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RetroLogic - Episode 20   RetroLogic isn’t just a podcast, It’s a retro game store! Visit Retrologic.games to check out our growing inventory of Cleaned, Tested, and 100% Authentic Retro Games! (what did you buy? And what did you play?)    John Bought - God of War chains of Olympus PSP,  Final Fantasy Tactics PSP, Wipeout Pure PSP, Genesis Collection PSP, Monkey Ball 2, and Starwars EP1 racer. John Played - Marvel VS. Capcom, Blue Fire, and Rocket robot on wheels    Dan Bought - Cover art! On the hunt for Gotcha Force. Dan Played - all the dreamcast games. Borderlands the Pre-Sequel   (The price is RETRO) Hambone Johnny's list   (Weekly Topics) (Crossplay) Castlevania Pokemon Snap   (This day in gaming history) 22 Years Ago (February 8, 1999)     Nintendo 64 Mario Party   (Old News) Retrobit Prism for Gamecube - HDMIhttps://www.retrorgb.com/prism-hd-by-retro-bit.html   Third Strongest Mole (Sam)Today at 8:11 AM So, interestingly enough, I started running some numbers.  There are actually more retro games available on switch than the wii, wii u or 3ds!  But it's difficult to get the full picture. Several of these collections overlap.  But then sometimes different versions of a game are significant enough they should count separately.  I also only pulled virtual console numbers for the other systems.  I know there were at least some compilations and collections on them as well. It might be interesting to give a breakdown by system. (how many SNES games are available on switch vs. Wii?)  Part of the reason the offerings on switch feel so sparse is I sort of mentally block out all the arcade stuff and the atari collection, and those make up a good chunk of Switch's final number.   (Game Releases)   (Break)   (Community Content)   (Retro Rewind) Sonic the Hedgehog   (Question of the week) ChrisHL94 -  With the recent release of the Monster Hunter film, what is the best and worst film based on a video game? What is the best and worst video game adapted from a film?    Mechadragon: Where do you cross the line when it comes to selling retro games at a higher price to make a profit, vs selling a game to someone and ripping them off with the price.   (Throwback Thursday) Favorite game that uses a peripheral Game of Scones (Jason B)02/04/2021 Probably Wii Fit?  I'm intrigued by Ring Fit Adventure   Adr0ck02/04/2021 I dunno, hard to beat the fun and simplicity of Duck Hunt   Eric Plunk02/04/2021 Typing of The Dead - Dreamcast   Bryan S

with Alora & Veronica May of Sam & Lance! Full show notes, links, and more at WWW.VALERIELAVIGNELIFE.COM/SAMANDLANCE  [0:31] Valerie LaVigne: Ladies, thank you so much for joining me on the women's empowerment Podcast. I am so excited that you're both here I know that one of you is in Canada, and the other is in Singapore so it's so great that we can be connected via zoom today. And, why don't you tell us a little bit about your brand and what you do.   Alora May: Thanks so much for having us. Um, so I'm Laura and I am the co founder and CEO of Sam and Lance. So we started this business in April of 2019 as a way to help empower people to shop ethically and shop transparent transparently, and also shop women owned   VL: On the show, we talked about sustainability we talked about shopping, like we we talk about women's empowerment I feel like this is a great. This is a great episode in partnership so I'm so excited that were chatting today, and because we're coming into the holiday season, and we're getting ready to spend a little bit more and shop a little bit more. We're also going to be talking about some of your favorite products, or our audience. So, let's go through the kind of gift guide that we've prepared for today. What's our first item on the list.   Veronica May: So, hi I'm Veronica. Other co founder of Sam and Lance, and for gifting this year we really wanted people to really stop and think about the things you want to send to your relatives. You want to make sure you're supporting things that are local you want to make sure that you're supporting women so we put together gift boxes to kind of help you on this journey. So one that's really excited about is our Zero Waste starter kit. So we have a number of different items that are going to help your friends and family and maybe even up shop yourself, I can do that, terribly. And so in this kit, you're going to have like reusable cotton pads that people can take their makeup off, or you can actually even use them for like children's faces like throw them in your purse. They're a mom. We have produce bags. So you can bring your produce bags to the grocery store and you don't use the plastic. So the number of products in there to help people start their Zero Waste journey. And we also like to advocate like zero waste is happy perfect it's just baby steps. So, by giving this to family members and helping them, put them in the mindset of shopping ethically    AM: and it was really cool about the zero waste kit on to that okay jump in is a few products in there that you might not think of, like for example we have a vegan and sustainable floss that's in a glass bottle so people don't really think about floss when they think of a scannability but there's a lot of plastic and things that go into floss that isn't great for our environment so you know we really like bringing these products to the forefront and having people have these conversations so then that way you know when you think about your next purchase or you're thinking about, oh my floss just ran out let me, let me get a new one and you just kind of start thinking about how my next purchase and my next thing can be sustainable. So that's why we really love the zero waste kit because it helps people just start that conversation in their own head about the products that they're using that they might not have thought of before.   VL: That's a really great point. And that's kind of where I've been on this zero waste journey, and the beginning of my Zero Waste journey I felt so guilty for like company I guess I was out oh my god this is single use plastic like oh my god I had to use a Glock bag and not beeswax, like, three years. But what I started to realize was it actually starts with just being more aware about the products that we're currently using like, where does this go when I get rid of it where does this flasco when I throw it out and so I actually switched my floss recently to in like q tips or bamboo q tips, which is again like something you don't think about they're not gonna reuse your kitchen. That's weird. Anyways, this sounds like an amazing kit and for people who are listening who maybe have heard the term Zero Waste but aren't exactly sure what it is, can you tell us a little bit about that.   [4:16] VM: Yeah, so the terms are especially a little misleading. A lot of people get nervous cuz you're like, oh I could be one of those people that puts trash in a mason jar and I'm literally create zero waste, but what it is is a journey, it's a momentum to reduce the amount of waste and to start consciously, like you said, thinking about where does this go at the end of its life, everything I'm using so start like everything that's been made of plastic is still on this earth today, every single toothbrush you have ever used is still somewhere on this planet and when you start taking this mindset be like okay, what can I use differently. And the other thing too is we actually named the company after our grandmother's, but thinking about your grandparents is a great way to get in the zero waste mindset, because what we're grandparents doing before all this plastic came into the world. So there's so many tips and tricks there's so many things you'll find online if you're lucky enough to still have your grandparents around you can actually ask them like, what did you guys used to do. And so it's about this journey to just reduce your waste to be really conscious of where it's going and where what you decide to do.   VL: And love that you guys named your company after your grandparents because I my grandma actually lived with us. my whole life ago. I only remember my grandparents living with us my grandma's still around. And I do notice little things that she does that I'm like oh that's over cork, but she's basically reusing jars or containers or whatever it is that she's doing and it's very different from what we're used to, or used to doing but I feel like we're kind of turning backwards a little bit with that so that's exciting. And I'm going to link to actually each of these products that we're talking about on the show notes page. So before I forget, that's going to be at Valerie Levine life.com, forward slash Sam, and Lance spelled out completely, so it's easy to find. Okay, what's our what's on our shopping list for number two, what's the next thing that we're going to get, for us, and then also for other people.   [6:09] AM: So we've curated different gift boxes and all of our different themes. So one of them we call be relaxed box. And this is just an awesome gift to give somebody, you know, to relax. So we have some bath salts in there, incense some body oil and some tea. So, it's also pretty gender neutral as well so you could gift it to anybody you know a friend, your mom, your brother, it doesn't really matter. It's a great gift for everybody. And then we'd like to also say that like our products tell us story so the T is tes t so it's a Toronto based brand, and it's an amazing ethical tea but a lot of the proceeds go to their charity program and give back and, you know, all of our products kind of have this lovely story behind it and story but the woman who made it so you know even with these gift boxes you're giving them this relaxing gift that also, you kind of get to learn these stories behind all these really awesome products, it's not just, you know, something off the shelf that doesn't give back.   VM: And the cool thing about the relaxed box to actually it just happened to be every box is different but this relaxed box is all Toronto based, which is kind of cool. So for any of you like Toronto listeners, you want to shop local. This box is all local Toronto women owned businesses which is extra. We think it's good for Toronto right   VL: We think it's good for Toronto right yeah I love, I love the idea of getting like all my gifts as local businesses or supporting local businesses, tell us a little bit more about the other businesses that you're supporting so you have women in Toronto. Do you have them all over the world or is it mostly Canada.   AM: Yeah, so we have suppliers and products from all over the world so we have Ghana's Cypress Madagascar, obviously Canada in the US but it's really really interesting to see, you know the the different charities and people and women around the world that they support. So, you know, we have these women in Palestine who embroider this beautiful designs onto bags and shoes so that's one of our favorite suppliers and we have karma who makes necklaces and jewelry and from Porsche the transitioning and homeless youth in Toronto, make these jewelry and that helps to give them an income so that's another one of our really awesome suppliers that we have here,   VL: I'm actually get like goosebumps when you talk about this because as you know my brand is all about empowering women. And it's so incredible that we live in such like a small world like that we can connect to people in Africa, and people in Europe and people through we can even Canada in the US like these are huge countries that were able to support all these women globally. So, this is really exciting I know I have listeners from all over the world so I'm sure that it's happening all over the world today.   AM: We only ship to the US but however we do ship globally if someone emails and gives us a certain request so we've had that before and we've made accommodations based on like individual requests, which is fine.   [9:10] VL: Yeah. Okay, that's really good to know. That's, I'm glad I asked that. So, we have the relax box, and let's say like, I love baths, so much. I love tea, but I don't drink a lot of tea. I don't drink as much tea as I'd like to drink. So let's say I want extra vassals, can I also order these products separately. When I'm shopping.    VM: Yeah, absolutely.   VL: Okay. Perfect. Okay, so this is all exciting because already I'm just like yes I want that because I want that, maybe I'll just tell people this is the link that I want everyone to shop at and that will be for me. We have one more special box that we want to talk about. [9:59] AM:  I also want to talk about the wearable aroma therapy gift boxes I just thought about one and I feel like you would love this and you should put this on your Christmas list because it also includes two products from brands that I just mentioned so there's a necklace from kind karma, which is the one that's made by transitioning and homeless youth and it has three different stones on it. And basically you can put essential oils on these stones and then you can, you know, relax and empower yourself throughout the day with whatever your scent is, but then also within the wearable aromatherapy bonds be included in essential oil that's made in Madagascar so it's a really cool bond that has these two items that's a really really fun gift to give somebody that we feel like we haven't seen anywhere else or done anywhere else.   VL: Oh my gosh, I love that I'm always looking for wearable aroma therapy because the special stones are typically they're lava rock or lava stones. And, yeah, they're like little diffusers basically and you just had a couple of drops in them, oh my god I love that actually, I couldn't find any necklaces and bracelets that I really liked so I started making just my own for, like, I wouldn't want to do retreats and things like, I make little extra ones but oh my god I'm so excited about that we're definitely going to add that into the list.   Okay everyone, we've done all my shopping today. Check. Okay, so now we have a fourth, we have a fourth kit that we want to talk about what which ones that one.   VM: Yep, so we want this year we launched our subscription service. So we think this week four times a year you would get a box full of ethical, sustainable items that are from companies made by women delivered to your doorstep. So we have two options we have the classic box, which is $66 and that's a collection of pieces that are already on our website you kind of get to try some kind of usable items like candle, with some nice bullet candle in there or like skincare. I think you'll actually use from our stuff and then we have the exclusive box where sometimes we can't. If we can't work with the supplier directly or you find some really special ones. He's good to go into our exclusive box and these aren't yet available on our site. So we do extra work to find new brands for you to love. And the thing about the box is to make sure that these items are usable. And we also try and make sure that the packaging is as eco friendly as possible. And we do everything in our power to make sure there's no plastic in there. And if there is we've actually worked with suppliers to have them change their packaging to be able to put them into the box which was a really big deal for us and it was wonderful that they're able to do that. So one thing that we think is great is that, to give this as a gift. It's like the gift that keeps on giving. So you know when you have like your sister or like your best friend for you spend a little more on her like giving her a couple months of the subscription boxes throughout the years to us will be about 16 per special, and we think would make an awesome gift and if Alora didn't already have a subscription that's probably what she would be getting from me for Christmas.   VL: That's such a great gift because you're right it does get like the gift that keeps on giving. If I got a gift, every four months. Oh my god.    AM: Because you it's seasonal right so it's each season you get a new box, all winter, spring, summer, fall, and then we try to keep it seasonal as well so on our summer box we had like all natural bug spray and some other summer items and fall we made sure to have a nice like cozy candle. And so I would have tote bags that would be like perfect for apple picking like we really like really thought about this. You told me I gravel thinking this is my number one thing we need to find this.   VL: Yes Oh my God, I went apple picking for the first time this year and they gave us like a reusable tote but there was there was like third plastic on it so I was like, oh, okay, I mean it's reusable but anyway. Wow, that's so exciting. Oh my god, and then is it a surprise every month or do you are each season I mean, or do you know what it is  AM: surprise each season, and we do you know spoilers leading up to it, but it is pretty much a surprise and then we also do have an add on market so if you're a subscriber to the subscription box right before we ship it out we send you you know a few of our select products from our site and we offer a pretty great discount on those to add on to your subscription box that's something that we,   VM: we also do which is like another little perk that you get just if you're as a scription box subscriber, but also for guests we had a few people who bought subscription boxes for themselves and then we're like, you know what I'm going to get out I'm going to look at the products that I'm going to give out a few of them which were like yep that's an awesome idea. And then after they got to be like, I just want to keep everything myself having to purchase additional just for their friends because they just kept everything for themselves,    VL: that's I'm so that person I'm like yeah just get this subscription box and then I'll share and I'm like, like, what, no I want this and I want this, so amazing. I love the idea of the add on market that is such a great idea for business but also for just getting more of these sustainable ethical products and supporting more women with these products bringing them into your home. That is amazing. So now that we kind of have this idea of all the products that we want for our holiday gift. And our holiday self giving.    [15:10] Let us know about I want to know about like the top three products and each and each home that you use every single day or like the most often that you use. I'm very curious.   VM: But so tough because yeah we everything on our site, we, it's very curated, we wouldn't put on our site if we won't use it, which makes it dangerous for us in our personal wallets as well. But in the best way. Um, so, I think my top of view we have a, it's a plain white tea, and it sounds super silly that I'm saying this but it's my favorite item I literally wear it like three times a week and have to wash it, so often. It's plain white tea it's a zero waste tea so it's made with all organic cotton fibers, and it comes with a barcode. So at the end of the natural life cycle when you are done with the shirt, you get to send it back to the woman on manufacturer of their twat, and they properly recycle it into a new t shirt, and then resell it. So it's really really cool it's a great woman owned company and this T shirt is just perfect. It's so soft, it's just the perfect cut and I yeah I say daily and I wear that shirt.   I think the other one would be province apothecary has a beautiful oil based cleanser I'm really big on skincare and oil based cleansers it just works so well for my skin and it just smells like a spa I end up just like sniffing my face one washing it and it's such a beautiful relaxing experience. The other problems apothecary moisturizing oil based cleanser.    I'm so big on the loofa. Okay, first of all, I learned this recently a loofa is actually a vegetable vegetable when it grows on land, I always thought it was like a sea sponge or something, but it's not like a bikini looking gourd thing. And, and you can actually eat them. But if they leave them on the vine longer they dry out and scrub your body. So we had this wonderful vendor from Nova Scotia, and she was looking to retire but wanted to have a farm and she just wanted a crop that would make some money and give her something to do so she created this loofa farm and so she's like the loofa Lee. And so it's just so wonderful like to support this woman's second career and these are just adorable vegetable based on the scrubbers and I just, I love that really gentle exfoliating. The don't get like the musty smell like you would on fire or something. So it has like certainly at microbial properties are really cool and then when you're kind of done with it for your body you can use it on the dishes or disrupt your floor and stuff. It's really cool. So yeah, good point or I do love the little lady.   AM: I'm probably like wearing my top three, which I know it's a podcast and bespoke can't see but I'll show you. So this is one of my favorite bracelets is again by kind karma, and it's a Morse code bracelet. So, it's a bunch of different things.   You can pick so this one actually says string in Morse code. And so there's like love and there's hope so you can kind of pick what message you want to wear just kind of like as a nice reminder to yourself, and that you got it and there this year. Um, so I ran this daily in the shower and it's like my favorite one.   Another one would be, we have what's called like a Yukon soap, so it's actually made up north in the Yukon and it's an indigenous made soap and has like three ingredients, and it's just like so good It's so nice. I usually like every day in the shower, and it's really nice to support I get paid in companies on indigenous made products and women who are doing great things in Canada. So those are two, um, what's my third favorite, there's so many.   Um, I just started using it and like I just ran out of my other shampoos or I just got, we have like a color hair and everywhere on shampoo bar. And so, for people who don't know shampoo bars are just like kind of a bar soap but you just use them like shampoo. So that way you're eliminating waste because it's just the bar you're not having a plastic bottle or even a glass bottle. And so it's really really great to just kind of get more into that less is more lifestyle. And then it's made from all like Zambian ingredients and hundred percent of the profits go to clean water in Zambia, so you just like washing your hair with purpose. [19:47] VL: I think that's so amazing and I feel like people should really be aware of not only Where is my product going. But where did my product come from. So this is a really cool part of, of what you offer and how you support, support other businesses to with your business. When we are shopping on your site. Do we see the stories do we see the people do we see where it's coming from, or is that like something that you get when you open up your product, you open up your package   VM: on the site so when you click on every product you can scroll down to the bottom, and we have a section that describes like the product itself the ingredients if it's skincare anything and then we have a story about the woman and a story about the brand. So, it's really interesting to see how different the braid of the women are but but usually the woman has her own beautiful story behind why she started it or what her story is and then again then the story behind, who the brain supports. And then we also if they do support an external charity or cause we do have that description in there as well. So you actually get to learn everything about it. And we do a whole bunch of research and verifications and checks before we put anybody on the site so if there's information that you're not sure of about a product but you want to know more about the raw materials you can actually just reach out to us, and we have the verification there if it's what you're looking for.   So, which is pretty cool but we can only conclude so much information because we just think people get bored.   AM: Yeah, and also have everything categorized by six values. So within that woman brand, and all that information we have another tab that's our values so we have six different values, which is certified so if they have certification like GTS or Fairtrade we have cruelty free, which of course all our products are but we have thought of ethically manufactured purpose driven sustainably sourced and waste reducing so you can see that that's what we're talking about. We're really really transparent and we have these like special categories that we created you can shop by your values and filter out all the products that are purpose driven they give back or that are sustainably sourced so we really really go deep into all of that to try to make it easy for people when they're shopping, so amazing.   VL: It's like a whole experience around these six values and the and supporting supporting female businesses. So, you are both females, and you are both running this business, tell us a little bit about your story I know you mentioned your grandmother's before and how you created SAM & LANCE   AM: It's like a whole experience around these six values and the and supporting supporting female businesses. So, you are both females, and you are both running this business, tell us a little bit about your story I know you mentioned your grandmother's before and how you cope with it but how you played it safe. VL: That's so cool. I love that I find that probably is one of those like eye opening things that you are getting this experience you're gaining all of these amazing memories but you're also learning so much about different people and different cultures and it's really cool because I think a lot of people go on trips and they think like, Oh, I want to change this, I want to bring this back and, but you're actually doing it, and I can't believe your business is so young, you guys are doing amazing I'm so proud of you both one oh my god I had no idea that you were only like a year and a half. That's like a little baby this is so exciting. Oh my goodness. Okay, we have one more. It's like part of the segment or one more segment in the show and it's the rapid fire round. So I'm going to ask you both for questions, and you can choose whoever wants to go first. And it's really fun and exciting and easy. Are you ready. I think so, yeah, I feel like, so usually like, are   [24:39] RAPID FIRE ROUND!   Question One: What are you currently reading or what is your favourite book?   VM: I have so many favorite books, I'm, I'm super into merch Haruki Murakami right now because I've read one to 84 and it is one of my top three favorite books of all time. And I'll say that I am reading.   AM: By, again, going on to like travel train but like my favorite book is a book, a little book called The desire for elsewhere and Veronica actually found this book for me i think you know like in a Singapore museum gift shop or something like that. And it's just like this little beautiful novel. It's just like a narrative about this woman's desire for elsewhere and travel and just talks about like little stories and you can probably read in an afternoon but it's just like this, like, like my favorite book.   Question Two: What do you love most about being a woman?   VM: I love feeling empowered about the little thing. I just, I love like. I love like putting on cozy sweatpants and like a little t shirt and feeling sexy I love like being able to have this opportunity to do whatever I want. Without these inhibitions where I feel like so many men have this inhibition to get to be masculine you have to be this you have to be that you can't have feelings but we're allowed to we get to have these feelings we have so much more. I just feel like we have a little bit more richness to our lives and sorry to the men who have their richness I don't know do you but I just feel like we have so much more of a chain to express ourselves and to be ourselves and there's more room for us and I also love this supportive sisterhood, especially lately like women are supporting each other so much more. And, and there's always been these tight knit communities of women all over the world throughout history and I just love that about women.   AM: Yeah, I was gonna say like the sisterhood like I just love like women coming together and like we've seen that obviously in the last you know two years that the community that we've built the same Atlanta, but then also you know like we met through make lemonade and I just love seeing these like groups of women come together and like kind of maybe an off side but you like stories about like in World War Two and like how the women like what all band together and they were like actually having better survival rates because they would take care of each other, whereas like the men wouldn't have that type of like camaraderie and help that they didn't have as high of survival rate so I just think it's like throughout history like just seeing women come together and support each other and care for each other and with each other off I think that's so awesome.   Question Three: What does empowerment mean to you?   VM: I thought about this whole blog, especially because of the Stacy working and I still have such a hard time coming up with an answer. But I think kind of what I touched on before it's like empowerment to me means being brave and being able to be every part of you, and feeling strong enough to be able to do that. So I think that's why things like your podcasts are so important to is to help people find that part of them and to empower themselves to find that bravery and to find that strength.   AM: Oh yeah, I know I did something similar to like, I, I agree. And I think for me empowerment is, you know, being brave enough to do things, be brave enough to talk about it and be brave enough to fail. And, you know, I think that especially at the beginning of starting this company, you know, we had a lot or at least I know I had a lot of imposter syndrome and like, barely would talk about what we were doing was almost not good enough for you know maybe when we have more products on holiday, you know tell more people and they just felt like it was never good enough and now that we're doing this. Well, we'll see. And we just did subscription boxes and you know, we're just like talking so much because if it you know something works or something people like it that's great but you know if they don't, if that part doesn't catch on that's okay it's, we'll chalk it up as a learning and we'll just keep moving on to me that is one part of it.   Question Four: What are you currently working toward?   VM: Oh yeah, I know I did something similar to like, I, I agree. And I think for me empowerment is, you know, being brave enough to do things, be brave enough to talk about it and be brave enough to fail. And, you know, I think that especially at the beginning of starting this company, you know, we had a lot or at least I know I had a lot of imposter syndrome and like, barely would talk about what we were doing was almost not good enough for you know maybe when we have more products on holiday, you know tell more people and they just felt like it was never good enough and now that we're doing this. Well, we'll see. And we just did subscription boxes and you know, we're just like talking so much because if it you know something works or something people like it that's great but you know if they don't, if that part doesn't catch on that's okay it's, we'll chalk it up as a learning and we'll just keep moving on to me that is one part of it.   AM: I'm working towards taking my time, I am such a rush through things do things quickly do 10 things at a time that I know that sometimes it ends up being a hindrance and not a help. So that's something that like I've done all my life and it's. I'm really really working towards just like slowing down, and it's, it's so hard for me to slow down but just like taking things, you know, one day at a time and really focusing on what I'm what I'm doing   VM: Fun Fact at Alora's old job they used to call her a laser because she did things like *fast lazer sound effect*   VL: Slowing down, it's going to be a good theme for me do all, ladies, thank you so much again for being on the show before I let you go, let us know where we can find you, where we can follow you. We feel like this question is a little bit obvious but how we can support your business.    AM: We feel like this question is a little bit obvious but how we can support your business. Yeah, so our website is WWW.SAMANDLANCE.COM,  and then on all socials it's Sam and Lance, so you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and yeah just follow us and sit down. We love just chatting with people we answer all our DMS because running in Singapore I'm in Toronto, we say that we're available 24 hours a day, because we are.    VM: So, another thing too, one thing we like to talk about is supporting small businesses doesn't have to cost anything so making sure you're following people on social media sharing stuff commenting. It's all all greatly appreciated like even if you love something we're doing like send us a message makes you feel good. And, yeah, you can you don't always have to spend money to support women to which is something that we like to remind everyone.   VL: I think that's a really good point but not everyone kind of remembers because a lot of times you will get zero waste products and you will get will be sustainable and ethical these ethical products as well and then you think like, oh my god like that. That's so expensive for floss or but so expensive for shampoo. I'm not used to paying that but you also understand that like you're making it an investment for your health, because the products are better quality but also for the world as a whole, like, the URL. Right. And then it's a great point to say that even just sharing and liking and commenting and yeah just being engaged and involved, mother. Gonna were so good. So amazing so we're getting our relaxed box we're getting our Zero Waste starter kit. We are shopping for wearable aroma therapy, love it, and are also getting and getting subscription boxes. This is just gonna, like, quietly send this episode to everyone and be like that. This is a great episode you should check it out and also has a really great gift ideas for the people in your life, pointing at myself.   VM: And we'll send it direct to your friends and family as they live far away and we'll write a little note for you so there's extra love and alaura learned like we don't pack them with love if we don't pack them with love, they're worried that it won't get ready to go so there's that there's always love in the book, there's good intentions whenever we pack it, it's important.   VL: Yes, it is. And I feel like those little things make such a big difference overall and I know when I open a package. If I'm opening. One of my friends from the States she sent me a little care package and it was like such a beautiful surprise to get you just feel. You just feel more whole and more happy when you get these boxes of love, so I'm really excited to be able to share this gift giving guide with everyone today. Ladies again thank you so much for being part of the show this has been an absolute blast I can't wait I'm going to go shopping right now.

The Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Stargate Pioneer, Agent Haley, Agent Lauren and Agent Michelle discuss the 2019 Marvel Cinematic Universe film “Avengers Endgame.” The Agents also run down the Marvel news roundup and discuss listener feedback.   THIS TIME ON LEGENDS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.:   Avengers Endgame Weekly Marvel News Your listener Feedback   The Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Stargate Pioneer, Agent Haley, Agent Lauren and brand new promoted Agent Michelle discuss the Marvel Cinematic Universe Epic record-breaking Film “Avengers: Endgame” as well as some related Avengers news and listener feedback. The Agents grasp at therapy and attempt to come to terms with this emotional and impactful 22nd installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and most importantly discuss who might have peed their pants during the film’s 3 hour runtime.   Captain Marvel [5:19]   AVENGERS ENDGAME   Directed by: “The Russo Bros”   Directed by: Anthony Russo https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0751577/?ref_=tt_ov_dr#director 23 Directing Credits starting in 1994 5 x Arrested Development You, Me and Dupree 14 x Community Captain America: Winter Soldier Avengers: Infinity War Part I Avengers: Endgame Producer for Community Producer for Animal Practice   Directed by: Joe Russo https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0751648/?ref_=tt_ov_dr#director 25 Directing Credits Since 1994 10 x Arrested Development You, Me and Dupree 2 x Animal Practice 21 x Community 1 x Agent Carter Captain America: Winter Soldier Captain America: Civil War Avengers: Infinity War Part I Avengers: Endgame Producer for Community Producer for Animal Practice Acting: Cameos: Arrested Development x 1 You, Me and Dupree Captain America: The Winter Soldier Captain America: Civil War Avengers: Endgame   Written By: Written by: Christopher Markus http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321655/?ref_=ttfc_fc_wr1 13 Writing Credits since 2004 including: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe (2005) The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010) Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) Thor: The Dark World (2013) 17 x Agent Carter Captain America: Civil War (2016) Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Avengers:Endgame (2019) Producer for: Agent Carter Acting Cameo In: Captain America: The Winter Soldier   Written by: Stephen McFeely http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321656/?ref_=ttfc_fc_wr2 13 Writing Credits since 2004 including: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe (2005) The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010) Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) Thor: The Dark World (2013) 1 x Agent Carter Captain America: Civil War (2016) Captain America: Civil War (2016) Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Avengers: Endgame (2019) Producer for: Agent Carter Acting Cameo In: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Avengers: Infinity War (Uncredited) Avengers: Endgame   Stan Lee            ...         (based on the Marvel comics by) and Jack Kirby         ...         (based on the Marvel comics by) Jim Starlin         ...         (comic book)   Produced by: Kevin Feige        ...         producer   Victoria Alonso   ...         executive producer Louis D'Esposito ...         executive producer Jon Favreau                   ...         executive producer James Gunn                   ...         executive producer Stan Lee                        ...         executive producer Trinh Tran                     ...         executive producer   Mitchell Bell                   ...         co-producer Christopher Markus        ...         co-producer Stephen McFeely            ...         co-producer   Ari Costa                       ...         associate producer   MUSIC BY: Alan Silvestri https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006293/?ref_=nm_mv_close#composer 126 Composer Credits ChiPs Back To The Future I, II, and III American Anthem Flight Of The Navigator Predator Who Framed Roger Rabbit The Abyss Father Of The Bride Forrest Gump Captain America: The First Avenger The Avengers Cosmos (2014) Ready Player One Avengers: Infinity War Avengers: Endgame   STARRING:   (73 MAIN CAST MEMBERS) Robert Downey Jr.                      ...         Tony Stark / Iron Man Chris Evans                               ...         Steve Rogers / Captain America Mark Ruffalo                              ...         Bruce Banner / Hulk Chris Hemsworth                        ...         Thor Scarlett Johansson                     ...         Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow Jeremy Renner               ...         Clint Barton / Hawkeye Don Cheadle                              ...         James Rhodes / War Machine Paul Rudd                                  ...         Scott Lang / Ant-Man Benedict Cumberbatch    ...         Stephen Strange / Doctor Strange Chadwick Boseman                    ...         T'Challa / Black Panther Brie Larson                                ...         Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel Tom Holland                              ...         Peter Parker / Spider-Man Karen Gillan                               ...         Nebula Zoe Saldana                              ...         Gamora Evangeline Lilly              ...         Hope van Dyne / The Wasp Tessa Thompson             ...         Valkyrie Rene Russo                               ...         Frigga Elizabeth Olsen              ...         Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch Anthony Mackie              ...         Sam Wilson / Falcon Sebastian Stan               ...         Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier Tom Hiddleston              ...         Loki Danai Gurira                              ...         Okoye Benedict Wong               ...         Wong Pom Klementieff             ...         Mantis Dave Bautista                ...         Drax Letitia Wright                             ...         Shuri John Slattery                             ...         Howard Stark Tilda Swinton                             ...         The Ancient One Jon Favreau                               ...         Happy Hogan Hayley Atwell                 ...         Peggy Carter Natalie Portman             ...         Jane Foster Marisa Tomei                             ...         Aunt May Taika Waititi                               ...         Korg (voice) Angela Bassett               ...         Ramonda Michael Douglas             ...         Hank Pym Michelle Pfeiffer             ...         Janet Van Dyne William Hurt                               ...         Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross Cobie Smulders              ...         Maria Hill Sean Gunn                                 ...         On-Set Rocket / Kraglin Winston Duke                ...         M'Baku Linda Cardellini              ...         Laura Barton Maximiliano Hernández   ...         Agent Sitwell Frank Grillo                                ...         Brock Rumlow Hiroyuki Sanada             ...         Akihiko Tom Vaughan-Lawlor      ...         Ebony Maw James D'Arcy                 ...         Jarvis Jacob Batalon                ...         Ned Vin Diesel                                  ...         Groot (voice) Bradley Cooper              ...         Rocket (voice) Gwyneth Paltrow                        ...         Pepper Potts Robert Redford              ...         Alexander Pierce Josh Brolin                                 ...         Thanos Chris Pratt                                 ...         Peter Quill / Star-Lord Samuel L. Jackson                      ...         Nick Fury Alexandra Rachael Rabe ...         Morgan Stark (as Lexi Rabe) Ross Marquand              ...         Red Skull (Stonekeeper) Joe Russo                                  ...         Grieving Man (as Gozie Agbo) Emma Fuhrmann                        ...         Cassie Lang Michael James Shaw       ...         Corvus Glaive (as Michael Shaw) Terry Notary                              ...         On-Set Groot / Cull Obsidian Kerry Condon                 ...         Voice of Friday (voice) Ben Sakamoto               ...         Cooper Barton Ava Russo                                 ...         Lila Barton Cade Woodward             ...         Nathaniel Barton Stan Lee                                    ...         Driver Yvette Nicole Brown                    ...         S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Callan Mulvey                ...         Jack Rollins Lia Mariella Russo                       ...         Lia (as Lia Russo) Julian Russo                  ...         Julian Taylor Patterson             ...         Taylor Ken Jeong                                 ...         Security Guard Ty Simpkins                               ...         Harley Keener Jackson A. Dunn             ...         Scott Lang (12 Y.O.) (as Jackson Dunn)     NEWS [1:34:07]   HIGHLIGHT STORY OF THE WEEK   MCU – Marvel Studios   Here’s what happened in Avengers: Endgame’s final scene https://nerdist.com/article/avengers-endgame-final-scene-explained/ Where did old Steve come from? Who is Steve’s wife? What about Peggy’s husband?   Avengers: Endgame’s timeline makes sense--and here’s why https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/26/18518923/avengers-endgame-time-travel-loki-alive-captain-america-old Time travel always goes through quantum realm & time works differently there Six stones together create stable timeline--remove one & unstable branch is created Do the splinter realities the Avengers create by taking the Stones exist? Presumably parts of them do.   LeSean McCoy spoiled Avengers:Endgame to thousands of people on social media and they are PISSED https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/lesean-mccoy-nfl-spoilers-avengers-endgame Running back for Buffalo Bills Posted shots of himself & his son watching movies on Instagram stories, tweeted about character death People are PISSED Marvel’s first openly gay character is played by Endgame’s director https://www.advocate.com/film/2019/4/25/marvels-first-gay-character-played-avengers-endgames-director Joe Russo plays character in snap support group “Representation is really important,” Joe Russo told Deadline. “It was important to us as we did four of these films, we wanted a gay character somewhere in them. We felt it was important that one of us play him, to ensure the integrity and show it is so important to the filmmakers that one of us is representing that” (Joe Russo is straight) -reaction that Lauren has seen from Queer Twitter so far is mixed   FEEDBACK [1:43:48]   TWITTER   @adanagirl (DM) I read Jarvis is the first Marvel TV character to cross over to a movie. :) andiminga‏ @andiminga   Replying to @MrParacletes @LegendsofSHIELD didn't listen in a while, but can't believe any one predicted THAT...and THAT Johnny Snow‏ @BornToEatBacon   @LegendsofSHIELD Is it too soon to nominate Kevin Feige for a lifetime achievement  award?   [discuss] 1:00 PM - 28 Apr 2019 asq   DISCORD   Johnny BaconLast Thursday at 10:06 PM A spoiler free suggestion of best times to pee during the movie.  https://www.gamespot.com/articles/avengers-endgame-pee-breaks-we-tell-you-when-its-s/1100-6466426/?fbclid=IwAR1En9WP7bvpEbF0WpfM61veLV6AfHPIuEB57xbA1ATeWG5bDshpKkP0zBk TheChrisFerrellLast Friday at 8:10 AM So spoiler here. do they change the name of the Falcon and winter soldier show now that Sam is cap? I regards the credits it's not worth staying. the sound is a callback to Tony forging the iron man armor in the first movie. yakk0dotorgLast Friday at 2:43 PM They've said that Spider-Man is going to be the final film in this phase. I'm imagining that it's going to be an epilogue of sorts as well as setting up the new status quo. I'm still processing Endgame. My wife said I cried more than her.   OUTRO [1:48:36]   Haley, Lauren and Stargate Pioneer love to hear back from you about your top 5 Marvel character lists, your science of Marvel questions, who would you pick in an all-female Avenger team, or which Marvel male you would like to see shirtless. Call the voicemail line at 1-844-THE-BUS1 or 844-843-2871.                    Join Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. next time as the hosts discuss the Runaways Season one tenth and finale episode “Hostile” as we led up to the Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 5 premiere in two weeks. You can listen in live when we record Sunday Afternoons at 1:00 PM Eastern time at Geeks.live (Also streamed live on Spreaker.com). Contact Info: Please see http://www.legendsofshield.com for all of our contact information or call our voicemail line at 1-844-THE-BUS1 or 844-843-2871   Don’t forget to go check out our spin-off podcast, Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D..: Longbox Edition for your weekly Marvel comic book release run-down with segments by Black Adam on S.H.I.E.L.D. comics, Lauren on Mutant Comics and Anthony with his Spider-Man web down. Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Longbox Edition is also available on the GonnaGeek.com podcast network.   Legends Of S.H.I.E.L.D. Is a Proud Member Of The GonnaGeek Network (gonnageek.com).   This podcast was recorded on Sunday April 28th, 2019.   Standby for your S.H.I.E.L.D. debriefing ---   Audio and Video Production by Stargate Pioneer of GonnaGeek.com.

Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form (ad-hoc) podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. In this episode, Allison Manley is joined by Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack, and Juan dives into the Drupal world of Latin and Central America. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley: Hi, everyone. Welcome to On the Air With Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to web design and development. I'm Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing manager. Today, my guest is Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack. Juan spent some time with me a few months back telling me about all the exciting things happening with Drupal in Latin America. Here we are at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017-   Juan D. Flores: That's right. AM: ... in the convention center at the corner of Pratt and Charles Street. I am sitting with ... JDF: Juan Flores from Rootstack from Panama. AM: From Panama. You came all the way from Panama. JDF: Yes, sunny, tropical Panama. Yeah. The temperature is quite a good a change for me. AM: Is it? JDF: I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, actually. The temperature is more or less like this. I really miss the cool temperature, because in Panama, sometimes it gets really, really hot. AM: Well, we're welcome to give you a nice, rainy break, so ... JDF: Yeah, I appreciate it. AM: Is this your first Drupal Con? JDF: Yeah, this is my first personal, my first Drupal Con in the States, but we have been attending Drupal Con like, since five years ago. We are three partners, and they do most of the traveling. AM: Okay. Excellent. How long have you been involved in Drupal? JDF: We have been involved with Drupal like from seven years ago right after college. We graduated, and we got our degrees, and we started the company. We started with Drupal right away. We learned about Drupal, actually, by a friend in the college. It was like we saw the tool. We saw all the things that you could do, and we were like hooked up, like, "We have to do this. We have to use this." It's been quite a long time. AM: Wow. That's great. Were you self-taught or ... JDF: Totally self-taught. In the university, they teach you certain things, but to be, to thrive in this world, you really have to be very proficient in learning by yourself. You have to be active. You have to be checking what's going in the world. Thanks to our desire to know more, we picked it up and here we are seven years later. AM: And here you are. Glad to have you. You call yourselves the Drupaleros, sort of jokingly. JDF: Yeah, that's the term we use for Drupal. That's in Spanish. It's a term that we use in general. AM: Universally. JDF: Yeah. Universal. AM: So that's not just the Panamanian- JDF: Exactly. Exactly. AM: Okay. I feel like there's a presentation next year for just the Spanish-speaking Drupaleros. I feel like there's some sort of presentation you should make around that and what's happening in Latin and Central America. JDF: That will be interesting. Even though like I feel that we're a little bit late to the party, in terms of doing stuff, there has been a lot of work that has been done by Latin developers. For example, there's Jesus Olivas, which is ... Well, and the team from We Know It, that they have been working hard with the Drupal console project, which is picking up, really, a great amount of fans. He gave a talk yesterday. He's from Mexico. There's another guy. His name is Omers. He's also from Mexico. The other guys, Anso and Kenya are from Costa Rica. AM: How many would you say there are total between Latin and Central America, you know, that you keep in touch with on a regular basis working in Drupal? JDF: It's hard to tell to know a certain number because, unfortunately, the community there is like a little bit shy. But I can say that, for example, if I can measure events that we have gone to, for example, the DrupalCon in Costa Rica, or the DrupalCon Central America that we did a couple years ago, I would say we could see around 400, but it's hard to ... They show up for events. There are a lot of people that show at events. It's the the building the community that's hard. AM: How did you start out? Tell me about the beginnings of your business, then. JDF: We were in college. One of the partners approach to us. He told us like, "Hey, I think we should do this. We should make a company for our own." We are good, each one, in our own stuff. For example, one of the partners is very good at business development, organizing. The other one is very good at developing. He's a very strong skill set. I'm more like the creative one in terms of design, in terms of implementing the science. We're sort like a match in terms of our skills. We started that in 2010, and we slowly grew. We recruited guys fresh out of college from our own university. Then, we started to build the team. One of the things that I have heard here is that it's hard to find Drupal developers. Which if it's hard for you, it's harder for us. It's been years of finding good people that we think that can be a good fit and training them. I think there's a value in that, in home-growing the developers. Because if they aren't there, you have to make them. AM: Right. How big are you now? JDF: We are 25. AM: Oh, so you went from 3 to 25 in just seven years. JDF: Yeah. AM: Wow. JDF: We have 18 developers. Then marketing sales, designers, so yeah. We hope to keep growing, and yeah. Basically, the objective is to be bigger, to go for more services. Even though we started as a Drupal shop, now we're doing more stuff. We're doing automations. We're doing mobile development. We're doing interesting projects in terms of challenges. For example, last year we did a project for a company here. Basically, we did a mobile app in Ionic that you could turn on, turn off, set the temperature of your spa machine. They sell spa machines that have a wifi antennae. You could be in your office, and you say, "Oh, I'm going home." You start the spa. You set the temperature. When you get there, there it is. AM: That's excellent. JDF: Yeah. AM: That's quite a range of services that you do provide already, even if you feel like you want to add more. JDF: Yeah, yeah. It is to find projects that are challenging and interesting. That's the what we're looking for. AM: What would you say is your main client base or what vertical? JDF: Basically, companies that split in two, in terms of half the company works with agencies here in the States providing Drupal services, so back-end, front-end development, and the other half of the team works with local clients. In terms of local and regional clients, our main verticals are government, banks, certain industries, like ... You have big clients like supermarket chains, people that are looking for very complex web projects, or automations, or yeah, that kind of solutions that we can provide. Yeah, that's what we are ... The companies, like two companies in terms of what we focus on. AM: Fair enough. Your first DrupalCon, what do you think so far? JDF: It's been great. I mean, the level of the sessions have been great. I really like the fact that people are very open to talk, very friendly. I know that in our conferences that, for example, I have been, it's harder to meet people, to find a point of conversation where you can start. But here, it has been great. The parties have been great, also. They provide a good space for talking. For example, yesterday, I was with the guys at Lullabot. They were super friendly, super fun. We have a lot of fun. Yeah, I really like. It's right what they say about the Drupal community. It's very open and very ... Well, even though what has happened recently, I think the people here are very good people, you know? AM: I would agree with that. JDF: Well, I hope that you go next year to Nashville. AM: I will be there in Nashville. I would love to go to Costa Rica if I could swing it, but- JDF: Yeah, so there in August. It's super fun. There's a good vibe always. We always do some, like after the camp, we always do like a trip to an island, or a beach, or- AM: Forest. Something. JDF: Yeah, very relaxing. AM: Sounds amazing. JDF: You can add your vacations and you do a- AM: Any others to look forward to or ... JDF: That's the ones I think right now the top of my head. AM: All right. JDF: I think Mexico is organizing one, too. AM: Fantastic. JDF: Yeah. AM: Look forward to it. JDF: Yeah. AM: Thank you so much, Juan. JDF: Yeah, look forward to seeing you. Thank you. AM: Thanks for listening. Follow us on Twitter at Palantir or read our blog at palantir.net. Have a great day.

