Podcasts about pj it

The level of antisocial behaviour in the general area of MacCurtain Street is far to high, according to Cllr Joe Kavanagh, he tells PJ It has become a focal point for on street drinking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jen Hogan tells PJ It would cost nearly 55 thousand euro to employ someone to carry out the work of a stay-at-home parent Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to Artbeat Radio!  Today we hear CECA's Star Club! Listen in as CECA shares about how to throw the best Halloween party! Many students participated in the creation of this podcast. Below are the following with media consent.  Andy, Mila, Maria D, Maria G, Johnny, Satchel, Michael, Harry, Jenny, Nanako, Jesus, Juliet, Kyuta, Drea, and PJ.   Thanks for listening and tune in next time! For more information about our organization, please visit our website www.ableartswork.org   Audio Transcription: (Please listen on Podomatic or Spotify to view the full transcript) *Intro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  Music, stories, and more! You're listening to Artbeat Radio, a program of Able ARTS Work.  ALL: Welcome to CECA's Star Club. Jenny: With ArtBeat Radio.  Halloween music intro starts with Jesus' scary laugh.    Mollie: Based on that spooky soundtrack, can you guess what holiday is coming up on October 31st? Jenny & PJ: It's Halloween! Mollie: It's Halloween! Exactly.     Halloween piece composed by Drea on acoustic guitar, keyboard, and Soundtrap loops plays.   Mollie: Today, our experts will tell you how to throw the best Halloween party you've ever been to.   PJ: Now there's a few things you'll need.   Jenny & PJ: Venue, guest list, decorations, activities, food, DJ.  Jenny: Let's get into it! Firstly, you need a venue with enough space to move around. For our example, we will be hypothetically throwing the best party ever right here at CECA.   Mollie: So, what are some good recommendations for a venue, DJ PJ?  PJ: Burgers and burritos.  Mollie: A venue? Not a menu, a venue! Laughs. Why you! So for a venue, do you think maybe a house?  PJ: Yes.   Mollie: A family member's house?  PJ: Yes.   Mollie: A park?  Organ music begins played in a minor key.   PJ: Yes.   Mollie: A bowling alley?  PJ: No.   Mollie: Oh, okay, what about the beach?  PJ: No.  Mollie: Not the beach either?  PJ: No.   Mollie: Okay, so just a house or a park.   PJ: Yeah.   Mollie: Alright. You heard it here first, folks. A house or a park is the ideal venue.   Mollie: Now who to invite? HOW to invite them? Call your friends and family!  PJ: Send out invitations to all the programs: EPI, San Diego, Art Center, and Long Beach. Maybe send out secret invisible invitations!  Jenny: The place has to look FANTASTIC if you are inviting all your favorite people! We would suggest your Halloween party has…  Jenny: …Halloween lights,   PJ: …a spooky graveyard,   PJ: 5 spiders, spider webs,   Jenny & PJ: orange and black streamers,   Jenny: …2 eye balls,  PJ: 4 monsters, and a   Jenny & PJ: …fog machine.  Jenny: Every good party needs some action! That's why at CECA, we would have a costume contest, pumpkin carving, dance party, a haunted house, and spooky movie showings!   Jenny & PJ: Try to guess these famous films by the popular song. We would watch films like…  Theme song sequence plays. Everyone at CECA played their part.   Jenny: The Addams Family  ALL:  Day-o, day-o,  daylight comes and I wanna go home.  Day-isa-day-isa-day-isa-day-isa-day-isa-day-o.  Daylight come and I wanna go home  Jenny: Beetlejuice  ALL:  When there's something strange  in the neighborhood Who you gonna call?  Ghostbusters! If there's something weird,  and it don't look good.  Who you gonna call?  Ghostbusters?  Jenny: Ghostbusters  ALL:  I put a spell on you And now you're mine You can't stop the things I do I ain't lying  It's been three hundred years Right down to the day Now the witch is back And there's hell to pay  I put a spell on you And now you're mine!  I put a spell on you And now you're gone Gone, gone, gone so long   My whammy fell on you And it was strong So strong, so strong, so strong!  Your wretched little lives Have all been cursed 'Cause of all the witches working I'm the worst  I put a spell on you And now you're mine  I put a spell on you And now you're mine  Jenny: Hocus Pocus  Jenny: It sounds like the place is decked out! Won't people get hungry doing so much fun stuff?  Organ music plays in a minor key.  JQ: Oh yes!  PJ: We recommend serving…   Jenny: Eyeball cupcakes, chocolate dirt cups with gummy worms, spooky punch with Hawaiian punch, eyeballs, gummy worms, gummy brains, dry ice, and 5 gummy ghosts in a witch's cauldron.  Mollie : Wow, that sounds like the deliciousness of that food would only be enhanced by creepy music! Be sure to secure a DJ to create the perfect frightening atmosphere. For our party, we would hire DJ PJ and DJ Michael.   Intro to CECA's rendition of “Thriller” by Michael Jackson plays.   Jenny: This is our rendition of “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.  CECA's rendition of “Thriller” by Michael Jackson continues to play.   ALL:  It's close to midnight Something evil's lurking in the dark Under the moonlight You see a sight that almost stops your heart You try to scream But terror takes the sound before you make it You start to freeze As horror looks you right between the eyes You're paralyzed  'Cause this is thriller, thriller night And no one's gonna save you From the beast about to strike You know it's thriller, thriller night You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller, ow  You hear the door slam And realize there's nowhere left to run You feel the cold hand And wonder if you'll ever see the sun You close your eyes And hope that this is just imagination (Girl) But all the while You hear a creature creepin' up behind You're out of time  'Cause this is thriller, thriller night And no one's gonna save you From the beast about to strike You know it's thriller, thriller night You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller, ow  Halloween music with organ and sounds of dogs barking and cats purring plays.  Mollie: Now not everything has to be in theme with Halloween. Our resident DJs recommend any music that gets people up and dancing! They prefer rap music like…  PJ: Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Biggie, and Wiz Khalifa…  Mollie: and Latin music like…  PJ: Selena, Ricky Martin, and banda music. It is important to note the Cha Cha slide and Cupid shuffle are undeniable American classics.    Lines from “Cha Cha Slide” and “Cupid Shuffle” play on organ.  Organ music continues in a minor key.  Mollie: We would recommend non-scary foods like candy, cake, Tres leches, chicken fingers, French fries, tacos with mole, coke, pizza with pepperoni, and rice.  PJ: Oh, yes!  Mollie: Jenny do you know what you are going to dress up as for Halloween?  Jenny: A cow.  Mollie: Ooo! Excellent!  Mollie: And PJ what will you be for Halloween?  PJ: I wanna be, like… I was SpongeBob last year.   Mollie: And will you be SpongeBob again this year?  PJ: I need to go buy a new costume.   Mollie: And where are you going to buy a new costume?  PJ: Grocer—Ah! I was about to say grocery store.   Mollie: laughs Don't buy your Halloween costume from a grocery store!  PJ: No!  Mollie: You're going to be dressed as a potato sack!  PJ: Target is better to buy Halloween costumes.   Mollie: Right on. On that note, we hope you have a great Halloween! See you next time with CECA's Star Club on   Jenny: ArtBeat Radio!  Instrumental guitar piece plays composed by virtual class.  *Outro music by Artbeat Radio staff*  We hope you enjoyed this episode of Artbeat Radio. For more information, please go to our website. Ableartswork.org. Thanks for listening and tune in next time! 

Description Today with CECA's Star Club, we are making enchiladas! Please enjoy the original Latin-inspired music and follow along with our audio instructions on Spotify or with the audio and video on YouTube. Many students at CECA were involved in the virtual making of the enchiladas and accompanying music with vocals featuring Jesus, DJ PJ, Maria, and Satchel. Enjoy this tasty episode.   *0:00-0:26 Energetic original Latin music plays in the background*Voice: Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.All: Welcome to CECA's Star Club on Art Beat Radio! Mollie: Today with CECA's Star Club, we will be making enchiladas. So, follow along with the audio or video.  *0:36-4:28 Enchilada recipe song*Jesus: Yeehaw. Mollie: Have you made enchiladas, Maria?Maria: No!PJ: Preheat the oven to 395.Jesus: Dice 5 tomatoes.PJ: Cook on medium heat for 5 minutes.Mollie: Stir, stir, stir the tomatoes.PJ: Add half a cup of diced onion.PJ: A tablespoon of--Jesus: Garlic.PJ: Quarter cup of oil. A tablespoon of the following…PJ & Jesus: Tomato paste, pepper--Jesus: Cumin, paprika, oregano--PJ, Maria, Jesus: CayennePJ: A teaspoon of sugar, salt, and--PJ & Maria: chili powder.PJ: Mix mix in the spices.PJ: Add a cup of --Jesus: --agua and simmer--PJ: --for 10 minutesPJ: Cool and puree.PJ and Jesus: One, two, three!Mollie: Boil the following in 4 cups of water...Satchel: Chicken, chicken--Satchel, PJ, & Maria: Chicken!Mollie: Half a cup onions, quarter cup cilantro, one tablespoon pepper, one tablespoon garlic, one teaspoon salt. Mix it. Bring to a boil, and place on the lid.Jesus: Boil for 20 minutes.Maria: VocalizesMollie: Shred the cheese and chicken. Add a spoon of sauce to the chicken and mix. Add mozzarella cheese and red onions and cheddar cheese. Grab a tortilla, put the chicken in, then the cheese, and onions, roll. Add sauce to the tray, place the enchiladas in the tray. Make about 5 or 6. Maria: Yes!Mollie: Add sauce on top; sprinkle cheese on top; then bake at 392 degrees Fahrenheit-- Jesus: Hot hot hot!Mollie: --for 15 minutes. Jesus: Ha ha.Mollie: Take out of the oven, then turn off the oven. Enjoy.Anonymous: VocalizesMollie: Tomato paste, and a bunch of different spices, but we need to add--PJ: Tomato paste.Mollie: What did you say?PJ: It's tomato paste.Mollie: Oh, not tomato?Pj: No, why you! Tomato. Mollie: We hope you enjoyed our enchilada audio or video as you followed along making your own delicious enchilada. Please enjoy this next enchilada song as you eat your first bite of your enchilada *4:44-5:27 enchilada song plays*Satchel: Enchilada, yum.  Mollie: Thank you, and we'll see you next time at CECA's Star Club with ArtBeatRadio. Click here to WATCH "An Enchilada Recipe" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8PwCXC6v_0 

Ashok Rajan, director of the board at Lister Digital and cycling enthusiast, gives commentary on how personalization strategies are more about human connection than technology. He shares a profound customer experience that shaped him, and stresses the importance of "data for purpose." *Hosted by Dave Goldstein and PJ Bruno LIVE at LTR 2019*       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to another episode of Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. We're back again with another episode of our humanity series. Our guest today, Ashok Rajan, president of Lister Digital. Ashok, thanks so much for being here.   [0:00:33] Ashok Rajan: Hey, thanks for having me here PJ and Dave. Very excited to be in this conference. Again, longterm relationships man, it's awesome.   [0:00:41] PJ: Let's build them. Let's expand them.   [0:00:43] Ashok Rajan: Let's build them. Let's expand them. And it's about the human experience. I don't see, again I am just free flowing here, that even as I see them live in the conference, it's very exciting. Because you guys are ... I was here last year, felt the same vibe. And it's been more, and because this is what we do as well. Like hey, we deeply care about the customer experience. We're not just sitting in thinking, "Hey, what's the channel?" And so on. You want to treat them like humans. Hey, it's another human that I'm trying to influence to do something. And then I feel like, "Hey, that's the vibe that I sense in the conference. It's very exciting to be here. So thank you.   [0:01:17] PJ: Exactly. And speaking of humans, Ashok and I are with a pretty rad human in my eyes here. And this-   [0:01:23] Dave Goldstein: Here I am again.   [0:01:24] PJ: Our good buddy Dave Goldstein, head of Global Solutions Alliance at Braze. Dave, love you.   [0:01:29] Dave Goldstein: Love to be a part of this.   [0:01:32] Ashok Rajan: [crosstalk] Dave is my cycling brother. We're from the brotherhood of cyclers.   [0:01:36] Dave Goldstein: That's right, that's right.   [0:01:38] Ashok Rajan: I love it man.   [0:01:38] Dave Goldstein: Strong legs in this podcast booth, watch out.   [0:01:40] PJ: If you guys saw the quads I was looking at right now.   [0:01:44] Dave Goldstein: Thousands of miles among us.   [0:01:46] Ashok Rajan: That's right. It's in my to do list to write a LinkedIn article on Zen and the art of cycling, because I think that tells you a lot of a life. Hey, you need to put a lot of effort to climb up the hill, but then no one can take me the love that you feel, the endorphins that you feel when you come downhill man. But you got to work hard. You got to work hard to go up that hill.   [0:02:06] PJ: Why don't you take us back now, Ashok, about 30, 35 years where it all started?   [0:02:13] Ashok Rajan: Absolutely. So now the age part comes in. So I feel young Dave, so thank you for your friendship, and you make me feel young. But now that he mentioned 35 years. I think it's interesting because the background, my background, is that I actually started before the internet. So now, or what was called is the worldwide web, and in client server technology. So client server technology which was used to, again, do a lot of interactions and how to make them easy. I feel life changed when I attended the Windows 95 release in Long Beach. I think I was about three or four years into my work life at that point. But as I was trying to share the story with you, it was a lot of ... I have this principle FSOGSD. Figure stuff out, get stuff done. So the lot of the ... I consider myself a child of the internet, and I had to figure a lot of things out. So one of the first things I would like to share is first piece of code I wrote that actually went live on the web. It was a program called [bannerad.exe 00:03:22]. That's what I called it, but hey, all it had to do was change the banner based on cookie values. So personalize the banner that was being showed. This is 1995. At that point it was Netscape, I think it's called Netscape Commerce Server or something. And then we went live on the web. So we kept building. The goal, I feel, was always how to personalize the experience. How to personalize the experience based on someone's interests. And so we were collecting information, right? So we're collecting all this information on people's interests, but then we're trying to say, "Hey, how can I change the web experience as they land on the web and they move on?" And then over time, I'll keep my background brief, but I was lucky enough to be part of two companies that were acquired. Great teams, a great group of people. First was 2000, I joined this company called Digital Impact, which was 2000 to 2005, Forrester rated top company for email and digital marketing. Then it was acquired by Axiom. And then I joined Responsys in 2010 which was acquired by Oracle. And these were great experiences for me because, again, even I heard this in the conference today, it's sort of exciting to me. "Hey, some of these things we worked on like in 2001, 2002, I was already building recommendation engines."   [0:04:42] Dave Goldstein: What's old is new again.   [0:04:43] Ashok Rajan: What's old is new again. Like hey, some of these concepts, sometimes I laugh. And like, "You guys are talking about stuff." Then I feel like your old guy. Then I feel like the old guy.   [0:04:53] Dave Goldstein: Go back to my bannerad.exe days, right?   [0:04:57] Ashok Rajan: That's right man, that's right. Or even these, some of the challenges that I heard some of the speakers talk about. And these are real companies. So hey, love your speakers in the conference because these are real experiences. They are talking about real world problems. And the challenge hasn't changed, that how do I get data, how do I move these things around? How do I make the optimal decision? And sometimes I feel that, over time as I've observed this, things have changed. Before, there was a time point in time, and I think it will come back in vogue again like bell-bottoms or something. And thankfully I didn't wear them, but I have older siblings that did.   [0:05:39] PJ: It always comes back.   [0:05:39] Ashok Rajan: Older siblings, I've seen them do that. I'm like, "What is that?"   [0:05:41] Dave Goldstein: It's just a matter of time.   [0:05:44] Ashok Rajan: But my point is that there was a phase where I felt that things moved to hyper analytics. Like hey, everything was analytics driven and I want this, but I come from a slightly different school of thought these days. But I feel like there's a sort of, I call this the Heisenberg principle of personalization. If you look at Amazon for instance, they do a lot of real time personalization. Of course the personalization is driven by a deep analytics, but it's not like the analytics are real time. And sometimes I joke with people, I say, "Hey, you're fooling people if you say you're real time analytics," because good analytics means that you have lots of data that you've chunked. Lots of data means it's been collected over a long period of time. And any good statistician will tell you the last day or the last minute's worth of data should not influence your model of things that you've collected over 30 days, one year, whatever the case is. Right? So that means analytics can be run offline, but how I'm treating the customer becomes a ... How do I influence the journey is something that happens more real time.   [0:06:47] PJ: That's an interesting point too, just because we hear all the time, or I personally do, as soon as that data's captured, the value of it will start to decay over time. But that makes so much sense. You should be able to look back at behavior over the past month or even year to kind of like help dictate, or at least inform some things.   [0:07:05] Dave Goldstein: I mean what I found so fascinating actually was just moments ago, Dipanjan Chaterjee from Forrester was presenting his updated research to the brand humanity index. And he was saying that, what is it, 0.5%, a half a percent of all data is actually actioned on. You're actually doing something with that data and doing something meaningful with it. So there's that fine line that you really do have to walk, right? Like you can collect just this wealth of data. But I suppose the key to that is to action on as much of it as you can, because what is data without appropriate action?   [0:07:43] Ashok Rajan: No, absolutely. I think Dave, I think this is a great segue because if you start thinking about the platforms and what's the newer generation platforms versus some of the older generation platforms that you have, the thinking, and some of these ideas were regurgitated before. I sort of joke about this and I say, "Hey, you don't bring the mountain to Moses, Moses goes to the mountain." And I use this these days with big data, right? With the proliferation of big data. I feel it's actually a simple engineering problem. The more data that I collect, the more difficult it is going to be for me to move it across systems. To move everything and start duplicating it is just a mindless exercise of, it's expensive, it's too late, it takes time to action. And how quickly you respond becomes more crucial. And so what I find exciting about platforms like Braze is that foundationally it's been built to handle that issue. That it's not now anymore like the old school, "Hey, why don't you give me everything?" I just remember with [inaudible 00:08:54], one of my previous companies since I've already mentioned who they are. I was sitting Nordstrom, and this is a true story. And then the guy was like, "Hey." I'm like, "Hey, give me all your data. Give me all of it." He says, "It's fine. I'll give you all my data. How many years of data do you want?" I said, "I'll take how much you can give me." He says, "Okay, I'm going to give you 10 years worth of data." But here he says, "I'm going to warn you. What's the database that you use behind the scenes?" I said, "So we have an Oracle database." I said, "Hey, I just spent like $15 million replacing my Oracle database with [inaudible] data, so you better have some big system. And I don't think we're paying you guys that much to basically send email marketing campaigns." And they're like, "Hold on. Don't give me any data. I don't want all your data. I only want what's required for my marketing." I think that-   [0:09:42] Dave Goldstein: Data for purpose.   [0:09:43] Ashok Rajan: Data for purpose. And I think that's a big theme of what I like about Braze. When I look at it, okay, it actually goes back to, "Hey, I'm only bringing Moses to the mountain for salvation, or whatever." He comes to the burning bush for that particular aspect. It's not like, hey now I'm trying to move the entire mountain and say, "Hey, let me get it to your camp, and then you can figure out what you want." It's like, "Okay, it's not going to work."   [0:10:07] PJ: Right right.   [0:10:08] Ashok Rajan: I think that's a big point.   [0:10:10] PJ: Yeah. People just assume sometimes the data equals value, so just give me all the stuff you have, but that can really put this opaque kind of lens over what your goals are. It gives you a little bit more confusion I think.   [0:10:22] Dave Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm fascinated by the paradigm shift that's happened in my own mind since starting to work in this industry almost a decade ago. I walked into a retail store recently whose mobile app I had on my phone. I had given them push notification permissions, they had my email, they had preferences about me, they had my location permissions as well. I live on Long Island so I actually go to a shopping mall. Yeah, I'm a mall walking dad, I'll admit it. And so I [inaudible] the store and of course my expectation, living in the age that we do and being in the space that I'm in, is that, "Hey, what a great opportunity for a geo targeted appropriate message based on the data that this brand understands about me." Right? Of course, nothing happened. But I entered the store nonetheless, because I'm a fan of the brand, as it were. And as I'm entering the store, there's a sales associate at the front standing with a stack of printed cards, the kind where you take your thumb nail or a coin and you scratch them off. And it's like, "Hey, it's a take a scratch off, chance to win X percent off anything in the store today only." So I grabbed the card and I scratch it off and I got 15% off. And of course I'm looking around the store and I was like, "Don't really see anything I want today. I'm not compelled to even use this." And so I kind of walk out, and as I'm walking out I throw it in the trash, right. It just occurs to me like, "Wow, what a missed opportunity. If that experience had been digital, imagine how they could have continued that. They would have known just so much, that I had redeemed and I had this 15% off coupon, and maybe it could have extended to online and other channels.   [0:12:03] PJ: Yeah.   [0:12:04] Dave Goldstein: How much did they spend to print those cards? And so there's this whole paradigm shift that I've had as I've kind of thought about how brands can leverage the data that they have about people. And I'm sure the brands that you work with and how you think about coaching them to best leverage the data they have and truly digitally transform, you must see this stuff all the time and have to think-   [0:12:25] Ashok Rajan: No I'm like, "Hey, my brain's racing actually." I want to share something with you as well. It's interesting, Dave, that you bring this up because you're so spot on. I think there's two aspects to it. And this is where I feel again, you guys are in not ... Braze is not just using buzzwords. I think, again, hey, this is not a shameless plug for Braze, I hope it means something to the people who listen that I truly see this. When you talk about the human aspect of things, you talked about the brand humanity index. And I saw this last year, and I'm like, "Hey, I'm on board this train." I want to share something with you that Nordstrom to me has been the brand, at least personally, we would read books on the Nordstrom [inaudible 00:13:12], that you talk about true customer service. And I'm saying like hey, when you really forget all the tech part first. But you say, "Hey, what's fascinating about Nordstrom's customer service?" And so hey, [inaudible] you would read about all these business cases of, "Hey, they changed the tires for some old lady who drove 50 miles to change some clothes." And they say-   [0:13:31] Dave Goldstein: Accept all returns from other stores. I remember that. Yeah.   [0:13:33] Ashok Rajan: And sometimes it feels like some urban legend or something right? But I want to share my personal experience with you, which I have now used in the digital aspect. So my personal experience with Nordstrom, again, I love, hey there's something a little bit about me, is when I work with brands, I love to see what it is that they do in their store. So as soon as I started working with Nordstrom, I started shopping at Nordstrom. And man it was interesting, first time I walked around the ... This is, again, 2011. Things are different now. So I'm walking around the store and this guy is just quietly following me around, didn't speak much, but he was just paying attention to what I was doing. And then what he did is, he didn't say anything. And then he said, "Hey, can I have your number?" I didn't buy anything. This was in the men's section where they have all the good stuff. And so then I said, "Okay fine, you can have my number." He says, "I'll just give you a call if I find something that you like." And I said, "How the heck would he know?" So I was, look again, curiosity killed the cat. I'm like, "I'm curious to know how the heck you know what I like, because I didn't speak to you." So then I gave him my number. And then believe it or not, Dave, he calls me after like a couple of weeks. He says, "Hey, I think I picked like two shirts for you. I think you're really going to like this." I go, "Okay, you have me. I'm going to come to the store." And guess what? He's like, "Michael Kors, here's the two shirts I think that will fit you perfectly. Go wear them." And then suddenly what happens is, this is the relationship I had with this guy, that at one point you would laugh, my wardrobe probably had like a dozen Michael Kors shirts.   [0:15:02] Dave Goldstein: Get out of here.   [0:15:03] Ashok Rajan: I kept all ... He would keep calling me every two months, and he would say, "Hey, I think I have something that you would like." I would go back, the fit would be great. And then it didn't stop until Michael Kors decided to move and start selling those shirts in their own store. But then this guy didn't let me go, right? So for me, I latch onto the concept of, "Hey, personalization is the human experience. Somebody was paying attention." And then of course, again, I was working with the Nordstrom marketing team. I was like, "Hey, you guys should do this." Fast forward to then I'm consulting with Adidas. And then Adidas basically says, "Hey, we have this ..." this is the guy that was running marketing for Adidas in India. And then he goes, "Hey, I want to change the customer experience. What do you think I can do?" I said, "Hey, have you considered this? Like put iPads in all your stores." And I shared with him the Nordstrom experience, but except now this was happening four years after the Nordstrom experience. And I'm saying, Hey, maybe you should have your salespeople just follow around and see what kind of shoes they're looking at. And then see what happens, then put everything, capture this information. Don't let them know. But then, like hey, just ask them, "Hey, would you like to know that if you really liked those Adidas shoes that you were looking at, running shoes, may I call you back if I find something that you like?" And then he calls me. The next year I meet him at the Oracle conference and he's super excited. He's like, "Hey, every store has an iPad, and this thing is working like crazy. Right?" Again, we're talking about stuff that's 2015, 2016. And here what I love about what Brace and what you're doing is hey, now we're talking about location based listing. Now we're talking about hyper personalization. Still the human experience doesn't go away.   [0:16:38] PJ: How did he know your size? He just was looking at you and he was like, "I got your number dude."   [0:16:43] Ashok Rajan: That's right. He's got my number. And I tell you like, hey, shame that the part that they didn't do well, like Hey I get that what he wants from me is not [inaudible] on Nordstrom is when that person left, he didn't capture that information and leave it somewhere. Unfortunately, I live in the Bay Area, I shop in the Hillsdale Mall, and this guy moved to the South Bay. And I'm like, "I'm not chasing you to South Bay to buy my clothes. I'm like, "Ah, okay." But you're right. Like he was actually sizing me up. And so this is somebody who knew his craft obviously. But that's when I feel that, I'm an old school techie, the more things move digital, I still love the relationship aspect. Relationship doesn't mean it's ... I feel it's about paying attention, it's about listening to people, quietly observing them. So the first thing that you need to do is, hey, you need to listen. There's three aspects that I feel to how things should work. First thing is you need to listen. And you need to listen, but then the next thing is you need to be able to analyze. And the third thing is you need to be able to act quickly. So you guys didn't put me up to this, but hey, when I look at a platform like Brace compared to something else, now you have web services. I can quickly listen to things. The data modeling is super simple. So now I can basically capture the information I need. I can analyze this quickly, and then I can act quickly to send you a push notification. Or send you an email message, or whatever it is that is the right communication style. I think people are ... In general, I hope people realize this, I think people underestimate. That's where I think is the real power of the Braze platform, that it brings things together.   [0:18:16] Dave Goldstein: Fantastic context. It's interesting, I was thinking about there's a lot of legacy technology out there. Sunk costs, if you will, whereby folks know it's just not getting the job done. It's no longer fit for purpose. They're afraid of change for a number of reasons, whether it be the money that they've sunk into it, whether it be the fear of moving to new technology and potential hiccups in business. Do you have a philosophy or a methodology that you use to help quell people's fears about, "I'm on this legacy technology that's just not ... It's clearly not working. And the whole team hates using it. We all know there's ... We all hope there's something better out there." How do you talk to those people? How do you actually help them transform and move into the new mobile first era, if you will?   [0:19:12] Ashok Rajan: What we like to tell people is that, "Hey look, you have someone like Lister that basically has worked with multiple platforms. We have helped build those platforms. We have the talent and the technology to basically drive these things. And the newer platforms are actually built for absorbing things quickly." So we're here to help them, and then we have really good success stories to show clients that, "Hey, it's not as daunting as you think". As long as, "Hey, you focus on the marketing." Someone say, hey, this is one of my mentors. And I really respect him. He said this a long time back in the conference. [inaudible] I say, "Hey, who was your biggest competition?" And he says, "My IT team."   [0:20:00] Dave Goldstein: Wow.   [0:20:00] Ashok Rajan: I thought that was the most profound thing that I heard so far. And it's like, "Yeah, amen to that. That's right." Because then, that's why when you bring people that already know how to work with these multiple platforms, then the migration is not such a daunting task. When we have done this day in and day out and we understand the nuances. We have done this successfully in the past and we feel that ... There's two things, right? It's not just about my talent or my team. I'm also saying that platforms like Brace, you make it easy to migrate, but the daunting part is unfortunately it's marchitecture. There is a technology aspect to it, but if you're used to classic database tables and operations, now suddenly you need to learn to work with unstructured data. My advice, or Dave, or my answer is quite simple, right? First, enlist in the right platform. I think these platforms are built for purpose. And they really leapfrog you from where you are to where you need to be. And then finding a great partner I think is important that has done this before and that can easily say, "Okay, I know you liked apples before, but now you have a vitamin C deficiency." And, "Hey, I'm here from Florida to make your orange juice."   [0:21:15] PJ: Amazing.   [0:21:15] Dave Goldstein: I know you liked meat before, but here's some kale.   [0:21:18] PJ: Exactly.   [0:21:19] Ashok Rajan: Exactly.   [0:21:19] PJ: That's beauty. Honestly, no better way to wrap it up than that.   [0:21:22] Dave Goldstein: That was great.   [0:21:22] PJ: Ashok, thanks so much for being here. And Dave, as always, thanks for joining me.   [0:21:27] Dave Goldstein: It's my pleasure. And Ashok, really, I can't say it enough. It's brilliant to have you as part of our community, and we're just so happy to have you as part of this solutions partner ecosystem. You add so much value to the overall landscape. And yeah, we love working with you. So thank you.   [0:21:43] Ashok Rajan: Thanks, thanks Dave. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. Really appreciate the opportunity and I look forward to working with you guys.   [0:21:49] PJ: And thank you guys all for listening. Take care. [0:21:51]

