Podcasts about hobsons

This episode features everything C, with a look at some of the latest ventures in the alcohol free beer world. We start by looking at the Citra hop, joined by Brew By Numbers to talk through their latest beers. We then dig into the array of coffee beers brewer in the UK and Europe, before finishing off with a deep dive into Cold Batu Brewery. Our affiliated brands this month are Butcombe and Hobsons, whose beers feature in the latest AF Beer Club box.

Chris Fait is a Sales Executive and leader with over 20 years of sales and leadership experience leveraging a growth mentality framework leading teams with over $30M in annual revenue. Chris is currently the Vice President of VisionPoint Marketing where he leads a growing team that is responsible for expanding new partnerships with Community Colleges, 4-year institutions and Graduate online programs. Chris has spent 15 years in the Higher Education, Admissions, Marketing, and Recruitment sector at industry leaders such as Hobsons and EAB working with a total of over 1,000 colleges.

We asked you to provide some questions of ballet and music topics that you wanted answering, and we did! We also ask questions of each other, things about ballet and music we wanted to know from each other's perspective, and it is very revealing and insightful. As is often the case on the Ballet Piano Podcast, you can expect lots of laughter, and bickering from the Hobsons, but it's all in good fun and light humour.  We answer your questions as honestly as possible, to the best of our knowledge and experience. This episode is proudly produced and published by PodcastRecording.co.uk

We asked you to provide some questions of ballet and music topics that you wanted answering, and we did!  We also ask questions of each other, things about ballet and music we wanted to know from each other's perspective, and it is very revealing and insightful.As is often the case on the Ballet Piano Podcast, you can expect lots of laughter, and bickering from the Hobsons, but it's all in good fun and light humour.  We answer your questions as honestly as possible, to the best of our knowledge and experience.

Of all the factors in the college admissions process, few seem as subjective or elusive as the interview. Do these even happen any more? Amy and Mike invited author Richard Montauk to explain how to prepare for a college admissions interview. What are five things you will learn in this episode? How common are college interviews, and which schools most rely on them? Who usually conducts college interviews? Do interviews have a substantial impact upon admission decisions? What advice do you have for how applicants can prepare to perform their best in their interviews? What are the biggest—or most common—mistakes applicants make regarding interviews? MEET OUR GUEST Richard Montauk has been consulting to applicants to college, professional school (especially law and business school), and other graduate programs since 1991. Richard received a BA in literature from Brown University, an MA in government from Harvard, an MS in finance, and a JD from Stanford Law School. Pursuant to a graduate fellowship, he also studied at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London). While an undergraduate at Brown University, Richard was also the head coach of the women's varsity track & field team. After graduating from Stanford Law School, he worked as a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles, then as a corporate strategy consultant for Bain & Co. in London, before devoting himself full-time to admissions consulting. Since 1991, he has consulted to candidates for the world's top universities, for both undergraduate and graduate programs. A member of the National Association of Fellowship Advisors, he has also periodically served as a judge for Venture for America's fellowship. Richard is the author of a series of best-selling guides, all published by Prentice Hall: How to Get Into the Top Colleges (with Krista Klein), How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs, and How to Get Into the Top Law Schools. More recently, he's authored College Interviews: The Definitive Guide, Getting into Brown, Getting into Dartmouth and has completed the first in a series of books designed to help college students pay for college, Waiting Tables for Very Good Money.  His writing has appeared in multiple career and education journals, including the Wall Street Journal's Career Journal, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Which MBA?, The Postgrad Guide, Executive Education Casebook, and MBA Career Guide. His articles for university fellowship advisors are to be found in Roads Less Travelled (and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships) and All In: Expanding Access through Nationally Competitive Awards. Richard has also served as Contributing Editor for two annual international publications, The Global MBA Guide and LLM Guide, both published by Hobsons. Find Richard at richardmontauk.com. LINKS College Interviews: Practice Questions & Strategies RELATED EPISODES SHAPING AN ADMISSIONS CLASS ADMISSIONS INSIGHTS FOR HIGHLY SELECTIVE UNIVERSITIES TRANSPARENCY IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ABOUT THIS PODCAST Tests and the Rest is THE college admissions industry podcast. Explore all of our episodes on the show page. ABOUT YOUR HOSTS Mike Bergin is the president of Chariot Learning and founder of TestBright. Amy Seeley is the president of Seeley Test Pros. If you're interested in working with Mike and/or Amy for test preparation, training, or consulting, feel free to get in touch through our contact page.  

#realsoulreplay 01. Jeffree - Mr Fix-It. 02. Ray Alexander Technique - My Special One. 03. The Independents - Lucky Fellow. 04. Carl Carlton - Smokin` Room. 05. The Natural Four - You Bring Out The Best In Me. 06. Anthony White - Where Would I Be Without You. 07. Randy Brown - You Says It All. 08. Tommy Tate - If I Gave You My Heart. 09. Ronnie Dyson - So In Love With You. 10, Benny Troy - I Wanna Give You Tomorrow. 11. Tyrone Davis - All You Got. 12. Lamont Dozier - Breaking Out All Over. 13. The Temptations - Aiming At Your Heart. 14. The Dells - Its Up To You. 15. Main Ingredient - Everything Man. 16. Walter Jackson - Touching In the Dark. 17. David Simmons - Yesterdays Song. 18. Jimmy Cobb - So Nobody Else Can Hear. Just the sweetest of Modern Soul during the early/mid 80`s period with a selection of wonderful independent 45`s & Great album tracks. Personal recollection - Final play of the night, Jimmy Cobb at Hobsons event at the University Arms Hotel (Parkers Piece CBG) - Rear Function Suite, about that time. Hope you enjoy the soulful diversion. Dx