Intro: Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. In this episode, Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Palantir CEOs George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss. TRANSCRIPT: Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. This is a special edition really, since this year marks the 20th anniversary of Palantir. It’s hard to fathom considering the internet was still very new in 1996, so there are very few web shops that have been around this long. Palantir started as a development agency, then over time added services such as design and strategy, to become the full, well-rounded, end to end company that it is today. So we are celebrating our 20th anniversary later this month. I sat down with owners George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss to talk about how Palantir started, how it developed into the company it is today, and where we’re headed. AM: Hello, Tiffany and George! How are you doing today? George DeMet [GD]: We’re doing well. Tiffany Farriss [TF]: Hi, Allison! AM: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it. So we’re going to talk about the 20 years of Palantir. It’s hard to believe, right? GD: It’s…yeah [laughs]. I’ve never really known anything else, it’s kind of funny. AM: You’ve never had another job? GD: That’s not true. I worked for my parents when I was in high school. They ran a disposal and recycling company. So I did have experience growing up driving a garbage truck and managing a recycling center. TF: This wasn’t what I was going to do, but it is pretty much the only thing I’ve done. Other than having a NASA research grant as an undergrad, this is it. AM: What were you going to do? I’m curious. TF: I was going to go to grad school in astrophysics. That was my thing. I really wanted to do astrophysics, and I really liked cosmology in particular. I wanted to study the origins of the universe. AM: Which we’re kind of doing [laughs]. So let’s have a quick overview of Palantir’s history. How did Palantir begin? GD: So I actually started Palantir back in the summer of ’96, which was between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had discovered the Web back in the fall of ’94 when I was a freshman, and had really been kind of fascinated by it. It was very new – Netscape was still in beta at that point, and I was just really captivated by this idea of having pretty much anyone in the world being able to publish content that pretty much anyone else anywhere in the world would be able to read and access and view. I thought that was kind of revolutionary and I could see that this was the start of something kind of interesting, and I wanted to be a part of it. And so I started making some web pages, just sort of as a hobby. I made a fan page for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ that is still around today, after 22 years. And then I discovered that folks would pay me money to build websites and web pages. So after doing this freelance for a while, I decided it was a good idea to start a company around it. TF: Because that’s what your family does [laughs]. GD: So that’s probably a little bit of helpful background. Both sides of my family are a couple of generations of people who started and ran family businesses. I mentioned that my parents have a disposal company. My mom’s father had a couple of grocery stores in Leavenworth, Kansas. My dad’s family ran the DeMet candy company, the folks that brought you the chocolate Turtle. So that was really kind of all I knew, right? Working for someone else was really not part of my DNA. So I knew I was going to do something, and when the web came along, it seemed like this was definitely something I wanted to do. TF: For me, I started on the web around the same time, in 1994. It was kind of an outgrowth of my love of Latin [laughs]. That’s the other thing about me is my love of the classics, particularly Latin, and I was involved in the Junior Classical League in Ohio. I first became the membership director and then the president of the Ohio chapter, and for them I learned how to do HTML. And the web was so new and so exciting, and I had a friend who was at MIT who could give me server space. And this was just so cool that we could be out there and be doing that. So when I met George, when I started at Northwestern, I joined up with him when we were creating a website for our dorm, for Willard Residential College. And we really wanted – our residential college was eclectic, which is probably the best way to talk about it [laughs]. GD: I think the proper way to talk about it was pan-thematic. Most of the other residential colleges had a theme, like arts or sciences or engineering. We were all the things. TF: We were all the things, we were all the interesting people interested in lots of things. And so we really wanted to do an amazing job creating that website, and that’s really how George and I started working together, in that capacity, and ultimately that’s how Palantir got its second client, or first paying client, depending on how you looked at it [laughs]. GD: That’s right. So one of the things I didn’t know how to do but Tiffany did quite well at the time was to actually go out and find clients. And that’s the skill that Tiffany brought to the table, in addition to her technical skills and managerial skills – really bringing some kind of structure to the enterprise, as it were. TF: And it all happened in the way we still sell today, in that we’re looking for that good fit. You say, OK, this is what we can do and these are our ideas and this is what we bring to the table. And that’s essentially how we got – when I was a freshman and George was a junior – how two students got the job to do Northwestern’s main university site. It was also the 90s which was a bit of a Wild West [laughs]. But that’s how it happened. We were at the awards ceremony for the residential college competition, which we won, of course [laughs], and I was talking to one of the judges who happened to be responsible for the web at Northwestern at the time. And she was talking to me about our thought process, and how we approached it, and I was talking about things that are so obvious to everyone now. The three-click rule. Thinking about how users would journey through the path and how you would organize information. And how you apply human-computer interaction theory to the web. But this being early ’97, you know, she said to me, I’m taking classes to learn what you guys already know, can I hire you for $2 an hour as a work-study? And I said, well, I already have a NASA research grant, so, no, but you can contract Palantir. My partner will be in Wisconsin but I can come in for meetings with you. And that’s how we got that contract, so that’s how it all worked out. And that first project was to redo the information technology site, and then in ’97 through ’98 we ended up doing the main Northwestern site. GD: For the folks at Northwestern, I’ve heard people complain since about the fact that it’s northwestern.edu. We share a little bit of the blame for that [laughs]. But seriously, nobody calls it NWU. It’s Northwestern. Or maybe NU, but I think that might have been taken. AM: Well, a pretty auspicious beginning, I would say. Now that you live in Evanston and the office is in Evanston. GD: Yeah. We never moved [laughs]. TF: Well, this is the thing. I met George my third day at Northwestern, and we’ve been a couple ever since, but we’ve lived within a six-block radius since 1998 [laughs]. Our first off-campus apartment was literally a block over, two blocks away. This has just been where we’ve found a home. Neither of us is from here. I’m from Akron, Ohio, and George is from Wisconsin. We met in the middle and literally stayed. GD: To be fair, I have some family connections to Chicago. My dad and his family are from Chicago, and so it’s always felt like a second home to me even though I grew up in northern Wisconsin. There’s also a lot more to do here, and it’s a place where even though we are a distributed company and have customers all over the world, it’s a really great place to be. TF: What I like about it is that irrespective of a physical office, I do consider us to be a firm that’s rooted in Midwest values. And I love that Chicago means business, but it’s business with this ethic. You work hard and you play hard, and you treat people fairly, right? That’s the way that we do things here, and it’s really important to me. And even once we don’t have a physical office or we don’t have headquarters or whatever it is, it’s about the sense of philosophy of place, of being Midwestern. Of being very authentic, being very genuine, and bringing our best selves to what we do. AM: What would you say, if you can project back 20 years, or 19 or 18 years, the focus was for Palantir the first couple of years? Was the focus just trying to stay afloat, was there a specific direction you were trying to take at the time? GD: So if you go back in time to the mid-90s and remember what the Web looked like at that point, it was the era of Geocities websites, and everyone was into, like, banners that scrolled across your pages and little animated GIF clip art and animated background patterns, and just really horribly ugly garish sites that people were creating because they could. And one of the things that I really wanted to do at Palantir was to bring more of a design aesthetic to the Web. I really felt that it shouldn’t be too difficult to create websites that were not just functional but were actually easy to use, and didn’t make you want to claw your eyes out when you looked at them. So I thought there was a real opportunity there. Not just to be able to do business, but also to help make the Web a better place. And that was very much what we wanted to do, certainly for the first couple of years, and even beyond as we started partnering with other folks. I think making the Web look better and work better for people was really key in those first couple of years. TF: And for me, I think – I agree with everything that George said, but I also felt very strongly about how the information was organized and presented. At the time it was a lot of brochure-ware. People were essentially trying to put these very linear experiences up on the Web. Now we call it ‘content strategy’ but at the time it was ‘information architecture’, and I really loved to think about the way to organize information in a way that made sense to someone who had no familiarity. It wasn’t about creating this highly linear journey for them, it was about – I saw the promise as being able to present information, to allow people to get what they wanted, but still to also come away with the message you wanted them to have. I thought that was such an interesting challenge, to be able to allow people to take control of how they gathered information, to really put the control back in their hands, but still to have it be that kind of alignment where you as the content provider were getting your message through, right? And that’s still a lot of what underpins our work today, is really this kind of ‘choose your own adventure’. And that’s where the name really comes from and why it comes into play. GD: So the name is something I came up with. It represents this idea of interconnectedness. The Palantiri are these communicators that in a fantasy realm are interconnected with each other, so you can look in one and communicate with anyone else who has a Palantir. The dominant metaphor at the time when Palantir started was the information superhighway, and I felt that metaphor was really flawed because it implied this kind of linearity, right? But the Web isn’t like that. The Web is this very decentralized interconnected place, and it really feels more and it actually is this network of interconnected communication, of nodes, really. TF: And it’s interconnected not just in terms of people, which it certainly is and always has been since its beginning, but it’s also in terms of content. What I love and what I find so fascinating and interesting is the notion that you don’t have to encapsulate all of the knowledge – you can just link to it, right? So you can tell a story and you can pull together these varied threads, and braid it together into a narrative in such an interesting way. And anybody can do that. It’s so accessible that it’s really broken down some of those traditional barriers that essentially gated who was able to define the narrative. So any person now can define that narrative and string it together. This is why a lot more of our work recently has dealt with APIs and what we can do to bring pieces of content from different systems together. And ultimately it’s why I’m so passionate about Drupal, because the ability to weave different pieces of content together but allow them to remain authoritative external sources is so exciting. AM: So it seems that, 20 years later, what you had outlined for yourselves back then still stands today. GD: Absolutely, no question. We’re still facing some of the same sorts of challenges. They’re very different in nature, but fundamentally it’s a question of enabling people to be able to access information, or to create information, or to share information in a way that’s findable, that’s usable, that’s discoverable. That’s what we started out trying to do, and that’s what we’re still trying to do today. TF: I have this very Teutonic brain, I like things to be very efficient. So for me the notion that I could weave these narratives together but allow there to be single authoritative sources of information, I don’t have to duplicate it – it’s very efficient, it’s so compelling to me. And this is where I think you see a lot of enterprises getting too narrow, with their notion of the omnichannel strategies – where you want there to be a single source but you need to kind of customize what that experience looks like. And you really get – by being so efficient with presenting that information and where you’re sourcing the information, you get to focus your efforts on how you differentiate it in different channels and different contexts, and have other people mix and potentially remix your information. That’s what’s so exciting about where we are today, but it’s not that different than in ’96. We were really trying to get authoritative sources, that was the key, to kind of have those sources be out there and have them be integrated together. AM: So you would say that Palantir’s core values and mission really haven’t changed at all, or maybe just better definition. GD: I would agree with that. What we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to do it, really hasn’t changed. What has changed is that we’ve talked about it, we’ve articulated it more publicly. It’s not just locked in our brains [laughs]. TF: Right, it’s those notions of assumptions so deep that you’re not even aware of them. For so many of the early years, we just knew. And because we were a smaller company and everybody worked with George and I on a daily basis, you just kind of felt it. You didn’t know it. I couldn’t articulate it very well, and it’s taken us several tries to be able to get it to the point where we feel confident saying, yes, this is it. Because words matter so much, and there’s such precision when I use language that I’m constantly trying to make sure, is this the right word to use, is this really capturing that feeling that’s so deep in our culture that I want other people to be able to grasp onto it. Because we do have this growing firm, and our folks here today – George and I are clearly the longest-standing employees of Palantir, but we have folks who start in a week. So how do they get a sense of the history? So it’s this notion that we have to really have those core values, as guiding principles, articulated so that, without knowing the lore and history of Palantir, they can apply it going forward. It’s really been an interesting challenge and one that George and I have been focused on for probably the last 18 months, is realizing that all that shared history has to be able to be communicated, has to be able to be transferred. And that’s been a really exciting part of the challenge. GD: And it’s not just communicated, it’s also contextualized. That’s the really fun part for me. AM: It’s very hard to define your own selves, too. It’s definitely tough work. GD: It is. But I think it’s essential. I think it’s something that has been kind of a hallmark of who we are. It’s really this constantly asking ourselves and trying to be as self-aware as possible about who we are and what we do and why we do it. TF: And also what we don’t do, right? I think that as we look at the growth over the last 10 years, it’s really easy to think that we were something we weren’t. We were never a start-up. We’re celebrating our 20th year so by definition we can’t be a start-up, and even in the past 10 years we weren’t a start-up. But it might have felt that way, or it might have looked that way. And so it’s on us, it’s our responsibility, to make sure that people understand – both our clients and our friends and our colleagues – that we are approaching this with very much a fundamental family business mentality. Really old-school principles. You don’t spend money you don’t have, you treat people fairly. This kind of notion that you’re always building, that every decision you constantly make has to be adding up to something. And I think that’s been – we certainly have friends who made other choices with their companies, whether they consider themselves a tech company or a start-up and they go after VC. We’re just not that. And we totally admire them and wish them well with what they’re doing. We’re doing something a little bit different over here. So in order for folks to understand that, we have to talk about it. We have to say, you know, we don’t spend other people’s money, we don’t spend money we don’t have. It’s been such an interesting journey, particularly for me not coming from a family business background, to understand really what that means and why that applies and to be really proud of it. I really think that’s the compelling thing here. Because at the end of the day, I’ve always believed that what you do outside of work makes you better when you are at work. And you have to have time and space in your life for that. And I believed that before I had a family, and I certainly believe it to be true now. How I live it, how I articulate it, is very different. And I think that’s right, that’s appropriate, to be able to evolve with you and to be able to change with you. And that’s the kind of company that we’ve built. AM: Well, one of the things I’ve noticed specifically about Palantir is how involved you’ve gotten in several communities. One of the reasons that I actually knew Palantir for years before working here was your commitment to design, which George mentioned was an early interest, and you did partner with design firms in Chicago when at the time you didn’t have an in-house design department, you were strictly development-only. So you were prescient and smart enough to know that you should partner with some very good design firms in the city, and there is a very strong design community here. And so you actually joined the American Institute of Graphic Arts board at one point, to become, I think, the Web liaison. TF: Electronic Media Chair, yes. I was lucky enough to be Electronic Media Chair for AIGA Chicago, and that came after several years of working with and partnering with those design firms. And that was such an invaluable time in Palantir’s history. Chicago does have such a very storied and internationally respected design community, and the opportunity to work in such an early stage in my career, and in Palantir’s lifespan, with some of the best – looking back on it, it was unbelievable. To be able to learn and work so closely with really, really smart designers as they were making that transition from being exclusively print designers to thinking about interactive design and Web design – it was such a neat time for all of us. We were bringing this very digital sensibility with us and they were bringing expectations of typography and color fidelity. And those were things that were really difficult in that early Web. It was really amazing. And that all came out of our early work at Northwestern. We originally started out partnering with the information technology department over there, and through that work we advocated that the university relations people be included in that conversation. Because we felt that there was a role for branding and photography, and just design standards as part of the work we were doing for the Northwestern home page. And through that we ended up learning how to work with traditional print designers. And our business has always been built on this word of mouth, on reputation. And so through that experience we ended up getting connected into the Chicago design community, and passed from firm to firm to firm, and I