How can you leverage new tech to ride the personalization wave into a best-in-class swell of engagement? Taylor "The Creator" Gibb and Jaz "Personalization Queen" Noble join me to discuss the future of personalization and how to make it work at scale.       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hi again and welcome back to Brace for Impact, your martech industry discuss digest and today I have two very, very esteemed colleagues with me both from the Success Org to my right Taylor Veronica Gibb and to my left Jaz Victoria Noble. It's good to have you guys here with me.   [0:00:37] Taylor: Well it's great to have you here as well. PJ, the Victor Jay-   [0:00:44] Jasmine: Let's give him a V, yeah.   [0:00:45] Taylor: Maybe a V, to fit in here.   [0:00:45] PJ: You guys missed it, we opened with talking about the origin story of both these lovely women have V middle names and so we were just kind of like hearing a little bit about their ancestry.   [0:00:54] Taylor: Absolutely. As we start every podcast with deep personal questions to the guests in the room really gets those creative juices flowing.   [0:01:02] PJ: Exactly. Tries to get us in the zone.   [0:01:04] Jasmine: I'm real excited to be here, you guys.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yes, Jaz is back. She was on our very first podcast, which was merely a hackday project about six months ago and now finally we have her back for another one.   [0:01:17] Jasmine: I'm micced up. I have headphones. It's official.   [0:01:19] Taylor: Much more official.   [0:01:21] PJ: It's official.   [0:01:21] Taylor: If I remember correctly, the first podcast, everyone was kind of talking very close to PJ's laptop.   [0:01:26] Jasmine: Yes.   [0:01:28] PJ: No headphones. Didn't know what we were doing.   [0:01:30] Taylor: Nope.   [0:01:30] PJ: Picking up a lot of ambient noise. We've gotten a little bit better and it's good to be here.   [0:01:34] Jasmine: Hilarious, though. I was very funny in that.   [0:01:36] Taylor: Hilarious. That's a great one.   [0:01:37] PJ: You were very funny in that one.   [0:01:38] Jasmine: Yeah.   [0:01:38] Taylor: I think we need to release that someday. Like a little bonus track.   [0:01:42] PJ: For all you listeners out there. Our listeners will receive a special Easter egg treat of the hackday first ever podcast.   [0:01:49] Taylor: For those of you who pledge a certain amount of money we'll be sending to you with a set of Ginsu knives.   [0:01:56] PJ: Absolutely. Well, you know we're a big family.   [0:01:58] Jasmine: Make those checks out to Jasmine Victoria Noble.   [0:02:01] PJ: It has to be in full. It's the only way they'll pay it out.   [0:02:03] Jasmine: Get the V.   [0:02:04] PJ: Well, we're fresh off a 4th of July break. Hope you guys had a lovely time. Go America, Women's national team winning the World Cup. A lot of cool things have happened, but today point break personalization. I mean, I'm thinking of the movie obviously because I loved it and not only that, this week is the 28th anniversary of when Point Break was released.   [0:02:26] Taylor: Oh my God.   [0:02:27] Jasmine: Oh really.   [0:02:27] PJ: It is.   [0:02:27] Taylor: Point Break could rent a car. Point Break, you know is getting settled in the world, like Point Break is-   [0:02:33] Jasmine: Finally making some money.   [0:02:35] Taylor: ... 28, yeah, 28 years old is a good time to be around. But I was actually just asking PJ before we got on the air here. I'm like, I love Point Break. I love personalization. What does Johnny Utah have to do with Braze and personalization here?   [0:02:50] PJ: I'm so glad you asked. So really we're thinking the movie fantastic, but we're thinking more about the concept of point break and what point break is, it means the wave, it gives you enough time to spend the most possible time on the board standing up. So a point break is what surfers really look for because it gives you the perfect ride, and that's what we're talking about. Personalization being the perfect method because as you move forward with your marketing initiatives, there's going to be more and more competition. People get overloaded in their inboxes every day. How can you stand out amidst the crowd and make your message heard? Personalization is the number one way and it doesn't have to be perfect today. It doesn't even have to be perfect next week, but a more perfect campaign will help you stand out amidst the crowd and call out your users by name and let them know that you know them.   [0:03:41] Taylor: I'm glad you cleared that up. I actually came in a president mask today ready to rob a bank with my surfboard. For those of you-   [0:03:49] PJ: Are you Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter?   [0:03:50] Taylor: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter.   [0:03:53] PJ: And if you haven't seen Point Break for the love of God, please go see it. We won't really talk any more about Point Break during this podcast. It was just kind of-   [0:04:01] Taylor: That's a you thing.   [0:04:02] PJ: But yeah, I mean what the first thing and last thing that I'll say about Point Break is it was really lauded for the relationship between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. This like, you know, bros for life. It was a heterosexual chemistry that could only have been created during that time, if it was accompanied by guns and waves and all these manly things. It's like through that atmosphere, it's okay to show a nice heterosexual close, intimacy between two men.   [0:04:32] Taylor: The origin of the bromance is what I'm hearing. All right.   [0:04:37] PJ: Yeah, jeez.   [0:04:37] Taylor: All right, well I think we've got to spin off podcast at the ready.   [0:04:40] PJ: I think we do.   [0:04:40] Taylor: But let's talk a little bit now about personalization.   [0:04:44] PJ: Actual personalization. When we say personalization, my God, you must've heard it a million times already just in the-   [0:04:50] Jasmine: It should be a drinking game at this point.   [0:04:51] PJ: ... Last five minutes.   [0:04:51] Taylor: Yes.   [0:04:51] PJ: Yeah, exactly. If you're following along at home, you should be wasted. But personalization at Braze, it means being able to email out a huge campaign to all these individual people and within the campaign have texts, call out users by name or reference specific things about those users based on their behavior in app or on the website. The way we use personalization is through a template language called Liquid. And this was created by Shopify and it helps us input things like first name, the very common one that I'm sure you've all seen. Hello Taylor, hope you're having a good day. Here's some deals relevant to you. And those deals can be in a specific category that Taylor has been known to search very often. More complicated examples is like dynamically pulling in content or materials or thumbnails based on information that they're collecting about how you interact with the brand. Do you guys have any examples of really smart personalization that you've seen? You know, being in the Success Org, these two are in the weeds of campaign creation day in and day out.   [0:05:54] Taylor: We're in the trenches as you mentioned, and it's kind of fun be able to be a part of a lot of our client's planning, about getting strategic about the personalization that they use. I'll probably bring up a couple examples as the podcast goes on, but off of the top of my head, I work with a dating app and they started using personalization with Braze using Liquid and connected content. By the way, shameless plug, go check out the lab course on this, if you guys are interested in learning more about these things. PJ is featured as well. But they use this to essentially customize the version of an email you get based on if you're a man or a woman, based on if you're looking for a man or a woman or maybe none of the above, you'll get a different personalized email for you with different content and different styling. So they're doing a little bit of this kind of micro personalization and getting really down to exactly what you're looking for and it's something that's so simple and seamless. You may not even realize that it's personal to you, but it just feels like you.   [0:06:56] PJ: Jaz, do you have any?   [0:06:57] Jasmine: I definitely do. So we talked about how Liquid allows you to insert dynamic variables. The simple example of the first name, we also touched on how you can pull in dynamic URLs, right, image URLs, things like that. One of my favorite ways to use Liquid is actually what we call conditional logic. So I can start saying within my message, if X equals Y, send this message to my user. If A equals B, send this other message, right? So I can start to build these conditional statements, if you will. And one of my favorite ways to use this is actually with weather. Braze is really flexible in that we can connect to external weather APIs. And quite literally say if it's raining right now, send this email and this is one thing, one of our customers does, is send out an email to say it's raining, why don't you order it. Or it's sunny, so get outside and make that reservation, I should say. So I really appreciate the conditional logic and think weather is a cool example of that.   [0:08:00] Taylor: And Jaz for all of you listening in is actually the queen of connected content here at Braze. Taught me everything I know, but she is your-   [0:08:08] PJ: Is that official?   [0:08:08] Taylor: ... Personalization wizard. She is. She doesn't always wear the tiara, but for special occasions she will dawn the crown and connected content queen.   [0:08:17] PJ: Where's the sash though?   [0:08:19] Taylor: Ooh, next time.   [0:08:20] PJ: Scepter?   [0:08:21] Taylor: Scepter, we'll see. We'll see.   [0:08:23] PJ: Conditional logic, that's all happening in the same campaign. Even in the same like text field. Right?   [0:08:29] Jasmine: Exactly. So quite literally you're putting in the different versions of the copy depending on what variables you have in place. So using that example of weather the conditional Liquid statement in the Liquid logic language would say, if degrees equals below 50 send, "hey, it's cold, grab a coffee." Alternatively, if the weather is higher than 50 degrees, send this generic message that I was planning to send to the user anyway.   [0:08:59] PJ: Cool. That's just a little sample of what you can see as far as personalization in the Braze platform. Conditional logic using Liquid. If you have access to Lab, please check out our Liquid course. Also, there's plenty of free resources on Liquid online, so just do some searching. Now let's jump into some other articles that are going to help us understand a little more about personalization in terms of what the future looks like and how you can do personalization at scale. The following articles were provided to us by McKinsey. McKinsey, thank you so much for your research and all you do. So this first one, let's jump off Tay Tay. What do you got?   [0:09:34] Taylor: Oh, hey there. Well, not only do I have this article, but I went ahead and brought along my crystal ball here cause we're going to be taking a look into the future of personalization. That was a terrible dad joke, but moving on. First-   [0:09:48] PJ: I can add like kind of like...   [0:09:50] Taylor: Like crystal ball.   [0:09:50] PJ: Sound in the background.   [0:09:51] Taylor: Ooh, I love that. All right, well then perfect. Well we'll edit it in the future of personalization. Physical spaces will be digitized. We've seen this a little bit. Jaz, you and I, I think are both Sephora fans, so you may be familiar with this already, but essentially the fact that when you walk into a physical store space, brick and mortar, what you see is going to be personalized to you. Some of the examples pulled out in the article were places where you could try on makeup or clothes just by standing in front of a mirror. In the future it could be that you'll see on screens around the space, places where you can try on clothes just by looking in the mirror, things that recommend a color for you based on your skin tone or things that you like. And I thought this was particularly interesting because I feel like just a few years ago we were talking about the fact that brick and mortar is on its way out, especially with the rise of Amazon. So can you see this as being maybe the resurgence of brick and mortar just by using this idea of personalization?   [0:10:48] PJ: I mean, you hit the nail on the head with the rise of Amazon and all this stuff, it seemed like physical is on the way out. But with all of these things, fad or not, it always feels like there's some sort of pendulum at play, where the pendulum goes to one side as we do more and more online purchasing. I'm not going out of my apartment. I don't need to go try things on. Like I know this brand, I know their sizes. And now I think we're starting to see the pendulum go the other way because physical storefronts are still going to be a part of the business, especially living in New York City, what is it, Sixth Avenue that's just a mecca for storefronts and for a brick and mortar businesses. So I think the secret sauce is being able to capture all that information in the store front and tether it to all these other touch points and this is not my idea or a nuanced perspective on it, this is something we've all been talking about for awhile. So I don't think brick and mortar is on the way out. I think this is a way to bolster or supercharged that brick and mortar experience when you're in front of one of those mirrors and you have that try-on experience probably makes you want to go back again.   [0:11:55] Taylor: How about you, Jaz.   [0:11:56] Jasmine: I actually just recently had an opportunity to visit Amazon HQ and hear from some of their panel of leaders that work there. And one of them was brought on to bring Amazon back into the brick and mortar space. You guys have seen these Amazon stores popping up.   [0:12:11] Taylor: The Four Star Store.   [0:12:13] Jasmine: He admitted, they're not necessarily profitable yet, but the company that really closed down a lot of brick and mortar spaces is now recognizing, realizing the value of bringing these experiences to your point outside of someone's apartment and off of their couch and in physical spaces. I think the challenge that Amazon and other companies who are rethinking about how they approach brick and mortar is in what ways do the digital and the traditional shopping experience play together and how do they play nicely and where does digital enhance. I mean, Taylor you mentioned Sephora, by the way, I just became a rouge member.   [0:12:46] Taylor: Oh, congratulations.   [0:12:47] Jasmine: Which means-   [0:12:48] PJ: What does it mean.   [0:12:48] Jasmine: It means I spent a lot of money at Sephora. But anyway, I was in the Sephora store and online you have the opportunity to kind of, they have some new technologies that we can try on different shades, but one of the hard things as a women is, especially with summer, we're trying to tan right? And now my foundation color has changed because my face color has literally gone several shades darker. Thank you Bahamas. And so I had to go into the store because I trust them to kind of match that. And they have face matching software, like a program where you sit in the chair and they quite literally scan your face and then tell you, okay, here is your color profile and here are the different foundations that match that and they direct me to the place in the store where those are found so I can pick them up, hold them, look at other aspects of marketing. Right. The bottle, is it pretty, right? There's a lot of things that go into that purchase decision, but it started with a digital experience, a technology coming into play to, essentially pull out where I should start.   [0:13:45] Taylor: And you brought something up earlier. Maybe a quick segue into another point that the article made. Talking a little bit about both with Amazon and in your Sephora experience, kind of that end to end personalized experience. And it's interesting to think, I would hope in Sephora, we'll see this some more, it sounds like Amazon's focusing in on it, that your experiences in the store don't end in the store. So if I go in on the store, I try on a certain shade of lipstick, maybe that will follow me and I'll see an ad later or I'll see an in app message that says, you looked really great in this shade of lipstick earlier. Would you like to order, there's a sale. Things like that that make you feel like you're understood and you're seen as a person both in and outside of the store. That's all personalization at work. And one other thing that I wanted to kind of bring up in this article before we transition over to Jaz's article that she looked at, is something I thought was interesting. They pointed out that empathy will scale within personalization. Now at Braze, our favorite besides personalization drink, our other favorite hot button topic is humanization, right? Making it feel like a brand not only knows you, but that they understand you as a person, that they empathize with you. And it sounds like brands again, like Amazon, are starting to think about becoming more human. One thing that was brought up in this article was the fact that they've patented technology. We're in the future. Voice recognition devices. We'll realize if you sound different than usual, so let's say you've got a stuffy nose, you can begin getting deals or outreach for brands of cough drops, for chicken noodle soup recipes, things like that, that it'll know that you're not feeling well. It's interesting and something that I want to hear from you on, first of all, is that creepy or caring?   [0:15:33] PJ: I don't know if it is creepy just because you know what is creepy is when you say something out loud amongst your friends and then you look at your phone and there's an advertisement for something you said audibly, that creeps me out, right?   [0:15:44] Taylor: Oh, big time.   [0:15:45] PJ: But, to introduce this intuitiveness into technology, I think it's definitely going to be considered creepy to some people and it's going to be a learning curve, I think for us. But that is the exact kind of humanization in technology that I want to see more of. That doesn't feel like they've captured something that I've said, or they've captured an action that I've done and it's like, we all know it, right, when you see something in your phone like, oh, I know exactly where this came from.   [0:16:09] Taylor: Right.   [0:16:10] PJ: Either something I said, or something I clicked on. But then when a computer program offers you cough drops because it can hear your voice a bit hoarse, you're going to have a moment of like how, you know. And I think that almost introduces a little bit of magic until the whole relationship with the brand. That's one that I'm really excited for. Jaz hot takes?   [0:16:28] Jasmine: One thing I will share is we were just talking about Sephora, still top of mind, because did I tell you guys, I'm a rouge member.   [0:16:35] PJ: You said rouge, right?   [0:16:36] Jasmine: Oh yeah, rogue, in case I didn't already mention it.   [0:16:39] PJ: That's like red.   [0:16:40] Jasmine: Yeah, red, rogue. So a recent experience I had shopping with them to actually, this is the experience where after I did it, I got the confetti lipsticks that said I made rogue, right? I shopped for several things, I needed a new makeup brush. I needed like setting powder, a few things, right. Sent them all to my house. One did not arrive.   [0:17:03] Taylor: Nightmare.   [0:17:03] Jasmine: And each item is north of $50 so I wasn't going to just let that go. And this is, I think, where companies, we haven't seen a huge shift necessarily is when it comes to customer service, right? So I missed this brush and instead of being able to, like right now with an Amazon app, I know we're talking about Amazon and Sephora quite a bit, but clearly I shop there a lot. With Amazon, if something didn't come in my order, I just like go through this tool where I say, I select options from a list. It didn't arrive, what didn't arrive, it gives me the list of things in the order. I click that. I click the one it wants. Where do you want it shipped? I click my address. I'm never talking with someone, or it doesn't feel like I'm talking with someone. With Sephora, they encouraged me to send an email to a customer service representative and that might never be their real name, but like a Stacey B emailed me back, right. To say that she was so sorry that I had that experience, wanted to make it right, like using words like that and that's where you feel the human piece of that brand as well. Both are good experiences. I think with Amazon it happened instantaneously, within five seconds, within five clicks, I was able to get that piece that they had missed sent to me. With Sephora, I had to talk with someone, but at the end of the day I kind of felt like Sephora was sorry about what happened.   [0:18:15] PJ: That's a really great point. Like when does the initiative bubble up where customer service has to meet the same high standard that our personalization tech does?   [0:18:25] Taylor: Well, and that's where personalization tech can shine, right? Because it makes empathy and it makes humanization scalable so everybody can feel like Stacey B is paying really close attention to them. That knows is exactly what you're talking about. I mean to avoid a bit of a Her scenario if those, if you guys have seen that movie. Maybe there's a point where it goes too far, but I personally really love the fact that when you have a customer support experience, when you have a shopping experience and it feels like they know you, exactly. That's that hyper personalization.   [0:18:59] PJ: Well, until it does go too far. Stacey B, thanks for all you do.   [0:19:03] Taylor: Stacey B this one goes out to you.   [0:19:05] Jasmine: Shout out Stacey, pour one out.   [0:19:07] PJ: Jaz. What do you got from me?   [0:19:09] Jasmine: We've talked a lot today already about the tools that Braze has, right? Which are really just vehicles for providing the personalization. Taylor touched on strategies and why you'd actually want to use some of these tools to put those programs in place, but now we need to talk about a team that's actually going to action on them, right? If a company decides they want to care more about personalization, they want to provide more personalized experiences, how do they do that, particularly if their tech stack isn't in a super fluid place where everyone's playing nice in the sandbox. And one of the ways that McKinsey talked about it and one of their most recent articles called Marketing's Holy Grail, Digital Personalization at Scale really talked about building a war room of people. Because at the end of the day, this is going to be a marketer, this is going to be a data engineer, this is going to be a software engineer that's going to help you bridge these gaps, get the data where it needs to be to ultimately action on things like including first name, including previous shopping behavior. All of the amazing examples that we walked through today would be nowhere without having the data and infrastructure in place. And so that's one of the things that this article touched on and it kind of reminded me of some of my own client experiences working here at Braze, as a CSM, I got a chance to see the types of teams that our customers are bringing together to ultimately action on this. And I would say it's interesting how some are very nimble and small, while others more at maybe enterprise sized corporations are thinking about, no, it's actually doesn't end here. Let's pull in an agency, right? Let's outsource some of this. Let's fill our stack with a bunch of tech partners including a Braze who can help us achieve all of these things. Like creating that right lineup of a team doesn't necessarily have to be someone at their own company. It could be outsourcing some of that talent, bring it in to be able to action on it.   [0:20:56] PJ: And also even with the enterprises, right? They think, you know they have agencies, they got a really souped up tech stack. They're outsourcing a lot. But I think the key here is having that small group of decision makers. So even though you have this monster stack and you have all these different moving pieces, you still have that core group of decision makers that can move quickly. So even though you have this big group and you have all these resources, you have the right people that can flip a switch, shoot out a campaign and do something. Because that, you know, I'm sure we see that right, the bigger the company, the more red tape, the more approvals. So how can you stay nimble as you expand?   [0:21:34] Taylor: Absolutely, and interestingly enough, this kind of very digital idea of this digital marketing personalization takes a lot of humans to make it run and to make it feel human. So maybe the robot uprising is farther off than we thought.   [0:21:48] PJ: Skynet we're looking at you.   [0:21:51] Jasmine: I mentioned kind of pulling together this team of specialists that could be people within your own organization with the ideas. You could also be bringing people outside from agencies, et cetera to for that strategy, right? The core group of people who are deciding how do we actually action on this, provide personalized user experiences. One of the things that you have to think about is what stack do you have in place? What technologies do you have at your fingertips to be able to action on this? And one company that I think did an excellent job at this and I actually had the pleasure of working with closely is Burger King. Fernando, their CMO talks extensively about this in an AdWeek article about how he assembled a stack. He knew that when they wanted to do and roll out this detour campaign that they were going to need someone to be the action layer. That's Braze actually getting these messages out to people. They are going to need someone to do location. That's Radar. They were going to need someone to connect their POS purchasing to user profiles and making sure that brick and mortar restaurant data actually got to a place where they can see the conversions, right, that's mParticle. And then they also have Branch, encouraging people to get those app downloads from an attribution standpoint. There are others obviously who played a piece in this tech stack that allowed detour to happen, but I think it started with Burger King saying, we can't do this alone. We need to assemble the right players who are flexible enough to play nicely with each other to allow that data to come back and forth and ultimately deliver on this user experience, which ended up being people downloading their app, going to a McDonald's, saying they were at McDonald's, and then getting a one cent whopper. How do you deliver on all of that? And that's one of the things that I thought they did a really good job at was actually thinking about rewiring and hard-wiring.   [0:23:37] Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would hope that the great success and the story of working together with this Avengers of a stack that you just mentioned, will kind of help other large enterprise size companies to realize that they may need to take another look at what they've set up over time and do a little bit of reworking. So many of the teams that Jaz and I work with are working with outdated software. Something that was best in class 10 years ago for this personalization to really work seamlessly and to make these great experiences. You need the best in class right at the bat.   [0:24:10] PJ: Right on the money. So take advantage of personalization tools at your fingertips.   [0:24:15] Taylor: That's us.   [0:24:16] PJ: Pay attention to the tech, to the team. Make sure it's the right people that can move nimbly. As far as the tech, always be reworking, always be focusing on the right tools that allow your teams to move faster. And that's about it for Point Break Personalization. Taylor, Jaz, thanks so much for being here.   [0:24:34] Taylor: Hang loose.   [0:24:35] Jasmine: I thoroughly enjoyed my time with you both.   [0:24:37] PJ: And thank you as well for being with us. Take care. [0:24:40]

Jesse Halpert from our Sales org and Taylor "The Creator" Gibb from Success join me to discuss the recent acquisitions of data visualizations tools Looker (by Google) and Tableau (by Salesforce). How do these products stack up? What does this mean for the martech landscape? Listen in to learn more!       TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:18] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your MarTech industry discuss digest. And this week I am accompanied by two very special guests returning for her third or fourth I think from our success org, Taylor Gibb, welcome.   [0:00:34] Taylor Gibb: Well thank you so much. Happy to be here. I didn't know if you guys knew its National Eat Your Vegetables Day.   [0:00:40] PJ: Oh really?   [0:00:41] Taylor Gibb: So I just assumed I was going to be talking vegetables. Is that not the case today?   [0:00:46] PJ: I think there's always room to fit vegetables-   [0:00:49] Taylor Gibb: Okay.   [0:00:49] PJ: Into the talk track-   [0:00:50] Taylor Gibb: All right.   [0:00:50] PJ: And I think you're good at finding creative ways to segue. So...   [0:00:53] Jesse Halpert: Solid plug.   [0:00:54] PJ: Absolutely. To my left, I have a very good friend Jesse Halpert from our sales org. He's joining us today. Jesse, how are you?   [0:01:03] Jesse Halpert: I'm doing great BJ. Thanks for having me, first time in a long time.   [0:01:06] PJ: Yeah, first, I mean I literally came to him this morning and was like, hey would you be willing to jump in here? And the reason I did that is because today's podcast is all about two companies that got acquired recently, both data visualization companies, Tableau getting acquired by Salesforce, and then also Looker getting acquired by Google. Jesse Halpert previously worked at Tableau. Isn't that right Jesse?   [0:01:28] Jesse Halpert: Sure is.   [0:01:29] PJ: So Jesse's going to be here to be able to give us the inside scoop. Tell us a little bit more about, you know, how they frame the selling of Tableau and maybe how it stacks up against Looker. But yeah, pretty pumped for this one. Me and Taylor had to do a lot of research on data analytics for this.   [0:01:44] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. Boned up big time on my understanding of Tableau as well as Looker, which we use here at Braze. Shameless plug there and I'm a big evangelist for Looker across my clients, but obviously want to hear more about Tableau as well. Both are great tools, much like eating your vegetables. It's certainly not as much fun but very good for your organization to have a great data visualization tool. So always love to learn a little more about that.   [0:02:12] Jesse Halpert: Were you paid off by the vegetable lobby prior to this podcast?   [0:02:15] Taylor Gibb: I actually was under the table. Sesame Street is paying me big time.   [0:02:19] PJ: We're two minutes in and you already had a vegetable comment, so pacing well for the day.   [0:02:24] Taylor Gibb: Brace yourself.   [0:02:27] PJ: All right, cool. Let's jump into this first article. Salesforce buying data visualization company Tableau for 15.7 billion dollars on the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for 2.6 billion. Salesforce announced a big piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization, and more generally tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass. And also, I hear now that they're going to be taking over Tableau's HQ in Seattle as well.   [0:03:00] Jesse Halpert: HQ2!   [0:03:02] PJ: HQ2, which a I guess has been kind of coined by Amazon when they were doing their search in New York for their HQ2. Yeah, I mean it's pretty cool. I mean, I guess the idea is the West Coast is really getting beefed up for tech and we kind of like have New York as this lone capitol of the tech world on the East Coast. Yeah. I'm interested to hear a little bit more. Jesse, when were you there at Tableau?   [0:03:25] Jesse Halpert: I was there for nearly two years and I finished up in March prior to Braze. But you know, worked primarily as an account executive and account manager there.   [0:03:36] Taylor Gibb: Jesse, would you have been swept up in all of this Tableau, you know, purchase excitement had you been there or are you getting a little FOMO right now?   [0:03:44] Jesse Halpert: Definitely a little bit of FOMO when I read it and definitely wish I had held onto more of my shares. But yeah, it's you know, incredibly exciting for, you know, people that have been there for awhile.   [0:03:54] PJ: But Tableau, it has a more of a beefed up product suite than Looker. Is that, is that right?   [0:04:01] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I'd say beefed up in a sense. I think what was always a big value prop that I would communicate at Tableau was the ease of use and you know, like intuitiveness that it would take to really use the product because they have a patented drag and drop technology that makes it really easy to take the different, you know, attributes or events that you want to measure and you know, put it right into a canvas to view.   [0:04:23] Taylor Gibb: Wow. Oh, that's interesting. That sounds a little bit familiar here at Drew's events canvas. [crosstalk] You just slid right into our lingo. And I'd also be interested to hear a little more about that just because Looker, I think touts itself perhaps even more so as being an accessible kind of platform. And I know at least some of my friends who work with Tableau and their suite, it's oftentimes kind of a point of pride to be able to navigate. So, you know, I'm very good at Sequel. I can use Tableau very well, is something that you see pretty frequently on Linkedin, on a resume as a skillset.   [0:04:55] Jesse Halpert: It's like a cert almost.   [0:04:56] Taylor Gibb: You can take classes for it. Yeah. Oh 100% whereas I feel like, I mean I'm going to be shooting myself in the foot here a little talking about how little I know, but Looker I think is intuitive for someone like me to be able to pick up on and to use pretty effectively and I know that our data BI team right now is face-palming because they think of how many questions I asked them on a daily basis. But still, did you find though that when you were at working with accounts, when you're selling into these accounts that there was a general consensus that this was the easiest way to be able to query and use your data?   [0:05:30] Jesse Halpert: If you're in any of those organizations, I think you get exposed most to your product and you get comfortable and familiar, so I think it's easy to say. I haven't used Looker enough frankly, to really give that impartial of an opinion on that.   [0:05:45] PJ: Fair.   [0:05:46] Taylor Gibb: Yeah, a very-   [0:05:47] PJ: You don't want half-informations here. It's like eating half of your Brussels sprouts.   [0:05:52] Taylor Gibb: No, not something that we do here at Braze.   [0:05:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, we go full sprout.   [0:05:55] Taylor Gibb: Full sprouts 2019.   [0:05:57] Jesse Halpert: I mean another aspect to this is, you know them moving into Seattle and the West Coast, obviously something that I hadn't really thought much about before until the whole Amazon thing is like, you know with that comes certain tax breaks and with that comes the expectation of giving back to the community in some way.   [0:06:15] Taylor Gibb: That's interesting.   [0:06:17] Jesse Halpert: And so, I mean traditionally Tableau and Salesforce, they're pretty philanthropic. They're kind of like all about giving back to the areas that they have offices. So I'm actually interested to see how that unfolds in the coming months and if there'll be any big initiatives. Mr. Benioff I'm sure has some big plans for Seattle.   [0:06:37] Taylor Gibb: I'm sure, whether Seattle wants it or not, maybe. One thing I was going to say, but maybe it's a segue for another time here is I'm interested just in the fact that salesforce already had an in-house BI tool and SBI suite that they were using that they were all about, right? This was what they built their data systems on and as a company that typically does buy and, something we've said before, "Frankenstein" in software, interesting to make this move for a completely outside data tool when they've already got this built in house. So one thing I'm curious about, other than whatever Seattle kind of grabbed that they're making there, do you suppose that this is coming mostly as table stakes for Google having purchased Looker?   [0:07:24] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think a lot of it, they probably had plenty of time to self reflect and see that either the tool wasn't beefed up to the point that they needed it to be, that they weren't seeing themselves in a lot of competitive situations, or probably a combo of both. And I think a lot of that might be similar for what Google went through too. I think they both had, you know, some sort of, I don't want to say half baked, I don't think that's a good way to put it, but probably not like to the full power of something like a Tableau or a Looker or even, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, which they're able to sort of throw in a with their Microsoft suite. And I think by way of Google purchasing Looker by way of a Salesforce purchasing Tableau, it probably will make it a bit more of an arms race between those three, you know all having something that's a little bit more powerful to sell to their clients.   [0:08:15] PJ: Yeah, good point. And you know what we're going to do is we'll get into kind of the details of each one and obviously we're not here to rip on any products, but well more just kind of like highlight the benefits of each. But before we get down and dirty with that, Taylor, you want to take us into the Looker situation?   [0:08:32] Taylor Gibb: Just in terms of the purchase of Looker? How Looker works? Our use of looker? I mean, I'm ready to speak to all of it from a very-   [0:08:41] PJ: You gotta be more specific.   [0:08:42] Taylor Gibb: Come on, man. You coming at me with Looker. Alright. Again, BI Team, I apologize, I may butcher it. But I want to first of all frame this as coming from someone who uses Looker who benefits greatly from Looker and our team using it. And my use, as you know, I'm a Success Manager is primarily being able to share with our clients the results that they're getting from campaigns that they send out. So it's so easy to be able to use things like Look ML, which is kind of the Looker language, to share things that others have built to be able to visualize. So Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for 2.6 billion... Basically Thomas Kurian, who's the man who was handed the reigns to Google Cloud at the end of last year, sees the two companies bringing together a complete data analytics solution for customers. So it's end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze, and visualize data across Google Cloud as your AWS on-premises databases. So one thing that I took away from this, from this quote that they've decided to pin their PR on is that they're looking to make this a connective kind of grab, right? So they've got Looker now and they're doing so because it's a tool that allows you to connect all sorts of different data. I think that's important when you're thinking Google Cloud, because so often the pain points with a big juggernaut like Salesforce are that you're having to go through crazy hoops and loops to be able to get all of your products to mesh together seamlessly. Google is saying, don't even worry about that pain point. We've picked Looker specifically because it makes it easy to connect to what they need. And so I think that that's something that really stands out. Google was also the first in this... You know, arms race was a good way to put it, earlier. They were the first to make this acquisition. I think that it really frames them as being a forward thinking organization and it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes of this in terms of the Google suite, in terms of what we as consumers are able to glean from Looker, but also what they do with their data internally.   [0:10:43] PJ: I'm interested to see how that will affect Looker's company in general. Kind of like their, you know, product roadmap, their priorities and stuff. Like I'm sure Google have big plans for them.   [0:10:53] Taylor Gibb: Big time.   [0:10:54] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it too, the data consolidation. I think it'll just make it really, really easy for any company regardless of the size to just be able to take all of their data and put it into a visual analytics platform, which was probably a little bit more of a difficult process, you know, prior to these purchases I think. So I think at the end of the day it's gonna benefit the end user and the companies that are, you know you're a Google house or Salesforce type of house.   [0:11:18] Taylor Gibb: Totally. And I love that all of this is about the demystification of data to your average user. They're saying that they want everybody from their actual BI analytics team to people like myself, a Success Manager who may not be as in the weeds with data, to be able to glean the important information from the data that's being pulled in. Because so often you see with these older legacy, some of my clients working with a ton of super valuable data but like unable to do anything with it because it's hidden in all these folders that only certain people know how to access and use and pivot on. So definitely a good thing for the end user, if anything.   [0:11:55] PJ: Well the end user is the real winner today, I think. All right, now the Looker versus Tableau smack down, all this information has been helpfully provided to us by SelectHub. Thank you, SelectHub. And so now we're just going to go over some of these different facets of the product to give you their perspective on which company has the advantage. So data visualization, you know, data is presented visually for easy interpretation. The winner there, Tableau over looker. I'm sorry, Looker, and I thought that was actually Looker's big.   [0:12:28] Taylor Gibb: That's what I thought too going into this. But again, we could see that in the Google acquisition, that wasn't necessarily what they pinned everything on, but I'm with you. I thought that Looker, I mean it's about looking at things. So you would think visualizations.   [0:12:43] PJ: Well you know what they do have the edge on, though? Analytics. Information is quantified and evaluated for a portrait of company trends and future possibilities.   [0:12:52] Taylor Gibb: Future possibilities.   [0:12:54] PJ: Point to Looker. Very nice. This next one, online analytical processing. This is OLAP.   [0:13:02] Taylor Gibb: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] PJ: Shout out to OLAP.   [0:13:03] Jesse Halpert: People don't talk enough about OLAP.   [0:13:04] Taylor Gibb: Maybe you should talk more about it Jesse.   [0:13:06] Jesse Halpert: I'm good.   [0:13:09] PJ: OLAP functionalities provide access to databases and web based analysis, and so this goes to Tableau.   [0:13:15] Taylor Gibb: Not only does it go to Tableau, but apparently Looker, at least at the time of this publication, had no means of OLAP-ing.   [0:13:22] Jesse Halpert: It's daunting.   [0:13:23] PJ: Yeah, that's a big, big... But it's also, you mentioned that it's kind of an old school...   [0:13:28] Jesse Halpert: Yeah, it's probably more of like a box checking thing.   [0:13:31] PJ: Yeah. Gotcha. And then next up, document management. Convert reports into different file formats and share analytical findings, both very strong there, which is nice.   [0:13:42] Taylor Gibb: And this is something that we do with our clients fairly frequently. Again, democratizing data across both processes and companies. So the ability to send a PDF of a certain chart that we've created to an end user, a marketer who just wants to have something on their boss's desk to say numbers are up, it's huge to be able to just press a button and do that export. Cause I know so many other times I would even have to go into something like Keynote and create a separate chart. So not sure what tableau has to offer there, but I can say it's a simple but super effective tool for again, someone like me who's an end user but not necessarily savvy enough to be doing a lot of this stuff my own.   [0:14:19] PJ: Yeah. And that's a big pattern we see right, with democratizing these tools and making it easy for a marketer to really get their hands dirty into data. And so looking forward to seeing how Tableau continues to push the envelope on that. I think Looker is already on a great path for it.   [0:14:33] Jesse Halpert: Yeah. I think one thing you'll see in each is that it's really easy for somebody who's a power user to, you know, again like you said, democratize the data and share it with people who are end users and don't have that type of analytical savvy and just make it really easy to serve up like one off visualizations and reports that they might receive regularly.   [0:14:50] PJ: Just like some veggies.   [0:14:52] Taylor Gibb: Just like veggies, you knew it! PJ just gave me this look like don't you dare mention vegetables again.   [0:14:58] PJ: Serving it up hot. Next, decision services. So financial management features provide analysis of monetary information. Both also very strong in this area. Integrations, the ability to connect with other systems provides multiple sources and functionalities.   [0:15:15] Taylor Gibb: Big win fir my buddy Looker and remember, that's what they were saying at Google. That's why they purchased this solution in the first place, which is really huge in terms of like market value for Google in general, that they're thinking about things like this. Because Salesforce does everything and they do it pretty well, but when you're trying to get data from one point to another? It's difficult.   [0:15:36] PJ: It's all about making that a fluid process and like, and that kind of lends itself as well to like future-proofing, right? Because you know, we talk a lot about being channel agnostic. If you have that kind of flexibility, I think you're, you're opening yourself to the future and you're giving yourself the ability to be agile, whatever channel should show itself.   [0:15:53] Taylor Gibb: Absolutely. It's that- [crosstalk 00:15:55].   [0:15:58] Jesse Halpert: So motivational.   [0:15:59] Taylor Gibb: At this motivational podcast, listen to it before you go to sleep and you will be successful. But it's like that Woody Allen quote, right? That's like "relationship is a shark; if it's not moving forward, it's dying." This is another thing, right? Google is like, we got to keep buying more stuff like, and Salesforce of course has to follow suit, but maybe more thoughtful on-   [0:16:16] PJ: I have been called the Woody Allen of Big Data, so.   [0:16:18] Taylor Gibb: I knew it.   [0:16:19] Jesse Halpert: I don't know if that's something you really want to hang your hat.   [0:16:21] PJ: Yeah, you're right, you're right.   [0:16:25] Taylor Gibb: Gonna take that out in editing, you think?   [0:16:27] PJ: Hey, Midnight in Paris, shout out to y'all. It was good! Owen Wilson!   [0:16:32] Jesse Halpert: Wow.   [0:16:33] Taylor Gibb: Wow.   [0:16:35] PJ: Wooooow. Last one, Big Data integration. Access to Big Data programs for comprehensive analysis. And this ad goes to Tableau. So thanks again SelectHub for facilitating the Looker v. Tableau smack down. It sounds like a WWF event. [inaudible] Oh, it literally is. That's right.   [0:16:58] Taylor Gibb: Speaking of vegetables, PJ, I got one more hot take to kind of take us out here. So we've been speaking in a very high level, obviously, again kind of a layman's view of these very powerful data tools and these very powerful companies, right? Salesforce and Google. We've been talking about these bigger companies and the ways that they're going to be using, the ways that this gives a competitive advantage. There's also a take to be made here that a few pundits are talking about and that this feels almost like an act of desperation, right? Because this is a hot sector right now. Data visualization, data in general as it becomes more and more accessible for people like us, it really sets your company apart as being future proof, something that you said earlier "a forward thinking company." Could it be that this grab wasn't so much, you know, thinking about the best ways to be using tools like this, but was perhaps an act of desperation, a grab for table stakes here?   [0:17:54] Jesse Halpert: I don't even know if it's a hot take.   [0:17:57] PJ: Yeah, I think it's a lukewarm take.   [0:17:59] Jesse Halpert: Its a lukewarm take. Yeah, I think they were just able to see that their products weren't as strong in this market and this is a market that applies to every line of the business. Not only is it future proofing companies, but it's something that, again like we talked about earlier, democratizes the data across an organization. And they were losing ground and they were able to acquire two really forward looking products and were able to bolster their line a little bit in a place where they were probably hurting.   [0:18:29] PJ: Yeah, I think we can call it like casual desperation if that is a thing and makes sense, you know? Because they're at the top of their game, right? It's like, like let's look at the cautionary tale of Blockbuster. If you're not like looking ahead to like either your business and how it will evolve or potentially other businesses that you can loop into your revenue streams, then you know you're really not thinking about the future health of your business.   [0:18:55] Taylor Gibb: You're gonna get Blockbuster-ed.   [0:18:56] PJ: Don't get Blockbuster-ed, y'all. Come on, now.   [0:18:59] Taylor Gibb: Look into OLAP, don't get Blockbuster-ed   [0:19:02] PJ: Exactly. Good for them acquiring Looker. I think Looker has a bright future, but I wonder what they stand to lose by trying to assimilate Looker into their product suite. Because looker is so good right now at what they do, when you try to, we said it on a previous podcast, you mentioned it again, Frankenstein-ing products-   [0:19:24] Taylor Gibb: I'm gonna trademark that.   [0:19:25] PJ: We need to, because you know, Salesforce is just creating the Frankenstein of all these products and as long as you can do it in like an agile way and really mold them together in a way where they speak well and it's architecturally enabling, as long as you can create it in that way, I'm all about it. But if you're just purchasing to stay relevant and slap-sticking it together, you know, Looker's got a lot of fanfare as far as our industry goes right now. If you're just doing it for that and you haven't thought about the execution, maybe rethink that bad boy.   [0:19:55] Taylor Gibb: Oh yeah. At the cost of several billion, I mean worth a second look.   [0:20:00] PJ: I think that was a steal, 2.6 billion. Like I think Looker is going to be, I mean it generates a ton of money.   [0:20:06] Jesse Halpert: I do think the integration will be fairly seamless for companies that already do have Google cloud.   [0:20:12] PJ: Yeah, good for them. So you companies that have Google cloud, you are in luck.   [0:20:17] Taylor Gibb: Oh very good point. And actually I really liked that as well.   [0:20:21] Jesse Halpert: And I think that's what both organizations are ultimately looking to do. Kind of you know, push this new product on them.   [0:20:28] Taylor Gibb: That's exciting news for my clients. You guys out there like using Looker? Good news! I have a feeling there's going to be some announcements on the books here.   [0:20:35] PJ: Absolutely. And for those listeners out there that aren't as familiar with the MarTech landscape, do some research. There's all sorts of products from engagement tools to attribution tools and you could say the analytics portion of that is like eating your vegetables. You get to eat your vegetables first and then you get the steak. Getting into visualizations and data and having it inform your strategy, that's just how you move forward. That's how you improve.   [0:21:02] Jesse Halpert: What's the baked potato in this analogy?   [0:21:04] Taylor Gibb: Attribution, I think.   [0:21:06] PJ: Yeah. Cause that's like nice. And I mean, I love a baked potato with a little butter on it.   [0:21:10] Taylor Gibb: You're telling me. Well, you know, after you've had this potato, this steak, these veggies, you know what these companies got to do, don't you? They gotta get that bread.   [0:21:18] PJ: Oh ho-ho!   [0:21:19] Jesse Halpert: I thought it was going somewhere else and, yeah.   [0:21:22] Taylor Gibb: Yeah.   [0:21:23] PJ: On that note, do your research. Look into both of these companies, both doing fantastic things. Eat your veggies, eat your bread, eat your baked potato. And for those of you who don't know, we are Braze. Braze is a customer engagement platform. If you don't know what that is, head to braze.com. I'd like to thank my guests Jesse and Taylor. Thank you guys so much for being here.   [0:21:45] Jesse Halpert: Thanks for having us.   [0:21:46] Taylor Gibb: Anytime!   [0:21:48] PJ: And you too. Thanks for stopping by guys. Take care. [0:21:50]

Longtime buddies Will Crocker (Senior Director of Customer Experience)  and Spencer Burke (VP of Growth) chat the return of Game of Thrones, a ban on the government from creating free tax-preparation software, and a potential ban on crypto mining in China. Also, Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite?!        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hello again. Welcome back to Braze for Impact, your weekly tech industry discuss digest. This is PJ Bruno, and I'm thrilled to have with me two very close buddies. I have Will Crocker, senior director of CX, that's customer experience. Hi, Will.   [0:00:32] Will: Hey, how you doing, PJ?   [0:00:33] PJ: And also, of course, my good friend Spencer Burke, the head of the House Growth. He's here with us today.   [0:00:40] Spencer: Hey, hey, it's good to be back.   [0:00:42] PJ: It is good to be back.   [0:00:43] Will: You guys grew a house?   [0:00:46] PJ: I'm just trying to rewatch more Game of Thrones, and I had that moment where Melisandre's like, "Robert of the House Baratheon." And I wanted to do something similar for Spencer, but I don't know if it hit.   [0:00:57] Spencer: PJ of the House Bruno.   [0:00:59] PJ: Exactly. Just makes you sound more special, I think.   [0:01:02] Will: So Game of Thrones is coming back real soon, right? What do you guys think?   [0:01:06] PJ: Oh, yeah. Sunday night. I'm thrilled. I'm gonna be in the UK, so I'm trying to find people there that ... For a watch party, because as you know, Game of Thrones takes place in England. Or so it may seem. I'm pumped. I'm so freaking pumped for the last season. Spence, any predictions?   [0:01:25] Spencer: I feel so far behind. I'm up to date, but my wife, Jenny, like you, is rewatching. She rewatched everything.   [0:01:33] PJ: You have to.   [0:01:33] Will: Everything? That's a lot.   [0:01:35] Spencer: Over the past couple months. Yeah. And so I'm going through, and I'm like, "All right, who's this again? What did they do?" And since she's been rewatching it, I'll come in at season four and be like, "Oh yeah, that's the guy who ..." And she's like, "No, that hasn't happened yet." And then when she got [inaudible], I was like, "Oh, but that's the guy who did this." She's like, "No, that was three seasons ago."   [0:01:54] PJ: Right.   [0:01:54] Spencer: So I'm just totally discombobulated, but I know once it gets started, there's the action, there's the dragons. We have a big battle coming. Gonna get straight into it.   [0:02:03] Will: Yeah, and you have a cheat sheet that's going to tell you what's going on in the new episodes.   [0:02:07] Spencer: Exactly.   [0:02:07] Will: Meanwhile, I am my girlfriend's cheat sheet, and I am in the same place as you, so I'm just gonna start making things up. I'm just gonna go out there and just say, "That's the secret Stark over there, that one. Just pay attention."   [0:02:21] PJ: They're gonna need to level up those recaps. That's gonna become a five to 10-minute thing of just, "Okay, wait, what ... There's all the sub-threads."   [0:02:30] Will: I'm actually shocked HBO didn't release a pre-episode which was a condensed, 30-minute explainer of what happened in the last season. They should've done that this week. They could've gotten a ton of views on that.   [0:02:40] PJ: Dude, tell me about it. I really ... I need something like that. I need-   [0:02:43] Spencer: That must exist somewhere. A supercut.   [0:02:45] Will: I'm sure YouTube has created that.   [0:02:47] PJ: There's a fan out there that's made that, for sure.   [0:02:49] Will: My main prediction is that HBO is gonna make a lot of money.   [0:02:52] PJ: And then they're gonna go back, they're gonna do a prequel, right? I think there's already talk about some sort of ... Around the time of Aegon and the Mad King. [crosstalk]   [0:03:01] Will: There are apparently four or five in production right now.   [0:03:04] PJ: Jeez.   [0:03:04] Will: Yeah.   [0:03:05] Spencer: Wow.   [0:03:05] PJ: It's a cash cow. What're you gonna do?   [0:03:07] Will: Got to milk it.   [0:03:09] PJ: That's what you do with a cash cow, man.   [0:03:11] Spencer: Did you guys watch SNL this past weekend?   [0:03:13] PJ: I didn't, no. Was there-   [0:03:14] Spencer: Kit Harington was the host.   [0:03:15] PJ: Oh, nice.   [0:03:16] Will: Yeah, he looked like he's 12 years old when I saw that ... The photo. It was really weird.   [0:03:20] PJ: When he's clean-shaven, he does look very young.   [0:03:22] Spencer: He also has a very laddish accent compared to his Jon Snow character. But they had a skit that was a parody of all of the spin-offs, so they had a Game of Thrones that was a Law & Order ripoff, just all of these different versions taking characters and then putting them into a sitcom or a drama or whatever. It was really funny.   [0:03:41] PJ: Classic. Yeah, I mean, I wonder ... Those guys ... You would think you just have a calling card to any job you want after you were on Game of Thrones, but I don't know. It's tough to break out of that when you've made a role for yourself.   [0:03:54] Will: Yeah, you can get pigeonholed pretty easily, I think. I think some of the other characters like that, like Robb Stark, who died seasons ago, what's he been in? Who knows?   [0:04:03] PJ: I don't know. I just see flashes of his face in different-   [0:04:06] Spencer: Actually, I do know.   [0:04:06] PJ: You do know?   [0:04:06] Spencer: He's in that Bodyguard show.   [0:04:08] Will: Oh, really?   [0:04:09] Spencer: I forget what ... Is it Netflix?   [0:04:12] Will: Is Sean Bean at a Starbucks now, shilling coffees? Is that where he is after he said "No, I need more money," and they were like, "Well, we'll kill you in season one. It's fine."   [0:04:20] Spencer: Yeah, he was in the Bodyguard on Netflix. Check it out.   [0:04:24] PJ: Check it out. We're plugging it. Plugging it here. All right, guys, we could talk about Game of Thrones forever, we might as well move on. But in light of Game of Thrones coming up and all the exiles that happen throughout Game of Thrones, this is the Banishment Episode-   [0:04:40] Speaker 8: You are banished!   [0:04:42] PJ: -of Braze for Impact.   [0:04:46] Spencer: Dun dun dun.   [0:04:47] PJ: Exactly. Dun dun dun dun dun dun ... We're really thrilled about it. We're gonna talk about some bans and some tentative bans that are on our radar right now. Starting off with number one, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that includes language that would permanently bar the Internal Revenue Service from creating a free, electronic service for Americans to file their taxes, advancing a primary objective of the industry of for-profit companies like Intuit and H&R Block. Companies like Intuit, which produces TurboTax, which I use, and H&R Block allow most Americans to file for free as long as they earn less than $66,000 for the year, but most eligible Americans don't take advantage of that, with just three percent filing for free. Are you guys TurboTaxers? Do you-   [0:05:37] Will: TurboTax, yeah, regrettably.   [0:05:38] Spencer: TurboTax.   [0:05:39] PJ: We subscribe over here. TurboTax. Yeah, I was one of those late bloomers for doing my own taxes. It was kind of like you'd check off things as becoming an adult. "Oh, got to do this. Got to do this." Taxes was the last thing. It was like my dad did it, and I paid a guy to literally handle all of it. Now I'm TurboTax-ing, and I'm a grown, grown man now.   [0:05:58] Spencer: Consider yourself an adult?   [0:06:00] PJ: I thought ... For me, that was the last bit of criteria to say, "Okay, I've made it. I'm an adult."   [0:06:05] Will: It's truly ridiculous that we have to file like that. It's crazy. No other country in the world does it that way. Apparently, I think, in the UK, you have to make ... This number might be a little bit wrong, but it's something like 125,000 pounds a year to have to file. Other than that, what happens is the government just mails you your tax return, because they've got all the data like the IRS does. And they say, "If you want to contest this, go for it. Otherwise, here's your check."   [0:06:32] Spencer: Good to go.   [0:06:33] PJ: Yeah. Super easy. Why are we making it so hard on ourselves?   [0:06:37] Will: It also really screws poor people as well, here, because people have this idea in America that paying taxes ... You are always paying your taxes, right? Filing taxes your taxes is synonymous with paying your taxes. When in reality, if you make $30,000 a year, you're almost certainly going to get a refund. They're leaving money on the table, and if the IRS isn't automatically doing it, they don't get the refund, and IRS doesn't call them to complain, either.   [0:07:03] PJ: Yeah.   [0:07:06] Spencer: They have the information. Especially for a simple filer. You're just getting your deductions, you worked at the same place, you've lived in the same state. They know ... They know it. They could just do it. Estonia does this. Estonia. But apparently, I was reading-   [0:07:24] Will: They have e-citizenship, too, though.   [0:07:25] PJ: It just would ... Is it ... What's the reasoning? It's just it would take a lot of work for that to happen?   [0:07:30] Spencer: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One, these companies spend a lot of money lobbying our Representatives.   [0:07:35] Will: Tens and tens of millions of dollars every year.   [0:07:38] Spencer: The second is the party that prefers to remove taxes, they tend to do it for the people with the most money. But that aside, they think that if it's too easy ... Too easy to pay your taxes, it'll be as a result too easy for our Congress to increase taxes. So they try to make it harder so that people have to go through the pain and we all hate taxes. So there's-   [0:08:08] PJ: So wait, the thinking is that taxes will be increased if we did less work?   [0:08:13] Will: They want you to associate misery and pain and nonsense with taxation every year, and they've been highly successful, I would say.   [0:08:21] PJ: Yeah, tell me about it.   [0:08:23] Will: So, it's ... I don't know. I hope that someday we get there, but this bill that's about to go through with the tax free preparation software, banning all that stuff, it's, I believe, a bipartisan-supported bill, which just makes me really, really ask virtually everyone in Congress, "Guys, what the hell's going on?"   [0:08:49] PJ: I mean, it's just they're making money, right? Is it just-   [0:08:52] Will: Yeah. I think it costs the IRS more money to deal with these external agencies, too. Because you have to imagine on the technical side, they're building integrations and accepting all these form factors from all these different places. If the IRS just built this internally, or some other service built it that was easy to use and free, everyone would start using that, and then all of a sudden all of the overhead costs and all that starts to go down, too.   [0:09:20] PJ: Well, let's hope there's a different future for us, because I think that should be a free tool, hands down.   [0:09:26] Spencer: For sure. Have any of you guys had to deal with cryptocurrency and paying taxes on that?   [0:09:33] Will: I have, yes. It was pretty damn confusing. That might be the exception for where you might have to file something yourselves.   [0:09:43] Spencer: Yeah, right. Here's this new, sketchy asset that I made some money on.   [0:09:47] Will: Yeah, I made ... Not, I would say, a well-informed investment on it, because I don't think virtually anyone's investment on it is well-informed, unless you're a Ph.D. Mathematician who's dug into the source code. But yeah, I'd go as one of the lucky ones and got out while I was sensible, so I had to figure out where the hell to put that in TurboTax. It was weird.   [0:10:06] PJ: I'm sure it was. Did you, as well, or-   [0:10:08] Spencer: Yeah, this year. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it now, but-   [0:10:13] PJ: Well, since you're mentioning crypto ... Nice segue. Appreciate it. Onto our next ban. China considers ban on cryptocurrency ... Mining, that is, because it's a stupid waste of energy. Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an undesirable economic activity, according to a government document released Monday. Basically, the whole thinking is that it's a huge waste on valuable resources because it takes so much energy to do this crypto mining. According to a recent report in Nature Sustainability, crypto mining emits anywhere between three million and 15 million tons of carbon dioxide globally. China making a decision that's good for the environment? I'm a little confused.   [0:10:59] Will: Yeah, although they've actually been getting a lot better about that. I think they won the race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact, and then realized how awful the bottom was and are trying to desperately claw up the other side now.   [0:11:12] Spencer: Yeah, I think with the Olympics, when they had to just close factories so that it wasn't so polluted that people were hacking up a lung while running a marathon.   [0:11:21] PJ: Jeez.   [0:11:21] Will: Yeah. It's still not good there, but they're doing a lot more, I think. Anyway, on the crypto subject, I just don't know. It's just like ... I see the potential, maybe, of something like this in the future, but right now, I read some article ... This was a year ago, that said that a year ago, Bitcoin itself was taking as much electrical energy every month as the nation of Germany.   [0:11:51] Spencer: I think it's one percent of global energy consumption is going to Bitcoin mining.   [0:11:55] Will: Yeah, and they kept saying that it's gonna go up. And that's only Bitcoin, too. There are, what, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other cryptocurrencies? If you assume Bitcoin is maybe half the market, probably? Something like that? Or maybe it's a third. Who knows? Anyways, that means a huge portion of global energy is essentially right now going to give people another store of money. Banking's a hell of a lot cheaper. Do you know how much energy J.P. Morgan probably spends? I don't know what it is, but I guarantee you it's not one percent of energy.   [0:12:31] PJ: Right.   [0:12:31] Spencer: Especially since most of the mining happens in China, and they're still pretty reliant on coal for a lot of that energy consumption, so not great with the whole global warming thing and the future of humanity, but who knows?   [0:12:44] PJ: Yeah, but I mean, you mentioned it, Will. Maybe sometimes you need to hit the bottom first to know that you need to dig yourselves out.   [0:12:52] Will: I just want to thank you guys as the hosts of this podcast for picking really uplifting topics. [crosstalk]   [0:12:57] Spencer: Do you have a story about hitting rock bottom you'd like to share with us?   [0:13:01] Will: No, that's coming in an upcoming episode of When Shift Hits the Fan.   [0:13:03] PJ: That's true. Look forward to our Rock Bottom Episode, starring Will Crocker.   [0:13:07] Spencer: Will, didn't you ... You were telling me before the show a little bit about graphics cards and how the changing and use in mining was affecting the prices.   [0:13:17] Will: Oh, yeah, there was a point where I ... I play computer games, so I own a graphics card, and there was a point where I bought a graphics card, and usually any piece of technology you buy depreciates over time. It's just because newer stuff comes out, and it gets better. But the market for GPUs, which are graphical processing units, was so nuts because of Bitcoin a couple years ago that I realized my graphics card had appreciated almost 50% at one point. And there just came a point when I was like, "Should I just sell this thing and wait for a while and get out of the market?" But it's absolutely insane how much the prices were fluctuating based upon that. If anybody who's an nVidia stockholder, you rode that wave right with everyone else.   [0:13:59] PJ: The graphics card biz. I see you, Will.   [0:14:03] Will: I'm long on the graphics card biz. They have real applications, too, like neural net processing and a lot of the kind of things that you see people doing, like libraries like TensorFlow to do understanding complex deep learning problems in computer science. All of that requires GPUs, essentially, so it's gonna come forward, but it's gonna fall a little bit for the crypto.   [0:14:26] PJ: Will, since you are such a gamer, and I am as well ... Spencer, were you a little bit in your heyday, probably?   [0:14:32] Spencer: A little bit.   [0:14:33] PJ: I mean, I think given that, Will, you should probably take some beef with Prince Harry, because this next article: Prince Harry calls for a ban on Fortnite. I know that's not your top game, but still, I mean, let's take a look at this.   [0:14:47] Will: Yeah. Fortnite's all right.   [0:14:49] PJ: Ahead of one of the biggest nights in the gaming industry, Prince Harry has called for a ban on Fortnite due to its supposed addictive qualities. Harry said, "That game shouldn't be allowed." In a British accent, of course. "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where's the benefit of having it in your household?" And then, also, Harry suggested Fortnite, a shooter game focused on survival, was responsible for tearing families apart. "It's like waiting for the damage to be done and kids turning up on your doorstep and families being broken down."   [0:15:24] Spencer: Is this real?   [0:15:24] PJ: This is real. This is a legitimate quote.   [0:15:26] Spencer: No.   [0:15:26] PJ: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.   [0:15:27] Will: You're tearing me apart, Lisa!   [0:15:30] PJ: "You're tearing me apart, Prince Harry!" Yeah. So that's where he stands on it. Ironically enough, he feels the same way about social media, feels like it's real poison in general. And I guess a day later, him and Meghan Markle started their own Instagram page, so you can follow them on that, which is nice.   [0:15:51] Will: Oh, yeah, which also isn't destroying society at all, right? That's just totally fine that everyone's addicted to Instagram and those things.   [0:15:58] PJ: Exactly. I mean, ban on addictive substances, i.e. Video games. This is ... We're addicted to our tech, obviously, right? But thoughts on video games? To me, my argument was always: video games, yes, they can suck time and everything, but to me, it was always ... It's like an interactive art form. I'm witnessing somebody's art they've put together. Especially MMORPGs, massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Anything that has a big, big, huge world, and I just want to run around all of it, I just really appreciate the design and thought that goes into all of it. That's my feeling.   [0:16:33] Will: It's like a concert in some ways, right? Like at a concert, you're coming to watch music, but you're also coming together to experience that with everyone else around you, and I think multiplayer games are the same way. You're creating that human interaction, which creates the art around it.   [0:16:44] PJ: Yeah.   [0:16:46] Will: Yeah, I don't know about this. I wonder if EA bribed Prince Harry to pick on Fortnite. It was like, "Epic Games needs to be taken down a notch." Because couldn't you just make this claim about most games?   [0:16:58] Spencer: Yeah, why Fortnite, Prince Harry?   [0:17:01] Will: Just because it's the big target. I don't know.   [0:17:03] PJ: Yeah, that's probably what it was. He was thinking about it, and it's just-   [0:17:06] Spencer: It's the only video game he's heard of.   [0:17:07] PJ: I mean, for a guy who smokes as much pot as Prince Harry, I would've thought that video games would be right ... What do you do, then, when you're stoned?   [0:17:13] Will: Is he a toker? I didn't know that.   [0:17:15] Spencer: Yeah, if we want to talk about tearing families apart, how about the royal family of the British Empire?   [0:17:20] PJ: Oh, man. Dude. Counterargument in your face.   [0:17:24] Will: Whoa, guys. Whoa, guys. We have EMEA customers here.   [0:17:28] PJ: Of course, we're just playing. This is all in jest. But no, I think it's a genuine thing. I'm sure plenty of parents are concerned when their kids are spending hours and hours in their room. I'm sure they also don't understand how social gaming actually is.   [0:17:42] Spencer: Especially Fortnite.   [0:17:43] PJ: Especially Fortnite. But what I will say, if you want to ban Apex Legends, you can just go ahead and do that as far as I'm concerned, because I can't even get in a session without throwing the remote against the wall, everyone's so good.   [0:17:54] Spencer: Talk to this guy.   [0:17:55] Will: It's just because you're bad. But it's just the ... Real talk. I'm sorry. Don't just run around in the open and just flail about. Hide behind things. Shoot people.   [0:18:04] Spencer: You should get a lesson from Will.   [0:18:05] PJ: I thought that when you run out in the middle of the board and you kind of scattershot and spin in circles-   [0:18:10] Spencer: He can't be taught.   [0:18:11] Will: I need clay to mold.   [0:18:14] PJ: I'm too old. I'm too old. This old sponge is dried up. There's not much I can learn left.   [0:18:18] Spencer: "This Old Sponge," that's our new show.   [0:18:21] Will: On the subject of ... "This Old Sponge," with PJ Bruno. But on the subject of addiction and games, I do think it's a problem. It is something that ... it's not great for kids to spend infinite hours on these sort of things, but I think there's some interesting, far less intrusive ways than banning the stupid thing. I think ... I've seen some things I think in Vietnam or China, somewhere in Asia, there're some countries now which have stipulations that if somebody has n hours of consecutive play time, that they then have to pop up a message that says, "Hey, are you sure you want to keep playing? Maybe it's time to go take a break or go outside."   [0:19:00] PJ: That's pretty cool.   [0:19:00] Spencer: I like that.   [0:19:00] Will: Or I think some of the games also have something where you have to ... you get reduced experience or something like that after you play for too many consecutive hours.   [0:19:10] PJ: Interesting.   [0:19:11] Spencer: In-game punishment.   [0:19:12] Will: So the game ... Yeah, so you basically get decreasing rewards in the margin.   [0:19:17] Spencer: That's smart.   [0:19:18] PJ: That is really smart. Or if they could have a feature that causes your parent to care more and actually put some restrictions on how much you're playing the game. That's just me. Anyways, we're at our time. Will, thank you so much for being here.   [0:19:35] Will: Thank you, PJ. I hope you find yourself in the game someday, and stop hating the game. Hate the player.   [0:19:43] PJ: That's true. And I'll never stop searching for myself in-game. Spencer, thanks for coming along for the ride.   [0:19:48] Spencer: Thanks, Peej.   [0:19:49] PJ: And you, too. Thanks for joining us, guys. You take care. [0:19:52]

Braze's Director of Data Jesse Tao and Tech Alliances Manager at Looker Erin Franz graciously break down BI tools and the value of data for the rest of us civilians. They walk through the marketization of data and the power of Looker blocks.        TRANSCRIPT: [0:00:17] PJ: Hi there. This is PJ Bruno. Welcome back to Braze For Impact, your weekly tech industry discussed digest. And I'm thrilled today to have two very good friends of mine, Jesse Tao, our director of data, the man about data. What's the title Jesse? It's just data person?   [0:00:33] Jesse: Well my Slack title is just data stuff.   [0:00:35] PJ: Right. So we have Jesse Tao, data stuff-   [0:00:38] Jesse: Official title is, Head of Data Strategy.   [0:00:41] PJ: Head of Data Stuff, Jesse Tao, and also our very good friend joining us from Looker, that's Erin Franz. Hi Erin.   [0:00:48] Erin: Hi.   [0:00:49] PJ: Good to have you here.   [0:00:50] Erin: Yeah, glad to be here.   [0:00:51] PJ: How's the day been so far? You guys have been doing workshops right?   [0:00:54] Erin: Yeah. Flew in last night. Just starting the day early, east coast time. Feeling great.   [0:00:58] PJ: Awesome. Not too jet lagged yet? You're feeling good?   [0:01:01] Erin: So far.   [0:01:02] PJ: Hitting our stride. That's what I like to hear. So we're here today to talk about data, about insights. I'm sure as you two know, over the past 30 years there's been monumental strides in what that means to companies, and the value that it can add. So let's start really, really general, where we are today. Erin, can you speak to some patterns that we've since in data, since the beginning of it? I guess from relational, to non relational databases, to the kind of stuff that you work with right now?   [0:01:34] Erin: Yeah. I mean, I can speak to ... Since I've joined Looker about four years ago, sort of how the landscape's changed and how we've seen sort of the product evolve with the technologies that have become available. So I think when Looker was founded six years ago or so, Redshift was just emerging as this modern analytical data warehouse. And those technologies didn't really exist before. And what this enabled, was the ability to actually expose large volumes of data across an organization in a way that multiple people could be accessing at the same time, and really using it to make data-driven decisions. Luckily, Looker took a bet on SQL being kind of this language of querying that would scale with all these different technologies that have come out. And luckily, that's been the case. With Redshift, we've also seen other databases like Snowflake and Google has BigQuery, that have really enabled organizations to become data-driven and self-serving when it comes to making decisions based on data.   [0:02:37] PJ: And making it more accessible to people like me, like pedestrians, plebs, who just don't really understand kind of the technical side of data. It's like-   [0:02:47] Erin: Exactly.   [0:02:48] PJ: Democratizes it a bit.   [0:02:49] Erin: Right. Making it accessible in a way that it's not just accessible to technical folks, to data analysts, to people who understand SQL and know how to code, to people who just want to click and drop and create reports and explore data on their own, products like Looker make that possible.   [0:03:06] PJ: And Jesse you work with Looker pretty regularly at this point?   [0:03:10] Jesse: Yes, almost every day.   [0:03:11] PJ: Almost every day. And I mean we wouldn't call you a pedestrian, you're pretty deep in data, you understand it well enough.   [0:03:16] Jesse: Yes I do.   [0:03:17] PJ: Why don't you talk to us a little bit about the marketization of data. This is something that's-   [0:03:22] Jesse: Yeah, you know, I think today we collect a lot of data. And in my opinion, data has more or less become a commodity now, rather than the hot topic. And what the hot topic of today is, it's insights. Because you're thinking about it, we're collecting a lot of data. We have data coming in from IOT and all these other sources, and most of the data that's collected, isn't being used. So, how useful is something that's sitting in the data of our house, kind of just collecting dust? So, very low value there. The value is from the insights, from actually analyzing the data, getting the data and figuring out what you want to do with it, to drive business decisions. And this is kind of where Braze comes in, and Looker comes in. We're providing the data and also providing the framework and the tools for people who are not using data, to get insights out of it and actually use that data. So I think in terms of the marketing pressure in the industry, we're moving ... We're going to still collect a lot of data, but more of the focus is going to be on how do we actually use that data faster and more efficiently?   [0:04:21] PJ: Right. Because if you're not using that data and you're not taking action on it, you're going to be left in the dust, more or less, right? Is that the ...   [0:04:27] Jesse: Yes. To put it in Marie Kondo terms, data just sitting there, brings us no joy.   [0:04:33] PJ: And you're all about sparking joy.   [0:04:36] Jesse: Sure.   [0:04:38] PJ: All right then. Okay, well what sorts of data, insights are available to day that wasn't available in the past? Obviously this is kind of a big sweeping generalization, but what can we speak to currently?   [0:04:49] Erin: I think some common themes that we've seen emerging are, people are collecting data from tools that they are using in their business, whether that's a Salesforce as a CRM's index as a support system and centralizing all that data in one place. So you're not just accessing one data set, not just your transactional data set, but also the data sets that define your whole business and your whole customer journey. So you're actually able to create kind of that 360 view of the customer that we're all sort of striving for, from as many sources as possible. And that's become possible because of these data warehousing technologies that are now available.   [0:05:27] PJ: It's all about that 360 degree view these days, isn't it?   [0:05:30] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:05:33] PJ: Because I'm still kind of just getting my feet wet with my understanding of the eco system of products right? You have your attribution, you have your CDPs, Braze is in there somewhere-   [0:05:44] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:05:46] PJ: Engagement. So Looker is the analysis, it's less the visualization and more the business intelligence right? Because I feel like on our call, we talked a little bit, it's not just graphs right?   [0:05:57] Erin: Right. Part of it is graphs for sure-   [0:06:00] PJ: Right.   [0:06:00] Erin: You need to be able to visualize your data, but much more than that, of course we always say the starting point for Looker is a dashboard, or a visualization. You can really drill into that visualization, see the components that have built that. If you're technical, you can even see the SQL that is being written to the database to supply that result set. And then you can modify that report, you can drill down into the granular level data that's supplying the data for that visualization. So let's say you're looking at event count by day on your application, you can see what those events are just by clicking into one of those data points.   [0:06:36] PJ: Gotcha. And that data, that belongs to the company effectively, or that belongs to the user?   [0:06:45] Jesse: I have a point of view on that. And before I share my thoughts, I'll preface it by saying I'm not a lawyer, so do not use this as legal advice.   [0:06:53] PJ: Okay, thanks for that.   [0:06:55] Jesse: I think the data ultimately belongs to the end user, but the company is basically the custodian of that data. Because without the end user, there is no data but without the company, there's not way of collecting or storing that data. So, the company is more or less using, collecting that data on behalf of the user. They're creating some sort of value from it, either from messaging or personalization or just understanding the user a little bit better. Some way of using that data to create insights into the level of value to that user. But ultimately, it is that user's data and the user should own that data. I think that's the point of view that many countries and regulatory bodies are holding as well. If you look at GDPR as well as the upcoming California privacy laws, the focus is really on the end user and their ability to control the data that they collect, the accuracy of it and the right to be forgotten. So, I think there is a common theme where the view point is the end user owns the data whereas, the companies are the ones who are using it to provide value both to the user and to the marketplace.   [0:08:03] PJ: That makes sense. And the California protection, that's going to happen at the end of this year right?   [0:08:11] Jesse: I don't know the exact timeline. We'll have to refer to our legal team about that.   [0:08:14] PJ: Okay. Well we can patch that up later if we need to. So Erin, let's dig more into Looker a little bit. What's the real differentiator for you guys? What do you guys kind of hold up as a torch? This is kind of who we are and what makes us stand out-   [0:08:29] Erin: Yeah.   [0:08:30] PJ: Amongst the other tools.   [0:08:31] Erin: I think luckily, the core Looker product has been fundamentally the same since its inception. With the core differentiators being that it's entirely in database. So as we talked about, the ability to access all of the data, down to the granular ... Most granular level that you're collecting it and exposed that across your organization. And the way that we're able to do that while still providing standards governance, so users are not creating their own one-off definitions of revenue, something that's incredibly important to reporting, is through our modeling layer, which is called LookML. So that's where you define all the business logic that your end data consumers will be using, whether by just exposing them to pre-built dashboards, visualizations or having them build their own content. And the way this works, while still leveraging the database, is it's really just an abstraction of SQL, or the language that you're using to create those database investments. And then finally, it's a web-based modern application. So that makes it really easy to share, collaborate and extend into plenty of other users. We have a fully baked API where you can serve data from Looker elsewhere to bring it into the tools where you need it.   [0:09:46] PJ: So LookML, you said it's your own language-   [0:09:50] Erin: Yup.   [0:09:50] PJ: It's built on another language-   [0:09:53] Erin: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:09:54] PJ: And so if you know LookML, it actually is useful outside of Looker as well.   [0:09:59] Erin: It's proprietary to the product, but it's very ... What you're doing is modeling the components of SQL, which is a core skillset of any data analyst. It really just makes it easier because instead of writing one-off queries, you're writing the components of those queries so they can be reused, by not only the data analyst, but also by all the data consumers.   [0:10:21] PJ: Gotcha. Cool. Well let's talk Looker Blocks. This is what I really want to get into because I first heard about it at LTR 2018, because we announced our first Looker Block right?   [0:10:34] Jesse: Two Looker Blocks actually.   [0:10:35] PJ: Thank you Jesse. Fact checking on the go. Do you want to talk about that? That was kind of a big release right?   [0:10:43] Jesse: Yeah, it was a pretty big release because it was still pretty early on in our relationship with Looker but we saw the immediate value pretty early on, so we decided to move quickly in that direction. And I'll let Erin talk a little bit about what our Looker Blocks, but the two Looker Blocks that we released back in November, are based around our currents data export and it focuses on market engagement and user behavior. So marketing engagement on the Braze data side will be things like email sends, push opens and at message clicks, stuff like that. And user behavior includes things like session starts and app purchases, so the behaviors of the users. We take all of that information together to create really useful insights around how campaigns are performing, user retention, if campaigns are improving your driving purchases, things like that.   [0:11:32] PJ: Gotcha. And Looker Blocks for those of us who don't actually know the definition-   [0:11:39] Erin: Yeah.   [0:11:39] PJ: Are basically ...   [0:11:40] Erin: They're basically templates for LookML. So LookML is a text-base modeling language. So we can model expected data sources upfront. So, data sources that are going to have a common schema, so common tables, columns, fields, within that. We've created a bunch of these for sources that are commonly used across our customers like Salesforce, Zendesk, as I mentioned before, Google AdWords, Facebook ads. The sources we're seeing most often, and then also the sources that we want to model proactively with our partners like Braze.   [0:12:12] PJ: Cool. And so these two Looker Blocks, these are the first of many.   [0:12:16] Jesse: Yes.   [0:12:18] PJ: Cool. I mean, do you know what's on deck? Do we know what's coming up or do we want to save that for our next episode?   [0:12:24] Jesse: We can save that for the next episode, but I actually want to talk a little bit about why we decided to make these Looker Blocks. And I think it's because we saw in it, the common vision with our product, which is data agility, or what we call, data agility. And that means basically speed to insight for us. As I mentioned before, the value of data is not in the data itself, it's what you can do with it, and how you can actually gets insights out of it. And with Looker Blocks, it acts as a template where we are predefining all the data fields and relationships, and providing those fundamental building blocks for us and out customers to build on top of. So, what would historically take a data engineer or a BI developer weeks, days, potentially even months to model, we do all of that leg work for our customers so they can just drag and drop in those Looker Blocks and be ready to find insights within minutes or hours.   [0:13:20] PJ: So that's huge. That's going to save time.   [0:13:22] Jesse: Absolutely.   [0:13:24] PJ: It's exciting. All right, let's move on down to data tech changing roles. How is data tech ... How is it changing the way people are doing their jobs and what will the change for real expectations be in the future?   [0:13:39] Jesse: Sure. Now, I think that people are becoming a lot more data-driven, and thinking about how to both collect and use data in their every day lives. Well not just their every day lives, but every day professional lives. They're using data to not just justify their decisions, but also to understand what the implications are in areas that they may not have seen before. And I think that's going to be a point of differentiation for customers, for our companies, because if you can actually use the data in a very insightful way, you can understand more about your users, your competitors, the marketplace and be able to confidently act in a way that will set you apart. And I think in terms of the data collection, the aspect of privacy is going to be more and more important as well. As I mentioned before, there's GDPR, there's the California privacy laws. I think people are just going to be ... Sorry. I think people are going to have to be more careful about what they collect because in the past, you could collect everything. And now with the privacy breeches you've been seeing at big tech companies, big banks, people have to be careful about both what they're collecting and how they're using it.   [0:14:49] PJ: What's the most insightful way you've collected data to make a decision about your life? Putting you on the spot Jesse. I'll start.   [0:14:58] Jesse: Okay.   [0:15:00] PJ: Mine will have to be using Rotten Tomatoes to decide to not watch movies. That's probably it. That's probably saved me several hours of viewing time.   [0:15:11] Jesse: Okay. So I actually have a script that I write, that scrapes lottery websites for the winning numbers, as well as the pay out. And I modeled out something where something like Powerball or Mega Millions, the optimal time to buy is a jackpot of around 3.25 to 3.5 million because at that time, there are not so many buyers where you have to split the pot. So you basically maximize your payout that way. So, we have office lotto pools here and I don't really partake in them up until a certain point where I think there's a higher payout.   [0:15:49] PJ: I'm going to keep that in mind Jesse. That's a good one. That was a really good one.   [0:15:52] Erin: Yeah, saving time, stress. I'm more on the Rotten Tomatoes path.   [0:15:59] PJ: Yeah?   [0:15:59] Erin: Yeah.   [0:16:00] PJ: Do your homework, do your reviews, leverage the data available.   [0:16:03] Erin: I guess restaurants also.   [0:16:05] PJ: Yup. Yeah.   [0:16:07] Erin: Avid Yelp user.   [0:16:08] PJ: I'm a latecomer-   [0:16:09] Erin: Not a reviewer but-   [0:16:10] PJ: Not a reviewer, right. I'm a voyeur. I hide in the comments and I watch.   [0:16:13] Erin: Yes.   [0:16:14] PJ: I'm a-   [0:16:14] Jesse: Lurker.   [0:16:15] PJ: What's that?   [0:16:16] Jesse: A lurker.   [0:16:16] PJ: I'm a lurker. I'm a lurker, that's right.   [0:16:18] Erin: Yeah, I rely on those people who are letting people know their opinions.   [0:16:22] PJ: And I'm a latecomer to Reddit actually. I kind of just joined the bandwagon because I needed information on a certain thing. I was like, wow, this isn't just funny comments, there's a lot of really useful information here. Who knew? Anyways, so what were some trends, some hot ideas in the last few years that really didn't deliver on its promise? What are some current trends or hot ideas you think do have promise in the future? Erin, you want to weigh in?   [0:16:48] Erin: Well, getting back to technology here, I think that as companies starting becoming more digital, and they were collecting so much more data and they wanted a place to put it, a data lake, and I think you know, I don't know how long ago it was, but Hadoop technology has emerged as kind of this place where you could be putting all your log data, all of your transactional data, all of this data. And it was easy to collect potentially, but not easy to actually self serve. So you were collecting all this data, but you didn't know ... There was no way to expose it to the organization. So I think that these analytical data warehouses have really filled that void and actually made that possible. And we've only seen that within the past five years or so.   [0:17:33] PJ: Can you tell me the different between a data warehouse and a data lake? Because I've heard data lake around this office over the past eight or nine months, and is there a big different that I'm missing?   [0:17:45] Erin: I can give the high level and then I think Jesse might want to comment on the more details. But you can think of a data lake as more like a file system. So you're putting all these files of data in this place for storage, but that doesn't make it necessarily accessible to the people who need it.   [0:18:02] PJ: But the warehouse, you can actually do more with it?   [0:18:05] Erin: Right. In a more performant way.   [0:18:07] Jesse: Yeah, I mean the way I would kind of think about it is a little bit more literally if you will. A data warehouse you can image as potentially a physical warehouse that you can just put anything in there. In this case, it's going to be data. And a data lake, you can think of as a warehouse that has a giant pool in it. All that data is kind of just swimming around in a, I wouldn't call it a liquid form, but there's ... It's potentially unstructured, it's very fluid, it's just there.   [0:18:31] PJ: Makes sense.   [0:18:32] Jesse: And then people can go into that data lake with buckets or whatever tool to extract the data that they need.   [0:18:40] PJ: That's a good metaphor. And so data lakes versus data ponds, is there ...   [0:18:45] Jesse: There have been some ... I've heard the term data ponds before-   [0:18:48] PJ: Really? Okay. I thought I was just messing with you, but I guess I wasn't-   [0:18:53] Jesse: No I've heard it before. I don't think we're currently using that though.   [0:18:56] PJ: All right, Jesse, hot shot, will data proficiency be a core skill for talent in the future? What do you think?   [0:19:05] Jesse: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think here at Braze, and just at other companies, just reading the news, you hear more and more about how companies try to be data-driven. If you just look at our job descriptions, by the way we're hiring, and job descriptions of other companies you see, the requirement of understanding the different data warehouses, technologies, how to use data. A move from Excel to more complicated analytics technologies like Looker for example, becoming more and more popular. So it's absolutely going to be more important in the future. And you know I think for data analysts, that's ... Their role has kind of changed over the recent years and will continue to change as well. I think for the data analysts that I see, it's moving more and more towards a full staff knowledge. So before, you would see people focusing on one element of the data pipeline, whereas analysts today tend to have more visibility over how to bring data in, how to clean it, how to do the app analysis and the visualization, everything. And I think there's going to be more focus on the domain knowledge as well because data and insights out of context, is not going to be terribly useful to the organization. So we need to know how to appropriately analyze and interpret enough information in a way that the business or the end users can actually use. Also, I think in terms of the marketplace, you're just going to see more and more technologies. Some better, some worse than others, within the visualization space. Looker is pretty new, they're a ... I would call them a challenger, again something encompassing the place and they're doing very well. But going further upstream, you're seeing a lot of new database, data warehouse technologies, a lot of new ETL technologies. So I think the data analysts of today and tomorrow, are just going to be more familiar with these technologies and how to use these technologies. And then flipping a little bit to the non technical people, so the end consumers of the data. I think you're going to see changes there as well, especially as data becomes more democratized, and easier to use and consume. We're definitely seeing a trend towards self service. So, drag and drop analysis of data rather than actually going into the data warehouse to write the code and analyze it. We're seeing more sophisticated alerting, so we know when data isn't looking the way we think it should be looking. And that's just going to allow people to move a lot more quickly and more confidently as they try out experiments, they do AB tests and iterate quickly.   [0:21:37] PJ: Brave new world.   [0:21:38] Jesse: Yes.   [0:21:40] PJ: Erin, you want to weigh in? What does the future hold for Looker? You don't need to show your full hand. I know you guys have stuff. But anything you want to leave us with?   [0:21:49] Erin: Yeah, I think beyond sort of self service, the core BI use case, Looker's really trying to position itself as a data platform. So, not just for internal analytics and reporting, but also serving data elsewhere to other applications, to deliver data where it needs to go, like the action hub integration that we built with Braze. So, basically connecting the dots when it comes to doing analysis and taking action on it. So, building your list of users you want to target a campaign to and not just having to export that and then upload it into a tool, but creating that link directly to that product you're using.   [0:22:32] PJ: Awesome. Cool. A lot stuff to look forward to then.   [0:22:35] Jesse: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-   [0:22:35] PJ: Thank you guys so much for being here with me, and thank you guys for joining us. This has been Jesse Tao, Erin Franz and PJ Bruno. Happy visualizing. [0:22:45]

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter