Podcasts about WYSIWYG

What began as a quick SEO tip while Meredith was swimming with whales in Tonga evolved into a comprehensive Fundamentals Series ShowIt, WordPress, and Squarespace users.Visit the Fundamentals Serieshttps://seiq.meredithshusband.com/c/welcome-fundamentalsIn this episode...[0:24] Origin of the Fundamentals series for Showit users[1:08] Why Showit needs specific SEO guidance[2:37] What is WYSIWYG and Showit's visual interface[4:03] How Showit splits sites between Showit and WordPress[5:00] The unique problem of dual sitemaps[5:20] Configuring Yoast properly for Showit blogs[5:54] Connecting Google tools (Analytics and Search Console)[6:48] How to monitor Google Search Console after setup[7:41] Why Google Business Profile is also a “fundamental”[8:20] Thank-you message and free access for contributors ---Meredith's Husbandhttps://www.meredithshusband.com

Slushies, we invoke the retelling of a ghostly experience shared by Kathy and Marion at the Hotel Figueroa in California earlier this year partway into this episode. Two poems by Jen Siraganian are at the heart of our discussion, and it's the first of these that puts ghosts into our heads. This poem also causes us to consider at some length the physical form chosen by or for a poem, and how this can utterly enhance the experience of the poem when it's just right. It's also an opportunity for Jason to raise the spectre of the virgule (or slash) once again, and we even pause briefly to recall when WYSIWYG was a useful acronym. We end the episode with an ekphrastic that prompts an on-the-spot tie breaker (thanks to our sound engineer Lillie for saving the day!).   https://whitney.org/collection/works/2171 https://www.nga.gov/collection/highlights/gorky-the-artist-and-his-mother.html  At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, Jason Schneiderman, Dagne Forrest, Jodi Gahn, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)   Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Barrow Street, Best New Poets, Cortland Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Smartish Pace, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the 2024 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco's Literary Festival, she is a current Lucas Artist Fellow. jensiraganian.com      Social media handles:   Facebook @jen.siraganian, Instagram @jsiraganian, Bluesky @jsiraganian.bsky.social, Website

There is something fascinating about paintings. While many are WYSIWYG, others demonstrate that there is more going on than immediately meets the eye of the observer. Take, for instance, Salvador Dali's Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) with Jesus crucified on a tesseract, with Dali's wife Gala depicted looking on, but is also seen on one of the knees, while Dali is represented on the other. Then there's Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm, and after carefully counting the number of people in the boat, you discover a 14th person looking back at you – the artist's depiction of himself.And without becoming conspiratorial, what if – what if there is more to this life than meets the eye? Would you be willing to look in?https://youtu.be/0MvfwPO0RC8A message by David Toscano

If something never goes away, you're never able to miss it. That's why there's an incredible amount of cynicism surrounding The Last of Us Complete, yet another re-release of the 2013 original and its 2020 sequel, a package that combines both games into something more accessible and affordable for PlayStation 5 owners. Naturally, this is heavily tied into the return of The Last of Us on HBO, and clearly this sort of thing isn't really aimed at us at all. In fact, it's likely very smart business. But that doesn't mean we're longing for something else. Anything else, really. For once. Plus: PS+ price increases slam headlong into Latin America, Portal gets some key UI and UX updates catered toward streaming users, PlayStation's concert series seemingly suffers poor ticket sales, and more. Then: Listener inquries! Should console manufacturers limit hardware sales to their most hardcore audience first? Considering the length of both Uncharted 4 and TLoU2, should be expect Intergalactic to be a very long game? Is the "games are too expensive" argument ultimately a dead end? Can Colin mystify his sons with the '90s tech magic of WYSIWYG? Please keep in mind that our timestamps are approximate, and will often be slightly off due to dynamic ad placement. Timestamps: 0:00:00 - Intro 0:37:06 - Larger shirts selling out 0:42:17 - Dealing with grief 0:44:51 - Kids listening to Sacred 0:46:02 - Espresso tips 0:52:04 - Lawn boys rise up 0:56:21 - Timestamps on what we're playing (no) 1:00:21 - Dustin's art of the deal 1:03:19 - PS+ price increase in Latin America 1:12:52 - Marathon reveal incoming 1:30:30 - HBO renews Last of Us for Season 3 1:38:28 - PS Portal update 1:41:06 - Animated background on PS5 1:43:58 - Vampire Survivors cross-save wont come to PlayStation 1:51:23 - PlayStation Concerts being canceled 1:56:08 - Death Stranding film details 2:03:06 - What We've Been Playing (The Last of Us: Part II, Breakout Beyond, Ready or Not, Blue Prince, Marathon 2: Durandal, Assassin's Creed Shadows) 2:35:58 - The Last of Us Complete 2:44:21 - New PlayStation+ games 2:52:47 - PSN Top Downloads 3:02:15 - Post-apocalyptic media 3:11:34 - Preorders looking at accounts 3:18:27 - Intergalactic's runtime 3:23:20 - Best weather in videos games 3:29:25 - Games industry and economics 3:40:48 - Lilymo and Kickstarter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, I speak with Chad Whitacre of Sentry about their functional software license and the open-source pledge.Want the power of Mermaid for enterprises? Try Mermaid Chart Mermaid chart brings WYSIWYG editing, generative AI, collaboration, and more to the flexible syntax of Mermaid.Sign up at go.chrischinchilla.com/mermaid For show notes and an interactive transcript, visit chrischinchilla.com/podcast/To reach out and say hello, visit chrischinchilla.com/contact/To support the show for ad-free listening and extra content, visit chrischinchilla.com/support/

From misbehaving power supplies to a WYSIWYG editor that thought it was running on a PlayStation, today's stories dive deep into the weirdest corners of tech support. We've got cables in chaos, corporate facepalms, and one very patient IT guy who just wanted someone to turn on their TV. These stories are frustrating, hilarious, and oddly satisfying — especially when the fix is something as simple as tilting a phone. Whether you're an IT pro or just enjoy watching disaster unfold from a safe distance, this one's for you. Grab your coffee and enjoy the madness.Submit your own stories to KarmaStoriesPod@gmail.com.Karma Stories is available on all major Podcasting Platforms and on YouTube under the @KarmaStoriesPodcast handle. We cover stories from popular Reddit Subreddits like Entitled Parents, Tales From Tech Support, Pro Revenge and Malicious Compliance. You can find new uploads here every single day of the week!Rob's 3D Printing Site: https://Dangly3D.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/karma-stories--5098578/support.

In this episode Cate and Chris talk about the future of European tech in the wake of the many challenges the block faces from the US, Russia, China, and more.Want the power of Mermaid for enterprises? Try Mermaid Chart Mermaid chart brings WYSIWYG editing, generative AI, collaboration, and more to the flexible syntax of Mermaid.Sign up at go.chrischinchilla.com/mermaid For show notes and an interactive transcript, visit chrischinchilla.com/podcast/To reach out and say hello, visit chrischinchilla.com/contact/To support the show for ad-free listening and extra content, visit chrischinchilla.com/support/

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a global SaaS company with 25 million users without venture funding. My guest is Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of Jotform. Aytekin founded Jotform in 2006, creating a pioneering WYSIWYG online form builder that has grown to serve over 25 million users worldwide today.  What's remarkable is that he bootstrapped the company from the ground up. This allowed Jotform to remain 100% independent and define its own rules and company culture as it grew. Under his leadership, Jotform has experienced impressive international growth, with offices in seven different cities around the world. Their growth and style were recognized as Jotform was named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine. Aytekin is not just a successful entrepreneur but also an automation enthusiast. He recently published a book titled "Automate Your Busywork. His book shares his insights on the automation philosophy he applied to grow Jotform. This inspired me, so I invited Aytekin to my podcast. We explore his biggest lessons learned from bootstrapping a form-building tool to leading a global company with 25 million users. He elaborates on his approach around continuous innovation and maintaining momentum (rather than worrying about competitors) and shares his insights on prioritizing product development and growth. Last but not least, he talks about how he recently gave new meaning to his 'Founder' role and why every SaaS entrepreneur should do that. Here's one of his quotes Being a founder is not just about leading a team, coaching a team, managing a team. But it's also about improving myself, growing myself. Because being a founder is about growth. It's about growth mindset. It's about growing yourself with the company. It's about growing your company. And it requires some dedication to do that - growing knowledge and learning. During this interview, you will learn four things: How he's working with customers to ensure JotForm's success His first principles for managing growth and avoiding getting bogged down in busy work. How he's organized his development teams and their rituals to ensure momentum on the one hand and optimal alignment on the other hand. How he approached competition from Google Forms to come out stronger themselves.  For more information about the guest from this week: Aytekin Tank Website: Jotform Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it's actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It's short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. table td.shrink { white-space:nowrap } hr.thin { border: 0; height: 0; border-top: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.3); } New hosts Welcome to our new host: SolusSpider. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4240 Fri 2024-11-01 The First Doctor, Part 1 Ahuka 4241 Mon 2024-11-04 HPR Community News for October 2024 HPR Volunteers 4242 Tue 2024-11-05 Interview with Lorenzo 'kelset' Sciandra Ken Fallon 4243 Wed 2024-11-06 Hand Warmer, long term product review MrX 4244 Thu 2024-11-07 Two methods of digitizing photos. Henrik Hemrin 4245 Fri 2024-11-08 What's in my bag? Trey 4246 Mon 2024-11-11 Bytes, Pages and Screens Lee 4247 Tue 2024-11-12 Installing GuixSD--Part Deux Rho`n 4248 Wed 2024-11-13 Millie Perkins Ken Fallon 4249 Thu 2024-11-14 Audio Streams on the Command Line Kevie 4250 Fri 2024-11-15 Playing Civilization IV, Part 3 Ahuka 4251 Mon 2024-11-18 Dave and MrX turn over a new leaf Dave Morriss 4252 Tue 2024-11-19 Privacy is not hiding Some Guy On The Internet 4253 Wed 2024-11-20 A brief introduction of myself Kinghezy 4254 Thu 2024-11-21 Cake Money Money Cake Money Money Cake! operat0r 4255 Fri 2024-11-22 What is on My Podcast Player 2024, Part 1 Ahuka 4256 Mon 2024-11-25 Birds of a Feather Talk at OLF 2024 Thaj Sara 4257 Tue 2024-11-26 Movie review: The Artifice Girl Kevie 4258 Wed 2024-11-27 Introduction and History of Using Computers SolusSpider 4259 Thu 2024-11-28 Why digitize photos Henrik Hemrin 4260 Fri 2024-11-29 The Golden Age Ahuka Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 61 comments in total. Past shows There are 21 comments on 17 previous shows: hpr0870 (2011-12-02) "Computer Memories" by Deltaray. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-29: "Commonality on Deltaray's computer experiences" hpr1322 (2013-08-27) "Kevin O'Brien - Ohio LinuxFest 2013" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-26: "Attended OLF2013" hpr1642 (2014-11-18) "Frist Time at Oggcamp" by Al. Comment 2: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-27: "Al at Oggcamp - 10 years later" hpr1890 (2015-10-30) "A short walk with my son" by thelovebug. Comment 4: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-11: "Comment on A short walk with my son" hpr2503 (2018-03-07) "My journey into podcasting" by thelovebug. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-18: "Comment on TheLoveBug journey into podcasting." hpr2673 (2018-10-31) "Urandom - Ohio Linux Fest 2-18 Podcaster Roundtable" by Thaj Sara. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-26: "Wonderful OLF Podcasters Banter" hpr3315 (2021-04-16) "tesseract optical character recognition" by Ken Fallon. Comment 2: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-28: "Tessaract OCR User" Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-29: "Spelling of tesseract" hpr3998 (2023-11-29) "Using open source OCR to digitize my mom's book" by Deltaray. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-29: "Experience with Tesseract OCR software" hpr4106 (2024-04-29) "My tribute to feeds" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-27: "New(ish) to Feeds" Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-29: "Thanks for feedback" hpr4129 (2024-05-30) "How I found Hacker Public Radio" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-27: "My own story of finding HPR" hpr4132 (2024-06-04) "Urandom talks about the future of HPR" by Thaj Sara. Comment 4: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-18: "Comment on Urandom talks about the future of HPR" hpr4195 (2024-08-30) "Hacking HPR Hosts" by Ken Fallon. Comment 2: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-29: "Another comment for Ken - he hacked this host" hpr4200 (2024-09-06) "Intro to Doctor Who" by Ahuka. Comment 5: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-09: "Comment on Introduction To Doctor Who" hpr4220 (2024-10-04) "How Doctor Who Began" by Ahuka. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-11: "Comment on How Doctor Who Began" hpr4233 (2024-10-23) "OggCamp 2024 Day 1" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: @geospart on 2024-11-09: "Nice" hpr4236 (2024-10-28) "History of Nintendo" by Lochyboy. Comment 3: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-10: "Comment on History of Nintendo" Comment 4: John Curwood - blindape on 2024-11-20: "Virtual Boy" hpr4238 (2024-10-30) "Snaps are better than flatpaks" by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 2: Elliot B on 2024-11-01: "Snaps are the least worst" Comment 3: mpardo on 2024-11-02: "Snaps are indeed better that Flatpaks" This month's shows There are 40 comments on 16 of this month's shows: hpr4240 (2024-11-01) "The First Doctor, Part 1" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Kevie on 2024-10-31: "Keep them coming"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2024-11-02: "More to come"Comment 3: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-07: "Daleks" hpr4241 (2024-11-04) "HPR Community News for October 2024" by HPR Volunteers. Comment 1: ClaudioM on 2024-11-04: "Commentary on Ep. 4231 (Tmux+dd+FreeBSD)"Comment 2: Torin Doyle on 2024-11-10: "Hunting, Buzzing"Comment 3: Dave Morriss on 2024-11-14: "Buzzing?"Comment 4: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-11-16: "Dave's buzzing"Comment 5: Torin Doyle on 2024-11-18: "Re: Buzzing (more like a hum) in the audio for Dave Morriss."Comment 6: Dave Morriss on 2024-11-18: "The buzzing of the brain" hpr4244 (2024-11-07) "Two methods of digitizing photos." by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 1: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-07: "Clarification equipment for repro photo"Comment 2: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-07: "What hardware are you using"Comment 3: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-07: "Response to Ken"Comment 4: Charles in NJ on 2024-11-08: "Missed this show because feed is broken"Comment 5: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-08: "Bug Report"Comment 6: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-09: "Please send me your version of bashpodder" hpr4245 (2024-11-08) "What's in my bag?" by Trey. Comment 1: men Fallon on 2024-11-07: "Backdoors and breaches" hpr4246 (2024-11-11) "Bytes, Pages and Screens" by Lee. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-07: "Terry Pratchett"Comment 2: Torin Doyle on 2024-11-18: "Podcasts, Books, TV" hpr4248 (2024-11-13) "Millie Perkins" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Kevie on 2024-11-13: "A fantastic Oggcamp Talk" hpr4249 (2024-11-14) "Audio Streams on the Command Line" by Kevie. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-07: "Great Tips"Comment 2: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-14: "Comment on Audio Streams on the Command Line"Comment 3: Jan on 2024-11-14: "Just Thanks"Comment 4: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-29: "Command Line" hpr4251 (2024-11-18) "Dave and MrX turn over a new leaf" by Dave Morriss. Comment 1: FXB on 2024-11-23: "using wttr.in"Comment 2: Dave Morriss on 2024-11-23: "Re: wttr.in" hpr4252 (2024-11-19) "Privacy is not hiding" by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 1: Tim J on 2024-11-20: "Big Tech is Watching You" hpr4253 (2024-11-20) "A brief introduction of myself" by Kinghezy. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-20: "Comment on kinghezy's introduction show hpr4253" hpr4256 (2024-11-25) "Birds of a Feather Talk at OLF 2024" by Thaj Sara. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-21: "Suspense"Comment 2: Thaj on 2024-11-25: "Resolution"Comment 3: Windigo on 2024-11-26: "Future shows"Comment 4: Torin Doyle on 2024-11-30: "OLF?" hpr4257 (2024-11-26) "Movie review: The Artifice Girl" by Kevie. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-26: "Also watched The Atifice Girl" hpr4258 (2024-11-27) "Introduction and History of Using Computers" by SolusSpider. Comment 1: Dave Lee (thelovebug) on 2024-11-18: "Welcome to the HPR family"Comment 2: present_arms on 2024-11-19: "This Podcast hpr4258 :: Introduction and History of Using Computers"Comment 3: archer72 on 2024-11-27: "Welcome to HPR"Comment 4: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-29: "Welcome as HPR host!" hpr4259 (2024-11-28) "Why digitize photos" by Henrik Hemrin. Comment 1: SolusSpider - Peter Paterson on 2024-11-28: "The thoughts behind digitizing photos"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2024-11-29: "Thanks for your comment" hpr4272 (2024-12-17) "Embed Mastodon Threads" by hairylarry. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-28: "Wayne Myers ?? Where did I hear that name before ?" hpr4320 (2025-02-21) "Switching my Mastodon account" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2024-11-25: "Target Audience of 1" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mail List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2024-November/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Any other business It's been another hectic month here at HPR Towers. As we discussed on the mailing list most of the time was taken by the migration to Mastodon, and the implementation of the mirrors on the Community Content Delivery Network. Some daily stats are been updated on https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/hpr_ccdn_stats.tsv Summary of the changes to the repo https://repo.anhonesthost.net/HPR Dave updated his tooling for processing shows and they are now available on the Gitea repo. We finally got around to creating the HPR Documentation wiki. Community Content Delivery Network (CCDN) A location to track the deployment of the HPR Community Content Delivery Network, that provides a mirror network for our content. HPR Website Design This is literally in the whiteboard phase of the HPR website redesign. Where we can track Compatibility of the clients subscribed to our feeds. Useful Resources Where we can link to other free culture sites that provide useful services. Requested Topics Where we can track topics that have been requested, and link to shows that addressed them. There is also a list with information about Podcatcher and Podcasting Platform Compatibility. If anyone wants to adopt a player then please do so. The section on Workflow will be changing shortly due to Dave stepping aside, and also the need to distribute to multiple end points. All the processing will happen first, and then all the checks will be done at the same stage just prior to posting. For this to work we need help finding a simple manageable WYSIWYG editor that can produce sane HTML when the host uploads the show. We also need a new system to distribute the files from an origin to all the mirrors. Other changes and fixes. The day of the week is now available on the website. Fixed the RSS feed to show explicit status. Fixed a bug that limited the future feed to just 10 shows. Fixed a typo in the status page. Following feedback, added emphasis about the upcoming two weeks, to the scheduling guidelines. Notable shout out to the people who are promoting HPR and are helping people out with audio issues. Provide feedback on this episode.

Retro Entre amigos 13x04 – Especial MUY ESPECIAL 150 programas ¡¡Saludos a todos los amigos del Retro!! Venid con nosotros a celebrar nuestro programa 150 ¡!. Permitidnos un paseo también bastante navideño por lo que ha sido para nosotros y vosotros estas efemérides (ya empiezo yo tambien a hablar como Morgancito) y compartir momentos, instantes y vivencias. En esta ocasión… os vamos a dejar con el audio. Sabemos que son varias horas de programa... pero creo que se respira por cada una de las ondas sonoras que estamos muy felices de haberos conocido y de poder sentarnos juntos al calor de la mesa “bastante cuadrada”. Recordad que estáis invitados a venir a vivirlo. Nosotros somos WYSIWYG, de modo que si queréis disfrutar de la ausencia de medios o guion (dice la leyenda que hay uno) .. estáis avisados Ah ¡!. Tengo que mencionar que como “juego del mes” traemos una maravilla programada por nuestro amigo y socio de ALTAIR, EdD.. llamado “MIJADORE 2 – The Key”. Todo esto…. Y mucho menos Feliz Navidad para todas las personas de buena voluntad… como esos que han ido con una pala, un cubo y un sueño a echar una mano donde hacía falta. G R A C I A S Josua Ckultur & La Alegre Pandilla

At React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Kent C. Dodds & Theo Browne for two fascinating conversations. Both of them showed us the whole gamut of their personalities! Kent shared his insights on effective teaching methodologies and the future of developer education, while diving deep into React and the Remix/React Router ecosystem, and closing on an appeal for kindness int he world. Then Theo took us behind the scenes of his developer-focused content creation, from streaming to the origins of the T3 stack, and how his online persona (including T3!) is "just him".

At React Summit in New York, KBall & Nick sat down with Kent C. Dodds & Theo Browne for two fascinating conversations. Both of them showed us the whole gamut of their personalities! Kent shared his insights on effective teaching methodologies and the future of developer education, while diving deep into React and the Remix/React Router ecosystem, and closing on an appeal for kindness int he world. Then Theo took us behind the scenes of his developer-focused content creation, from streaming to the origins of the T3 stack, and how his online persona (including T3!) is "just him".

Javid and Robert are two guys who dive into the long, boring stuff of standards and protocols so you don't have to. Because of them, you will know which cables and wires to use for your DMX512 projects. You have the ANSI E1.27-2 Task Group to thank for setting the standards for “Permanently Installed Control Cables for Use with ANSI E1.11 (DMX512-A) and USITT DMX512/1990 Products.” Did you know that DMX512 needs a specific kind of cable? Well… now you know. Javid Butler is a lighting designer and energy engineer who holds LC, CEM, and CMVP certifications. He has contributed to the development of many lighting standards including RDM and sACN, and chaired the task group for E1.27 DMX512 cabling standards. He presently chairs the E1.68 DMX512 Compliance task group. In addition to lighting standards Javid enjoys teaching Fundamentals of Lighting. He also writes science fiction under the pen name David Pax. Robert Bell a Consulting Director for Product Market at Acuity Brands and oversees the development of the entire Pathway Connectivity product line. Robert has been awarded multiple US Patents for lighting controls and networking which have been assigned to Acuity Brands. In 1992, he won the first every Wally Russell Newcomer Award as the creator of WYSIWYG, the Emmy Award winning previsualization software. His is a regular contributor to entertainment lighting periodicals and is the author of the book Let There Be Light, Conversations with Lighting Pioneers. With roots in the Rock ‘n Roll touring world and broadcast Television during the 1990's, he spent the 2000's as a product manager for Strand Lighting and as brand ambassador for Vari*Lite. For the past 20 years, Robert has sat on ESTA's Control Protocol Working Group, the body that brought DMX, RDM and sACN forward as ANSI standards. 

Adam meets with Elliot Azhdam from Golden State Corals to dive into his methods and technics, culturing an amazingly array of colorful and unique corals. They discuss the store's display tank, his use of high par LED lighting, some tricks for the photoperiod, along with his implementation of kalkwasser and calcium reactors. Check out Golden State Coral's website at the link below and don't miss out on the current 50% off WYSIWYG sale!Golden State Corals Links:https://goldenstatecorals.com/https://facebook.com/goldenstatecorals/https://instagram.com/goldenstatecorals/https://www.reef2reef.com/forums/golden-state-corals-gsc.1096/Frag Garage Links:https://www.patreon.com/BeyondTheReefPodcasthttps://fraggarage.ca/https://www.instagram.com/fraggarage/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLkiAJNqvoIRDRTFs34e6Twhttps://www.facebook.com/fraggarageBeyond the Reef Merch!https://fraggarage.ca/product-category/swag/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

3:02:46 – Frank in New Jersey, plus the Other Side. Topics include: The DMV, new recorder, Phish at Dick’s, Tweezer Reprise, Mitch Hedberg, The Sharper Image, dead mall, gun incident, Futurama, secret action figure, VHS effects, vegan Nutella, Wacky Packages, Florida trip, The Obtuse Angle with Steve Dupont, Upon a Wysiwyg Yonder, British Empire Exhibition, The Rings […]

3:02:46 – Frank in New Jersey, plus the Other Side. Topics include: The DMV, new recorder, Phish at Dick’s, Tweezer Reprise, Mitch Hedberg, The Sharper Image, dead mall, gun incident, Futurama, secret action figure, VHS effects, vegan Nutella, Wacky Packages, Florida trip, The Obtuse Angle with Steve Dupont, Upon a Wysiwyg Yonder, British Empire Exhibition, The Rings […]

What's up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Simon Heaton, Director of Growth Marketing at Buffer. Summary: Simon helps us explore Buffer's martech journey, highlighting their shift from traditional tools to a product-led approach driven by data and server-side analytics. We unpack their use of Customer.io for automation and hold out testing, Redash for data insights, and their agile sprint model that fosters continuous innovation. Discover how Buffer's small team thrives with efficient, data-driven strategies.About SimonSimon started his career in the agency world at Banfield in Ottawa, CanadaHe later moved over to Shopify where he would spend nearly 7 years, first as a content Marketing Manager and later as the Senior Growth Lead, AcquisitionSimon's also worn a part-time teaching hat for over 5 years, he was an Instructor with Telfer School of Management at UofO as well as a Professor at Algonquin CollegeHe's a startup mentor for founders that are part of the Singapore-based equity fund at AntlerToday Simon is Director of Growth Marketing at Buffer, the world-renowned social media management platformBuffer's Marketing Tech Stack and Why it Doesn't Include a CRMBuffer's marketing strategy is unique. They don't use a traditional CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. Simon explains that Buffer is a product-led company without a dedicated sales team. This means they don't need typical CRM functionalities like lead routing and scoring. Instead, Buffer relies heavily on data and product analytics to drive their marketing efforts.The core of Buffer's operations is their data warehouse, with Segment acting as their Customer Data Platform (CDP). This setup allows Buffer to integrate various tools and centralize crucial information. Mixpanel, their product analytics tool, is pivotal in this system. It gathers both product usage and marketing data, providing a comprehensive view of user interactions.Simon highlights the importance of server-side tracking and integrating data from diverse sources such as AdWords, Customer.io, and Pendo. This integration helps Buffer understand the user lifecycle and measure the impact of marketing efforts beyond basic website metrics.Tools like Customer.io are also essential for Buffer. It manages most user communications, making it a critical component of their stack. The combination of Mixpanel, Customer.io, and other integrated tools ensures that Buffer can seamlessly track and analyze user behavior.Key takeaway: Not all B2B companies need a CRM or a sales team. A product-led approach, using robust data and product analytics tools, can effectively drive your marketing efforts and provide comprehensive insights into user behavior.The Power of a Visual and Intuitive Automation Flow InterfaceSimon loves working in a smaller team like Buffer, where he can get hands-on with their tools daily. He highlights how Buffer uses Customer.io for their marketing automation, a tool he's familiar with from his previous experience at Shopify. Unlike Shopify, which eventually switched to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for more enterprise-level needs, Buffer continues to thrive with Customer.io.Buffer relies on Customer.io to manage email marketing, push notifications for mobile apps, and various communication programs. Simon appreciates how the tool handles both marketing and transactional communications, offering a unified view of user interactions. This integration ensures consistency in messages, whether they're marketing emails or product notifications.Simon praises Customer.io's user-friendly interface, especially the journey mapping functionality and the WYSIWYG editor, which make it accessible for non-technical team members. Despite its ease of use, the platform also boasts deep technical capabilities, allowing for extensive customization through HTML and API integrations. This flexibility has been crucial for Buffer's needs.The integration with Segment, Buffer's Customer Data Platform (CDP), is particularly valuable. Simon emphasizes that having all data in Segment and seamlessly integrating it with Customer.io enables precise data handling. This setup ensures accurate and timely data flow, essential for personalized and effective marketing automation workflows.Key takeaway: Even as a small team, you can effectively manage complex marketing automation needs by choosing user-friendly tools like Customer.io that offer both simplicity and deep customization. This approach allows your non-technical team members to contribute meaningfully while ensuring your technical needs are met, enhancing overall efficiency and personalization in your communications.Experimentation and Holdout Testing at BufferExperimentation is a cornerstone of Buffer's approach, and Simon is particularly enthusiastic about the capabilities provided by Customer.io. He explains that the platform's holdout testing functionality is essential for validating new programs and comparing campaign performance. Unlike some tools, Customer.io counts a delivery for the holdout group, simplifying the tracking process over time.The integration with Segment and Mixpanel is a game-changer for Buffer. This setup allows them to surface Customer.io data in Mixpanel, creating unique reports and dashboards to support their experiments. Tracking differences in behavior between groups becomes straightforward, thanks to the detailed delivery events logged for both test and holdout groups. This level of detail ensures that Buffer can effectively measure the impact of their campaigns.Simon also highlights the ease of A/B testing within Customer.io. Whether at the message level or within workflows, the platform's randomization logic allows for extensive testing. Buffer can run tests on content, sequencing, and other variables, ensuring they continually optimize their marketing efforts. The ability to branch workflows and test different variants simultaneously is particularly valuable, enabling ongoing experimentation.Key takeaway: Leverage holdout testing and detailed event tracking within your marketing automation tools to gain deeper insights into your campaign effectiveness. This approach allows you to validate new programs, compare performance, and optimize your strategies based on precise, data-driven insights.Testing Journeys and Templating Language with QA Draft ModeSimon praises Customer.io's QA draft mode, a feature he finds invaluable for Buffer's marketing automation. This functionality allows the team to build complex workflows, trigger off specific data points, and test the entire process in a production environment without actually sending emails. It's a unique capability that Simon has not found in other tools, making it a standout feature of Customer.io.Simon highlights how QA draft mode lets them see real users qualifying for different branches of the workflow while emails remain in draft. This means they can verify that users are correctly segmented and the emails look as intended, all without prematurely sending any messages. This testing phase is crucial for catching errors that might not be evident during initial previews.Buffer has used this feature for several initiatives, such as new onboarding iterations and product notifications. Given the high frequency and volume of these emails, ensuring everything works perfectly before going live is essential. Simon appreciates that once the testing phase is complete, it only takes a click to start sending the validated emails to users.This capability saves time and reduces the risk of errors in live campaigns. It allows Buffer to maintain high st...

