the ways you can learn and how to set priorities and how to figure out how to figure out for yourself the order. That makes sense. And that's why I can't really answer the question now. Because the answer is, you know, watch that course, spend a couple of hours and learn how to learn strategically, Barry Luijbregts  16:45  And then to create a strategy for yourself on what you're going to learn and how you're going to learn it. Dan Appleman  16:51  Absolutely, absolutely. And, and more important, how to do it efficiently because, you know, we're all busy. You want time Hang out with your family. So anything you can do to learn more efficiently is worth it. And, and I'm a real believer in that and, and I've gotten much better at practicing it myself and really thinking about, Okay, I'm gonna learn this technology, how am I going to go about it? What's my strategy? What's my plan? How far do I want to go? Because, you know, you don't have to become an expert, you cannot become an expert in everything. So, one of the questions to ask yourself is how, you know, what is what is the point where, okay, I've learned enough of this. Let me move on and learn something else. Barry Luijbregts  17:38  Right. And that's also the question of do you specialize in something or do you want to be a generalist more, right? Dan Appleman  17:45  When I was going to school, everyone told me you should specialize, you should specialize and I said, No, I am going to be a generalist. And in the course of my career, I have at times had expertise in certain areas. Right. But at a certain point, the technology changes or you change. You know, one of the ways I got into Salesforce was, you know, I was I was in dotnet. I was an expert in dotnet. Right, very, very familiar with, with Edyta probably a deeper level than most people. And I've, you know, you talk about personal crisis. In my case, it was about the time that my father passed away and I sort of had this you know, what do I do with myself now, you know, and in the truth is that between that and I just wasn't having fun without net, it's like, they're adding new features and they didn't seem to be, you know, providing that much value for all the effort I was spending to keep up. And then I bounced into the Salesforce world, and it was fun. And I know there are people out there who think Salesforce and think most, you know, evil language in the world, or whatever it was, it was an enormous amount of Have fun. And I was meeting people who were really enjoying being part of that ecosystem. It was a very real sense of community. A lot like I had experienced in the early days of Visual Basic, a little us against the world kind of thing. And I just sort of said, this is this is fun. You know, I'm having fun in the Salesforce platform. I am having a blast in the Salesforce platform.Pays well, too. But yeah. Barry Luijbregts  19:32  That's also important. Yeah. But but that's, that's a very important aspect of anything that you dive into. It has to be fun for yourself. Because there's so much to choose from nowadays. The world of technology is just incredible. It was much, much smaller. But now there's so much. If you look at something like Microsoft Azure, for instance, that's not just one technology. No, there are like 150 services that you can become an expert in. Dan Appleman  19:59  And plus then becoming an expert in just managing them on as your, your AWS is a whole other thing. And, you know, this is one of the things going back to somebody asking I want to get into a career in, in technology and technology's a hard career. And, you know, I didn't see that going into it originally. Because, you know, I saw that, hey, it's a career, I love technology. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be interesting. I, you know, I'm, I'm as much a geek as they come. But what I didn't realize until much later is that the hard part of being a technologist isn't learning the new stuff. It's the fact that all the old stuff keeps going obsolete. And most careers don't have that, you know, like, if a doctor doesn't keep up. It's not like, the ways they treat people don't work anymore, right. Yeah. You know, most careers. Once you've gained the skill, the old stuff doesn't go away even as you're learning new things and But in technology, it is. So it's a hard career. It is, it is one that you have to resign yourself to learning, always. And in that stress of keeping up, so. So that's one aspect that people, you know, I don't necessarily discourage people from getting into tech. But I note this, you know, this is what you're getting yourself into. Barry Luijbregts  21:27  Yeah. And it has to be in your nature a little bit as well as in you have to be a lifelong learner, maybe by yourself, or you, or maybe you get into that. But if you're not, then you're gonna have a very, very difficult time in technology. Dan Appleman  21:39  But if you love technology, you want to learn it. So it's not that heavy lift. It's not that hard to do, right. But when people go into it just for the money, they discovered it, in some cases, that it becomes very costly because you're working for work and then you're also on the side in the evenings and other times struggling To keep up, and the money is costing you a lot. So Barry Luijbregts  22:05  Yeah, and is the money actually that good? Because in your course, the hidden secrets of technology careers, you explained that people in technology careers starts with a high salary, but it typically plateaus quickly. Yeah, I've seen the same thing where graduates, they have their job interviews at car dealerships, and then they pick out the lease guy right then and there. And later on, they get stuck in their jobs because then they plateau. Can you explain why that is? Why do salaries plateau in technology quickly? Dan Appleman  22:34  Why do salaries poplateau  in technology quickly? You know, that's a tough one. But there is no doubt that you know, for most companies, if you want to go past that, you have to really continue to see salary increases you end up having to go into management and which is fine, you know, nothing wrong with management. But it is hard to you know, Unless a company has a real specific technology track, and, you know, part of it is because, you know, when when you've been, you know, working for, say 10 years? Well, the stuff you did five years ago is obsolete. So, you know, why shouldn't a company hire someone cheaper? Yeah. Right. You know, that knows the same things that you do, presumably, at least in the technology side. So, you know, there's a certain amount of that there's a certain, you know, there's definitely age discrimination in, in the technology field. But other companies recognize that there are advantages to hiring, you know, the older technologists because, you know, they're bringing other things to the table, especially those that developed the leadership skills and the managerial skills and the soft skills. Barry Luijbregts  23:48  Yeah, because those are the skills that actually matter. You know, obviously, the skill in the technology matters as well. But if you can't think around it, then it's Have no use? Dan Appleman  24:01  Absolutely, absolutely. Barry Luijbregts  24:03  So you say one way of breaking through that salary plateau would be to become management, maybe a development manager or whatever, what have you. That's, that seems very difficult and quite a leap. Right? Because then you really stepped out of technology. Dan Appleman  24:20  It it, you know, it's funny, because one of the things I really became to came to realize system the past few years, as I'm teaching about careers is that I actually am a rather unique character in terms of my career path, because, you know, I've held an awful lot of titles. I mean, you know, right now, I'm a CTO, and I've been an entrepreneur and a speaker and an author and manager and the VP of software development and all of these kinds of fancy titles, but most of the time when you meet someone who's been working in a career as long as I have, they will respond to exactly the way it is like, yeah, you know, I miss developing software. haven't built anything in a long time, right? they've, they've turned completely to management. But in my career, the one constant The one thing that I've been doing all the time without a break for four decades now almost, is building production software and shipping software. Right. And I say that because, you know, as someone who's in software development, you know, there's a big difference between somebody who's a hobbyist and someone who's shipping product because, you know, shipping product is is releasing things. That's the thing. And, you know, in fact, let's see to today is Sunday. I think my last I think, last week, I'm working on I'm working on a branch that's not going to be out for a while. Last Monday, I put in a commit into our code base, that will probably be in a release not This week, but next week, and it will go out to hundreds of customers, and they'll be using it. So, you know, I'm still shipping software. And I think that gives me a rather unique perspective of what it means to have a technology career. It's possible, but it's rare for someone to keep their head in the game, even while doing all the other crazy things. Barry Luijbregts  26:22  Yeah, and I think for you, obviously, that's possible because you work for yourself, you're an entrepreneur. But for people that work in a company, it might be more difficult. And that will heavily depend on your company culture. Dan Appleman  26:36  That is very, very, very true. And, but it also brings up the other thing when we talk about getting over that salary, plateau. Entrepreneurship, and, you know, I have mixed feelings about it. I couldn't go back now. And it's not for everyone, but it is accessible to everyone. And I created a course called, so you want to be an entrepreneur, which basically is, okay, here's, here's the deal, here's how to do it. And I note that, you know, in the, I think the 1800s, if you look at the United States, 90% of the population were entrepreneurs, they were all small, small business owners. It was only with the industrial age that we got into the whole factory model and employees and so on. So entrepreneurs are nothing special, anybody can do it. Right. It really is one of those things. Yeah, you're not not everyone's gonna be a super billionaire, whatever. That's takes luck and genius, but just, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You're a Pluralsight author, right? Barry Luijbregts  27:40  And I have several businesses as well. Dan Appleman  27:42  So, you know, what I'm talking about most, most entrepreneurs are like, you and I were small business small businesses, you know, or, you know, founders or co founders or, or whatever and, you know, it is possible to busts the plateau. You know, when I first took that first leap by working really hard and doing some consulting, my first year as an entrepreneur, I made about the same amount of money as I did the year before that. The year after that, I doubled it. And the year after that, I doubled it again. And it was like, whoa. Since then, there have been ups and downs. There was one year looking back that I probably should have applied for food stamps. I think that was I think that was during the.com bust during like 2000 to 2003. But that's the the secret of entrepreneurship is people say, Oh, that's so risky. That's so risky. And what they don't necessarily realize it's a different kind of risk. losing your job. You know, being an employee, if you lose your job, you've lost all your income. That's pretty high risk. At the worst of the.com bust, my income didn't drop to zero. It dropped a lot but it didn't drop to zero. Barry Luijbregts  29:00  Yeah, plus, I think also, in the worst case scenario, you could also go and find a job. Sure. Dan Appleman  29:06  You might not like it find the job. Yeah, you can find the job. You can, you know, you can write articles nowadays you can Uber well, or doordash. Because I don't think this is the other challenge right now, when we talk about someone getting new into technology is we always have to be very careful in terms of how we advise people based on our own experiences. Certainly, you know, since I have since, you know, my entry to technology was so long ago, the world has changed. And, and, and one has to be, you know, careful with one's assumptions, and really be thinking about what the world is like now for people and the challenges they're facing now. And right now, the challenge is particularly difficult, because we are now in entering this new reality we are experiencing everywhere on the planet. At a disruptive change, so people are working from home. This is a terrible time to be looking for work. Barry Luijbregts  30:05  Yeah, absolutely. Dan Appleman  30:07  It is. One has to be careful, right, you know, in terms of giving advice, because one has to question all of one's assumptions. Barry Luijbregts  30:16  Yeah, definitely. And especially, we might not be the most typical people to talk about this. Because we have very different careers and most developers that work for companies. Dan Appleman  30:28  