see that being appointed to the board was really the outcome from that, after the several years we’d been working with and partnering with design firms, from 2001 – I think it was 2001 when I became Electronic Media Chair, until 2008 – we had been working for six or seven years. But I still reflect on those experiences and what I learned from working with those folks, just in terms of how to relate to clients and how to really be a consultant. It was an amazing opportunity, it was really great. I’m really grateful for it. AM: And around the same time, around 2008-ish, was when you started to get involved heavily in the Drupal community as well. GD: That’s right. AM: So a pretty pivotal year there [laughs]. GD: Well, the Drupal decision we actually made in 2007. We had started working with Drupal in 2006, but to lay a little bit of background, we’ve always worked primarily with open source technologies – open source software, free software, from the very beginning. The LAMP stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and used those technologies. And I had always been interested in getting a little more involved with open source on the content management side. We did a little bit of looking into that around 2001, when some of the first generation open source CMSs started to come on the scene, and none of them were really never mature enough at that point. And at that point we actually thought we could probably do our own, just as well if not better. So we had our own CMS for a while – it was called the Community Platform and we did four major versions of it, each of which was pretty much a complete rewrite. Was it just three? TF: We were thinking about doing a fourth. GD: Right, right. And that was a really interesting learning experience for us, because when you are responsible for creating your own product that you are then in turn using for customer projects, you have to really be careful. Because there’s a huge temptation to modify it or tweak it or change it every single time. So what we actually found was that we didn’t have one CMS, we had however many dozen CMSs, each of which was a bespoke version for that particular client, because we had had to make some sort of tweak for the business needs of that customer. Which was great in terms of the short-term customer need, right? Because we could very quickly and inexpensively roll out a site for a customer, get it up very quickly, but when it came time to expand that site or support that site or make that site do something different, it was incredibly difficult. So that was one of the big issues that we were running into. We had worked with some other proprietary platforms – there was a product that was being used by a lot of higher education institutions we were working with in the early 2000s. It definitely had its challenges, but it was something our customers were using and it worked well for a lot of our customers. And ultimately the company ended up deciding to end-of-life that product, actually without telling any of their customers [laughs]. We had a little inside knowledge on that, and Tiffany actually announced it up on stage at South by Southwest, I think this was 2007. TF: 2008. GD: 2008. And it was really kind of interesting seeing everyone flee the room when you made that announcement. TF: The 20 people. GD: The 20 people, yes [laughs]. I mean, you know, it was a pretty big session. So at that point, things were kind of – we realized we really needed to get involved with, you know, something that was going to be more widely supported by a wider community, and that also wasn’t going to be tied to the commercial whims of one particular company. And so I’m actually going to let you tell the story of how we started working with Drupal. TF: It happened over several years, really. In 2006, Robert Petrick, who’s one of those amazing Chicago designers that we were lucky enough to work with, he brought us in on a project for Washington University in St. Louis. And the project was a little unusual, because it wasn’t an implementation project. It was going to be an implementation project, but first it started with a consulting project, where they wanted us to look at the available landscape of content management solutions, but both bespoke – our Community Platform was on the table for consideration – and open source projects as well as proprietary. And I helped them make the decision, and open source was absolutely the right choice for them. Again, we narrowed it down – should it be Drupal, should it be Joomla, and there were a couple of other options they were considering at the time. And for them Drupal was the right choice. So we built out that first site for WSTL in Drupal 4.6, and it was a little bit frustrating. But 4.7 came out actually before the site launched, and we immediately upgraded it to 4.7. We had looked at 4.6 before and not used it, because we couldn’t do the things we needed to visually. We were working with a lot of the design firms, and we couldn’t tell them, oh, the technology choice we’ve made won’t allow us to present the interface visually the way you want it to be done. That was why we had our own community platform, and in 4.6 we felt that was still very much the case, we were very much limited by that theming layer. Then 4.7 ended up being the right choice for Washington University in St. Louis, and we built out the site there, and it was still a bit frustrating but we achieved the level of fidelity we wanted. And as we were wrapping up that project and getting ready to launch it, Drupal 5 came out. And without launching the 4.7 version we ended up going to Drupal 5 right away. And that was when our team said, oh, this is different, and we can do everything that is being asked of us visually, everything we want to do visually. And by the way the security team that Drupal has is larger than our entire firm. So it was really in early 2007, in February 2007, when we were faced with rewriting our community platform from version 3 to version 4, it was going to be a complete rewrite – I just looked at George and said, I think we need to deprecate our own CMS in favor of Drupal. I think we need to put our efforts in that direction. So the next month we actually sent George and one of our colleagues at the time, Larry Garfield, who’s known as Crell in the Drupal community, we sent them both out to Sunnyvale where Drupal was having a DrupalCon, to learn more about it. And George came back and said, I think this is a community you’d really like. And you could really get involved in this. Ah, I don’t know, let’s just start with where we’re at right now. And then you do fast forward, that year of 2007 was when we did a lot of our first projects. We got all of our clients off our own community platform, and any new project we’d start doing in Drupal. AM: How were they when you suggested getting them off the existing platform and getting them onto Drupal? Were they receptive to that, or were they hesitant…? TF: We did it gradually, as people needed new enhancements or new versions of their sites. At the time, none of the sites we were working on had particularly long life spans, right? And we ended up having to support the community platform for several years thereafter. So it was really when someone came to us for new work, it was, oh, here’s Drupal and we think you should move here for the following reasons. We would lay it out, but we weren’t going to do any new enhancements to it, and we told them very clearly, we’re not in active development on the community platform any more. GD: One distinction that’s important to make, I think, is that with our own product, the Community Platform, it wasn’t an open source product, but we did have our customers have the right to modify the source code themselves. They just didn’t have the right to redistribute those changes. So if customers wanted to take on that responsibility of updating or maintaining the site themselves, they were certainly able to do that, or we gave them the option of moving to Drupal. TF: Right. So really through 2007 and into 2008 – 2008 is really where we got involved in the Drupal community per se. And that’s when I went out to Boston, and I said, oh, this is a community I will love. This is something that – the ethos of it, getting to meet Dries and Angie Byron and Moshe Weitzman, all the early and very influential Drupal developers, and just how welcoming and how open they all were. And what we were able to build with Drupal was just so much more than we would be able to build if we were responsible for the whole stack. It just started to fall into place, it started to make sense that we could do more for our clients. And that’s ultimately what’s always driven us. We’re trying to add value. We’re trying to say, because the clients we work with have limited resources and are always under constraints, what’s the most we can do for them? How much can we accomplish, how much value can we give back to them? How much easier can we make their lives by the choices that we make all along the project? And Drupal was one of the ones that made a lot of sense for them. It had roughly the same implementation cost as any other proprietary or custom solution, but in terms of the long term, it was much less expensive. Because you didn’t have the long-term licensing fees, you had the community patching issues – so sometimes a client would say, oh, I’m noticing this bug on the site, and we’d say, oh, actually that’s a module that’s been patched in, we can patch that for you. It really opened it up and allowed us to focus. So all these kind of pivotal points that you’ve noted in Palantir’s history, they come around our ability to focus. Right? So in 2001 when we really started partnering in earnest with design firms, it allowed us to focus and really hone our craft, and understand how to do content strategy and how to architect solid technical solutions. And then again in 2008, when we focused in on Drupal it allowed us to realize, okay, here’s how – only build what you absolutely need to build. That really allowed us to do more with our client budgets, and again, I would say 2016 is another one of those pivotal years for us, when we realized how to focus in and how to really get to the nugget of the business problem that needs to be solved. We have the opportunity now to influence businesses and the success of those businesses, and organizations as well since we do so much work with non-profits and higher ed in particular, and really how to solve core problems that aren’t technology problems. They’re problems that reach across the organization at every level, and so the fact that we’re able to focus in on it from that perspective, with that lens, I see that as another transformational moment for Palantir. AM: It seems like you had some very pivotal choices that you made, in 2001 to 2008 in particular - partnering with design firms, choosing open source and eventually choosing Drupal – and that you were sort of on the forefront when the mid-2000s hit. That was when it seems to me, from my perspective, that you were a very big fish in a tiny pond at that time. You had this incredible design aesthetic and appreciation, you knew how to work with design firms at that point – you weren’t doing in-house design yet – and you were one of the few firms who had really embraced Drupal in particular. And that community was exploding, and I’m not sure if you could see that community was going to explode, if you were able to predict that. GD: It was pretty apparent when I went to Sunnyvale in early 2007. That was a very small conference, it was maybe a couple of hundred people, and not all of them were Drupal people. But it was really, really clear just from the conversations that were happening and the folks that were there that Drupal was on the verge of becoming a big deal. And it was really funny, because I think the first couple of years that we started working with Drupal, we would go to industry conferences like higher ed conferences or museum conferences, and people would be like, oh, what do you do, and we’d say, we work with Drupal. And people would be, Drupal, what’s that? And then a couple of years later, we would go to the same conferences, and people would literally come up to me, like, I hear you guys are experts in Drupal and I need a Drupal expert [laughs]. So there really was a huge shift, I think, between 2008 and 2011, when Drupal went from being kind of this niche open source project that very few people had heard of that powers some of the biggest and most ambitious sites on the Web. TF: And I think a lot of that has to do with the ecosystem that was built up around Drupal. Not just Acquia but especially Acquia, which is the firm that Dries Buytaert founded and is CTO of, that really brought a lot of visibility to Drupal particularly around hosting and 24/7 support. I think that was a really important moment for Drupal. But I think what was happening before then as well, not just with firms like Palantir but the work that Phase2 was doing in the government sector – there are a lot of firms both in the US and Europe that were doing this very ambitious very large-scale work. You had Examiner really pushing the development of Drupal 7, and then eventually the White House goes to Drupal, and everything that was happening with Warner Brothers and SonyBMG putting all their artists on Drupal – Drupal became this kind of de facto go-to. When you had a project that was, as George said, ambitious – it didn’t necessarily have to be large, sometimes they were technically complicated and involved a lot of integrations between different kinds of data sources. That was the kind of work that we did, both for higher ed and for museums, where we were combining, say, digital asset management systems with content management systems with active directory or LDAP-based user solutions. Any kind of complexity at that level, Drupal’s so good at tying those systems together. Or if you wanted to go headless, right now Drupal’s very good if you want to have, you know, no front end to your data source. Drupal just knows how to connect people, how to connect things, and it gives you such a good basis for what you’re trying to do, or trying to replicate. If you need a thousand sites, right, this is again what Pfizer does, and they’ve got such huge regulatory concerns that Drupal, you know, was just always there. And those of us in the, I would say, the second wave of Drupal – Palantir’s not a first wave Drupal shop, we really did start to come on line with Drupal 6, and we were essentially writing for those pieces that our clients need. So again this is that ethos that we have, where we’re going to find that win-win solution. And what we did early on, and in particular when we made our name with Drupal 7 where we created Workbench, it was because this was a need that our clients had, and multiple clients had that need at the exact same time. It was a space that Drupal just wasn’t solving, and it was something that we had the capacity, we had the expertise in-house to be able to write. So we were able to combine pooled budgets from some of the smaller non-profit clients that we had, combine them together and get that better solution than they would be able to afford on their own, and make Drupal better – those are those niches that we’re constantly looking for. Okay, where can we add the most value here, where’s that problem that we can pull the resources together to solve – whether it’s people or time or money. AM: Well, I think one of the direct results of – maybe Palantir wasn’t a first adopter, but pretty early, still, and the creation of Workbench which has proven to be very popular, and going back to the fact that those choices led Palantir to be a pretty big fish in a small pond for a long time – one of the things that I think is amazing about Palantir is that for 17 years, I think you told me, you never had to do any marketing. GD: That’s right. No outbound marketing. AM: That’s a dream, right? [laughs] To never have to look, the referrals came so naturally. But then, 17 years in, as Drupal became more ubiquitous and more people were adopting it and more people were recognizing the design abilities of it and the flexibility on the front end, marketing all of a sudden was needed [laughs] because there was more competition. So how would you say the landscape has changed? I’m going to guess that was a pivotal moment too, just how that landscape changed. GD: Well, I don’t know that it’s a pivotal moment – I think it’s been a general trend we’ve been seeing over the past few years. And fundamentally I think if you – we talked about focusing, and that’s important, but if you narrow your focus too much and you find yourself in too much of a niche and people associate you with a specific technology or a specific type of client, that’s not a great situation to be in. And I wouldn’t actually describe us so much as a Drupal shop, we’re a full service boutique firm that helps customers be successful on the Web. And fundamentally the tools we use to accomplish that – what’s important to us is helping our customers make the right choices, collaborating with our customers, being able to help them to achieve success. Drupal is and historically has been a really great way to do that for an awful lot of our customers. But at the end of the day, it’s not about being the biggest or the best or the most well-known Drupal shop. It’s about being a firm that can help achieve success for our customers, in a really smart way. And because we were so closely associated with Drupal, that’s something we didn’t talk about as much. But we have started talking about it a lot more in the last few years. So if that’s marketing, sure [laughs]. TF: Well, I think it is. Early on, in those days when we were partnering, it was, oh, you’re the people who know tech who know how to talk to designers. So we want to work with you. AM: Which is a valuable skill [laughs]. TF: Absolutely. And we keep it with us, we still have it today. But at the time, what we were doing was problem solving. We were hearing what they wanted, what their clients wanted, and how we solved it, right? But then you fast-forward to Drupal, and then we had this really great run where it was like, Palantir! You know Drupal! We want to work with you! But at the end of the day we did the same thing. You come in, you have a problem to solve. They picked us for different reasons and they were pleased with the outcomes, and that’s how we ended up getting those referrals and that engine. But as Drupal matured and as Palantir matured, and, quite honestly, as the Web matured as a channel in its own right, not kind of as ancillary to the traditional channels that businesses and organizations relied on – as it became co-equal and even dominant, the expectations of what people needed from the Web started to go up. So I think that the notion that, oh, you’re good at this tech thing was no longer going to be compelling, it was kind of a given. Oh, we’re going to bring you in as a partner, we assume that you have technical expertise, but we need to know that you have the strategic expertise to help us make those good decisions. And we need to know that you are going to work with us to help us build our internal capacity around this. Because the Web has gone beyond something that you would just give to, you know, your neighbor’s kid who knew how to do HTML, to, you know, the core of many businesses. And right now we’re in this era where even the oldest and most established businesses are going through digital transformation. It is reshaping how everyone works right now. So the expectations, and rightly so, have changed. They’ve increased, And Palantir has had the luxury of all of this time to mature and to hone our craft, and we are still excellent problem-solvers. That approach, combined with all the expertise we’ve built up over the last 20 years, makes us a really great partner. AM: So now it’s July 2016, celebrating the 20th anniversary, and we’re having a company retreat – we’re shutting down everything for a week to bring all the employees, one from as far as South Africa, to Chicago so we can all get together and celebrate and – there’s going to be some work too, internally, but there’s going to be a lot of celebrating. So my final question: what would you like to see for the next five years, moving forward, or two years, what would you say? GD: [laughs] AM: Is it overwhelming, is it too much…? GD: No, no – you know, actually a couple of years ago we set out a couple of very high-level goals for the company, and we’re kind of in the middle of the process of that, of working toward those goals. We refined them a little bit at the beginning of this year, but they’re still fundamentally the same. And it’s about helping our clients achieve success on all of our projects, that’s number one. Number two, continuously learning, sharing and applying new knowledge, and this is one I’m really interested in having us focus a lot more on in the coming years. That this learning and applying new knowledge is really not just about technical skill or expertise, but it’s really about new ways of understanding people’s problems and looking at people’s problems in new and different ways. And developing our skills internally in terms of being able to understand and address those issues and questions and concerns, and the goals that our customers have. And then of course continuing to be a sustainable well-run organization with healthy finances and a happy staff. Those are the three things we’re working on. I think when we get together here for our on-site we are going to really talk a lot about how we’re going to do those things, and figure out and talk about what we’re going to do. We’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past year talking about what we have done – you know, how we are where we are today – and I think it’s time to start looking to the future. TF: Building on what George said, I think learning really is the key. It’s about taking what we learn on every project and elevating it to the level of organizational learning, and doing the same thing for our clients. We have a long track record of collaboration and we have clients who embed with us and who we help level up and we make kind of essential parts of our projects. And that’s fabulous, and that’s a huge service for capacity building for our clients. And I think the opportunity I see is being able to take that and transform the organizations as well, so that they also have an organizational learning moment. So for me, I’m really focused on the notion of making sure that we’re getting the most out of every opportunity, out of every decision, and understanding why things worked or why things didn’t work, and how we make it better. And it’s this notion of continuous improvement, and really making that a core part of our service. I see that as kind of the biggest change. Because as the industry and the Web kind of matures, and continues to mature, I think we’re getting to this point where we’re going to see fewer and fewer exponential leaps, and I think it’s going to start to plateau off. And so the notion that you kind of create and institutionalize incremental learning is really going to be key for us and for our clients. So that’s what I want to focus on – how we help them continuously improve, not only in their website and their Web presence and their infrastructure and their digital strategy, but how they can continue to incrementally improve their teams and their organizations to be able to take advantage of and recognize opportunities when they come up. AM: And cake. There will be cake. GD: I hope there will be cake. Who’s in charge of the cake? I’m not in charge of the cake! [laughs]. AM: Well, thank you very much. Looking forward to our retreat, and looking forward to the next five. GD: Absolutely. TF: The next 20! [laughs] AM: Why stop at five? The next 20! [laughs] AM: Thank you so much for listening.  