About Patrick McFadinPatrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of Apache Cassandra successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.Twitter: @PatrickMcFadinLinkedIn: Patrick McFadin DataStax website: datastax.comK8ssandra: k8ssandra.ioStargate: stargate.ioDataStax Astra: Cassandra-as-a-ServiceWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-BcIL3VlrjEThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Fauna.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Patrick McFadin. Hey Patrick, thanks for joining me.Patrick: Hi Jeremy. How are you doing today?Jeremy: I am doing really well. So you are the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what DataStax is all about.Patrick: Sure. Well, I mean mostly I'm just a nerd with a cool job. I get to talk about technology a lot and work with technology. So DataStax, we're a company that was founded around Apache Cassandra, just supporting and making it awesome. And that's really where I came to the company. I've been working with Apache Cassandra for about 10 years now. I've been a part of the project as a contributor.But yeah, I mean mostly data infrastructure has been my life for most of my career. I did this in the dotcom era, back when it was really crazy when we had dozens of users. And when that washed out, I'm like, oh, then real scale started and during that period of time I worked a lot in just trying to scale infrastructure. It seems like that's been what I've been doing for like 30 years it seems like, 20 years, 20 years, I'm not that old. Yeah. But yeah, right now, I spend a lot of my time just working with developers on what's next in Kubernetes and I'm part of CNCF now, so yeah. I just can't to seem to stay in one place.Jeremy: Well, so I'm super interested in the work that DataStax is doing because I have had the pleasure/misfortune of managing a Cassandra ring for a start-up that I was at. And it was a very painful process, but once it was set up and it was running, it wasn't too, too bad. I mean, we always had some issues here and there, but this idea of taking a really good database, because Cassandra's great, it's an excellent data store, but managing it is a nightmare and finding people who can manage it is sort of a nightmare, and all that kind of stuff. And so this idea of taking these services and DataStax isn't the only one to do this, but to take these open-source services and turn them into these hosted solutions is pretty fantastic. So can you tell me a little bit more, though? What this shift is about? This moving away from hosting your own databases to using databases as a service?Patrick: Yeah. Well, you touched on something important. You want to take that power, I mean Cassandra was a database that was built in the scale world. It was built to solve a problem, but it was also built by engineers who really loved distributed computing, like myself, and it's funny you say like, "Oh, once I got it running, it was great," well, that's kind of the experience with most distributed databases, is it's hard to reason around having, "Oh, I have 100 mouths to feed now. And if one of them goes nuts, then I have to figure it out."But it's the power, that power, it's like stealing fire from the gods, right? It's like, "Oh, we could take the technology that Netflix and Apple and Facebook use and use it in our own stuff." But you got to pay the price, the gods demand their payment. And that's something that we've been really trying to tackle at DataStax for a couple of years now, actually three, which is how ... Because the era of running your own database is coming to an end. You should not run your own database. And my philosophy as a technologist is that proper, really important technology like your data layer should just fade into the background and it's just something you use, it's not something you have to reason through very much.There's lots of technology that's like that today. How many times have you ... When was the last time you managed your own memory in your code?Jeremy: Right. Right. Good point. I know.Patrick: Thank god, huh?Jeremy: Exactly.Patrick: Whew.Jeremy: But I think that you make a really good point, because you do have these larger companies like Facebook or whatever that are using these technologies and you mentioned data layers, which I don't think I've worked for a single company, I don't think I actually ... I founded a start-up one time and we built a data layer as well, because it's like, the complexity of understanding the transaction models and the routing, especially if you're doing things like sharding and all kinds of crazy stuff like that, hiding that complexity from your developers so that they can just say, "I need to get this piece of information," or, "I need to set this piece of information," is really powerful.But then you get stuck with these data layers that are bespoke and they're generally fragile and things like that, so how is that you can take data as a service and maybe get rid of some of that, I don't know, some of that liability I guess?Patrick: Yeah. It's funny because you were talking about sharding and things like that. These are things that we force on developers to reason through, and it's just cognitive load. I have an app to get out, and I have some business desire to get this application online, the last thing I need to worry about is my sharding algorithm. Jeremy, friends don't let friends shard.Jeremy: Right. That's right. That's a good point.Patrick: But yeah, I mean I think we actually have all the parts that we need and it's just about, this is closer than you think. Look at where we've already started going, and that is with APIs, using REST. Now GraphQL, which I think is deserving its hotness, is starting to bring together some things that are really important for this kind of world we want to live in. GraphQL is uni-fettering data and collecting and actual queries, it's a QL, and why they call it Graph, I have no idea. But it gives you this ability to have this more abstract layer.I think GraphQL will, here's a prediction is that it's going to be like the SQL of working with data services on the internet and for cloud-native applications. And so what does that mean? Well, that means I just have to know, well, I need some data and I don't really care what's underneath it. I don't care if I have this field indexed or anything like that. And that's pretty exciting to me because then we're writing apps at that point.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And actually, that's one of the things I really like about GraphQL too is just this idea that it's almost like a universal data access layer in a sense because it does, you still have to know it, you have to know what you're requesting if you're an end developer, but it makes it easier to request the things that you need and have those mutations set and have some of those other things standardized across the company, but in a common format because isn't that another problem? Where it's like, I'm working with company A and I move to company B maybe and now company B is using a different technology and a different bespoke data layer and some of these other things.So, I think data as a service for one, maybe with GraphQL in front of it is a great way to have this alignment across companies, or I guess, just makes it easier for developers to switch and start developing right away when they move into a new company.Patrick: Yeah, and this is a concept I've been trying to push pretty hard and it's driven by some conversations I've had with some friends that they're engineering leaders and they have this common desire. We want to have a zero day dev, which is the first day that someone starts, they should be producing production code. And I don't think that's crazy talk, we can do this, but there's a lot of things that are in front of it. And the database is one of them. I think that's one of the first things you do when you show up at company X is like, "Okay, what database are you using? What flavor of SQL or GRPC or CQL, Cassandra query language? What's the data model? Quick, where's that big diagram on the wall with my ERD? I got to go look at that for a while."Jeremy: How poorly did you structure your Git repositories? Yeah.Patrick: Yeah, exactly. It's like all these things. And no, I would love to see a world where the most troublesome part of your first day is figuring out where the coffee and the bathroom are, and then the rest of it is just total, "Hey, I can do this. This is what I get paid to do."Jeremy: Right. Yeah. So that idea of zero day developer, I love that idea and I know other companies are trying to do that, but what enables that? Is it getting the idea of having to understand something bespoke? Is it getting that off of the table? Or not having to deal with the low-level database aspect of things? I mean because APIs, I had this conversation with Rob Sutter, actually, a couple weeks ago. And we were talking about the API economy and how everything is moving towards APIs. And even data, it was around data as well.So, is that the interface, you think, of the future that just says, "Look, trying to interface directly with a database or trying to work with some other layer of abstraction just doesn't make sense, let's just go straight from code right to the data, with a very simple API interface?"Patrick: Yeah, I think so. And it's this idea of data services because if you think of if you're doing React, or something like a front-end code, I don't want to have a driver. Drivers are a total impediment. It's like, driver hell can be difficult at large organizations, getting the matching right. Oh, we're using this database so you have to use this driver. And if you don't, you are now rejected at the gate. So it's using HTTP protocols, but it's also things like when you're using React or Angular, View, whatever you're using on the front-end, you have direct access.But most times what you're needing is just a collection or an object. And so just do a get, "I need this thing right now. I'm doing a pick list. I need your collection." I don't need a complicated setup and spend the first three days figuring out which driver I'm using and make sure my Gradle file is just perfect. Yeah. So, I think that's it.Jeremy: Yeah. No, I'd be curious how you feel about ORMs, or O-R-Ms, certainly for relational databases, I know a lot of people love them. I can't stand them. I think it adds a layer of abstraction and just more complexity where I just want access to the database. I want to write the query myself, and as soon as you start adding in all this extra stuff on top of it to try to make it easier, I don't know, it just seems to mess it up for me.Patrick: All right. So yeah, I think we have an accord. I am really not a fan of ORMs at all. And I mean this goes back to Hibernate. Everyone's like, "Oh, Hibernate's going to be the end of databases." No, it's not. Oh yeah, it was the end of the database at the other side because it would create these ridiculous queries. It's like, why is every query a full table scan?Jeremy: Exactly.Patrick: Because that's the way Hibernate wanted it. Yeah. I actually banned Hibernate at one company I was working at. I was Chief Architect there and I just said, "Don't ever put Hibernate in our production." Because I had more meetings about what it was doing wrong than what it was doing right.Jeremy: Right. Right. Yeah. No, that's sounds, yeah.Patrick: Is that a long answer? Like, no.Jeremy: No, I've had the same experience where certain ORMs you're just like, no. Certain things, you can't do this because it's going to one, I think it locks you in in a sense, I mean there's all kind of lock-in in the cloud, and if you're using a data service or an API or you're using something native in AWS, or IBM Cloud, you're still going to be locked in in some way, but I do feel like whenever you start going down that path of building custom things, or forcing developers to get really low level, that just builds up all kinds of tech debt, right? That you eventually are going to have to work down.Patrick: Well, it's organizational inertia. When you start getting into this, when you start using annotations in Hibernate where you're just cutting through all the layers and now you're way down in the weeds, try to move that. There's a couple of companies that I've worked with now that are looking at the true reality of portability in their data stores. Like, "Oh, we want to move from one to a different, from a key value to a document without developers knowing." Well, how do you get to that point?Jeremy: Right. Yeah.Patrick: And it's just, that's not giving access to those things, first of all, but this is that tech debt that's going to get in your way. We're really good, technologists, we're really good at just wracking up the charges on our tech debt credit card, especially whenever we're trying to get things out the door quickly. And I think that's actually one of the problems that we all face. I mean, I don't think I've ever talked to a developer who was ahead of schedule and didn't have somebody breathing down their neck.Jeremy: Very true.Patrick: You take shortcuts. You're like, "We've got to shift this code this week. Skip the annotations and go straight into the database and get the data you need." Or something. You start making trade-offs real fast.Jeremy: What can we hard code that will just get us past.Patrick: Yeah. Is it green? Shift it. Yeah.Jeremy: Yeah, no, I totally, totally agree. All right. So let's talk a little bit more about, I guess, skillsets and things like that. Because there are so many different databases out there. Cassandra is just one and if you're a developer working just at the driver level, I guess, with something like Cassandra, it's not horrible to work with. It's relatively easy once a lot of these things are set up for you.Same is true of MongoBD, or I mean, DynamoDB, or any of these other ones where the interface to it isn't overly difficult, but there's always some sort of something you want to build on top of it to make it a little bit easier. But I'm just curious, in terms of learning these different things and switching between organizations and so forth, there is a cognitive load going from saying, "I'm working on Cassandra," to going to saying, "I'm working on DynamoDB," or something like that. There's going to be a shift in understanding of how the data can be brought back, what the limitations are, just a whole bunch of things that you kind of have to think about. And that's not even including managing the actual thing. That's a whole other thing.So, hiring people, I guess, or hiring developers, how much do we want developers to know? Are you on board with me where it's like, I mean I like understanding how Cassandra works and I like understanding how DynamoDB works, and I like knowing the limits, but I also don't want to think about them when I'm writing code.Patrick: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because Cassandra, one of the things I really loved about Cassandra initially was just how it works. As a computer scientist, I was like, "This is really neat." I mean, my degree field is in distributed computing, so of course, I'm going to nerd out.Jeremy: There you go.Patrick: But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have mass appeal because it's doing the thing that people want. And I think that's going to be the challenge of any properly built service layer. I think I've mentioned to you before we started this, I work on a project called Stargate. And Stargate is a project that is meant to build a data layer on top of databases. And right now it's with Cassandra. And it's abstracting away some of the harder to understand or reason things.For instance, with distributed computing, we're trying to reduce the reliance on coordination. There is a great article about this by Pat Helland about how coordination is the last really expensive thing that we have in development. Memory, CPU, super cheap. I can rent that all day long. Coordination is really, really hard, and I don't expect a new programmer to understand, to reason through coordination problems. "Oh, yeah, the just in time race conditions," and things like that.And I think that's where distributed computing, it's super powerful, but then whenever people see what eventual consistency are, they freak out and they're like, "I just want my SQL Lite on my laptop. It's very safe." But that's not going to get you there. That's not a global database, it's not going to be able to take you to a billion users. Come on, don't cut ...Jeremy: Maybe you don't need to be.Patrick: ... your apps short Jeremy. You're going to have a billion users.Jeremy: You should strive for it, at least, is how I feel about it. So that's, I guess, the point I was trying to get to is that if the developers are the ones that you don't want learning some of this stuff, and there's ways to abstract it away again, going like we talked about data as a service and APIs and so forth. And I think that's where I would love to see things shifting. And as you said earlier, that's probably where things are going.But if you did want to run your own database cluster, and you wanted to do this on your own, I mean you have to hire people that know how to do this stuff. And the more I see the market heating up for this type of person, there is very, very few specialists out there that are probably available. So how would you even hire somebody to run your Cassandra ring? They probably all work at DataStax.Patrick: No, not all of them. There's a few that work at Target and FedEx, Apple, the biggest Cassandra users in the world. Huawei. We just found out lately that Huawei now has the biggest cluster on the planet. Yeah. They just showed up at ApacheCon and said, "Oh yeah, hold my beer." But I mean, you're right, it's a specialized skillset and one of the things we're doing at DataStax, we feel, yeah, you should just rent that. And so we have Astra, which is our database as a service.It's fully compatible with open-source Cassandra. If you don't like it, you can just take it over and use open-source. But we agree and we actually can run Cassandra cheaper than you can, and it's just because we can do it at scale. And right now Astra, the way we run it is truly serverless, you only pay for what you need, and that's something that we're bringing to the open-source side of Cassandra as well, but we're getting Cassandra closer to Kubernetes internally.So if you don't want to think about Kubernetes, if you don't want to think about all that stuff, you can just rent it from us, or you could just go use it in open-source, either way. But you're right. I mean, it should not be a 2020s skillset is, "Get better at running Cassandra." I think those days should be, leave it to, if you want to go work at DataStax and run Cassandra, great, we're hiring right now, you will love it. You don't have to. Yeah.Jeremy: So the idea of it being open-source, so again, I'm not a huge fan of this idea of vendor lock-in. I think if you want to run on AWS Lambda, yeah, most of what you can do can only run on AWS Lambda, but changing the compute, switching that over to Azure or switching that over to GCP or something like that, the compute itself is probably not that hard to move, right? I think especially depending on what you're doing, setting up an entire Kubernetes cluster just to run a few functions is probably not worth it. I mean, obviously, if you've got a much bigger implementation, that's a little different.But with data, data is just locked in. No matter where you go, it is very hard to move a lot of data. So even with the open-source flair that you have there, do you still see a worry about lock in from a data side?Patrick: Yeah. And it's becoming more of a concern with larger companies too, because options, #options. There was a pretty famous story a few years ago where the CEO of Target said, "I am not paying Amazon any more money," and they just picked up shop and moved from AWS to Google Cloud. And the CEO made a technical decision. It was like everybody downstream had to deal with that. And I think that luckily Target's a huge Cassandra shop and they were just like, "Okay, we'll just move it over there."But the thing is that you're right, I mean, and I love talking about this because back when cloud was first starting and I was talking about it and thinking about it, just what do the clouds promise you? Oh, you get commodity scale of CPU and network and storage. And that's what they want to sell you because that what they're building. Those big buildings in north Virginia, they are full of compute network and storage, but the thing they know they need to hook you in and the way that they're hooking you in, there's some services that are really handy, they're great, but really the hook is the data.Once you get into the database, the bespoke database for the cloud, one of the features of that database is it will not connect to any other database outside of that cloud, and they know that. I mean, and this is why I really strongly am starting to advocate this idea of this move towards data on Kubernetes is a way where open-source gets to take back the cloud. Because now we're deploying these virtual data centers and using open-source technology to create this portability. So we can use the compute network and storage, a Google, Amazon, Azure, OnPrem wherever, doesn't matter.But you need to think of like, "All right. How is that going to work?" And that's why we're like, "If you rent your Cassandra from DataStax with Astra, you can also use the open-source Cassandra as well." And if we aren't keeping you happy, you should feel totally fine with moving it to an open-source workload. And we're good with that. One way or the other, we would love for you to use a database that works for you.Jeremy: Right. And so this Stargate project that you're working on, is that the one that allows you to basically route to multiple databases?Patrick: That's the dream. Right now it just does Cassandra, but there's been some really interesting ... There's some folks coming out of the woodwork that really want to bring their database technology to Stargate. And that's what I'm encouraged by. It's an open-source project, Stargate.io, and you can contribute any of the connectors for underlying data store, but if we're using GraphQL, if you're using GRPC, if you're using REST, the underlying data store is really somewhat irrelevant in that case. You're just doing gets and puts, or gets and sets. Gets and puts, yeah, that's right. Gets, sets, puts, it's a lot of words.Jeremy: Whatever words. Yeah. Exactly.Patrick: That's what I love about standard, Jeremy, there's so many to pick from.Jeremy: Right, because there are ... Exactly, which standard do you choose? Yeah. So, because that's an interesting thing for me too, is just this idea of, I mean, it would be great to live in a perfect little cloud where you could say like, "Oh, well AWS has all the services I need. And I can just keep all my stuff there, whatever." But best of breed services, or again, the cost of hosting something in AWS maybe if you're hosting a Cassandra cluster there, versus maybe hosting it in GCP or maybe hosting it with you, you said you could host it cheaper than those could, or that we could host it ourselves.And so I do think that there is ... and again, we've had this conversation about multi-cloud and things like that where it's not about agnostic, it's not about being cloud agnostic, it's about using the best of breed for any service that you want to use. And APIs seem to be the way to get you there. So I love this idea of the Stargate project because it just seems like that's the way where it could be that standard across all these different clouds and onto all these different databases, well I mean, right now Cassandra, but eventually these other ones. I don't know, that seems like a pretty powerful project to me.Patrick: Well, the time has come. It's cloud native ... I work a lot with CNCF and cloud-native data is a kind of emerging topic. It's so emerging that I'm actually in the middle of writing a book, an O'Reilly book on it. So, yeah. Surprise. I just dropped it. This just in.Yeah, because I can see that this is going to be the future, but when we build cloud-native, cloud applications, cloud-native applications, we want scale, we want elasticity, and we want self-healing. Those are the three cloud-native things that we want. And that doesn't give us a whole lot ... So if I want to crank out a quick REACT app, that's what I'm going to use. And Netlify's a great example, or Vercel, they're creating this abstraction layer. But Netlify and Vercel are both working, they've been partnering with us on the Stargate project, because they're seeing like, "Okay, we want to have that very light touch, developers just come in and use it," in building cloud-native applications.And whenever you're building your application, you're just paying for what you use. And I think that's really key, not spinning up a bunch of infrastructure that you get a monthly bill for. And that bill can be expensive.Jeremy: It seems crazy. Doesn't it seem crazy nowadays? Actually provisioning an EC2 instance and paying for it to run even if it does nothing. That seems crazy to me.Patrick: There are start-ups around the idea of finding the instance that's running that's causing you money that you're not using.Jeremy: Which is crazy, isn't it? It's crazy. All right. So let's go a little bit more into standards, because you mentioned standards. So there are standards now for a lot of things, and again, GraphQL being a great example, I think. But also from a database perspective, looking at things like TSQL and developers come into an organization and they're familiar with MySQL, or they're familiar with PostgreSQL, whatever it is. Or maybe they're familiar with Cassandra or something like that, but I think most people, at least from what I've seen, have been very, very comfortable with the TSQL approach to getting data. So, how do you bring developers in and start teaching them or getting them to understand more of that NoSQL feel?Patrick: I think it's already happened, it's just the translation hasn't happened in a lot of minds. When you go to build an application, you're designing your application around the workflows your application's going to have. You're always thinking about like, "I click on this. I go there." I mean, this is where we wireframe out the application. At that point, your database is now involved and I don't think a lot of folks know that.It's like, at every point you need to put data or get data. And I think this is where we've taught could be anybody building applications, which makes it really difficult to be like, "No, no, no, start with your data domain first and build out all those models. And then you write your application to go against those models." And I'll tell you, I've been involved in a few of these application boot camps, like JavaScript boot camps and things, they don't go into data modeling. It's just not a part of it.Jeremy: Really?Patrick: And I think this is that thing where we have to acknowledge like, "Yeah, we don't really need that anymore as much, because we're just building applications." If I build a React app, and I have a form and I'm managing the authentication and I click a button and then I get a profile information, I just described every database interaction that I need and the objects that I need. And I'm going to put my user profile at some point, I'm going to click my ID and get that profile back as an object. Those are the interactions that I need. At no point did I say, "And then I'm going to write select from where." No, I just need to get that data.Jeremy: And I love thinking about data as objects anyways. It makes more sense, rather than rows of spreadsheets essentially that you join together, describing an object even if it's got nested data, like a document form or things like that, I think makes a ton of sense. But is SQL, is it still relevant do you think? I mean, in the world we're moving into? Should I be teaching my daughters how to write TSQL? Or would I be wasting my time?Patrick: Yeah. Well, yes and no. Depends on what your kid's doing. I think that SQL will go to where it originally started and where it will eventually end, which is in data engineering and data science. And I mean, I still use SQL every once in a while, Bigtable, that sort of thing, for exploring my data. I mean for an analytics career or reporting data and things like that, SQL is very expressive. I don't see any reason to change that. But this is a guy who's been writing SQL for a million years.But I mean, that world is still really moving. I mean, like a Presto and Snowflake and all these, Redshift, they all use Bigtable, they all use SQL to express the reporting capabilities. But ... And I think this is how you and I got sucked into this is like, well that was the database that we had, so we started using reporting languages to build applications. And how'd that work out?Jeremy: Yeah. Well, it certainly didn't scale very well, I can tell you that, going back to sharding, because that is always something that was very hard to do. So I guess, I get the point that essentially if you're going to be in the data sciences and you actually need to analyze that data and maybe you do need to do joins, or maybe you need to work with big data in a way, that's a specialized aspect of it and I think people could dabble in that if they were just regular developers and they didn't want to go too deep.But it sounds like the bigger, or the end goal here, maybe altruistic, is to just give people access to data. So even if they don't know SQL or they don't know something complex, just make it so that whatever data is there that anybody, with whatever level is, they can consume it.Patrick: Yeah. And move fast with the thing that you're building. Actually, I use a Facebook term, but Facebook does do this. Internally there's a system called Occhio that provides gets and puts for your data, but it abstracts things like geographics and things like that. But the companies that are trying to move quickly, they understood this a long time ago. If you have to reason through, "Am I doing a full table scan? Is that an efficient interjoin?" If you have to reason through that, you're not moving fast anymore.Jeremy: Right. Right. All right. Cool. All right, so let's talk about Astra a little bit more and this whole idea of, because Astra is the serverless version, the hosted version, the serverless version of Cassandra, right? Through DataStax?Patrick: Right. And ...Jeremy: Did I get that right?Patrick: You got it right. And so it gives you full access. You could do Port 9042 if you still want to use a driver, but it gives you access via GraphQL, REST, and there's also a document API. So if you just want to persist your JavaScript API or JavaScript and then pull it back out your JSON, it does full documents. So it emulates what a MongoDB or DocumenDB does. But the important thing, and this is the somewhat revolutionary side of this, and again, this is something that we're looking to put into open-source, is the serverless nature of it.You only pay for what you use. And when you want to create a Cassandra database, we don't even call it a Cassandra database on the Astra panel anymore. We just create a database. You give it a name. You click. And it's ready. And it will scale infinitely. As long as we can find some compute and network for you to use somewhere, it'll just keep scaling and that's kind of that true portion of serverless that we're really trying to make happen. And for me, that's exciting because finally, all that power that I feel like I've been hoarding for a long time is now available for so many more people.And then if you do a million writes per second for 10 minutes and then you turn it off, you only pay for that little short amount of time. And it scales back. You're not paying a persistent charge forever.Jeremy: I'm just curious from a technical implementation, because I'm thinking about PTSD or nightmares back of my days running Cassandra, and so I'm just trying to think how this works. Is it a shared tenancy model? Or is there a way to do single tenancy if you wanted that as a service?Patrick: Under the covers, yes, it is multi-tenant, but the way that we are created ... so we had to do some really interesting engineering inside. So my RCO's going to kill me if I talk about this, but hey, you know what, Jeremy? We're friends, we can do this. He's like, "Don't talk about the underlying architecture." I'm talking about the underlying architecture. The thing that we did was we took Cassandra and we decomposed it into microservices mostly. That's probably, it's still Cassandra, it's just how we run it makes it way more amenable to doing multi-tenant and scale in that fashion where the queries are separated from the storage and things that are running in the background, like if you're familiar with Cassandra because it's a log structure storage, you ask to do compactions and things like that, all that's just kind of on the side. It doesn't impact your query.But it gives us the ability to, if you create a database and all of a sudden you just hammer it with a million writes per second, there's enough infrastructure in total to cover it. And then we'll spin up more in the back to cover everything else. And then whenever you're done, we retract it back. That's how we keep our costs down. But then the storage side is separated and away from the compute side, and the storage side can scale its own way as well.And so whenever you need to store a petabyte of Cassandra data, you're just storing, you're just charged for the petabyte of storage on disk, not the thousandth of a cluster that you just created. Yeah.Jeremy: No. I love that. Thank you for explaining that though, because that is, every time I talk to somebody who's building a database or running some complex thing for a database, there's always magic. Somebody has to build some magic to make it actually work the way everyone hopes it would work. And so if anybody is listening to this and is like, "Ah, I'm just getting ready to spin up our own Cassandra ring," just think about these things because these are the really hard problems that are great to have a team of people working on that can solve this specific problem for you and abstract all of that crap away.Patrick: Yeah. Well, I mean it goes back to the Dynamo paper, and how distributed databases work, but it requires that they have a certain baseline. And they're all working together in some way. And Cassandra is a share-nothing architecture. I mean you don't have a leader note or anything like that. But like I said, because that data is spread out, you could have these little intermittent problems that you don't want to have to think about. Just leave that to somebody else. Somebody else has got a Grafana dashboard that's freaking out. Let them deal with it. But you can route around those problems really easily.Jeremy: Yeah. No, that's amazing. All right. So a couple more technical questions, because I'm always curious how some of these things work. So if somebody signs up and they set up this database and they want to connect to it, you mentioned you could use the driver, you mentioned you can use GraphQL or the REST API, or the Document API. What's the authentication method look like for that?Patrick: Yeah. So, it's a pretty standard thing with tokens. You create your access tokens, so when you create the database, you define the way that you access it with the token, and then whenever you connect to it, if you're using JavaScript, there's a couple of collection libraries that just have that as one of the environment variables.And so it's pretty standard for connecting the cloud databases now where you have your authentication token. And you can revoke that token at any time. So for instance, if you mistakenly commit that into your Git ...Jeremy: Say GitHub. We've never done that before.Patrick: No judging. You can revoke it immediately. But it also gives you our back, the controls over it's a read or write or admin, if you need to create new tables and that sort of thing. You can give that level of access to whatever that token is. So, very simple model, but then at that point, you're just interacting through a REST call or using any of the HTTP protocols or SQL protocol.Jeremy: And now, can you create multiple tokens with different levels of permission or is it all just token gives you full access?Patrick: No, it's multiple levels of protection and actually that's probably the best way to do it, for instance, if your CI/CD system, has the ability to, it should be able to create databases and tear them down, right? That would be a good use for that, but if you have, for instance, a very basic application, you just want it to be able to read and write. You don't want to change any of the underlying data structures.Jeremy: Right. Right.Patrick: That's a good layer of control, and so you can have all these layers going on one single database. But you can even have read-only access too, for ... I think that's something that's becoming more and more common now that there's reporting systems that are on the side.Jeremy: Right. Right. Good.Patrick: No, you can only read from the database.Jeremy: And what about data backups or exporting data or anything like that?Patrick: Yeah, we have a pretty rudimentary backup now, and we will probably, we're working on some more sophisticated versions of it. Data backup in Cassandra is pretty simple because it's all based on snapshots because if you know Cassandra the database, the data you write is immutable and that's a great way to start when you come to backup data. But yeah, we have a rudimentary backup system now where you have to, if you need to restore your data, you need to put in a ticket to have it restored at a certain point.I don't personally like that as much. I like the self-service model, and that's what we're working towards. And with more granularity, because with snapshots you can do things like snapshot, this is one of the things that we're working on, is doing like a snapshot of your production database and restoring it into a QA cluster. So, works for my house, oh, try it again. Yeah.Jeremy: That's awesome. No, so this is amazing. And I love this idea of just taking that pain of managing a database away from you. I love the idea of just make it simple to access the data. Don't create these complex things where people have to build more, and if people want to build a data access layer, the data access layer should maybe just be enforcing a model or something like that, and not having to figure out if you're on this shard, we route you to this particular port, or whatever. All that stuff is just insane, so yeah, I mean maybe go back to kind of the idea of this whole episode here, which is just, stop using databases. Start using these data services because they're so much easier to use. I mean, I'm sure there's concerns for some people, especially when you get to larger companies and you have all the compliance and things like that. I'm sure Astra and DataStax has all the compliance things and things like that. But yeah, just any final words, advice to people who might still be thinking databases are a good idea?Patrick: Well, I have an old 6502 on a breadboard, which I love to play with. It doesn't make it relevant. I'm sorry. That was a little catty, wasn't it?Jeremy: A little bit, but point well taken. I totally get what you're saying.Patrick: I mean, I think that it's, what do we do with the next generation? And this is one of the things, this will be the thought that I leave us with is, it's incumbent on a generation of engineers and programmers to make the next generation's job easier, right? We should always make it easier. So this is our chance. If you're currently working with database technology, this is your chance to not put that pain on the next generation, the people that will go past where you are. And so, this is how we move forward as a group.Jeremy: Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well Patrick, thank you so much for sharing all this and telling us about DataStax and Astra. So if people want to find out more about you or they want to find out more about Astra and DataStax, how do they do that?Patrick: All right. Well, plenty of ways at www.datastax.com and astra.datastax.com if you just want the good stuff. Cut the marketing, go to the good stuff, astra.datastax.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Patrick McFadin. And I'm everywhere. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, I love connecting with folks and finding out what you're working on, so please feel free. I get more messages now on LinkedIn than anything, and it's great.Jeremy: Yeah. It's been picking up a lot. I know. It's kind of crazy. Linked in has really picked up. It's ...Patrick: I'm good with it. Yeah.Jeremy: Yeah. It's ...Patrick: I'm really good with it.Jeremy: It's a little bit better format maybe. So you also have, we mentioned the Stargate project, so that's just Stargate.io. We didn't talk about the K8ssandra project. Is that how you say that?Patrick: Yeah, the K8ssandra project.Jeremy: K8ssandra? Is that how you say it?Patrick: K8ssandra. Isn't that a cute name?Jeremy: It's K-8-S-S-A-N-D-R-A.io.Patrick: Right.Jeremy: What's that again? That's the idea of moving Cassandra onto Kubernetes, right?Patrick: Yeah. It's not Cassandra on Kubernetes, it's Cassandra in Kubernetes.Jeremy: In Kubernetes. Oh.Patrick: So it's like in concert and working with how Kubernetes works. Yes. So it's using Cassandra as your default data store for Kubernetes. It's a very, actually it's another one of the projects that's just taking off. KubeCon was last week from where we're recording now, or two weeks ago, and it was just a huge hit because again, it's like, "Kubernetes makes my infrastructure to run easier, and Cassandra is hard, put those together. Hey, I like this idea."Jeremy: Awesome.Patrick: So, yeah.Jeremy: Cool. All right. Well, if anybody wants to find out about that stuff, I will put all of these links in the show notes. Thanks again, Patrick. Really appreciate it.Patrick: Great. Thanks, Jeremy.

Author and international keynote speaker, Roger is a recognized expert in the use of brain and behavior research to improve marketing, sales, customer experience and corporate culture. He has worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 firms to entrepreneurial startups to enhance their digital and conventional marketing.   As well as authoring Friction: The Untapped Force that Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, Roger has also written the best-selling Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing which has been translated into nine languages. In addition, Roger writes the popular blog Neuromarketing and a column at Forbes.com. He founded Dooley Direct, a consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website, which was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Roger served as Vice President of Digital Marketing after the acquisition.   Roger's new book takes you step-by-step through the process of: Empowering frank conversations Guiding individual and team behaviors Getting ahead of friction Optimizing the customer experience Building a frictionless corporate culture Combining scientific research with real-life examples of leaders who have conquered business friction, Roger shares with us his thoughts on how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change. Sponsor/Partnership: Blooom – Your 401k could earn more. Take a minute to link up your 401k to and maximize your investments. For $10/ month, we manage your nest egg so you can enjoy life.

Further democratizing Apache Cassandra, DataStax (https://www.datastax.com) has announced a serverless option for Cassandra via DataStax Astra, its Cassandra-as-a-Service offering. “You can now deploy Cassandra without having to think about capacity,” said Patrick McFadin, VP, Developer Relations at DataStax. “It’s a huge shift for Cassandra as developers don’t have to worry about over-provisioning their capacity, which will have a direct impact on what they are going to pay for that capacity. Now in a pure serverless fashion, they can pay what they use.” In this episode of TFiR Insights, we dug deeper into this announcement. Here are some of the topics we discussed: • What is serverless Astra? • Why did DataStax feel a need to offer this now? • How is it more about giving developers greater control over what they pay? • What are the direct benefits for developers? • The evolution of DataStax Astra over time? • Discussion on Apache Cassandra, the heart and soul of Astra. Patrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of Apache Cassandra successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.