Well, you know, I did my time. Barry Luijbregts  30:31  Yeah, Dan Appleman  30:32  I did. I did my time. I was a cubicle dweller for a lot of years. So, you know, I, my, I started my first company when I was like, 31 or so. So the first more than 10 years of my career was, you know, small business and a startup but cubicle, you know, not a not a founder or anything like that just yeah, employee. So, you know, I remember that very, very well. And Of course, Now on the flip side, I've hired people, right? So I'm in the manager position and, and, you know, I try to keep a real eye and sense of what their experiences. Barry Luijbregts  31:12  So as we come to the end of our conversation, let's talk about one more thing. And it is, to me your successful career is one that's also results in comfortable retirement, as in, you're done. And you have enough money to live when you're not working anymore, if you choose to not work, of course. So how do you go about it, you know, as an employee, you might put your money into a big bucket of 401k, or whatever that is in your country. In the Netherlands is similar. We also have a pension fund and usually, the employer also pays a little bit into that and you pay in depth into that yourself as an entrepreneur, you have to do it all yourself. What are things that you can do to make sure that you actually end up with a comfortable retirement? Dan Appleman  31:59  well, You don't end on the easy ones do you?Again, one has to be really, really careful because whenever somebody offers financial advice, they'll say, Well, you know, the stock market has done this for the past six years. And yes, this rule and all this kind of stuff. And right now I look at the US stock market. And you know, we are, we are massive unemployment businesses are shutting down every day. Every sign indicates that the economy is suffering. And yet the stock markets hitting new highs, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. And I know it doesn't make sense to anyone else. And the way I know that is because when I look at the news feeds and the finance pages, you will find exactly on the same page one person who's saying, you know, here's why this is the best time to invest them the other person saying get out of the market, get out of the market. Yeah, nobody, nobody knows. So but I question The concept of retirement in the sense, because if you're having fun, if you're doing what you love doing, and if you enjoy technology, why would you stop? Right? I mean, really, especially nowadays, when you can do stuff on the road, right? I mean, you can, you can go drive cross country, and in the evening in the hotel room, you can work on gigs, or you can work on articles or, you know, this is the this is the golden age of the gig economy and technology as well. Why would you stop? I mean, if if you are in a career, and you are looking and saying, I wish it was over and I was done and I could retire, then I would say you're asking the wrong question. What can you do now to create for yourself that income stream that will be fun that you will want to do You know, and and everyone will tell you that having purpose, when when you're retired, just retiring is a terrible thing. It's bad for your health, having a purpose, having meaning having, you know, something to keep your mind sharp, of, you know, I plan to do PluralSight courses, you know, for as long as they let me because, you know, it's fun, and I get to share my experience and knowledge and, and so on. And, you know, I'm probably will at some point stop shipping code, not because I don't want to keep up but because if you ship code, you're, you know, are responsible for it, and you have to maintain it and know that at a certain point, you don't want to have to do that. But articles, you don't have to maintain articles. You don't have to maintain, you know, blog posts, white papers, books, you know, can always write a book. Anybody can do this stuff. So, but in terms of the financial stuff, the other thing is, take the time learn personal finance, right? Just Learn it. Barry Luijbregts  35:01  Yeah, dive into it. Dan Appleman  35:02  You're all technologists, you can understand basic finance, you can understand this stuff. You know, it's not rocket science. Barry Luijbregts  35:11  Yeah. So there's definitely no magic bullet, or investment strategy. There's no such thing. But I think the best advice here that that you gave is, why would you stop? If you like what you're doing. And if you don't like what you're doing, change it. Dan Appleman  35:27  The best investment you can ever make is investing in yourself, whether it's your skills or your knowledge, or figuring out what it is that you love doing or your health. You know, even when I was still, you know, a starving student or having tough financial times. If I wanted to learn something, I just go buy a book on it, and I would never begrudge the money I would never think twice because you know, anything that you're investing in yourself. That's what pays off. Barry Luijbregts  35:59  Yeah, that is amazing. And a great way to start doing that is to visit your Pluralsight courses and start learning. Dan Appleman  36:07  Please do.  Barry Luijbregts  36:10  All right, thank you very much for this enlightening conversation. I will link to all of your Pluralsight courses in the show notes as well. Dan Appleman  36:18  Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about this. And I'm glad that you have found this project to work on as well. And I'm sure it's going to be very successful. Barry Luijbregts  36:28   Yeah, I love doing it because it helps people. Dan Appleman  36:31  Yep. And that's sort of one of the most fun parts of this, isn't it? Barry Luijbregts  36:36  Absolutely. Okay. Thank you for listening and tune in next week for another episode.

Today we're going to cover the software that would become Microsoft Office.  Microsoft Office was announced at COMDEX in 1988. The Suite contained Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are still the core applications included in Microsoft Office. But the history of Office didn't start there.  Many of the innovations we use today began life at Xerox. And Word is no different. Microsoft Word began life as as Multi-Tool Word in 1981, when Charles Simonyi was hired away from Xerox PARC where he had worked on one of the earlier word processors, Bravo.  He brought in Richard Brodie, and by 1983, they would release it for DOS, simplifying the name to just Microsoft Word. They would port it to the Mac in 1985, shortly after the release of the iconic 1984 Macintosh. Being way more feature-rich than MacWrite, it was an instant success. 2.0 would come along in 1987, and they would be up to 5 by 1992. But Word for Windows came along in 1989, when Windows 3.0 dropped. So Word went from DOS to Mac to Windows.  Excel has a similar history. It began life as Multiplan in 1982 though. At the time, it was popular on CP/M and DOS but when Lotus 1-2-3 came along, it knocked everything out of the hearts and minds of users and Microsoft regrouped. Doug Klunder would be the Excel lead developer and Jabe Blumenthal would act as program manager. They would meet with Bill Gates and Simonyi and hammer out the look and feel and released Excel for the Mac in 1985. And Excel came to Windows in 1987. By Excel 5 in 1993, Microsoft would completely taken the spreadsheet market and suddenly Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) would play a huge role in automating tasks. Regrettably, then came macro viruses, but for more on those check out the episode on viruses. In fact, along the way, Microsoft would pick up a ton of talented developers including Bob Frankton a co-creator of the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc. Powerpoint was an acquisition. It began life as Presenter at Forethought, a startup, in 1983. And Robert Gaskins, a former research manager  from Bell Norther Research, would be brought in to get the product running on Windows 1. It would become PowerPoint when it was released for the Mac in 1987 and was wildly successful, selling out all of the copies from the first run.  But then Jeff Raikes from Microsoft started getting ready to build a new presentation tool. Bill Gates had initially thought it was a bad idea but eventually gave Raikes the go-ahead to buy Forethought and Microsoft PowerPoint was born.  And that catches up to that fateful day in 1988 when Bill Gates announced Office at COMDEX in Las Vegas, which at the time was a huge conference. Then came the Internet. Microsoft Mail was released for the Mac in 1988 and bundled with Windows from 1991 and on. Microsoft also released a tool called Inbox. But then came Exchange, expanding beyond mail and into contacts, calendars, and eventually much more. Mail was really basic and for Exchange, Microsoft released Outlook, which was added to Office 97 and an installer was bundled with Windows Exchange Server.  Office Professional in that era included a database utility called Access. We've always had databases. But desktop databases had been dominated by Borland's dBase and FoxPro up until 1992 when Microsoft Access began to chip away at their marketshare. Microsoft had been trying to get into that market since the mid-90s with R:Base and Omega, but when Access 2 dropped in 1994, people started to take notice and by the release of Office 95 Professional it could be purchased as part of a suite and integrated cleanly. I can still remember those mdb files and setting up data access objects and later ActiveX controls! So the core Office components came together in 1988 and by 1995 the Office Suite was the dominant productivity suite on the market. It got better in 97. Except The Office Assistant, designed by Kevan Atteberry and lovingly referred to as Clippy. By 2000 Office became the de facto standard. Everything else had to integrate with Office. That continued in the major 2003 and 2007 releases. And the products just iterated to become better and better software.  And they continue to do that. But another major shift was on the way. A response to Google Apps, which had been released in 2006. The cloud was becoming a thing. And so Office 365 went into beta in 2010 and was launched in 2011. It includes the original suite, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams for chatting with coworkers, Yammer for social networking, Skype for Business (although video can now be done in Teams), Outlook and Outlook online, and Publisher. As well as Publisher, InfoPath, and Access for Windows.  This Software + Services approach turned out to be a master-stroke. Microsoft was able to finally raise prices and earned well over a 10% boost to the Office segment in just a few years. The pricing for subscriptions over the term of what would have been a perpetual license was often 30% more. Yet, the Office 365 subscriptions kept getting more and more cool stuff. And by 2017 the subscriptions captured more revenue than the perpetual licenses. And a number of other services can be included with Office 365.  Another huge impact is the rapid disappearing act of on premises Exchange servers. Once upon a time small businesses would have an Exchange server and then as they grew, move that to a colocation facility, hire MCSE engineers (like me) to run them, and have an amplified cost increase in dealing with providing groupware. Moving that to Microsoft means that Microsoft can charge more, and the customer can get a net savings, even though the subscriptions cost more - because they don't have to pay people to run those servers. OneDrive moves files off old filers, etc.  And the Office apps provided aren't just for Windows and Mac. Pocket Office would come in 1996, for Windows CE. Microsoft would have Office apps for all of their mobile operating systems. And in 2009 we would get Office for Symbian. And then for iPhone in 2013 and iPad in 2014. Then for Android in 2015.  Today over 1 and a quarter billion people use Microsoft Office. In fact, not a lot of people have *not* used Office. Microsoft has undergone a resurgence in recent years and is more nimble and friendly than ever before. Many of the people that created these tools are still at Microsoft. Simonyi left Microsoft for a time. But they ended up buying his company later. During what we now refer to as the “lost decade” at Microsoft, I would always think of these humans. Microsoft would get dragged through the mud for this or that. But the engineers kept making software. And I'm really glad to see them back making world class APIs that do what we need them to do. And building good software on top of that.  But most importantly, they set the standard for what a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool would look like for a generation. And the ubiquity the software obtained allowed for massive leaps in adoption and innovation. Until it didn't. That's when Google Apps came along, giving Microsoft a kick in the keister to put up or shut up. And boy did Microsoft answer.  So thank you to all of them. I probably never would have written my first book without their contributions to computing. And thank you listener, for tuning in, to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day. 