I have to say, after three years of being with Palantir myself, and after having worked with them for several years prior to that, I’m thankful that I get to go to work every day with really, really smart and thoughtful people who are creating great work and toiling every day to make the Web a better place. So - happy anniversary, Palantir! If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to a new episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. In this episode Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our client Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. Allison caught up with Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal, how we worked together, and how it’s been going since. We'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Secret Sauce and a new installment of our long-form interview podcast On the Air With Palantir next month, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes over on iTunes. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s June 2016 and this is episode #5. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today my guest is a client of ours named Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. I caught Justin at DrupalCon in New Orleans last month, and spoke with him about how his school has implemented Drupal and how it’s been going. I am here with Justin McGregor from Rhodes College. How are you? Justin McGregor [JM]: Doing well, doing well.  AM: We’re in the last legs of DrupalCon 2016, and we’re in the busy lobby of the conference hall in New Orleans. So there’s a little bit of noise behind us, but we will plow through. So tell me a bit about Rhodes College. JM: Who we are and what we do? We are a small liberal arts college nestled right in the middle of Memphis, Tennessee. If you look at a map of Memphis from above, there’s a big ring road that runs at the side, and if you throw a pin in the middle, that’s us [laughs]. We are 2000 students, roughly, 300-odd employees, traditional liberal arts curriculum covering everything from pre-law, pre-med, that sort of thing, all the way down to the study of the classics. We have a Greek and Roman studies department, and right across the quad we have people that are doing pediatric oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So it’s literally all over the map. And I get to support them all [laughs]. AM: Wow. So your college is on Drupal. How did you come to choose Drupal in the beginning?  JM: I’ve personally been an open-source advocate for a very long time. I’ve been in higher ed web work for going on 16 years now, and I’ve worked with a lot of different CMSs, none of which I could really ever evangelize for. They were really good for what they were, but, you know. At my last school I had evaluated Drupal 6 early on, but our CTO was very anti-open source. But I kind of fell in love with it then, and I’m like, one day I’m going to come back, I’m going to be in the right position at the right school to do this, Years elapsed and D7 had come to be a really mature solution, and I got the job at Rhodes. We were coming off of an aged open-text solution and also Sharepoint 2010 pointing internally. Both solutions were long in the tooth and needed to be replaced, and when I came on board, I’m like, yeah, cool, let’s do this thing, but one of my caveats was, we have to give serious consideration to open source and to Drupal specifically. And so during our CMS roadshow we looked at the two leading proprietary higher ed solutions and also to Drupal vendors for hosting and DevOps. And it became clear really early on that for our use case, Drupal was the only solution. AM: Well, great. Thank you for choosing Drupal! JM: I’m glad to be here, believe me. AM: So what does your internal team look like? What’s the composition? JM: It’s largely me. I am the only developer on staff. I work in the communications department, which actually reports to the dean of admission. So from a business perspective I work for our sales team. That being said, I do have an interactive technology manager, who is my liaison to our external services alumni and development departments. And while he’s not a Drupalist, he’s in the guts of the thing every day, doing work on the site in one capacity or another. I’m also lucky enough to have a handful of student workers, including one third-year computer science student, and while they’re contractually limited to only ten hours a week they are a massive help. And also I found out just before I left to come here that one of our vacant positions may be reclassified as a developer. If anyone’s looking for a Drupal development position in Memphis, Tennessee – just saying it’s a possibility [laughs]. AM: So you did hire Palantir, just to be transparent about things. You hired us for consulting a few times a week to support your team. What was it that you needed from us? What was it you needed to complete the project? JM: Okay, there were two projects. Let’s do them chronologically. The first one was, we’re relaunching our flagship .edu, and while I’ve been in web work for a long time, I was new to the practice of building a Drupal site. And so I knew what I wanted to accomplish, but I would go to Contrib and, here’s all the modules that are available, I could go do this by modifying a template file, or any number of things. But I needed best practices, I needed best solutions. And you can go watch training videos all day long, but they’re around the piece of technology or the specific use case that may or may not actually be the use case you’re dealing with at the time. So having somebody – the structure that I loved was, we would start the week with ‘here’s the problem of the week’. Here’s the piece of functionality that I’m going to be building. Let’s talk through all the possibilities for how this problem could be solved, and arrive at what the best practice is for this use case. And then I’d take a couple of days, get in there, work on it, build it out, and at the end of the week – nine times out of ten, it was done, but if it wasn’t, we could come back and say, here’s the specific problems I ran into, how do we work through that? The metaphor I kept using was, we ate the elephant one bite at a time [laughs]. I had six content types, a whole ton of media assets, and, ooh, I think we ended up moving about 7000 pages, a piece at a time. We took this fairly massive implementation over the course of a couple of months, and built out the framework to handle it all, and just started shovelling in the content. AM: And what was the second project? JM: So I said a minute ago that we had the open-text that was the CMS for the public-facing part of our site at the time, and also an internal SharePoint 2010 set of publishing sites. So support for that is going away, and we needed a solution, and I’m like, you know what, I’m not standing up another CMS for this, let’s just go multi-site and do it all in Drupal. But then we have the challenge of standing up branded sites in a hurry for every little department, grant, professor, whatever, that had had a SharePoint 2010 publishing site before this. And so what we worked through was, first of all, building a road-specific installation profile of Drupal, so that out of the box, all of my content types were there, all of the branding was there – there’s the branding they can change and the branding they can’t change, as a site owner. And also the mechanism for site ownership and how that’s going to work. And the second part of that was to automate a good chunk of the deployment, so I can do from the handful of things that I have to do in my DevOps environment to a functioning Drupal site. The last one I set up took me about five minutes, which is not a bad way to go. AM: I don’t know if I’ll have time to do that today, boss, it took me five whole minutes [laughs]. So what were your goals for your site? JM: To drive recruitment, more than anything. We need students. More than that, though, higher ed is generally in the position of having – as much as we say that the mantra of the site is to drive recruitment, and we say that over and over, we have parents, we have alumni, we have the colleagues of our tenured faculty, on and on. Researchers that are coming because of the disciplines we teach and the research that we do. Researchers from around the country want to come see the research that’s being done here, to be able to collaborate, all of this stuff. So ease of discoverability of whatever piece of content that’s relevant to that audience – now that we’ve been in Drupal and been in production for a year and change, we’re really starting to look seriously at personalization. It’s sort of the standard higher ed model to have the audience navigation across the top – you’re a parent, you’re an alumni, you’re a current student, yada yadda yadda. But once you’re in the guts of the site, that just starts to bleed away, you know? And so being able to contextualize information based on what we know about the person coming in is steadily going to become more and more important to us. Part of that to be handled through Drupal and part of that through CRM integrations, with both Salesforce and an admissions-specific product called Slate.  AM: So personalization is next down the road. Excellent. So what was your working relationship with Palantir? What did it look like on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis? JM: So both of the consulting setups were more or less the same. We identified an hour early in the week where we could, you know, bang around what this week’s problem was, and then an hour later in the week, how did it go, staging for next week’s problems, or if something didn’t get done because I had a roadblock or whatever. Both of the guys I worked with were fantastic. Even if we weren’t on a call I could send them an email any time I wanted to, and hear back pretty darn quickly. But a lot of times I would save stuff for the call because it’s just something you need to talk through, or screen share or something. It was nice to have somebody who’s done a lot of Drupal deployments, at the front of the week, to say ‘this is what, given your current level of expertise, you can reasonably expect to get done this week without just absolutely killing yourself’. And to do that knowledge transfer early in the week that says, okay, here’s what you’re going to need to know, if you’re not hip to this, go read this, go watch these YouTube videos, whatever. Then set to the task and we’ll wrap up on the back end. Having somebody who was really expert in these sorts of Drupal deployments helping set your agenda, because I know my goals, I know my organization, but I need to know what is really realistic to do in the product in a given span of time, you know? AM: All right, so let’s start with the bad stuff, the obstacles. What roadblocks did you run into during the course of the project, and how were we able to help you remove those roadblocks? JM: I’m not new to development, I’ve been doing web work for a while, but there are sort of Drupal-specific things that, when you read through the documentation, or at least when I read through the documentation, like the hook system – they seem to work fine in the documentation, but then when you get into the guts of the system, you think, that doesn’t seem like what I just read, or doesn’t behave in the expected way. I had done a lot of front-end development prior to coming to Rhodes, and the Drupal templating system is something wholly different from anything I’d encountered before. I knew how I needed the site to behave, I knew what I needed it to look like, I knew how I needed it to respond, and all of that, but figuring out, do I do this from stacking a bunch of modules in order to handle fences, for example, which I ended up relying on a lot, to sort of get the markup back down to something reasonable and something I can work with and go from there. Or do I just dive off into the PHP and let’s make template files for everything, and that way I’m programmatically controlling markup. We had to come up with a strategy pretty early on and say, okay, for the sake of anybody who ever has to follow in my footsteps, let’s find a solution we like, and move forward with, that’s how we’re going to work. AM: So what was the biggest win over the duration of the project? I don’t know if you have one win per project, or… JM: So many. Seriously, I say that about the theming as a roadblock, but overall, both of these projects from an institutional perspective have been a resounding success. For academics not to complain about something is actually fairly rare [laughs]. That’s not to say that there weren’t people who take exception to, say, font choices, or, is that really the institutional red, it needs to be a little richer – you know, that sort of nitpicky ‘I don’t like this element of the design so I don’t like all of the design’. Overall, oh gosh, as of last week I think we’re 16 sites in, that we’ve launched so far. And yeah, all the designers have been very very happy with the end product, with the authoring experience. I’ve had some requests for new features and I like that my users are passionate enough to say, hey, this is great but here’s how we could make it even better, and to work through these things with me. I’ve got a handful of new content types that people have suggested – as I’ve been rolling out these little multi-site instances, I think that every last one of them could be used across the enterprise. And it’s great to have people that are willing to work with me on this sort of stuff, to come up with these ideas – not just for them. Probably one of the nicer things about being in a small liberal arts college is that they are mindful of the impact any change can have all the way across the organization, because they eat lunch with these people every day, you know? [laughs] So they’ve all been really successful. AM: Fantastic. So the next step you’ve mentioned for yourself, because you don’t really have a team [laughs], moving forward is the personalization piece. Anything else? JM: Well, part of the reason we selected Drupal to begin with was that it allowed us the flexibility to not deploy a site and then sort of be stuck with it forever. I mean, unlike some of the proprietaries, you get the tools that come out of the box and that’s kind of the end of it. You take one of their templates, you skin it your way, and you’re done. We’re looking at some design improvements. We did a complete redesign, this wasn’t just a move of an old design, we started from scratch and rebuilt. So there were design elements that have really worked well for us, and some things that, to use the industry jargon, aren’t converting the way we’d like them to. We’re not getting the traffic draw for some of the elements that the real estate they’re on deserves. So we’re going to take some time with the design team this summer and look at redesigning certain elements, and – I love that my templating architecture is flexible enough that there’s going to be no problem to just drop in there and, it’s all the same entities, it’s all the same data, we’re just presenting it differently. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly painless process. Also, since we’re at DrupalCon, I’m going to mention this. I’ve been at several sessions about paragraphs over the course of the last couple of days, and when I was at DrupalCon LA I went to a session and I was like, hmm, neat idea, maybe when it matures a little bit more – well, apparently it has matured a lot over the course of the last year. Because some of the things I’ve seen people do with paragraphs here are really impressive. So I’m sort of starting to daydream about some of the tools that I may be able to give my content creators, to do a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting things than they are now. There are certain things, the demand of the site and the demand of the brand, that will require us to leave some things static, but I want to give them as much creativity and as much flexibility as I can, to really make their content sing.  AM: Are you going to be able to add to your staff? JM: We’re trying to get a position for another developer, which hopefully will allow me to pull out and do a little more high-level stuff. We’ve also been steadily training more and more of our communications staff to work directly in the CMS and not rely on me or Nick or the student workers to do the layouts and content for them. And again, so far that’s gone really well. Like I said, the reason that I liked what I was seeing of paragraphs and a few of the other sessions is that, as much as I’m worried about user experience for our audience, I’m also worried about user experience for my content creators. I want them to want to work in the CMS, you know? And anything I can do to improve that situation for them – out of the box Drupal’s a great CMS to work with, but there are always ways to make it better. I’m always on the lookout for tools to help make their work better. AM: Isn’t that the thing about the Web, though – you can always make it better. Tomorrow’s another day [laughs]. JM: Exactly. AM: Well, thank you, Justin. I appreciate you taking the time, I know you’re fried – we’re all fried on the last day of DrupalCon – and there’s been a lot of knowledge and alcohol shared [laughs]. So I know everyone’s ready to relax a bit. JM: Next stop for me is the streetcar, I’m going to go to the other end of the French Market and start tchotchke shopping for the kids and hit three or four bars on the way back to the hotel, that sort of thing [laughs]. AM: Well, hopefully you’ll join us tonight at trivia night, and then at sprints tomorrow. JM: Don’t know, I have family here in town so I have some obligations there. But I’d like to put in a hour or so at the sprints and see how it goes.  AM: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. JM: Thank you! AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!