Ahead of the Choice Music Prize 2021, Jim Carroll who chairs the judging panel and co-founded the event discusses the purpose and the track record of Choice. He addresses some topics in this episode that he probably hasn't dealt with elsewhere e.g. does he get paid for working on Choice and do the acts who perform at the event get paid. Ben McCormack has begun a petition to introduce a full week of Irish only music on radio stations in the Republic. He discusses why he started it and what he hopes to achieve. 

On average, 85% of high school students graduate within four years in the U.S. However, the average for white public high school students (89%) was 10% higher than the average for Black and Latino students (79%) in the 2017–18 school year. In this episode, we speak with Howard Bell, the CEO of Abl Schools. Abl is an education software company that is aiming to improve education equity across districts. Abl focuses on understanding student access and enrollment in courses, and the distribution of teacher load, through a master schedule. Howard previously held leadership positions in the education sector, including at Hobsons, Study Group, Kaplan, and Scholastic.  "The key is to not let biases become unchecked in the educational process, because that's when systemic barriers come into play," says Howard. "We are here to help illustrate all the imbalances present in school systems, so that you can understand from an equity perspective which student groups are getting access to rigorous courses necessary for college eligibility."

This week Martin & Steve are joined by long time friends Janice & Wayne Dunne, aka The Irish Beer Snobs, to chat lockdown in Ireland, human nature and festival-going Beers | Oakham ‘JHB’, Hobsons ‘Postman’s Knock’, Sambrook’s ‘Battersea Rye’, Tyne Bank ‘Silver Dollar’, Titanic ‘Stout’ & Bedlam ‘Phoenix’ Hopinions | Would you go to a beer festival […]

Joe was joined by Edward & Kyle from Perfectparachutepicture on Hobson's Choice this week talking about their brand new single, the journey the guys have been on so far plus what would they put in Room 101.

Trick question of the week: What’s in the future of developer relations, especially after covid-19?  The pandemic forced all companies to shift strategies mid-Q1. But how does this affect developer relations? Events, the cause burnouts for many developer marketing, relations, advocates and evangelists are currently out of the mix. So is the opportunity for reaching developers, 1-on-1, face-to-face. Software has come to cover this hole by many applications. What does the future hold and how can we connect to developers when we can’t reach them in person? Patrick McFadin, VP of DataStax joins us in this episode to discuss connecting with developers in the COVID-era and post-COVID-era, open source and the challenges developer relations professionals face. In this episode, we introduce the “Let’s talk Data” section where we pick one graph from the DevRelx Trends page and analyze the results. Patrick's pick for this week:  programming language communities and growth (https://www.devrelx.com/trends?lightbox=dataItem-k9mq59cz1?utm_source=PodcastDescription&utm_medium=PatrickMcFadin&utm_campaign=Desctiption) . Patrick McFadin is the Vice President of Developer Relations at DataStax. He is one of the leading experts of Apache Cassandra and data modeling techniques and has helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.

Read the complete transcript on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. [EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Sales Game Changers Panel Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on April 8, 2020. It featured sales leaders Paul McConville from Hobsons and Dorean Kass from Neustar.] Watch the webinar here. Listen to Paul McConville’s Podcast . Listen to Dorean Kass’ Podcast. MAJOR TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The big thing for us (Neustar) and the focus for us is maintaining the connection between the team, the individual contributors, the management, the support organizations and the other components of the functional team.“

Your browser does not support the audio element. Click the Title to Play or DownloadInterview with Howard Bell, Senior Vice President of Higher Education Student Success and the General Manager of Starfish at Hobsons. We discuss their Starfish Enterprise Success Platform including Early Alert, Connect, and Degree Planner, and how it helps scale student support initiatives in a way that enables students to engage with the campus community and achieve their academic goals. We also discuss:Howard BellSVP HobsonsInterface with the LMS and SISAutomatic flags and progress surveysPredictive analytics frameworkStudent points of contactNew Degree Planner featuresPartnering with student networksMeasuring return on investmentLinks to Related PodcastsRPP #101: Starfish Retention Solutions: Interview with David Yaskin (March 2012)RPP #158: StudyTree - Interview with Ethan KeiserRPP #159: AEFIS - Interview with Mustafa SualpPodsafe Music Selection "Run" from the new age piano album "Lines Build Walls" by Ehren StarksDuration: 38:58

Author and international keynote speaker, Roger is a recognized expert in the use of brain and behavior research to improve marketing, sales, customer experience and corporate culture. He has worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 firms to entrepreneurial startups to enhance their digital and conventional marketing.   As well as authoring Friction: The Untapped Force that Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, Roger has also written the best-selling Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing which has been translated into nine languages. In addition, Roger writes the popular blog Neuromarketing and a column at Forbes.com. He founded Dooley Direct, a consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website, which was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Roger served as Vice President of Digital Marketing after the acquisition.   Roger's new book takes you step-by-step through the process of: Empowering frank conversations Guiding individual and team behaviors Getting ahead of friction Optimizing the customer experience Building a frictionless corporate culture Combining scientific research with real-life examples of leaders who have conquered business friction, Roger shares with us his thoughts on how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change. Sponsor/Partnership: Blooom – Your 401k could earn more. Take a minute to link up your 401k to and maximize your investments. For $10/ month, we manage your nest egg so you can enjoy life.

Life in a modern, interconnected world has delivered miraculous advances in communications, technology and trade. It is also becoming widely acknowledged that the last few decades of globalised commerce and finance has, by design, transferred large amounts of power and profit out of small communities, towards distant and unaccountable actors, while the waste generated in manufacture and transport of goods has accumulated among the most undeserving of areas. The Circular Economy proposes an alternative to the current model of global trade, which funnels money out of communities, by keeping as many transactions within the local community as possible. Dr Kersty Hobson's latest paper makes the case that theories of circular economics would benefit from incorporating a better understanding of the psychology of ownership. Read more about Dr Hobsons work through her Cardiff University staff page.The original research is available here.