Shon Gerber from ShonGerber.com provides you the information and knowledge you need to prepare and pass the CISSP Exam while providing the tools you need to enhance your cybersecurity career.  Shon utilizes his expansive knowledge while providing superior training from his years of training people in cybersecurity.  In this episode, Shon will provide CISSP training for Domain 8 (Software Development Security) of the CISSP Exam.  His extensive training will cover all of the CISSP domains. BTW - Get access to all my CISSP Training Courses here at:  https://shongerber.com/ CISSP Exam Questions Question:  125 What type of virus utilizes more than one propagation technique to maximize the number of penetrated systems? A) Stealth virus B) Companion virus C) Polymorphic virus D) Multipartite virus Multipartite virus Multipartite viruses use two or more propagation techniques (for example, file infection and boot sector infection) to maximize their reach. From https://www.brainscape.com/flashcards/software-development-security-976024/packs/1774328 ------------------------------------ Question:  126 What programming language(s) can be used to develop ActiveX controls for use on an Internet site? A) Visual Basic B) C C) Java D) All of these are correct. All of these are correct Microsoft's ActiveX technology supports a number of programming languages, including Visual Basic, C, C++, and Java. On the other hand, only the Java language can be used to write Java applets. From https://www.brainscape.com/flashcards/software-development-security-976024/packs/1774328 ------------------------------------ Question:  127 What transaction management principle ensures that two transactions do not interfere with each other as they operate on the same data? A) Atomicity B) Consistency C) Isolation D) Durability Isolation The isolation principle states that two transactions operating on the same data must be temporarily separated from each other such that one does not interfere with the other. From https://www.brainscape.com/flashcards/software-development-security-976024/packs/1774328 ------------------------------------ Want to find Shon elsewhere on the internet? LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/shongerber Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/CyberRiskReduced/ LINKS:  ISC2 Training Study Guide https://www.isc2.org/Training/Self-Study-Resources

GhostCat; Coronavirus Scams; TrickBot Adds ActiveX; Internet Weather

Visual Basic Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover an important but often under appreciated step on the path to ubiquitous computing: Visual Basic. Visual Basic is a programming language for Windows. It's in most every realistic top 10 of programming languages of all time. It's certainly split into various functional areas over the last decade or so, but it was how you did a lot of different tasks in Windows automation and programming for two of the most important decades through a foundational period of the PC movement. But where did it come from? Let's go back to 1975. This was a great year. The Vietnam War ended, Sony gave us Betamax, JVC gave us VHS. Francisco Franco died. I don't wish ill on many, but if I could go back in time and wish ill on him, I would. NASA launched a joint mission with the Soviet Union. The UK voted to stay the EU. Jimmy Hoffa disappears. And the Altair ships. Altair Basic is like that lego starter set you buy your kid when you think they're finally old enough to be able to not swallow the smallest pieces. From there, you buy them more and more, until you end up stepping on those smallest pieces and cursing. Much as I used to find myself frequently cursing at Visual Basic. And such is life. Or at least, such is giving life to your software ideas. No matter the language, there's often plenty of cursing. So let's call the Altair a proto-PC. It was underpowered, cheap, and with this Microsoft Basic programming language you could, OMG, feed it programs that would blink lights, or create early games. That was 1978. And based largely on the work of John Kemeny and Thomas Kurts, the authors of the original BASIC in 1964, at Dartmouth College. As the PC revolution came, BASIC was popular on the Apple II and original PCs with QuickBASIC coming in 1985, and an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, for QuickBASIC shipped in 2.0. At the time Maestro was the biggest IDE in use, but they'd been around since Microsoft released the first in 1974. Next, you could compile these programs into DOS executables, or .exe files in 3.0 and 4.0 brought debugging in the IDE. Pretty sweet. You could run the interpreter without ever leaving the IDE! No offense to anyone but Apple was running around the world pitching vendors to build software for the Mac, but had created an almost contentious development environment. And it showed from the number of programs available for the Mac. Microsoft was obviously investing heavily in enabling developers to develop in a number of languages and it showed; Microsoft had 4 times the software titles. Many of which were in BASIC. But the last version of QuickBASIC as it was known by then came in 4.5, in 1988, the year the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan - probably while watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on pirated VHS tapes. But by the late 80s, use began to plummet. Much as my daughters joy of the legos began to plummet when she entered tweenhood. It had been a huge growth spurt for BASIC but the era of object oriented programming was emerging. But Microsoft was in an era of hyper growth. Windows 3.0 - and what's crazy is they were just entering the buying tornado. 1988, the same year as the final release of QuickBASIC, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language he'd been calling Ruby. Now, there would be another Ruby later. This language was visual and Apple had been early to the market on Visual programming, with the Mac - introduced in 1984. Microsoft had responded with Windows 1.0 in 1985. But the development environment just wasn't very… Visual. Most people at the time used Windows to open a Window of icky text. Microsoft leadership knew they needed something new; they just couldn't get it done. So they started looking for a more modern option. Cooper showed his Ruby environment to Bill Gates and Gates fell in love. Gates immediately bought the product and it was renamed to Visual Basic. Sometimes you build, sometimes you partner, and sometimes you buy. And so in 1991, Visual Basic was released at Comdex in Atlanta, Georgia and came around for DOS the next year. I can still remember writing a program for DOS. They faked a GUI using ASCII art. Gross. VB 2 came along in 1992, laying the foundations for class modules. VB 3 came in 93 and brought us the JET database engine. Not only could you substantiate an object but you had somewhere to keep it. VB 4 came in 95 because we got a 32-bit option. That adds a year or 6 for every vendor. The innovations that Visual Basic brought to Windows can still be seen today. VBX and DLL are two of the most substantial. A DLL is a “dynamic link library” file that holds code and procedures that Windows programs can then consume. DLL allow multiple programs to use that code, saving on memory and disk space. Shared libraries are the cornerstone of many an object-oriented language. VBX isn't necessarily used any more as they've been replaced with OCXs but they're similar and the VBX certainly spawned the innovation. These Visual Basic Extensions, or VBX for short, were C or C++ components that were assembled into an application. When you look at applications you can still see DLLs and OCXs. VB 4 was when we switched from VBX to OCX. VB 5 came in 97. This was probably the most prolific, both for software you wanted on your computer and malware. We got those crazy ActiveX controls in VB 5. VB 6 came along in 1998, extending the ability to create web apps. And we sat there for 10 years. Why? The languages really started to split with the explosion of web tools. VBScript was put into Active Server Pages . We got the .NET framework for compiled web pages. We got Visual Basic for Applications, allowing Office to run VB scripts using VBA 7. Over the years the code evolved into what are now known as Unified Windows Platform apps, written in C++ with WinRT or C++ with CX. Those shared libraries are now surfaced in common APIs and sandboxed given that security and privacy have become a much more substantial concern since the Total Wave of the Internet crashed into our lego sets, smashing them back to single blocks. Yah, those blocks hurt when you step on them. So you look for ways not to step on them. And controlling access to API endpoints with entitlements is a pretty good way to walk lightly. Bill Gates awarded Cooper the first “Windows Pioneer Award” for his work on Visual Basic. Cooper continued to consult with companies, with this crazy idea of putting users first. He was an earlier proponent of User Experience and putting users first when building interfaces. In fact, his first book was called “About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design.” That was published in 1995. He still consults and trains on UX. Honestly, Alan Cooper only needs one line on his resume: “The Father of Visual Basic.” Today Eclipse and Visual Studio are the most used IDEs in the world. And there's a rich ecosystem of specialized IDEs. The IDE gives code completion, smart code completion, code search, cross platform compiling, debugging, multiple language support, syntax highlighting, version control, visual programming, and so much more. Much of this isn't available on every platform or for every IDE, but those are the main features I look for - like the first time I cracked open IntelliJ. The IDE is almost optional in functional programming - but In an era of increasingly complex object-oriented programming where classes are defined in hundreds or thousands of itty bitty files, a good, smart, feature-rich IDE is a must. And Visual Studio is one of the best you can use. Given that functional programming is dead, there's no basic remaining in any of the languages you build modern software in. The explosion of object-orientation created flaws in operating systems, but we've matured beyond that and now get to find all the new flaws. Fun right? But it's important to think, from Alan Kay's introduction of Smalltalk in 1972, new concepts in programming in programming had been emerging and evolving. The latest incarnation is the API-driven programming methodology. Gone are the days when we accessed memory directly. Gone are the days when the barrier of learning to program was understanding functional and top to bottom syntax. Gone are the days when those Legos were simple little sets. We've moved on to building Death Stars out of legos with more than 3500 pieces. Due to increasingly complex apps we've had to find new techniques to keep all those pieces together. And as we did we learned that we needed to be much more careful. We've learned to write code that is easily tested. And we've learned to write code that protects people. Visual Basic was yet another stop towards the evolution to modern design principals. We've covered others and we'll cover more in coming episodes. So until next time, think of the continuing evolution and what might be next. You don't have to be in front of it, but it does help to have a nice big think on how it can impact projects you're working on today. So thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

While the rest of the media was focussing on the Olympic Games in Atlanta, we ran an "Olympics Free" Programme...well almost. Problems for journalists in Atlanta with reporters being refused access to events. Lou Josephs discusses Macromedia and ActiveX technology. We link up with Christian Voice in Zambia and ask why it decided to broadcast only in English. Incidentally, as of 2019, the station is still on the air .

Alla är trötta denna vecka när vi diskuterar viktiga ämnen som: SID-spelande, tupplurar och att vakna utan väckarklocka “99 hejdå” (goodbyeval?) verkar bli “99mac revival”: Martin Björnström är med i matchen på något sätt Apple köper företag var och varannan vecka Jocke blir äntligen med 4K Kinakameror Hur vänliga själar på Youtube hjälpte till att döda Internet explorer 6 Ett novelltips Microsoft skeppar Linux Nya poddhörlurar i Kårsta: Bose QuietComfort 25i www.ikod.se - fantastisk sajt med tonvis av intressanta saker att läsa och ladda ner En podd Fredrik faktiskt lyssnar på (History on fire) försvinner in bakom Luminarys betalridå Kan man någonsin se “färdigt” på Netflix? de visar liksom aldrig allt de har, osv Jocke testar ett annat spamfilter för sina mailservrar Länkar SID SIDPLAY Lineageos Martin Björnström Artikeln om Apples företagshandlande Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway Spelet med Warren Buffett Paperboy Jockes TV Vällingby Barkaby Ambilight Jockes billigaste nätverkskamera Activex System integrity protection A conspiracy to kill IE 6 The feeling of power Microsofts terminalreklamfilm Windows subsystem for Linux Microsoft börjar skeppa Linuxkärna Wireshark Bose quietcomfort 25i ikod tosec.ikod.se Luminary History on fire Netflix-genrer Inumbo Halon Disney+ Steinbrenner & Nyberg Interstellar Dunkirk Friendly fire om Dunkirk Blade runner 2049 Två nördar - en podcast. Fredrik Björeman och Joacim Melin diskuterar allt som gör livet värt att leva. Fullständig avsnittsinformation finns här: https://www.bjoremanmelin.se/podcast/avsnitt-166-tartbuffe-som-efterratt.html.

쿠도군이 짐 정리하러 세인트루이스로 돌아간 관계로 녹음방송으로만 진행된 쿠도캐스트. AT&T와 미 법무부의 2차전, 저가형 서피스 고(그리고 윈도우 얘기가 나올 때마다 나오는 ActiveX 까기), 최신 애플 루머, 그리고 새 맥북 프로 얘기까지. 그리고 닥터몰라는 이번에도 iOS 음성 메모 앱과의 사투를 벌이는데...- 팔로우업: AT&T vs 미 법무부- 서피스 고 (http://drmola.com/293051)- 최신판 애플 루머 (https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/11/apple-product-updates-fall-kuo/)- 2018년형 맥북 프로 (http://drmola.com/pc_news/293391)자세한 에피소드 노트는 아래 웹페이지 방문을 클릭해주세요! (애플 팟캐스트 기준)

Andre Resendez, candidate for the Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, with an emphasis in International Relations, gives the student address at the UC Davis Fall Commencement ceremony.2017-12-16_Comm_Andre-Resendez

Mike is recovering from a weekend you wouldn't believe. Plus we revisit the web vs native topic with a vengeance & discuss the sun-setting of ActiveX.

Nach einer kleinen Abstinenz haben wir diesmal, wie versprochen, wieder ein Thema. Mario Volke (Webholics) hat uns das Thema FoaF+SSL vorgeschlagen, vorbereitet und erklärt uns in der aktuellen Folge wie es funktioniert :)Vielen Dank auch an Henry Story, dem geistigen Schöpfer von FoaF+SSL, der uns im IRC-Chat mit Rat und Tat zur Seite stand. Ihr Browser unterstützt diesen Audio-Player nicht.Länge: 0:55h (47.5 MB), Download MP3News Google Buzz Liste der offenen Standards Salmon-Protokoll PubSubHubbubShownotes(Vielen Dank an Mario, der die Shownotes zusammengestellt hat) dezentralisiertes Authentifizierungsprotokoll One-Click-SignOn (kein Username, kein Passwort) WebID: Ein URI als ID für deine Person (LinkedData) 100% Standardbasiert: REST, RDF, LinkedData, SSL, X509 Alle Vorteile von Semantic Web Technologies: strikte Semantik, Erweiterbarkeit (Namespaces), Reasoning (OWL) Web of TrustUse Cases neben einfachem Login Web site personalization Profil (FOAF) portabel und unter Kontrolle des Users, import mit nur einem Klick (FOAF+SSL Login) Einfaches Kommentieren (keine Eingabe von persönlichen Daten mehr notwendig) Distributed Access Control Zugang nur einer bestimmten foaf:Group gewähren Rule Based Access Control: Komplexe Policies möglich (bsp. nur Freunde von bereits vorhandenen Usern erhalten Zugang, dies macht jeglichen Invitation-Mechanismus obsolet) Komplexität der Policies lediglich durch Aussagekraft von RDF/OWL beschränkt Distributed Social Networks auch hier komplexe Rollen und Zugangsbeschränkungen möglich Details Was braucht ein User um sich einzuloggen? X509-Zertifikat (normalerweise direkt im Browser installiert) FOAF-File (öffentlich auf einem bel. Server, LinkedData) SSL (RSA) Zertifikate häufig nur, um Server gegenüber Client zu authentifizieren jetzt: Browser besitzt self-signed Zertifikat und authentifiziert sich gegenüber dem Server X509-Zertifikat enthält Link zur WebID (und damit zum FOAF-File) (im Feld “X509v3 Subject Alternative Name”) Der Public-Key des Zertifikats muss mit dem im FOAF-Profil identisch sein Protokoll User klickt auf Login-Button Server eröffnet SSL Handshake und verlangt Zertifikat vom User Server holt sich das FOAF-Profil des Users (überprüft den Public-Key auf Gleichheit) nun sind weitere beliebige Autorisierungsschritte anhand des FOAF-Profils möglich (Web of Trust) Wie erstelle ich mir ein Zertifikat? z.B. HTML5 -Tag (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome) (http://test.foafssl.org/cert/) mit ActiveX für IE zur Not Serverseitig, allerdings Security Risk weil der Server dann den Private Key kennt Gibt es bereits Server-Implementierungen? Ja, einige, z.B. für PHP, Python, Java, Apache Modul Browser-Support: Firefox und Fennec Opera Safari, iPhone (mit bugs) Chrome Internet Explorer >= 6 Links Hauptseite Wiki: http://esw.w3.org/topic/foaf+ssl Mailing-List http://lists.foaf-project.org/mailman/listinfo/foaf-protocols Paper: FOAF+SSL: RESTful Authentication for the Social Web - http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2009/Papers/SPOT/foaf-ssl-spot2009.pdf Vergleich OpenID vs. FOAF+SSL http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/what_does_foaf_ssl_give Das ganze funktioniert sogar mit dem iPhone: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/one_click_global_sign_on xfn ontology: http://vocab.sindice.com/xfn# vcard ontology: http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/SUBM-vcard-rdf-20100120/ foaf+ssl als Alternative zu OAuth: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/sketch_of_a_restful_photo FOAF & SSL: creating a global decentralised authentication protocol: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_creating_a_global foaf+ssl: adding security to open distributed social networks: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/foaf_ssl_adding_security_to

Ken Levy and the VFP Letter for May: Survey results and new KB articles Rick Schummer Blog: Shedding Some Light and Upcoming Events Deploying FoxPro Applications DevTeach has Day Passes Windows Interface: Take Our Poll and tell us how you run Windows. VFP CommandBars: It's not an ActiveX control! Problems with web sites: PureTracks Google Web Accelerator Logging out users in Novell: How to? (and NO! finding support online is virtually impossible on this) Dealing with Variables Simon Arnold's tip from LanguageOptions Andy Kramek's Scope in FoxPro Part 1 FoxMasters CodeInspector

Java und ActiveX geben sich die Kante im Internet. Und beide versprechen einem das Blaue vom Himmel: alles wird einfacher, besser toller und schöner. Der Kaffeeklatsch im Netz erschlägt die elektronischen Diskussionsforen und man hat den Eindruck, daß die Zukunft der Welt davon abhinge. Gar nicht so abwegig. Sun, Netscape, Apple, Oracle und andere Softwaremultis führen mit Java den Kampf gegen Microsoft'sche Monopol. Die Firma aus Redmond kontrolliert mit ihrem Produkt Windows den wichtigsten Teil der Computertechnologie überhaupt: die Plattform für Anwendungen. An Microsoft vorbei kann derzeit kaum jemand eine Technologie etablieren, weil der Times-Auflagen-Aufkäufer William III überall mitspielen will und spielt. Und die anderen Kinder dürfen nicht mitspielen. Mit Java allerdings scheint der Rest der Industrie das Zauberwort gefunden zu haben, um dem Softwaregiganten zumindest etwas Paroli zu bieten. Chaosradio brüht Euch den Netzkaffee frisch auf. Wir diskutieren über die Technologien, ihre Vor- und Nachteile und zeigen auf, was dran ist am Hype um warum Java eben mehr als nur eine Programmiersprache ist.