DrupalCon is just a few weeks away in New Orleans, so this time around our Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by our CEO and Founder George DeMet, Drupal veteran and PHP guru Larry "Crell" Garfield, and Senior Front-End Developer Lauren Byrwa. They share thoughts about the conference generally, what they're excited about specifically, and what they're expected from the Driesnote, among other topics. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi, and welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s April 2016, and this is episode #4. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we are going to give a preview of what to expect from the upcoming DrupalCon in New Orleans which is taking place May 9th through the 13th. The website is drupalcon.org if you want to see more. I’m a newbie to DrupalCon — this will be my very first one — so I gathered a bunch of my seasoned colleagues here at Palantir who have attended in the past to get their thoughts on the upcoming conference. I am here with three of my fabulous colleagues that are going to be attending DrupalCon with me. So I have Lauren Byrwa, who’s one of our senior front-end developers. Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi! AM: George DeMet, founder and CEO. George DeMet [GD]: Hello. AM: And Larry Garfield, Senior Architect and Community Lead. How are you? Larry Garfield [LG]: Hello, world. AM: So what we’re doing here is basically a preview of DrupalCon. DrupalCon is coming up in a couple of weeks, in New Orleans, which is very exciting. How many DrupalCons is this for each of you? LG: I think this will be #21. AM: Out of how many? How many have there been? LG: Maybe 25? I’m a staple at this point [laughs]. GD: It’s a good question. Not as many as you, Larry, but probably, if I had to guess, between 15 and 20. LB: I’m actually only at #2 for Cons. So not a whole lot compared to these guys. AM: I’m a complete newbie, so we’ll get to that later — what I can expect — but before we get to what most people or new people can expect from DrupalCon, or what DrupalCon is about — we know that Drupal was started by Dries Buytaert. Did I pronounce that right? LG: Close enough for an American [laughs].  AM: What is the correct pronunciation, please? LG: Well, I’m an American too. ‘Drees Boy-thart’ I think is closer, but don’t quote me on that. Dries, feel free to correct us. AM: I’m sure he will later [laughs]. So what is DrupalCon about? LG: DrupalCon is the summit of the community. It is the largest Drupal in-person event in the world by a very wide margin. It’s a place for the whole community of whatever stripe to gather and discuss, learn, teach, plan, work, play, drink, and several other things along the same lines. A lot of conferences are very developer-centric or very business-centric, or very whatever. DrupalCon is — these days, DrupalCon is a Web conference with a Drupal angle to it. There’s sessions for back-end developers, there’s sessions for front-end developers, there’s sessions for project managers, there’s sessions for content strategists, there’s sessions for business owners — whatever you do, if it involves Drupal or the Web in some way, there’s at least a couple of sessions that are worth going to for you. GD: I would agree, and I would say that even if you don’t do Drupal or you’re not someone who’s really immersed in the technology or the community, it’s still a conference with really great value. You can get a lot out of it, and I think particularly for folks who are new to DrupalCon, it’s a really great way to get immediately connected with the community. And it’s often a very overwhelming way. We’re a very friendly and welcoming community, sometimes overly so. LB: I would like to think of DrupalCon as our family reunion, for all Drupalers. We’re there to learn, we’re there to share, but mostly we’re there to collaborate. And that can happen in sessions, that can happen at happy hour,that can happen anywhere. But it’s a great way to get plugged into the community.  AM: So I am a newbie, as I said — this will be my first. So what should I expect from DrupalCon? Am I just going to walk in and be completely overwhelmed at first? GD: Yes. AM: [laughs]. LB: I think at my first DrupalCon — overwhelmed? Yes, definitely expect to be overwhelmed no matter what. But feel comfortable, feel welcomed. Everybody is excited for newcomers. Everyone is excited to get to know you, to hear your ideas. So stand up and talk, and listen, and ask questions. And go up to people that intimidate you, and tell them that you’re a huge fan and that you work with their tools every day and that you like what you saw in this blog post. And they’ll be flattered and want to know what you think and why or why not you agree or disagree. But talk to everybody. Talk to them on Twitter, talk to them in person, talk to them at bars — everything you can do to soak up as much information as possible. That’s always my number one.  LG: The main thing you should expect at DrupalCon is 3000 introverts playing extroverts, who really want to talk to you and teach you things because that’s what they do. And if you’re up for talking to people you’ve only heard of, or never heard of, and just learning from every person you run across, you’ll do just fine. GD: And I think — so when we’re at our booth, every year without fail I’ll be standing there and someone will just kind of come up to me, and they’ll have The Look in their eyes. It’s very clear that this is their first time, they’re feeling very overwhelmed. And it’s really funny, this happens every time, they’ll make eye contact, come over to the booth, pull out their program guide, and be like, where do I go? And there’s so many different things you can do and places you can go and sessions you can experience, and it really is about — I think for folks who are going, it’s really taking a look at the sessions, figuring out ‘what do I want to get out of this event’, and focusing on that. And if you are getting overwhelmed, just find a friendly face, and they’ll more than likely be able to help you out and point you in the right direction – ‘oh yeah, I know the person doing that session, they’re awesome, go to that session if you want to learn about this, so-and-so is like the world’s expert on that’. All kinds of opportunities to just soak everything in, and learn what you can. It’s a really fun, really intense time. AM: Great, I’m really looking forward to it. So every year Dries gives a keynote. And it’s fairly spectacular, I’ve seen a bunch of them on YouTube. They’re very involved. So what are you anticipating this year from the Driesnote, as he calls it? LG: I have no idea what Dries is planning. I think the best keynote he’s given in recent years was in Amsterdam, where he was talking about actual practical changes to our process. That’s where he introduced the plan for putting credits on the site, which got implemented later. And I think that’s been a great thing to encourage contributions from companies and clients and commercial organizations, which we absolutely need.  I’d like to see something inward-looking. By that point Drupal 8.1 will have just come out, and that’ll be the first time we’ve done that type of release in, I think, ever in Drupal. So I suspect he’ll be talking about that and the implications of being able to evolve the system more smoothly than in the past. That’s my prediction, such as it is. [this was cut from the original recording due to audio issues, but is left intact for the transcript] GD: I’m hoping that Dries will take this opportunity to talk a little bit more about what the vision and future direction of Drupal is going to be, not just from a technical standpoint but really from an — answering the question, why does Drupal exist? What we’ve seen over the last few years, particularly as we’ve been through the Drupal 8 cycle, is that Drupal has changed and evolved tremendously. And at the same time the kinds of people that use Drupal, and the ways that they are using it, have changed tremendously. And I think that a lot of folks in the community have moved along with those shifts, but others might be feeling a little left behind, like they’re not really sure. Maybe if you’re somebody that’s joined Drupal at a point in the past, and you’ve had a particular motivation for doing so, the project and the community may be very different now. I think as we go through that change and that evolution, having a shared understanding and grounding in what our shared values are as a Drupal community and a project would be really cool to hear from Dries. LB: I would say we’re actually at a place right now where we don’t entirely know what’s next for Drupal. We’re not waiting on D8 any more — there’s a whole slew of things out there. And so I agree that the future of Drupal is going to be a big topic. I think in addition to that, this is our good chance and this is Dries’ good chance to really press on contribution, and to recruit people.  A lot of our hardcore developers that helped build D8 are feeling a little burnt out. They too are celebrating the release, but in addition to that, they’re feeling a little burnt out after years and years of press to get it there. So I think contribution is going to be a really big topic this year — trying to figure out how to get people involved and how to get new blood in the system and new  ideas. To really push us towards that future, that’s going to be important. AM: That’s a lot to cover in one keynote [laughs].  GD: The expectations are always incredibly high for these things. And it’s really often almost too much to ask, that one person will be able to cover this much in an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. One thing I’ve seen is that sometimes, when Dries delivers, he really delivers in a really great way. But I also know that it’s really hard to do that. So hopefully everything will click in place. I’m looking forward to it. AM: Me too. So what are the big talking points in Drupal right now? Obviously I can assume Drupal 8. What else do you think will be the big things? LB: A big focus of this year’s DrupalCon is actually a lot of the front-end frameworks and performance. Like we said earlier, it’s really kind of a dev conference with Drupal in the background. So we’re really trying to branch out as a community and accept some of the other new things going on in tech right now, and I know that’s going to be a big press this year. LG: There’s a whole lot of sessions on the front-end frameworks, like Lauren was saying, and around the discussions around, should Drupal have a front-end framework baked into it, like Angular or Ember? Or should we do something along those lines with our own components? Or should we ignore all of that? Or should we, whatever? So there’s actually a new track for this con called Horizons that has — pie-in-the-sky ideas. That’s kind of the point of that track. So we actually have the project lead of Angular talking. We have the project lead of Ember talking.  And there’s a number of other sessions along similar lines. We’ve got a core conversation that was originally supposed to be a moderated fight between people who wanted a front-end framework and people who didn’t. I think it’s turned into — those people have already fought and have a plan now, and what’s that plan, but we’ll see. Definitely, the front end and JavaScript are big talking points.  Another core conversation, as Lauren was talking about, is burnout. We have two, maybe three, sessions on time management and burning yourself out and managing volunteers, and what happens when people leave Drupal and how can we learn from the people who have. People will always come and go from any project, but how do we do that in the most graceful fashion, so that it’s good for those people and good for the project. That’s another talk we have there. And then of course, continuing the ‘get off the island’ angle, we have a Symfony track, as we’ve had the last couple of years. We have a dedicated PHP track — that’s non-Drupal-specific PHP that we actually collaborated with Php[architect] on. I was one of the track chairs for that. It’s the first time we’ve had it in North America — we’ve had it in Europe. And then the Horizons track includes a lot of big ideas outside of Drupal, so there’s a lot of, what new stuff outside of the Drupal experience should we be looking at and taking stuff from. LB: In addition to what Larry was saying, there’s a new spotlight on mental health in the tech industry, and this is going to be a big issue. You’re starting to see real sessions on mental health and taking care of yourself as a developer. But I also think it’s going to be a hot-button issue for BOFs, and you’re going to see a lot of talking about it outside of sessions as well, and how to cope with this environment. AM: OK, wait a minute. Can we define “BOF”? LB: My apologies, it’s an acronym for “birds of a feather”. It’s a group talk where people of like-minded ideas or having the same interests get together and have a conversation about it, as opposed to somebody getting up and presenting about a topic. It’s a more casual and close way to discuss some of the issues that are popular. GD: And so one of the other hats I wear in the Drupal community is serving on the Community Working Group. And I know that we’ve been talking internally about a lot of the challenges we’ve seen, experiencing burnout, and trying to improve — trying to provide more communication tools and resources, particularly for folks in the core development community. So I’m really happy to see an increased focus on that, not just at this DrupalCon but at the last couple of DrupalCons. I think we’re going to have more and more, hopefully more structured, programs and resources, so that people can contribute in a way that is sustainable in the long run. The other kind of big topic or trend that I’m seeing is — I think there’s a little bit of a question or tension, that ties into a lot of the technical questions, about the extent to which Drupal is a product and Drupal is a software platform. If you think about it in terms of Legos, is it a big box of a whole bunch of Legos that you can put together in any kind of different shape or form to create whatever you want, or is it more kind of a Lego construction kit that’s got all the tools you need to build a truck or a boat or whatever. And the extent to which we move in one direction and make Drupal more of a polished product — does that undermine our ability to be incredibly flexible? And so there’s questions like, do we have a decoupled front end? How do we approach questions like content workflow and management and all that stuff, and how much is that prescribed by the system? These are all really important questions that we’re going to have to, as a community, come to some sort of agreement or consensus on as we move forward. LG: As a side note, on the mental health front, our third keynote for Thursday is from Michael Schmid, a long-time Drupaler. He’s talking on brain health and mental health and so forth. It’s definitely an area worth the time it’s being given, which is considerable and as it should be.  AM: Great — I definitely want to get to some of the sessions that you’re excited about. So there are 13 tracks total in DrupalCon this year. Some of them are new, as you mentioned earlier, and they cover quite a range of topics. So there is something for everybody. I am not an engineer myself, but there is plenty for me to absorb at this conference [laughs], because the tracks are so varied. And I haven’t counted how many sessions there are in total, spread across those 13 tracks. LG: I think it’s 131 or something like that. AM: Wow. So there’s a lot of information being shared. So outside of the Palantir-led sessions, because we are leading three — which we’ll cover in a bit — which sessions are you most excited about, aside from the ones you’ve already mentioned? LG: I’d say I’m most looking forward to the core conversations on burnout and on community management, and on how do we keep this process sustainable? Because the way we went about Drupal 8 is not sustainable. That level of work was necessary for the project, but that kind of surge mentality of, throw warm bodies at it and work extra hard to make sure it gets done, is not a good way of developing software, open source or not. I’m looking forward to the discussions that are already slated around, how do we not do that? How do we make Drupal successful, or more successful, and how do we make our people more successful while respecting the fact that people still have lives and limits, and people have families? We don’t want to inadvertently pressure people to sacrifice those. No one consciously likes to do that, but there’s unconscious pressure at a lot of times. So how do we counteract that in a healthy fashion? Topic-wise, that’s probably what I’m most looking forward to, probably followed by some of the front-end framework discussions. LB: As a front-end developer, I’m interested in some of the config management in D8, some of the front-end frameworks, I’ll definitely be at those. But outside of that I’m also really looking  forward to the content strategy and UX things — D8 accessibility, content strategy and popular culture, some of these look really interesting. I know there’s also one on lessons from WordPress that I think is going to be really great as well. I think there’s a lot of great sessions regardless of what you’re specifically interested in.  