Elvis and Barb are back again this week recording wonderful people at the Jensen Dental (https://jensendental.com/) booth at the Florida Dental Laboratory Association (https://www.fdla.net/) Symposium. THANK YOU JENSEN! (go get MIYO) First up is MIYO (https://miyoworld.com/) expert, teacher, guru Terry McQuiston. Terry talks about his dental journey that eventually landed him at Jensen Dental teaching everyone the wonders of this amazing liquid ceramic. His role now is onboarding labs and making sure they have their "ah ha" moment and not become "missing in action". Then we meet the new VP of Global Sales for Argen (https://argen.com/), Juston Gates. Juston is new to not only Argen, but also our industry. He talks about where he came from, how it compares to our profession, and some exciting things that Argen has just released. We wrap up the episode with everyone's favorite person to see at a dental show (and if you don't know her, go be her friend), Nina Rapuano. Nina talks about joining Jensen Dental as her first "adult job", why she loves the people and culture, and giving back every year and swimming during the Race For the Future (https://dentallabfoundation.org/news-events/race-for-the-future/). Introducing Ivotion Digital Dentures (https://www.ivoclar.com/en_us/products/digital-processes/ivotion) from Ivoclar (https://www.ivoclar.com/en_us) – Experience unparalleled precision and efficiency with Ivoclar‘s state-of-the-art digital denture workflow. Ivotion is available in their patent pending monolithic disc that combines denture base and tooth materials in one seamless puck. Or if you lab needs more flexibility, Ivotion is also available as stand-alone discs - Ivotion Base, Dent and Dent Multi all in 98mm width to fit your favorite milling machine. With Ivotion you can streamline your lab's processes, reduce production time, and enhance patient satisfaction. Elevate your lab's capabilities with Ivotion Digital Dentures – where innovation meets perfection. Discover the future of dentures today with Ivoclar." Thanks for your continued support of the podcast Ivoclar. Join the GOLDEN BENCH CLUB! All you have to do is leave us a 5-star review and comment on the Apple Podcast app (or any other app and email us a screen shot) and we will read your review on the podcast and welcome you to the Golden Bench Club. This super elite club is only for the best of the best. Special Guests: Juston Gates, Nina Rapuano , and Terry McQuiston.

Join us for an in-depth review of Clutch's seminal 2004 album, "Blast Tyrant"! 'Trucker' Andy from the  All Apologies Podcast is a 30-year Clutch veteran and Ryan is the newcomer to the band. Join us as we dive deep into each track, offering unique perspectives and analysis. We'll explore the album's stoner rock roots, Neil Fallon's cryptic lyrics, and the band's musical evolution. From the opening riffs of "Mercury" to the closing jam of "WYSIWYG," we'll dissect the highs and lows of this pivotal release. Stick around to the end as we controversially pick what we consider the album's weakest track. Whether you're a die-hard fan or new to Clutch, this episode is packed with insights, laughs, and pure rock appreciation. YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch Here⁠ join our Discord ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/ndZwrUpeA5⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ email us worstofthebestpodcast@gmail.com

TinyMCE is a great library to add a WYSIWYG Editor to your Web app. This week we had Mrina Sugosh sharing everything you need to know about TinyMCE and its Angular Wrapper!More about Mark and Angular 17X: @mrinasugosh    @jointinyLinkedIn: Mrina Sugosh                TinyMCEFollow us on X: The Angular Plus Show The Angular Plus Show is a part of ng-conf. ng-conf is a multi-day Angular conference focused on delivering the highest quality training in the Angular JavaScript framework. Developers from across the globe converge on Salt Lake City, UT every year to attend talks and workshops by the Angular team and community experts.Join: http://www.ng-conf.org/Attend: https://ti.to/ng-confFollow: https://twitter.com/ngconf             https://www.linkedin.com/company/ng-conf             https://bsky.app/profile/ng-conf.bsky.social             https://www.facebook.com/ngconfofficialRead: https://medium.com/ngconf Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@ngconfonline Stock media provided by JUQBOXMUSIC/ Pond5

Eno and DVR discuss aging stars whose long-term value might be on the cusp of falling, as well as a few players to target despite an overall body of work that leaves something to be desired. Rundown10:07 Freddie Freeman Is the Power & Speed Drop a Sign of Things to Come?18:02 Marcus Semien & Nearly Impossible Durability23:12 Jose Altuve & Extreme Pull Tendencies Over Time28:59 Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: Should We Still Chase A 2021 Ceiling?34:58 Adolis García: Fearing the Fast Peak From Late Bloomers with Aggressive Approaches36:37 Oneil Cruz: Will He Improve Enough Against Lefties in the Long Run?43:02 Zach Neto: Sacrificing Ceiling for a Safer Floor?46:01 Jordan Walker: No Homers at Triple-A This Season?!53:58 Alex Kirilloff: A Delayed Breakout Coming, or WYSIWYG?1:02:14 Project Prospect: The Prospects to Target Via Trade As Top 100 Lists Have In-Season UpdatesFollow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: ratesandbarrels@gmail.comJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFeJoin us this Thursday 1p ET/10a PT for our livestream episode!https://www.youtube.com/c/ratesbarrelsSubscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eno and DVR discuss aging stars whose long-term value might be on the cusp of falling, as well as a few players to target despite an overall body of work that leaves something to be desired.  Rundown 10:07 Freddie Freeman Is the Power & Speed Drop a Sign of Things to Come? 18:02 Marcus Semien & Nearly Impossible Durability 23:12 Jose Altuve & Extreme Pull Tendencies Over Time 28:59 Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: Should We Still Chase A 2021 Ceiling? 34:58 Adolis García: Fearing the Fast Peak From Late Bloomers with Aggressive Approaches 36:37 Oneil Cruz: Will He Improve Enough Against Lefties in the Long Run? 43:02 Zach Neto: Sacrificing Ceiling for a Safer Floor? 46:01 Jordan Walker: No Homers at Triple-A This Season?! 53:58 Alex Kirilloff: A Delayed Breakout Coming, or WYSIWYG? 1:02:14 Project Prospect: The Prospects to Target Via Trade As Top 100 Lists Have In-Season Updates Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarris Follow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRiper e-mail: ratesandbarrels@gmail.com Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Join us this Thursday 1p ET/10a PT for our livestream episode! https://www.youtube.com/c/ratesbarrels Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Maines, bassist and founding member of the iconic hard rock band CLUTCH, is my guest this week! Dan and I connected just before Clutch's show at Vinyl Music Hall in Pensacola on May 12. We talk touring, family, record label changes & what keeps Clutch going after all these years. The band released its 13th full-length album Sunrise on Slaughter Beach on September 16, 2022.Dan describes the special bond he shares with the other three members of the band — all of whom met while attending Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, MD 35 years ago. The foursome have continuously recorded and toured since the release of their first independent EP Pitchfork in 1991.Clutch wraps up its April/May New World Samarai Tour on May 19 — then embarks on its first tour of Latin America on July 18! The band returns to North America for a September/October "Two-Headed Beast" co-headlining tour with Rival Sons.Dan plays the Fender Precision Bass, Rickenbacker 4003 & Gibson EB-3 Bass.Be sure to visit Clutch's web site for merch, tour & band news — and follow the band across the socials. You can find the limited edition Transnational Speedway League signed 12" LP; Sunrise on Slaughter Beach 7" Box Set (Limited), CDs, apparel & more.www.clutchmerch.com@OfficialClutch - YouTube@clutchofficial - Instagram, XClutch - FacebookEpisode Art/Photo Credit: Dan Winters (@danwintersphoto)Very special thanks to Stefan KosterSongs appearing in this episode - used with permission:"WYSIWYG" (opening minutes of episode — appears on the album Blast Tyrant)"Hot Bottom Feeder" (20:56 mark — appears on the album Book of Bad Decisions)"Firebirds!" (outro of episode — appears on the album Psychic Warfare)