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant. How do you have your creator tools give people the knowledge of how to be able to address such complexity? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, David Hong of Webflow. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: Now something that we talk about quite a bit in the Muse world, maybe we take inspiration from physical workspaces, physical studios, but I understand you are creating your own physical studio screen free these days. 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the pandemic projects, if you will. We’ve been working in our garage and trying to create a more creative space that just really fosters movement and I think the inspiration just came from Back pain, you know, and just sitting in front of your desk all the time and just being on Zoom, which is a lot of my day these days. And I was watching Brett Victor seeing faces again and just really got a lot of inspiration of like How do you leverage like physical spaces to create stuff? So my girlfriend’s an interior designer and I used to do a lot of art. I went to school for art, which ties a lot into a lot of the work I’m interested in these days and really just wanted to create a space for us to be like, let’s just work all analog and really Just to feel something, right? Just create something really physical, just to really deviate away from what feels like a 100% digital world right now. 00:01:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, doing things with your hands, the texture of paper or certainly craft materials. I like to go to just art stores, craft stores, and yeah, I like highlighters and I like chunky markers and I like butcher paper, and I like all that sort of thing, and I have less as the digital tools get better and better and in fact. Superior, particularly in their shareability, which is really important on your kind of distributed teams, those things become more of a curiosity maybe or something I keep around, but every once in a while I get them out for a similar reason to that. But yeah, maybe that means I should really just take up like wood block carving or something like that. 00:02:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about that too is I think in many ways, our tools are processing way faster than we can think about our ideas. And the thing I love about working on paper and those chunky markers like you said, is it gives you time to really kind of flush through the idea and work on it because the problem today is not the level of computation you have access to, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. It’s like you can process and build anything, but it’s just like how do you Hash out the ideas and I’ve really kind of found this return to working on paper recently and that’s whether it’s drawing up a user flow or creating low fidelity wireframes. It’s been really helpful to work in that material that almost intentionally slows down and gives you time to think a little bit deeper. 00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory, days before web flow, and then what you’ve been doing now that you’re there. 00:03:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, right before I joined Webflow, I was the head of product design at a health tech startup called One Medical and was there for about 4 years. I led design and research there. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Quick personal note, I was a customer there while I lived in San Francisco. This was kind of A doctor’s office, but reimagined a bit in terms of being more user experience centric. Is that a right way to describe it? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s accurate. I hope you had a good experience with it too. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: I did. I’m missing that there is no such thing in Berlin as far as I know. User experience is not a key feature of doctors I visited here, sad to say. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Healthcare experience is something where I think we need more designers and more technology, like thinking about that end user experience. Yeah. So when I was at one medical, one of the first features I started working on was our video visits platform. So it was being able to do a one on one virtual call which You and your doctor, and I built that prototype using Quartz composer and kind of started that from the initial prototype of like how we could even wire the AV and really test these cases. So a lot of what I’ve been interested in is design prototyping in a lot of ways. And prior to one medical, I was director of mobile design at a company called Black Pixel that was really focused on Like iOS and Mac apps doing our own products, but then also doing a lot of client services as well. And what brought me to web flow was after I left one Medical, I think. It’s really great when you leave a place that you feel like you could be there for another 4 years, and that’s kind of how I felt at one medical and was just looking for something a little bit different. So I took a mini sabbatical, probably about 2 months off trying to figure out what’s next. And my original idea was considering to do a startup around like prototyping on the iPad, because I think that was the year when Swift UI came out and I thought to myself, it’d be really cool to Build tools for people to build, and really build layout, and whether it was like a full-on developer tool or prototyping tool. That’s what I was exploring, but I think for me, I know how hard startups are and the life expectancy of those. So, you know, it’s something that I was continuing to explore lately, but then got connected with web flow. And for those who don’t know, web flows a visual development platform and it’s really focused on websites, blogs, and more dynamic web experiences. And I think the thing that got me really interested in that is this bridge between design and engineering. And it wasn’t just prototyping, but the stuff you build goes straight into production right away. So you can build your site, publish it, and you know, wire up a domain and you’re done. And I was just like, wow, you know, I think this is a really interesting space to be able to take the things that I was really excited about, which is like visual programming. And that is naturally just a part of it too. And I was like, OK, this is a company I have to join. Like I think at that time, they were growing and still growing, and I figured, you know what, instead of doing my own thing, I’d love to join forces with a company that’s already doing a good thing. 00:07:02 - Speaker 2: And thinking about the product positioning there. Is the target user or I’m sure you have a lot of diversity of customers now, but when you’re doing this design work, do you think of it as someone who’s coming from maybe a simpler tool, I don’t know, Squarespace comes to mind, and they want to upgrade and do something that’s more powerful and gives them more control over the CSS more capabilities, or is it actually the other way around, which is someone who’s been hand coding their HTML and they go, you know, this is a little bit tedious, and I’d like a visual tool that augments my ability to do that. 00:07:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, oh man, that’s such a good question, and I think it’s something we’re talking about a lot. And the thing that I know for sure is, you know, our end user and who we’re targeting are designers, and not to get into this existential crisis, but it’s like, what is a designer, right? There’s so many different flavors of what a designer can do. I would say this predates my time at web flow, but I would say like when the early product was being developed. I think it was really focused on the web designer and the web designer that really knew, really familiar with HTML and CSS, you know, that material of code to create and build these sites, but I think as Our customer base has grown, you are kind of seeing people who maybe their mental models are more from the Squarespace or using a tool like FigMA or Adobe XD to really understand design, so they’re kind of bringing those mental models in. So I think the thing that I think about a lot is What are the different types of personas of designers that we’re looking to serve, and that could be many different levels, you know, could be designers who know code really well or they want to use no code tools so they don’t have to know code. 00:08:52 - Speaker 2: If I can make a comparison to Hiokku, this was a similar, I think dilemma we had, you might say in our user base, and of course a good product can be used by different types of people and it works to try to understand the different segments you’re trying to support. Yeah, Hiroku both had developers who were people that maybe would have struggled a bit to get like a production deployment of. on rails and a SQL database and so on, and we made that much more possible for them to do, but it also had the other way around, which was professional developers that completely knew how to buy a server, install Linux on it, put it in a co-location facility or set up a VPS or whatever, do all that server and operation stuff. They said, I don’t want to bother with that. I would rather outsource. To you, it’s undifferentiated work. I just want to build my app, but we have people that are sort of coming from two very different skill directions that land on kind of needing the same solution, but as you said, like their mental models of how everything works is going to be wildly different in that, hence the huge design challenge to make a single product that works for both of them. 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s such a tough challenge because what I ask myself is, who do you serve in that instance? And for me, the answer should be both approachable software for these sort of tools. is you want to be able to abstract away the complexity, but you also want to be able to pop the hood open, if you will, right? So if someone wants to use code and make things more extensible, there’s a lot of challenges if we cap that from people and they don’t have access to it and to what you mentioned with Hiroku it’s like. Do people go with a different solution, or do you find ways where it can be a little bit more flexible for what people’s needs are? And I think that’s the sweet spot you want to hit and it’s really hard to find, which kind of makes me really excited about this space because it’s not only like a diverse persona, but it’s also the different use cases and how people learn too. So really trying to figure out how you find that place where it meets both of those ends of the spectrum is really challenging. 00:10:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good moment to introduce our topic which is designing for creative tools. Now creative tools can include a pretty big gamut from word processors and video editing. Here we’re talking about maybe the fairly far end of the spectrum on complexity, which is dynamic modeling tools, web design, development, but if you think of that spectrum as being on one far end as the pure consumer, very everyday apps, something like a kitchen timer. Whether maybe things that are in the middle but still closer to that consumer side might be social media, for example, not to say there isn’t a ton of complexity in that, but compared to what you can do with creative tools or what the user can do with creative tools, there’s the variety of possible states essentially that a user can put their document into with anything on this end of the spectrum is vastly greater than some of those everyday apps. And that creates some pretty big challenges, but also for the right kind of person, and I would count, I think the three of us in that category, those challenges can be very fun and interesting. 00:12:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it keeps you on your feet, for sure, and I think the word I keep attributing to this is just dynamic, right? It’s that it’s always changing, it’s always evolving. And I think what’s most interesting for me in this space is you build a set of capabilities for people and you see what they do with it, right? And that’s different for what you alluded to is that, you know, a lot of my background before was consumer apps or networks and e-commerce and they’re more rigid in the user experience, so it’s more predictable with what people will do. Like, of course, there’s flows you want to Optimized for, but I think there have been times where I imagine a lot of spaces of people working in creator tools see this a lot, where end users just subvert and find new ways to use your tool and you’re always so surprised by it and I think Rather being worried about what happened to you, embrace that and see where it goes, and I think that’s really interesting. It’s just kind of like, uh, you know, this whole notion of like, I think Microsoft uses the term citizen developer or you know, end users creating stuff. Now it creates such a unknown journey map for a lot of these users, which I think is personally really cool. 00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that rigid design you mentioned in, for example, e-commerce, that’s actually by design, you want a checkout form, for example, the number of forks in that path should be pretty minimal, right? The data is different, where I’m shipping to is different, maybe there’s a few options in there, but you don’t want to choose your own adventure on a checkout form and perhaps the work you did in the medical space was similar that you want something pretty structured, pretty rigid. Everyone kind of does it more or less the same way with some essentially minor variation is really the complete opposite of a great creative tool. I think almost by definition is one that your users will use it to make things that you never expected. They like you said, that subversive element. 00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that’s why at Webflow, we tend to call things capabilities versus features, and we want to focus on that lens where it’s like, what are we equipping end users being able to do versus like, here’s this feature that will do X or do Y but it’s more like, here’s this capability, here’s this offering. Let’s see what you do with it. 00:14:32 - Speaker 2: I’d be curious to hear if there’s any cases you’ve seen so far of web flows, users and customers doing something interesting, unexpected, even even subversive. 00:14:43 - Speaker 1: Oh man. 00:14:43 - Speaker 3: Have you had any bitcoin miners like we did on Hookku? 00:14:46 - Speaker 1: Not yet, not yet. We’ll see, there’s still time for that. I’d love to hear the Hiroka use case. There’s two that come to mind for me, and one is a weblow community member created, I think it’s called The Big Bed, and it’s a children’s story that he illustrated. I can’t remember if it was directly about his daughter, but it was this narrative that they created. So he created an interactive site with web flow that had audio and just this really great immersive experience. And then there’s another use case where someone in the blood flow community created a game that I used to love playing is he actually recreated some of the intro and functionality of the game Civilization in web flow, and I’m just like, oh my goodness, there’s so many events, so many interactions built this, and you could tell like the people who built this is just, it’s pure passion for learning and just love of creating stuff and like. When I saw those two things, especially, I’m just like, oh my goodness, like this isn’t just for building like the websites built on Twitter bootstrap where they all kind of look the same. It’s kind of returning this sort of expressive form of the web, which got me really excited because I think in my iOS days, I think at that time the web was becoming a little bit stagnant and less expressive, but kind of seeing these sort of tools come back for people to be expressive on the web, I think it’s really awesome. 00:16:18 - Speaker 2: I think we talked with Wei Weixu a bit about kind of personalization in our online spaces, and I think I expressed my love of personal websites and the web and HTML remains and has only gotten better with years, even if there’s fewer sort of GeoCity style places for people that easily have their own spaces, what you can express through a personal site is greater than ever before, but that’s balanced out or maybe just drowned out would be the way to put it by. Yeah, maybe social media profiles or even just sites that are designed to be a profile for you, and it’s nice cause you upload a picture and you type in a bio and you click on three things you like and it gives you a nice looking page, but yeah, it lacks that personality, that expressiveness, and certainly that handmade element, but that’s still live on the web in terms of what you can do with HTML. You have to get away a little bit from the template driven world of say a Squarespace and a little bit closer to the metal if we want to call it that, and I think you know hand coded HTML is a great way to go, but not to drop in too many metause references here, but we also talked with Maggie Appleton about visual programming, which I think David discussing that episode is part of how you and I got talking and Talks about, well, look, we don’t want to replace code, but maybe we want to layer new kinds of visualization tools on top of it. I think the web is really, really perfect potentially for that, and you see a small version of that and say the developer tools, the Chrome slash fire bug derived developer tools, but there’s so much more we could do with that, I think. 00:17:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, the word I keep coming back to is expression, right? And the expression of how you create, and I think. I don’t like using like web 12 and 3 just because I think it’s just like a continuous evolution, but for the sake, let’s say web 2’s a lot of social media, a lot of feeds, and that’s where conversation happened, right? And I think for me, I grew up in the earlier days of the internet having a Geo City site using Dreamweaver to build my personal websites. I use this analogy of like visiting people’s homes and you would go to people’s home pages to be able to see that expression and now things are in social graphs, right? And there’s still a lot of where web 3 might move and I still think it’s. Really early, but through all this, I think there’s a lot of this interest to kind of bring personal expression back and bring back personal websites, blogs. RSS is a technology that I continue to use and love today, and I think there’s like a resurgence to this because people want expression in the content, you know, whether it’s personal expression or that of the people they interact with. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely hitting on some recurrent themes from the podcast here, just kind of give another angle on it. This idea of a personalized space is so important for professionals because almost by definition, you’re spending all of your waking, working time in it. And if you have no agency over how it works and how it looks and how it feels, that’s very demoralizing and discouraging. So for that reason alone, it’s very important. There’s other angle of like being able to do things that the creator of the tool didn’t specifically envision. In some ways, that’s the very definition of a creative professional, as someone who’s doing something novel, who’s doing these. Combinations because if there was no novelty for it, it’d be more like turning a crank and why pay really high professional labor rates for doing that, right? And so the tool has to facilitate it. You have to make this leap of, we’re going to provide these primitives and building blocks and people are going to reassemble them into games or whatever, you know, civilization, who knows, right? You have to be able to support that. 00:19:56 - Speaker 2: So going a layer deeper on what it means to design creative tools and design for creators, including designers and developers. One of the big topics in design is always mental models, and I’d be really curious to hear about the mental models you’re using for web flow, David, maybe Mark, you could talk to Muse a little bit or maybe we have some other examples from our collective experience, but maybe to start, Mark, could you define mental model just to make sure we’re all on the same page? 00:20:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so a mental model is sort of the platonic forms you’re dealing with in the domain. It’s the nouns and the verbs and how they interact, you know, what is the way that you think about the space? What are the primitives, how do you build on top of them? How do you combine them? So, for example, with a desktop OS you have things like files, folders, windows, things like that, mouse, and so forth. 00:20:51 - Speaker 2: One trick I’ve always liked for coming to grips with the mental model of some system that I’m designing is to write a glossary, essentially a list of all your vocabulary, and these are things that you’re surfacing to your user. So for example, I think I might have first tried this for the Hiroku add-on system. And in writing that glossary, I realized first of all we had way too many things. There was like 20 different things in there we were expecting people to keep track of, many of which were like kind of a relatively new concepts and certainly pretty abstract ones. So we’re looking for ways to kind of reduce those. Second, I found that sometimes we would use two words to mean basically the same thing, and that’s confusing. But then third, it kind of forces me at least to ask, does each one of these serve a really good purpose? Is a person going to have a clear understanding of what this item is? They know this term refers to that, and they can either connect it to something else they already knew before they started kind of using the product or reading your documentation or whatever, or for the very few you want to offer as new, is it worth your while to introduce this new term, this new concept. And of course one of the tricks, I think you Kind of illustrated pretty well there, Mark, is to take physical world metaphors. So your desktop is on your computer as a literal metaphor to your top of your desk. Files and folders are also metaphors, although even there you see where it’s an imperfect. fit. My mom actually has commented on this a number of times, which is she’s worked with paper files and folders for a long time and from her perspective, a file folder is one kind of thing and it’s one of those folding manila envelopes that you can put pieces of paper and documents into. So she thinks that you should call files documents and you should call folders files, and now of course, we’re set now, but it’s a good example of where users have preexisting expectations, you’re trying to borrow these metaphors, but they don’t necessarily map perfectly, but you get some leverage there because you’re not asking someone to learn a whole bunch of new words that don’t map to anything they know from any other domain. 00:22:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and my experience has been that the product architecture, which is the phrase we sometimes give to coming up with and naming these mental models, is incredibly important. If you get this even a little bit wrong, it’s gonna make everything much harder down the road, and in particular for some people to be able to span the full range of use cases from very simple to very complex, and to be able to do unanticipated recombinations, they have to be really solid. 00:23:24 - Speaker 2: So what kind of mental models do you make use of in web flow, David? 00:23:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a challenge in a lot of creator tools is to decide how opinionated you should be. And what I mean by that is when you become opinionated, there’s kind of a trade-off with that, right? You can kind of really help guide people in how they build certain concepts, or do you be more open ended and you give people the flexibility to explore that. And I think the thing that’s tricky with that is The question I ask myself is what mental models do people come in with using web flow, so someone who is a front end developer, the way they approach using web flow is going to be dramatically different than someone who may use FIMA. And I think the thing that’s hard is In design, there’s a lot of these things that are very similar, but not necessarily identical, right? So, for example, in Xcode, the auto layout engine is a lot different than auto layout in Figma, but yet, these are things that people associate with how to approach using it. So I think When we’re thinking about the mental models of web flow, I think a lot of things that we’re asking ourselves is like, what do people come in expecting, right? So, someone who’s coming in and using layout may not think of things as divs, right? And also think about things like nesting and parent-child relationships. They may be thinking of it as an infinite canvas that they drag and move freeform. And unless you kind of set position to absolute, there’s really no way of doing that in a way that produces good code and That can be frustrating for users if you’re coming in not knowing box model and some of these web design practices. So I think a lot of things we’re thinking about like, how do we become more opinionated in our own product without like biasing them on what to build, right? So for example, a lot of this can come from onboarding new users and teaching them like, hey, these are the core aspects of web design that’s going to be really important for you. To know, you already know this, great, you can skip it, right? But if you don’t know, it’s going to be really helpful for people to really understand those mental models, because I think for me, really being true to the material and the material in this case being like HTML and CSS I think. I personally wouldn’t want to abstract it so far away where you’re creating some like proprietary markup or something, right? You really want to make sure that you can get as close to the native output as much as possible, but abstracting how people build with. That I think is key. 00:26:08 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that some of the mental models are things about what do my users come in expecting a front end developer versus a designer, for example, but also, as you said, the material, you just inherit a bunch of things that are just true whether or not you want them to be, and certainly the web and HTML and CSS are full of plenty of quirks and history and that sort of thing, and so something about how the grid system works or something about how Flexbox works or what have you, you’re just gonna inherit that. Some of that may be good because there’s good mental models, some of it may be more like baggage or gets in your way, and so presumably, maybe I’m realizing now I’m just kind of resting what she said, but just for my own understanding, you’re trying to figure out which things are abstractions you really want to surface to your users because they’re useful, they’re powerful, they’re compre. Sensible, they fit well with the visual tool you’re creating and which are weird quirks of the web that don’t really help you to know and I don’t need to know about, I don’t know what JavaScript mification, it’s just we do that quietly behind the scenes and kind of tuck it away and you don’t need to really like have a concept for that in your mind to get value from the tool. 00:27:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this is why I like the jobs to be done framework where you’re kind of focusing on that outcome that a customer wants, right? And I think for us, when we think about it. There’s like multiple ways to build a layout, right? But if we’re kind of looking at some of the best practices of like, here are the things that people typically try to build and it solves like 80% of those use cases, like how do we surface more of that because the likelihood of what people want to build with that is higher, right? And there’s always going to be this option B, C, D, and E that people can explore. But when you give them A through E all at once. It’s this paradox of choice, right? So if I drop a div and then you’re asking like, OK, you can use display, flex box or grid, someone who doesn’t know what the difference is three are, they probably just pick one, right? And then really just trial by error with that. But if we can be more opinionated about some of these things, I think it helps reduce the cognitive load of decisions that people have to make. So can we streamline people to what we think is the best decision while giving them that option to subvert it or explore other paths to, as opposed to give them all the divergent paths at once. 00:28:38 - Speaker 2: Now here we’ve spoken a little bit about sort of things within the page ad, a flex box, and that sort of thing, but actually the web has a huge number of abstractions or that mental model glossary for the web would include pages, include URLs, would include links. I think all of those are pretty well understood even by non-creators, which is actually pretty great and so you can just rely on using those things, I assume, even something like a website, what actually is a website. Where are the edges of it that may or may not be fully understood by the average person, they may not fully grasp when they sort of leave Facebook and go to another site, but certainly I think for your target audience, those things are probably really well understood and you can totally lean on that, is that right to guess. 00:29:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the beauty of building for the web is there’s such a rich taxonomy and a lot of like standards already set on that, that even if people aren’t familiar with it, it’s not like they’re learning just web flows mental model, right? They’re learning the mental models of like building a website and links, buttons, and even in layout, you know, thinking about sections and Some other elements that are offered to people. So I think that’s the thing that’s been helpful for us is that it’s like, as you’re learning web flow, you’re learning the web mental model as well. 00:30:01 - Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of something, you know, we’ve talked about this kind of visualization element, which in many cases I think a visualization tool is something that doesn’t really add a new mental model, it just helps you better, well, literally see what it is that, yeah, understand, for example, margins and padding. It sort of shows you how those layout. Is there some major new abstraction that web flow gives you that’s sort of a new capability that’s added to your user’s tool kit, but it is not something that comes from the web, but is something you created as part of your universe of mental models. 