GD: Unfortunately, one of the things about being someone in my position is that I don’t really get to go to sessions very much [laughs]. I actually have not looked too much at the program schedule yet. AM: But you will, of course [laughs]. GD: I will, certainly. And I will pick out a few sessions and put them on my calendar and will intend to go to them, and then inevitably something else will pull me away and I’ll end up watching the recording after the fact. AM: But luckily they are all recorded. GD: They are all recorded. And they’ve gotten really good at making sure that the session recordings are up usually within a day or two of when they’re recorded, which is a very impressive logistical feat. So I’m really happy with that. And in addition to Michael Schmid, or Schnitzels — that’s his nickname — and his keynote, I’m very much looking forward to, and I hope I don’t destroy her name here or we can correct it in post-production, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who’s doing a keynote on content and design. I’ve read a lot of her stuff and I’m really excited to hear what she’s going to have to say for the Drupal community. One of the great things over the past few years is that we’ve really started thinking more about design as a project, which is really important and really challenging for an open source project – to really come together and prioritize not just what the software does but how people interact with it. LG: That’s something that we’ve been seeing not just in the visual design aspect. We have a session in the PHP track that I’m really looking forward to, called “Your API is a UI”. The idea is that code should be designed with the same kind of thought you put into user experience for someone pushing buttons — it also needs to go into how someone is writing code. And that’s something that the community is starting to get their head around in the last couple of years. So I’m really excited for that session and others like it, that push that concept. AM: Well, let’s talk about the ones that Palantir is leading. We have three. One is “PHP 7: The New New PHP”. LG: I talk about new stuff [laughs]. This is a talk that I’ve given at a few PHP conferences – it’s not Drupal-specific at all, it’s in the PHP track. PHP 7 was released last fall, right after Drupal 8 was – its release date was actually pushed back because of Drupal, we kept finding bugs. But for the developers and sysadmins in the room, if you have not tried out PHP 7, you really need to. It’s got a ton of really nice new features which I talk about in the session, and it’s twice as fast. And I’m not just showing marketing numbers – there are companies that have said they’ve shut down half their servers by switching to PHP 7. It is dramatically faster. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5 or later, and I would say, within six months if you’re not running Drupal 8 on PHP 7 – you’re doing it wrong. You’re leaving money on the table, you’re hindering your own developers. So come to the session. I’ll tell you all the reasons why as a developer you really, really want to be using PHP 7 right now. AM: Really, really! LG: Really, really, really [laughs]! AM: So your second session is “D8 Module Acceleration Program”.  LG: And this isn’t a normal track session, this is actually in the Business Showcase. It’s a panel that Acquia is putting together. Acquia, as some of our listeners know, has been funding a program called MAP — Module Acceleration Program — which is basically, hey, Drupal 8 is out, what about contrib, let’s put some actual money behind getting the major contrib modules up and running on Drupal 8. And Palantir has been partnered with them, as have a number of other companies. Acquia has provided some funding, and Palantir is working at a reduced rate because we’re doing community work, essentially. My main work for the last few months has been the Workbench moderation module for Drupal 8, as well as the multi-version Workspace deploy suite which I’m collaborating on with some other developers at Pfizer. So the idea is there’s a panel of people who have been working as part of this program, saying, okay, what is it, why is it, what are the benefits of it, what does it mean for contributing to open source. Teaser: contributing to open source is a viable and important part of any business that’s using it, and it is a worthwhile investment. Now you can come to the session to hear the details of that. AM: Cool. So the last session is George’s session, “Finding Your Purpose as a Drupal Agency”. GD: Yes, so I’m going to be doing a session in the Business track. It’s a little bit, for those who might have seen the session I did for DrupalCon Barcelona last fall, it’s a little bit of a sequel to that session. Essentially what I’m going to be talking about are some of the challenges. Last year was a fairly challenging time for a lot of companies in the Drupal ecosystem. Everyone was kind of waiting for Drupal 8 to come out — a lot of folks were holding off on starting new projects because of that, and so I’m going to talk a little about that. I’m reaching out to some other folks, some other companies in the Drupal ecosystem, hoping to get them to share some of their perspectives as well.  But then I’ll be talking about how, particularly during challenging times but during any time in general, the value of defining your purpose as an agency — your vision, your values, and how those things really come together and enable you to really have kind of a focus for where you’re taking your company. And not just how you run your agency, but also why — which I think is a question that doesn’t get asked often enough. So I’m really looking forward to that. For people that might be interested, it’s not just for folks that run Drupal companies. If you are involved in or interested in any way about how companies are run, and even — I’m not going to be talking that much about Drupal in particular, so I think it will be really valuable for folks, obviously even non-technical. And one of the things I do with my talks is a lot of analogies, so I’ll probably have some pretty entertaining analogies for folks. AM: Great. Well, as Lauren touched on, beyond the sessions DrupalCon is also about the social life, and the socializing, and the community around it. So what am I to expect as a newbie, going to my very first one, after the daily sessions are over? LB: Expect to be overwhelmed. Expect to be bombarded. And expect a little debauchery. I think you’ll be entertained, to say the least, but everybody is very friendly, everybody wants to buy you a drink and hear your thoughts. And everybody wants to argue. So be willing to defend your ideas, because it will come. And you might change your mind and you might change somebody else’s, but that’s the glory in all of it. And I’ve found a lot more meaning comes from the conversations outside of the sessions than sometimes during them. So I always encourage especially first-time Drupalers or first-time Con-goers, don’t stop after the sessions. Go to the after-stuff, even if you don’t drink, even if you just want to sit there and have water and talk to people, or have a Coke. It doesn’t have to be about the drinking, and it’s a really great place to socialize and share ideas. AM: I understand that in the past there’s been things like trivia night, or karaoke, or just meeting at ping-pong [laughs]. GD: Well, in fact there is a trivia night on Thursday, and we are sponsoring it, as we have for the last couple of DrupalCons. And for me at least, it’s one of the highlights of the whole event. The key is, try to find a table with people who have been around the community a little while. But the questions can be all over the place, and sometimes they even give credit for having someone who’s at their first DrupalCon at your table. AM: So what, you get something like frequent flier miles for your very first one? [laughs].  LG: It varies by year, but I think your team gets a bonus point for every person at your table who’s at their first DrupalCon. If it’s your first time at a DrupalCon, that makes you a valuable commodity, so show up anyway [laughs]. AM: I should wear a sign. LG: And I think there’s actually a penalty if someone on your team is a core committer. So don’t always go for the table with all of the lead developers because you get a penalty for having them on your team. I’m not a core committer so I have no penalty one way or another. GD: The trivia night is on Thursday night, and I think a lot of folks may be tempted to leave early because Thursday is the last day of sessions, but definitely stick around for trivia night on Thursday. And stick around for the sprints on Friday as well. Folks are generally fairly tired by that point, but sometimes being tired at that place really lets you focus [laughs] on getting cool stuff done. And it’s not just code, it’s all sorts of things. There’s documentation sprints, we’ll often do some community work as well — all sorts of things going on even after the sessions are over. LB: Definitely, it’s an exhausting week and it’s a long one. But those sprints at the end, those make the difference, and that’s how you really get involved and how you really learn stuff. So don’t ever think that, oh, I’m not an engineer, or, I don’t know how to do this. Because if you show up, we will find a job for you. LG: There’s a number of people at sprints every year whose job is, it’s just part of sprints, to mentor people in getting started. Get your dev environment set up, figure out where to find issues to work on, figure out if you want to do code or documentation or usability testing or whatever else you’re going to do — whatever you’re interested in doing, there’s a use for it, and someone who can hold your hand along the way to get involved in it. So, yeah DrupalCon doesn’t end on Thursday, DrupalCon ends on Saturday. AM: That’s a long conference. It is. Sunday to Saturday, pretty much. LG: It is, but for all of that, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around for that length of time. It’s definitely worth the value of going. AM: So then let’s delve into the exhibition space and the vendor space. What can attendees expect from going into the vendor room, besides being thrown a whole lot of swag? Pencils, buttons, tattoos, all sorts of things [laughs]. LB: So there’s the swag, which is always wonderful. And you will find some very cool and unique swag, depending on what booths you’re at. But what I think is funny, having worked a booth before, is you’ll see vendors kind of use it as bait. They’ll watch you walk by and they’ll watch you want it but not want to talk to people, because, like Larry said earlier, we’re all introverts. We’re just pretending for the week. And so they’ll kind of bait you with it, and they’ll get you to talk. And they’ll start with something small and introductory, and you might find yourself connecting with people you didn’t expect. LG: People are generally not too pushy about it, most of the time. But yeah, tech conferences are where introverts go to cosplay extroverts. GD: So as somebody who’s been to a lot of different conferences, and seen a lot of different exhibition spaces and exhibit halls and vendor booths and all that stuff — I really love the DrupalCon exhibit hall because it’s a lot more down-to-earth. It’s a lot less sales-y than most other conferences out there. You definitely have folks who will put a little flair on their booth or have some wacky promotion or something like that, but it doesn’t feel forced as it does at many other kinds of conferences. You really can, as Lauren said, just go up to people and have a conversation. And most of the time they’ll be happy to talk to you and not just to convert the sale. AM: So of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’re going to have a booth and we’re going to be luring people in with our swag as well [laughs]. LG: Come to our booth! Say hi! We’ve got swag! AM: That’s right [laughs]. Come to our booth, there’s going to be about seven or eight of us this year, and we’re going to be booth number 222. Come visit! And the website for DrupalCon is… LG: http://www.drupalcon.org . That will redirect you to what the actual URL is.  AM: Perfect. LG: One final note. On Tuesday, you go to the pre-note. That’s not even a question. You go to the pre-note. Everyone goes to the pre-note. GD: The pre-note is kind of a tradition that’s sprung up over the last five or six years or so. It’s the presentation that occurs before the keynote on Tuesday. And it’s generally put together by the same group of people. It’s intended for people who have never been to DrupalCon before, but it’s enjoyable by everyone, and they go to great lengths to make it incredibly enjoyable. So in the past, there was one that was all themed around Disney musicals — they’re very often tied into the culture of the location where DrupalCon is being held. Occasionally in the past we have even seen Larry up on stage [laughs] singing and dancing… AM: And wearing inappropriate things [laughs]. LG: Those things were very appropriate given the character I was playing. AM: Fair enough, fair enough [laughs]. LG: Without giving too much away — this year is more musical numbers, and I’m sure there will be shenanigans [laughs]. We’re still working on it as we speak, but expect shenanigans. You want to be at the pre-note. It’s worth waking up early for. AM: Early? How early is it? LG: It’s before the keynote on Tuesday, so it’s at 8 am. And it’s worth being up and at the conference center for. AM: Good, I look forward to it. Thank you all for joining me. I’m looking forward to my first DrupalCon, thanks so much. LB: Thanks for joining us, and you can find us at DrupalCon. GD: Thank you. See you in New Orleans. LG: See you in New Orleans. Let’s have some fun! And learn stuff [laughs]. AM: Thank you so much for listening. If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on Twitter at @palantir. See you at DrupalCon New Orleans!

Good Friday on Rose City Forum 12-1 PM on KKPZ 1330 AM So, what is the big deal about the cross anyway?

Creative Expression - How Does the Science of Mind WORKSunday Service - January 16, 2011  (10:30 AM) So how are you doing?  How are you doing in keeping those new year's resolutions after two weeks?  Most people say they've already set them aside.  Others say they do not make any because it never works.  I've been in both those perspectives and neither one worked.   About a year ago I decided not to think about new (or old) resolutions but to approach the new year from a perspective of "Evolution".   This means to review my life and determine how far I have come -- or how much I have "evolved" in my Spiritual understanding and wisdom over the years.     Thus with the idea of "evolution", I can simply add steps to where I am today.  Steps that take me in the direction I want to go.  No stress, no guilt and certainly no denial.  Just a clear intention with the flexibility of Infinite Mind to continue to reveal its wisdom by means of me.   Every day, in my spiritual practice, I then affirm my intention for my life and as I go about my busy-ness, I am aware of making those choices that support my continual spiritual "evolution".  I notice that every day in every way my life does get better -- because I get better at being me!  For the next 3 Sundays, we're covering the Basic Ideas of the Science of Mind teaching based upon our textbook by Dr. Ernest Holmes.  This Sunday at 10:30, I'll be speaking on the subject of:  CREATIVE EXPRESSION -- considering how the principles of the Science of Mind work in our lives.     Your generosity helps to support our podcasts. Please visit:  http://www.cslftl.org  The Center for Spiritual Living – Fort Lauderdale is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and relies upon charitable donations to continue its community outreach programs.