This teaching is taken from Colossians 3:8 and teaches you how the words you say create the results you see. /// If you have any questions, or you would like to share how our teachings have affected your life, please email us or visit us at www.rejoicingheart.net God bless you! Rob and Donna /// Rejoice In You From the Integrity Music Release One, featuring Planetshakers Ministries Int'l ©2009 Planetshakers Publishing (APRA) (admin. By Music Services, www.musicservices.org) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

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

Today we are talking about CKEditor 4 End of Life, Moving to CKEditor 5, and what you can expect from CKEditor 5 now and in the future with guest Wim Leers. We'll also cover CKEditor 5 Premium Features as our module of the week. For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/438 Topics CKEditor 4 end of life June 2023 Issues people might see if they are still on CKE4 Why a third party library and not roll our own Are there other alternatives Why did Drupal decide on CKEditor Drupal 10 moved to CKE5 How should people update Upgrade gotchas What's new in CKE5 What is on the roadmap regarding Drupal and CKE5 Is there going to be a CKE6 Native Web Components Does CKE in core affect Gutenberg Resources CKEditor 4 End Of Life Contrib Core, prioritized upstream blockers Core, all issues blocked on upstream (currently 29), if we look just at bugs there's 17 (1 of which is critical, 6 major) Drastically improve the linking experience in CKEditor 5 Drupal Image ability to opt in to SVG image uploads Native and UX https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3274635 Extended html filter Views / ckeditor custom elements Guests Wim Leers - wimleers.com Wim Leers Hosts Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Ivan Stegic - ten7.com ivanstegic MOTW Correspondent Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu Brief description: Have you ever wanted to offer your content creators advanced capabilities like real-time collaboration? There's a module for that. Module name/project name: CKEditor 5 Premium Features Brief history How old: created in Sep 2022 by Wiktor Walc, although recent releases are by Wojciech (vOYchekh) Kukowski, both of CKSource, the company behind CKEditor (Wiktor was on episode 372 https://talkingdrupal.com/372) Current version available: 1.2.5 which works with Drupal 9 and 10 Maintainership Actively maintained, latest release in the past month User Guide available, link is in the README Number of open issues: 16, 8 of which are bugs Usage stats: 159 sites Module features and usage To me, the most compelling features enabled by this module are the ones that turn your Drupal WYSIWYG into a robust collaboration tool, similar to what users may be used to in tools like Google Docs or Office 365 Real-time inline comments and changes from multiple users Track changes to suggest ways the content could be improved A history of changes made in the WYSIWYG, independent of the saved Drupal revisions Tag users with @ mentions to have them notified There's also a Productivity Pack to enhance your WYSIWYG, and again some of these will be familiar to users that also use popular online collaboration tools A document outline that uses heading within your content to make navigation for moving quickly within the document Can generate a linked Table of Contents, which will automatically update as headings are added or changed Slash commands to execute actions Enhanced Paste from Office, to preserve complex incoming content structures, but with clean HTML as the result And more! Another premium feature is the ability to export to Word or PDF, and it can also restore full screen editing, a feature that didn't make the transition from CKEditor 4 to 5, as part of the open source offering Finally, it also includes an AI Assistant that provides yet another interesting way to empower your content authors to leverage AI tools for their writing, including the ability to change the style, length, or tone of selected content using pre-made prompts, or generate content with custom queries. It also works with a number of different models out of the box, so you're not restricted to ChatGPT The module is open source but using these premium features does require a subscription. The pricing will depend on the number of active users and which features you need, so if you'd like more information you can use the contact form at ckeditor.com Also worth mentioning here that the team at Palantir has released a YouTube video of an open source collaborative editor that they're calling Edit Together. It's based on the ProseMirror rich-text editor framework, and the blog where they announced it mentioned a mid-2024 release, but that was back in Jul 2023 and I haven't been able to find any updates since then

Hey friends, today is a first impressions episode about Sysreptor, which according to their GitHub page, is a fully customisable, offensive security reporting solution designed for pentesters, red teamers and other security-related people alike.  It is easy to stand up with Docker, has built-in MFA and a great hybrid WYSIWYG/code editor.  The only scary part?  There is no export to Word (insert suspenseful music here!) - your reports just go right to PDF, friends!  The killer feature for us, though, is the ability to create reports from the command line and send files, notes and findings to Sysreptor automagically!