Naviance by Hobsons is a comprehensive K-12 college and career readiness platform that enables self-discovery, career exploration, academic planning, and college preparation for millions of students across all ages and around the globe. How important is this for your high school student? Aaron, Alex and Emma dig into the details. During each episode, Aaron Greene, Founder and CEO at College Liftoff, and his staff of counselors help students and families reduce the cost of higher education, navigate the application process, and make well-rounded decisions by evaluating the modern metrics of education. College Liftoff emerged from Aaron's desire to help students learn to treat education like an investment, accounting for the career, academic, and financial factors that shape this decision. He has also forged a debt control calculation to set student loan debt limits for each student. College Liftoff opened its first office in Columbus, Ohio in May 2009. https://www.collegeliftoff.com (College Lift Off) - https://www.collegeliftoff.com https://facebook.com/collegeliftoff (Facebook) - @collegeliftoff https://youtube.com/collegeliftoff (YouTube) - https://youtube.com/collegeliftoff https://twitter.com/collegeliftoff (Twitter) - @collegeliftoff Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. http://www.subscribeonandroid.com/ (Android user)? http://www.subscribeonandroid.com HELP US SPREAD THE WORD! We'd love it if you could please share this podcast with your social media friends!  If you liked this episode, please leave us a rating and a review in your podcast player.

Welcome to episode #685 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #685 - Host: Mitch Joel. Simply put: Roger Dooley is a really nice human being. His latest book is Friction - The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage. Prior to that he authored, Brainfluence - 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing  and The Persuasion Slide. He writes at Neuromarketing, and is columnist for Forbes. Roger is the founder of Dooley Direct and co-founded College Confidential, a leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, where he served as VP Digital Marketing after the acquisition. Roger also spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm and also was director of corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. In this episode we break down the power of removing friction for business (and why it's so critical). Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 48:50. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Roger Dooley. Friction - The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage. Brainfluence - 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing. The Persuasion Slide. Neuromarketing. Follow Roger on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

In this episode we talk with Roger Dooley about his entrepreneurial journey & the writing of his books Friction & Brainfluence. Roger Dooley is an author and international keynote speaker. His books include Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage (McGraw Hill, April 26, 2019) and Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing. He writes the popular blog Neuromarketing and a column at Forbes.com. He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Dooley served as VP Digital Marketing after the acquisition.Dooley spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm and also was director of corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. He has an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee.Roger chats with Adrian Brady-Cesana and the CXNation on the CXChronicles Podcast about the 4 CX Pillars and how to eliminate friction from your customer experience & customer journey. Support the show (https://cxchronicles.com/)

 Roger Dooley explains how your business can run smoothly and more powerfully! I brought Roger Dooley back to our podcast because he is publishing his next book, Friction: The Untapped Force that Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, which might just be your next “must read." Think about it: In 2016, $4.6 trillion of merchandise was left in abandoned e-commerce shopping carts. Every year, the U.S. economy loses $3 trillion in productivity due to excess bureaucracy. Red tape and over-complicated licenses have enabled China’s GDP to exceed India’s by $82 trillion in just three decades. According to Roger, these statistics illustrate the real and growing threat of “friction,” which he defines as the unnecessary expenditure of time, effort or money in performing a task. There's so much we can learn from him...be sure to listen in! By understanding the impact "friction" can have, you can establish positive habits and eliminate negative ones. We actually were speaking with a client recently who is transforming his own multi-cultural company to reduce the “friction” that was absorbing time and undermining his effectiveness—exactly what Roger is talking about. This friction is all around us. The question that Roger and I discuss is how to "lubricate" its edges so business can run smoothly. In today's high-speed, customer-empowered world, the levels of swiftness and efficiency of business transactions will determine ultimate success or failure. In our conversation and in his groundbreaking new book, Roger helps you spot the inevitable points of friction in your organization, then provides the tools and insight you need to eliminate them and lead your company to industry dominance.  Roger's new book takes you step-by-step through the process of: Empowering frank conversations Guiding individual and team behaviors Getting ahead of friction Optimizing the customer experience Building a frictionless corporate culture Combining scientific research with real-life examples of leaders who have conquered business friction, Roger teaches us how to identify roadblocks, alter them for the benefit of both business and customer, and create positive, lasting change. As culture change experts, this is right in our wheelhouse. If you’re in a leadership position, now is the time to declare war on friction—before your competitors do. Stamp out ridiculous rules, pointless procedures and meaningless meetings. Instead, become a relentless advocate for the customer and for minimizing customer effort. Lubricate every point of friction and make your company run like a well-oiled machine. Background on Roger An author and international keynote speaker, Roger Dooley is a recognized expert in the use of brain and behavior research to improve marketing, sales, customer experience and corporate culture. He has worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 firms to entrepreneurial startups to enhance their digital and conventional marketing. As well as authoring Friction: The Untapped Force that Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, Roger has also written the best-selling Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing which has been translated into nine languages. In addition, Roger writes the popular blog Neuromarketing and a column at Forbes.com. He founded Dooley Direct, a consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website, which was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Roger served as Vice President of Digital Marketing after the acquisition. 4 more podcasts on neuromarketing you might enjoy: Roger Dooley—Neuromarketing Made Easy Ask Andi series—Why Companies Have Got To Change Or They Will Not Thrive Holly Green—Tapping Into Your Brain to Build Better Relationships Alex Vorobieff—How To Replace Chaos With Clarity By Realigning Your Business Additional resources: Roger's books: Friction: The Untapped Force that Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage and Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing Roger's blog and Forbes column My book: "On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights" Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants    Download the 1-page synopsis of my book, "On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights" here

How do you balance the old with the new? For product companies, knowing your audience and continually evaluating your portfolio is key to driving value for your users. This week on Better Product, we are talking with Amy Reitz (@AmyReitz), General Manager of the Intersect™ product line at Hobsons, which offers a recruitment optimization platform for higher ed admissions offices. On this episode, you’ll hear why Hobsons was forced to take a step back because their portfolio, made up of more than 80 products, was in conflict - the story no longer made sense. Going beyond the financial drivers for scaling down their product line, Amy shares how the team reexamined its vision and mission to differentiate in the marketplace. Find out how Amy and her team decided which products to keep, which ones to retire, and why.   Connect with Amy Learn more about Hobsons Connect with Christian Connect with Anna Learn more about Innovatemap

Ashish Rangnekar is the CEO and Co-Founder of BenchPrep, a SaaS learning platform for education and training companies to create and deliver personalized digital learning programs across multiple devices. They have helped millions of people all around the world learn better and faster by leveraging the power of technology. The world’s leading education organizations, including ACT, Hobsons, McGraw Hill Education, HR Certification Institute, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Cliffsnotes use BenchPrep to help learners improve outcomes. The company has raised more than $22M in venture capital funding from industry leading investors including New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Jump Capital, Revolution Ventures and Lightbank. Ashish is interviewed by Paul Lee, Founder and General Partner of Builders VC, a $200M early stage venture fund, and formerly a General Partner at Lightbank, an early investor in BenchPrep.  

Patrick McFadin is the VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, where he leads a team devoted to making users of DataStax products successful. He has also worked as Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra and consultant for DataStax, where he helped build some of the largest and exciting deployments in production. Previous to DataStax, he was Chief Architect at Hobsons and an Oracle DBA/Developer for over 15 years.

Mehr Conversion durch mehr Produkte? Nein! In dieser Folge verraten Felix Hoffmockel und Malte Helmhold wie online Shops und Salespages wirkungsvoll ihre Conversion Rate durch den Hobsons+1 (Hobson) Choice Effekt steigern können. Viel Erfekt als perfekte Marketing-Ergänzung mit dem Hobson +1 Choice Effekt.

Read the complete transcript on The Sales Game Changers Podcast web site. JACK'S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: "Be proud of your profession.You bring solutions to bear that solve real problems that matter to many, and that should matter to you. I don't care what the product is, if it's a solution that actually solves a problem, that helps people...you're doing good. Be confident in what you do and have that confidence and pride be exemplified in the work and the product that you produce day in and day out." Jack Dilanian is the chief commercial officer with Interfolio in Washington DC. Jack has held senior sales leadership positions in companies such as Blackboard, Intelliworks and Hobsons.

Learn about Paul McConville's journey to become a hugly successful sales leader on the Sales Game Changers Podcast! Check out the complete transcript of this podcast here. Paul McConville is a leader in SaaS and analytics businesses. He is SVP of Sales and Account Management at Hobsons with global responsibility for the success of their 12,000+ K-12 and higher education clients. He was previously Chief Officer at Jornaya, a Comcast Ventures and Edison Partners backed consumer analytics business. He spent 10 years at TARGUSinfo and led sales and marketing prior to the acquisition by Neustar for $657MM. He is the father of 3 daughters and husband to a wonderful wife. When not competing in business, he competes in tennis and basketball.

From the ASU+GSV Summit, this special edition of To A Degree explores solutions for student success with Michele Johnson, chancellor & CEO of Pierce College District; Rick Miranda, provost and executive vice president at Colorado State University; Ellen Wagner, vice president of research at Hobsons; and Gates Bryant, partner at Tyton Partners.

Greg Greenlee (http://codemonkey.fm/guests/greg-greenlee), DevOps Engineer at Hobsons, an education SaaS company, discusses followup on Java's Jigsaw, IoT security threats, and Microsoft announces Windows 10's bash will get Fedora and SuSE support and Visual Studio for Mac. Greg also shares with us his experience founding his professional platform for people of color called Blacks In Technology. Credits Opening Music: Another beek beep beer please (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/gigs_n_contest/rolemusic_-_gigs_n_contest_-_03_Another_beek_beep_beer_please) by Rolemusic (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rolemusic/) Special Guest: Greg Greenlee.

The relationship between what you study in college vs. what you stand to make when you graduate, may not be as obvious as you think. Listen to this excerpt from Tony Carnevale of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. He also addresses the growing divide at some of America's most prestigious colleges. This is an edited version pulled from episode 7 of Upgraded by Hobsons.

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski has been recognized by TIME magazine as 1 of the 100 most influential people in the world, as well as 1 of 10 of the best college presidents in America. So, needless to say, he has some pretty clear & inspiring ideas on how to best move education forward. In this excerpt, he talks about how graduation rates have changed over time, what we need to do now to help more minorities get into college, and the power of our thoughts. This is an edited version pulled from episode 7 of Upgraded by Hobsons.

Episode 067: Roger Dooley – How To Persuade And Convince Others With Neuromarketing This episode was absolutely packed full of action oriented takeaways to help us all gain a better understanding of how our brain works to process information.  It was an extremely interesting talk on a topic that fascinates me. Roger Dooley is a speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes. He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Dooley served as VP Digital Marketing and continues in a consulting role. Episode 067: Roger Dooley – How To Persuade And Convince Others With Neuromarketing Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher Radio   The Learning Leader Show “According to leading neuroscientists, 95% of all thoughts, emotions, and learning occur before we are ever aware of it.” Some Questions I Ask: What one common characteristic do all high achievers leaders share? How can someone ease the pain of high prices? What are your thoughts on “high price = high value object?” Why is it smarter to share a cup of coffee with someone as opposed to a cold beverage? Why is oxytocin so important? What is The Persuasion Slide Model?  How can it help people in their everyday lives? In This Episode, You Will Learn: The power of focus and why it’s so important How certain phrases or word choices can manipulate you Why it’s important to think of the other person in the conversation A deep dive in persuasion and why it must be ethical How it can help to briefly touch someone’s shoulder   Great qualities for leaders: Humility and having an open mind  “I work to translate the findings from neuroscience into actionable advice.” Continue Learning Read:  Brainfluence: 100 Ways To Persuade And Convince Consumers With Neuromarketing Go To: www.RogerDolley.com    Follow Roger on Twitter: @rogerdooley You may also like these episodes: Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector With Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks Episode 002: How To Take Over And Set Bigger Goals With Chris Brogan Episode 004: How Todd Wagner (and Mark Cuban) Sold Broadcast.com To Yahoo! For $5.7 Billion Episode 010: Shane Snow – How To Accelerate Success Using Smart Cuts Did you enjoy the podcast? This was a jam packed episode full of great content.  Roger Dooley is leader who is constantly learning in order to help us all live a better life.  Who do you know that needs to hear this?  Send them to The Learning Leader Show! Episode edited by the great J Scott Donnell Bio From RogerDooley.com   Roger Dooley is a speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes. He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Dooley served as VP Digital Marketing and continues in a consulting role. Dooley spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm and also was director of corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. He has an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee.

This week Stephen sounds depressed, and a little bit angry, confusion reins whilst Roland tries to make the world a better place

About the Author: Mr. Hobbs (Mark Hobson) is from Lincoln, NE, where he competed on the University of Nebraska men's gymnastics team. Following graduation, he coached club level children's gymnastics, where he discovered their love for stories. The name "Mr. Hobbs" comes from a stuffed frog that Mr. Hobson played with as a child at his grandmother's hosue. Mr. Hobbs now resides in a place of honor in the author's home. Mr. Hobson currently lives in Omaha, NE. with his wife Ann and their youngest daughter, Sarah, who paints beautiful pictures with her music. He enjoys continuing to share his love of stories with all ages. About the Illustrator: Molly Hobson studied art education at the University of Nebraska where she developed her talent for interpreting children's stories through her illustrations. This is her second book collaboration with her dad, Mark Hobson, and she is currently working on her own writing projects. Ms. Hobson enjoys creating beautiful images that encourage children to both follow and never give up on their dreams.

Cincinnati Business Talk highlights the positive side of Cincinnati area businesses. We will be talking to CEOs who have won awards or who examplary. Today's guest is Craig Heldman, CEO of Hobsons.  Craig joined Hobsons in 1995.  As CEO, Craig has learned that a company’s people and culture are critical to success. This is why Craig defines Hobsons’ culture of collaboration and passion for education as “the engine driving Hobsons’ business.” He is also an active participant in a number of industry organizations, including the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRO), National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), Association of International Educators (NAFSA), and Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), where he holds a position on the Corporate & Philanthropic Council. Prior to joining Hobsons, Craig held a variety of sales management positions at Procter & Gamble USA. Hobsons is an education solutions company dedicated to helping educators, administrators, students, and families maximize success through every stage of the learning lifecycle. Our solutions serve millions of students across more than 7,500 schools, colleges, and universities worldwide. The show aired live at 4 PM on Friday December 14th at 4PM.  Listen to this link: http://tobtr.com/s/4111433 You can listen to the show on Apple iTunes as a Podcast. You can add the podcast at:   http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Cincy-Business-talk.rss You can add Cincy-Business-Talk as an RSS feed to your Outlook email program. The exact feed http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Cincy-Business-talk.rss

Our monthly podcast is all about great radio production and the people who make it. This month meet Jardin Lobo, Tim Johns and Simon Rushton and hear their work. The podcast is sponsored by Hobsons.

Left to right: David Couch, Chris Nicoll, Joe Thomas, Jonathan from Hobsons, James Stodd, James Cridland and Donna from Hobsons. In December’s hot-rocking, flame-throwing podcast, some of the loveliest people in UK radio production play their favourite audio of the year. Now that’s a format. They are: David Couch of Maple Street Studios, Chris Nicoll […]