00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s not something we originally created, but maybe I’ll throw this example out here because we just had our no code conference. We announced a capability that we call logic. And now when you have the UI side of things, and you have logic, and you have data with our CMS offering, it’s essentially a 1 to 1 connection to model view controller, right? And I think as we start exploring this is like, The question I’m asking is, do we teach everyone the fundamentals of model view controller and ask them to build it the exact same way? Are there ways to leverage those ways of doing things in new ways? And I think for us, there’s a lot to be able to explore there, even with our CMS, right? It’s like we’re letting people buying data to layout and building collections with them not necessarily knowing. What a collection is and how you would build that in code, right? So I think it’s not necessarily like inventing new definitions of things, but maybe new ways of manipulating and using it. And I think for us now that we have data, UI and logic, being able to manipulate, layout or data based on events, there’s a lot for us to really explore on how end users interact with that. 00:32:00 - Speaker 3: This brings us to another interesting aspect of designing for creative tools, which is the social aspect. So increasingly designing tools and then using the design tools takes place across many people, and there’s interesting social dynamics there. So especially if you look at a domain like the web, which is very multidimensional, like you can use absolute positioning or box model or grid or whatever, you have to come to some common language and understanding as a team, and sometimes you just gotta kind of pick one or be on the same page or at least call things the same thing. So an important job of design tools I think is helping teams reach that agreement. I can give you two examples. One is Hiroku, where there’s basically a lot of ways you can design and deploy an app, and Hirokoku picked one, and there were good reasons why Hiokku picked that way, and we said basically you should do this, like you should use Git and you should not write to the local file system and so on and so forth, you should use environment variables and Yes, those were good choices to make in of themselves, but they also basically forced everyone onto the same path, which was itself another example that’s maybe more analogous to web flow is Ruby on Rails, where basically it need people to pick a way to do NBC like, put this here, put this here, call this that, use this convention for converting between lower case and uppercase, and just do it, it’ll be fine. And there’s actually a huge service and just picking these defaults and having these guard rails in place. 00:33:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really interesting you bring that up, Mark, because I think one of the things we’re really thinking about and that’s really top of my mind is how does collaboration work in web design and in a tool like web flow, and I can give some examples of that is one, let’s say you have an end user creating their site, but perhaps they find inspiration from our showcase and they pick a template to use, right? But that template is built Flexbox only. And let’s say they use CSS grid or something else for their site, they drop it in and just boom, the whole layout just collapses, right? So I think for us, that’s something to really think about. It’s just like, again, just how do users understand like how the material’s created, right? And I don’t know if it’s something where we’re like, want everyone to use flash. Xbox only and get rid of the other stuff because there’s implications with that. But how do we kind of nullify and make sure that when people are using other resources that people build, like in a community aspect, that there’s clarity, there’s good documentation, and there’s some good best practices around that. And I think the other thing. That you touched on, Mark, that I think is really interesting is, how do you think about like design architecture as a team, right? And if you have multiple designers working in web flow on a larger team, it’s like, how do you make these agreements and how do you declare these things that’s like, hey, as we’re working, this is our approach to Naming our CSS architecture or this is kind of how we want to approach building pages and having that. I think a lot of that lives off platform right now today. Some of the things that we’re thinking about is just like how do we enable teams to work better in web flow, and I think we’re still doing a lot of research on it and trying to figure out like what that best case is. 00:35:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems inevitable that all design tools are going to become collaborative and social, at least have the capability to do things as a group, and it’s interesting that we’re sort of working our way up. So the first thing was like Google Docs, which is text, and then you add the whole office suite, and now we’re working on complex tools like Figma and web flow, and I think eventually we’ll get to video that’s probably the hardest one to do collaboratively because of bandwidth, but we’re gonna get there. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out. 00:35:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m starting to see a lot of startups working on collaborative video too, so I think definitely a really gnarly problem, but I think it’s a sign, like you said, it’s inevitable that everyone’s shifting to collaboration in as real time as possible too. 00:35:55 - Speaker 2: A bit of a tangent, but it’s certainly a reminder of something I feel like comes up on Twitter from time to time, which is, it does seem odd that you basically have all of these startups that are reimplementing collaboration, typically inspired by Google Docs or some combination of Google Docs and GitHub. And in fact, given that we want every single tool to be collaborative, couldn’t you imagine that as an element of the operating system or the file system? And instead, every single startup that does this has their own big engineering team and like needs to build it all, but one can’t help but to envision that future operating system where by default that is part of anything you build. 00:36:36 - Speaker 1: I think about that a lot about annotations too. Couldn’t annotations and commenting be more native across the operating system based on the objects that you’re working with, but like you said, a lot of these tools, it’s part of this walled garden, right? And everyone’s building their own version of it and there’s got to be a way where How do you take that a layer deeper, like either in the operating system or being more open source about it, but it is interesting, like everyone’s kind of building these same like set of features, and I always think about annotations and commenting as ones that I would love something like that on the OS level. 00:37:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually had the aspiration for such a thing existing. I think it could be an OS service or a web service sort of like S3, and I repeatedly hear people ask for this, and I think there are two big hurdles. One is there’s an expertise hurdle, which I think is not obvious until you try to do it, but it’s very, very hard to build such a system, and I think it’s basically impossible to do without having a motivating example product. So I think it’s most likely this gets extracted out from either a company or someone who has experience with the domain of trying to build such a system. And I think there’s an important path dependence thing where yes, everyone wants the operating system to support this, but, you know, it’d be very convenient if the operating system was the one that already ran, you know, my program, right? I don’t want to have to rewrite all my stuff or change my business or lose my business for such an operating system. So there’s a first mover problem. So, basically, I’m looking for the bookstore that wants to get into the business of web services in this space, and I think they’re out there somewhere. If you are, remember, we’re looking for such people, so contact us please. 00:38:16 - Speaker 2: David, what you mentioned earlier about the dropping a Flexbox component into a grid layout also makes me think of another thread here, which is the kind of componentization elements of things. Yeah, I think a product with a good mental model, a good set of abstractions, the elements of it can be combined together in a lot of different ways, again, ways the creator didn’t originally expect, but you take that even a step further, which is not just that I, the person using the tool within my document, can Do interesting and different things, but then you can go from there to, as you said, the collaboration, we’re on a team and we’re working together on something like a website or a document, but then the furthest step is to go from there to, you have these components that you can plug together where maybe the I don’t even know the person that made this calendar widget that I’m plugging in. But I feel like this has been a dream for a long time, and maybe one that there’s been many attempts, I think OpenDoc is kind of a famous one there, maybe ActiveX kind of Microsoft had a couple of different iterations of object embedding and yeah, I’m curious if you have a take on that path of computing history attempts. 00:39:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can speak about the promise of OpenDoc cause candidly speaking, I never really had a chance to play around with it and. Implemented, but I think this idea of component software that is reusable and adds value for people immediately, I think it’s still a lot of ways the dream, right? And when we think about community plug in the ecosystems, it’s an aspiration I want to continue to pushing now, there’s a lot of trade-offs in practice because I think for me. Someone who used like cocoa pods a lot, right? There was something around like how open are these plug-in ecosystems, and I think that’s a tough tradeoff for any platform that’s being built, but I think for me with OpenDoc, I kind of felt like web objects was a lot of this too, in this world where you now have people who can build components. That serve other people and really being able to open up like how work is done, right, whether within your company or externally, but I think OpenDoc is just one of those still kind of waiting for that promise to be fulfilled and then I think that vision is so inspiring. 00:40:40 - Speaker 3: I think this is a super interesting frontier as well, and I think it’s like understudied and under theorized. I think people don’t appreciate how complex it is, especially when these plug-ins are turned complete and they have access to compute and data, you know, that is your compute and your data, they can do wild stuff and there’s sort of a this problem in the engineering world of libraries. And I think we’re still in the very early days of how we think about libraries, which is basically we download a bunch of random code from the internet and run at our computers and who knows, you know, a lot of it’s probably like mining Bitcoin or, you know, stealing my keys. It’s a complete mess. And I think it requires a very serious design and engineering effort. As well as again this respect of the path dependence problem where you need a way to bootstrap the ecosystem and to incentivize the ecosystem. So I’m so optimistic. I just think it’s a very hard problem. 00:41:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, you’re right, it’s still so early in the way that we’re doing it. And I think one of the things, like let’s take no code, for example, and use this open doc analogies. I’ve always described as no code being like the 3D printer for building on the web. So what it does is really creates repetition and reusability in a great way, right? Now, no code tools, there’s always going to be this threshold where if you’re doing something sophisticated, you might need to code it, right? So it’s never this like one or the other, but I think it kind of evolves into that and I see that with component software too, in the sense that it’s like, I think about this all the time. If I’m building an app, I’m like, why do I always have to build the same authentication flows, right? Or kind of build these things that people predict. It’s a very rigid solution intentionally, like, you know, e-commerce and check out some of these things like why do these things have to be constantly unique, right? There’s clear interactions of what people expect in those. And how do you do those things at scale. So then the things that need to be unique for your business or your product, you can really focus on that. And I think that’s where, again, I think this whole concept of like component software, I still very much believe in it. It’s a very ambitious vision and I think in a lot of ways still pretty early. 00:42:54 - Speaker 2: By the way, it probably is worth defining no code briefly for the audience. Again, we suspect a lot of folks may have at a minimum part of it, but given that you put on a conference with that name, it seems like you might be an authority to speak to what you think that word means, you know, what the category is, what the movement is, etc. 00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. With like what it’s not, right, which is not the absence of code or any existence of that. And it’s really more of like the primitive that you build with. So instead of building, using code in a command line interface or a text editor, it’s through like visual abstractions. So there’s no code and low code. But yeah, it is something funny where It’s not even in my opinion, combating with code, right? It’s just kind of the existence of these two approaches in a lot of ways. And I think the companies that are going to excel at this is they’re probably going to use a combination of both, right, depending on some of the different use cases, but yeah, no code is kind of starting with not needing to learn how to code and you’re kind of focused on like the visual abstractions of creating with code. 00:44:05 - Speaker 2: My sense is that it’s often non-programmers doing automation and particularly connecting services together, so I think of the if this, then that and Zapier as being kind of a starting place, very simple, just, I don’t know, we use a Zapier integration for someone tweets about X, then put it in the Slack channel, for example, or you get an email with a PDF, stick it in this Dropbox. Those kinds of basic automations and that certainly I’m sure professional software engineers sometimes use such service just because it’s easier, less work to maintain or whatever than using their full on development stack, but I think very often it’s a business person or a designer or some other person that the writing a, I don’t know what a shell script to do the same thing would probably be out of reach for them. 00:44:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes me think about and name any use case, right, where before you’d have to like ask an engineer to run a rake task to be able to get all these things done. Now you’re empowering people, like you said, maybe they’re on the business side of things or not on the engineering and product side to be able to create their own automations in that way. And the question I always ask myself is like, this is the stuff you want to democratize even within your own company, right? It may not be the stuff like an engineer even wants to work on. So it’s like, again, it’s not contrary to how you do it, it’s just kind of really thinking about some of these use cases. I don’t know, do you all remember Yahoo pipes? That was another one that I think about with the automations too. 00:45:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had to do some serious digging around in the web archives to find a screenshot of that because I wanted to reference it for the inco switch end user programming article that we did. But yeah, I think of that as one of the original put together flow-based programming with, I guess the emerging idea of web services or the fact that URL over here as a web report and another API over here is where I can feed in my travel plans and maybe I can connect all those together with well pipes. And maybe it was before its time, I’m not sure, but the concept there was so simple and maybe coming back to our mental models point, you know, you even look at a screenshot, you instantly understand what this is doing and what it might be capable of. Now another thing that I think about when thinking of a tool like what you’re making with web flow, I think Kokku had some of this as well, and I think any kind of creative tool always has this, you know, you talk about your ideal is the low floor, high ceiling, that’s the idea, it’s relatively easy to get started with, but you don’t get constrained later on. There’s also these powerful cases, but I do think there are cases where you do want to say, OK, you’re asking for something that actually is more kind of off the edge of what we actually want to offer with the tool. Certainly when we ran this Hiroku, someone would come in. I want to tune all these kernel parameters, whatever, we’d say, well, look, this actually isn’t the right platform for you because that level of control and customization is exactly what we’re trying to save you from. We’ve just made good choices there that will work pretty well for most people, and you can just remove thinking about all that kind of stuff from your head. And an example, you know, that I like to cite a lot for end user programming is Flash, which I think did a really great job of bringing animators and maybe what we would now call motion designers into something that was essentially kind of a programming environment, but it’s been speculated on some of these uh flash dyed postmortems that came along a couple of years ago that one of the Issues that it faced was in those early days, it was so accessible to animators, then people started making games, those games would get pretty complicated, they would need all these things that just professional software engineers need, want, expect in terms of data layer, caching. Complexity of the language, all that kind of stuff, ability to add libraries and dependencies, and eventually it became such a powerful programming tool that it actually lost that ease and that accessibility. Essentially the floor kind of crept up as they pushed up the ceiling. So I also think in designing a particular tool, it’s very reasonable to decide our spectrum of use. cases, you know, there’s some that’s going to be too trivial or too, you know, we don’t want to make things so easy, you know, we push you out to some more beginner tool, but there’s also a ceiling somewhere where we say, look, you actually reached the limit of what this tool is for. We’re not designing it for you. You should go use this over here that’s more powerful but also has, you know, other trade-offs. 00:48:38 - Speaker 3: Furthermore, I think there are different ways to do this. So I think the ideal way, again, if you have the right mental model and product architecture is to have basically a nested mental model, a nested architecture where you can peel back layers and get at the granular abstractions within. There’s all kinds of examples on Hooku. I think we did do a pretty good job with this. If you get push an app to compile and deploy it, it just basically picks how I think it should compile based on what the app looks like. But if you want, you can swap in your own compilation step and say, here’s the script that I want to compile this app, but critically, both the Hiokku default and that. use the same interface. They’re totally interchangeable. It’s like basically peeling off that one layer and saying I want to insert something different into this interface. It’s not saying, oh well, you know, Her only deploys Ruby. I gotta go do my whole own thing on AWS from scratch, right? You get to granually pick apart pieces and there are all kinds of examples of that. In contrast, sometimes I see these programming tools that are like code generators where there’s a super complicated problem and you invoke the code generator and it spits out 100 files. And as long as you don’t need to do anything different, you’re fine, but as soon as you need to do something different, you’re completely out of luck. It’s like you’re often hand editing these 100 different files. So I think the extent that you can create a system where you can peel back these individual abstractions while still enjoying the stack overall, that’s great. 00:49:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes me think about, I’ll give a small example. So there’s this note taking tool I love called Obsidian, and the thing I love about Obsidian is you use your local markdown files, right? So. If Obsidian ever gets to a point where it’s not scaling for me, which I think it serves my use case, well, you still kind of have the native markdown files and you’re not kind of stuck in that application layer, right? And I think great applications will figure out ways to be more of a facilitator than controller on that, you know, and I think for some like web flow, we think about, OK, we no longer are meeting the threshold of what like a certain customer wants, they can still export their code. But are there other things we can kind of build to make that interoperability a little bit easier too. So I think that’s the trick is like being in an application that can be great at facilitating some of these things. So if such things do evolve too, that you’re not kind of locked into that, but I think what you said, Mark is spot on. 00:50:57 - Speaker 2: Yes, I guess in the ideal world you design your tools so that. You start with a basic set of primitives, abstractions, mental model glossary that hopefully someone can understand and do something useful with when they need a little more power in some particular areas, that’s where they, as you said, mark, peel it back or I think David you put it as kind of popping the hood, and you can go down one layer at least for that spot, but you’re not completely off in some new world, you’re still within the kind of universe of abstractions that all fits together. And then there’s a final step, which might be what you referenced there David, which is where you actually do get to the end of what the tool can do for you, but hopefully now it’s not, now I’m really screwed and I have to just kind of recreate everything from scratch in some new environment, but rather you can, I think it’s React Native uses this term. Eject, where you essentially can say I want to take my project out of the React Native world to just make it a standard X code or Android Studio project, and there’s no going back once you eject or no easy going back, but that’s your out, right? 00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Interesting choice of words for React Native. 00:52:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s actually the kind of project that I was thinking of in my previous example where if you have to eject in that case, I think it’s pretty bad. I mean, you can still run. Another example of ejection would actually be with deploying apps with Hiokku. If you have a standard app, you can deploy to Hiroku, but you can also take that standard, like Ruby on Rails app, for example, and deploy it somewhere else, sort of an injection in a sense. Hm. This is a very important concept, by the way. Another way I think about this would be as an efficient frontier where the axes are difficulty slash complexity and the other axis is power, and what you want is you want a smooth trade off on those where you can always add a little bit more complexity to get a little bit more power. If you need it. And so if you need a little bit more power, you never have to undergo a huge complexity jump, like migrating your app to a whole different platform. For example, there’s little changes you can make along the way. And furthermore, you want that frontier pushed out as far as possible, so that the minimal amount of complexity is needed for the given amount of power. 00:53:01 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap too, because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant, so then complexity becomes a sort of like villainous thing, right? And I think there are times where we do need to embrace complexity, but how do you make it approachable, right? And I think that is the thing to solve, right, is to figure out like when there is a time where complexity is called for, how do you have your creative tools give people the knowledge of how, like again, to peel that layer back or pop the hood open to be able to address such complexity as opposed to avoiding it entirely. 00:53:45 - Speaker 3: And again, I keep coming back to this idea of mental models, often with complexity, you’re dealing with a fundamental reality of the underlying world, and if you ignore it or try to cover it up for long enough, you just make it worse, you have to address it. But on the other hand, you don’t want to make that problem any worse than it is by, for example, combining two problems and giving yourself three problems. 00:54:06 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the Einstein quote, Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler, which is, yeah, the world is complex, it can be messy. You’re creating a tool for someone to model something about the world or create their own little mini made up world, and they are just going to need to deal with that complexity. In the web world, that’s something like all the different browsers and all the different devices that someone might browse from and different screen sizes and the difference between interaction on touch versus mouse versus trackpad versus stylus. Those things all exist and you need to deal with them when you’re creating something and attempt to totally abstract all that away because it sounds too complicated. It may impair the ability of the creator to make something that’s really good. 00:54:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, because abstractions still derived from the original thing, right? And I love the idea of really focusing on where you address complexity as opposed to neglecting it or putting it everywhere, right? So when you have these complex things to solve, what’s the optimal place to solve it? 00:55:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do think we’re in kind of a golden age or the beginning of a golden age for creative tools that includes being more interesting, maybe place for designers to go work on tools for thought and things like that, that the the stodgy old kind of vanilla styles of the office suites of the past and so forth are giving way to more stylish and interesting and opinionated tools for thought and developer tools and designer tools. I’d be curious to hear from both of you looking forward to kind of the future, you know, if we could fast forward that trend 3 or 5 years, how does creative tools look different in the near future? 00:55:50 - Speaker 1: I think you’re gonna see a lot more participation in it, and it’s almost like. The consumerization of creator tools, which I think is exciting. And the reason I’m excited about it is I believe some of the people with the best ideas and things that can be life changing and can really change the world, probably don’t know how to code. They might not know how to design. So being able to give a platform for people to explore and express, kind of gives the continuation of such idea to manifest in other ways. Now, it may not be that person who ends up creating it, but maybe it sparks an idea somewhere else. So I’m always like a big fan of participation in anything because I think for me, honestly, if it wasn’t for visual programming tools like Hypercard and Quartz Composer, I may not have gotten into an interest in Building software and if I went the conventional route, I probably would have failed. So I think for me, that’s what I’m excited about is that like, this whole notion of like end user programming and it being more accessible, just for people to play and explore is pretty exciting for me. 00:57:03 - Speaker 2: It’s funny, I’m obviously a huge proponent of end user programming and more people learning how to grasp the power of the dynamic medium that is computers, not just as users, but as creators of software. But when you use the word consumerization, Then that actually almost gives me a little bit of an opposite reaction and intellectually, I think I agree with you that more participation, more accessibility is better, but I guess as a crafts person and I love my niche and sometimes kind of complicated powerful tools, then what consumerization brings to mind for me, I don’t know, Instagram stories, or for example, you’ve seen this in some of Apple’s creator products like they have for audio editing, you’ve got. Logic Audio, but then you’ve also got GarageBand, which is installed in a reac. It’s pretty simple and easy to use, which is nice, but then in some ways they brought some of that design aesthetic to logic, maybe taken away some of the things that the longtime pro users of that could be described as like a dumbing down. So it’s interesting to reflect on that reaction of myself. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t think I’m proud of it, but I just had that twinge when you said that word. 00:58:12 - Speaker 3: Oh Adam, I got a different phrase for you. What if we called it end user creating as a sort of generalization of end user programming, and this is a road we’re already part of the way down. So it used to be that even end users couldn’t do something like word processing that was kind of a professional activity you had a typist or whatever. And we’ve since brought the Office suite to end users, and now I think we’re in the process of doing that for richer media, so audio, video, web pages. Of course, those are things that are kind of on the cusp right now of even a few years ago, it was quite hard for someone to casually do audio editing or video editing, but now you go look on YouTube and there’s these like super, super niche, random people doing super random stuff, but the video quality is like insane because everyone can do video editing now. And I think that kind of progress is going to continue. 00:58:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Adam, even when I said that word, I had a similar reaction too and it just makes me wonder, like, has the term consumer transformed in a way that, you know, needs to evolve a little bit, but I’ll give you an example. There’s an awesome. iOS app called Universe, which lets you build websites like on your phone. And I think for that, that to me is like the consumerization of a creator tool, right? You’re kind of taking the mental models of what people are used to on their. Smartphone dragging and dropping these swipe gestures, but instead of consuming content, maybe it’s more the consumers are becoming creators, right? So it’s kind of normalizing creators in that way and I think the universe is a great example of that. But just wanted to say when I said that word too, I had a certain mental model that came to mind and I think it’s, yeah, kind of like, maybe it’s more turning consumers and the creators rather with the mental models that they know. 00:59:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, and certainly I have my own career to thank for that in a way. As a kid, I loved video games, I was a consumer of video games, and that led me to think I want to be able to create these for myself, h