Michael "Big Dog" Murphy has experienced a lot of life. Some good, some bad, but enough to deliver songs that are some of the deepest, most honest gems you'll hear. Michael is old school and when he performs, he doesn't hide his sound behind a lot of gadgetry or gimmicks. What-you-see-is-what-you-get is how Michael lives life and presents his music, so it's no wonder he has the love and respect of the local music community.NOTE: This episode contains a short discussion regarding substance abuse.(Photo credit: 2016 Square1Images)"Bottom Of The Bottle" written and performed by Michael "Big Dog" Murphy℗ 2022 Michael Murphy. Used with permission of Michael Murphy."If I Look Old" written and performed by Michael "Big Dog" Murphy℗ 2022 Michael Murphy. Used with permission of Michael Murphy.Support the showSupport the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/intothemusic E-mail us at intothemusic@newprojectx.com YouTube Facebook Instagram INTO THE MUSIC is a production of Project X Productions, Appleton, WI.Producer: Rob MarnochaRecording, engineering, and post production: Rob MarnochaOpening theme: "Aerostar" by Los Straitjackets* (℗2013 Yep Roc Records)Closing theme: "Close to Champaign" by Los Straitjackets* (℗1999 Yep Roc Records)*Used with permission of Eddie AngelThis podcast copyright ©2024 by Project X Productions. All rights reserved.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but  there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point. A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are  things like fun, engaging games. The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage. The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD. I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?  Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture. Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.  When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are. So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?  Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.  It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays. So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.  So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.  So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing? Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.  We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.  Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.  There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that's our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback. It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.  We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.  Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.  If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean, the part that determines the cost of any of these installations is the hardware you choose to use. If you're a brand and you're developing the content from scratch, maybe hiring our team or hiring a third party to develop custom content for you, there may be 3D modeling involved, there may be compositing, you might have multi-level programming, you might have second screen experiences, so all of those things add up.  But we can generally, when somebody comes to us and asks for a ballpark estimate, the only thing we really need to understand is where it is going and what kind of display you are planning to use, and we can generally come up with a range.  But if you're doing it, it's going to be a fraction of what it would cost if you just went to an interactive agency and said, “Build this, please!”  Meghan Athavale: Absolutely. But I think that something to keep in mind is that if you're going to an interactive agency and you don't have an idea yet, you're likely going to pay less. If you go to an agency and what you're paying them to do is to figure out what the activation actually should be, we're not an agency, and so we don't position ourselves as somebody that's going to do a lot of things like research and problem-solving. But what we can do is scale that.  You're not Moment Factory. Meghan Athavale: We are not and we don't want to fill that niche because it's a different skill set and it requires the ability to experiment with things on a one-time basis.  You may develop a solution for a brand or a display for the Super Bowl or something like that, where you're using a specific set of hardware just one time, and that's fantastic. I love that there are agencies in the world that get to do that, but that's not what we do. We look at it and go, how do we make this happen a thousand times, and that's a very different way of looking at things. So I think, if you want something that already exists, and you just want to put your stamp on it and create something that gives it a unique feel for your brand or experience, that's where you come to us. If you want something that's never been done before in the entire world and uses new technology that hasn't been proven long-term in the industry. TeamLab, and Moment Factory, are where you would go, but it is a lot more expensive for sure. You're starting to use things like LiDAR and everything else. Meghan Athavale: Yeah. The risk is just so much higher, and you need people on the ground. You need to roll a truck if something goes wrong. However, with our systems, we're way past that point.  Yeah, because you've got the device management designed for scale and everything else, right? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we don't release anything into the market that hasn't been tested thoroughly in our labs for months and months at a time. We have the ability to guarantee things, whereas in some of these riskier projects, as long as you hire somebody that knows what they're doing, they're going to find a way to make it work, but they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you how from the beginning of the project.  So, for something like a classroom, what's the kit of parts, and what's the degree of complexity to put this in?  Meghan Athavale: Most classrooms either have an interactive floor, an interactive wall, or both.  Already?  Meghan Athavale: No, that's what they're putting in, and it's basically the same technology for either. We designed our software so it works with any projector, and a lot of classrooms already have projectors, so they'll just use what they have. So you've got your display, which in classrooms is typically a projector, a 3D camera, and a Windows computer. We typically recommend that people use the sort of baseline specification on our site as an i5 or equivalent with a decent graphics card, you don't want something that's not going to be able to run games because that's basically what we're running, and the cost is usually like for including the projector for a classroom is usually around $2,000-2,500. To set that up, is it the sort of thing that the school district or the schools, IT person, or people have to do, or is it simplistic to the level that if a teacher already got a projector pointed at a whiteboard of some kind, they can just do it themselves? Meghan Athavale: So teachers can do it themselves, and we often help teachers do it themselves. But nowadays they're busy. Teaching is not an easy career right now, and we're typically dealing with the IT personnel for an entire division when these installations are going in. If you're dealing with a full division or district, are they rolling out like that, or is it still onesie twosies?  Meghan Athavale: It's usually one per school across an entire district, is what we're seeing, and that's mostly in the U.S. We haven't really seen nearly the same traction in schools in Canada yet. I didn't say at the outset, but you're in Montreal.  Meghan Athavale: Yes, that's right. Why do you think that is just because of the way education works in Canada versus the US?  Meghan Athavale: I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's like that in all of our verticals. So it's not just education. I would say retail, events, and all of the verticals that we serve, we have faster pickup and larger rollouts in the US. It could be the population just much bigger.  I think we're just not risk takers, and I also think, to a certain extent, we're limited by things like weather and the accessibility of venues to having these types of, there are a lot more venues in the US that have built-in walls or built-in interactive components that we can just hop our software onto them. I don't think there are as many opportunities here.  You mentioned, in detail, education; what other vertical markets or segments are you seeing a lot of activity in?  Meghan Athavale: Events is the fastest growing segment, and this is like events of all different sizes and lengths, so it could be something that is like a week-long trade show, it could be like a birthday party for kids. It could be somebody who is a DJ, and they're bringing an interactive floor to all of their gigs.  It's really all over the map. We just did a pop-up in Times Square for a major chocolate brand. We've done interactives for movie launches, so like those short-term events where they're developing their own special content and it's on for less than a month, I would say that is our fastest growing vertical.  Interesting. We talked a little bit about planning before we turned on the recording, and I'm curious about how these things get planned out and how you ensure and how your users ensure that what they're putting up gets beyond just being eye candy/wow factor stuff because I often say that wow factor has a short shelf life.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a balance between the cost and the reward of experiences like this. One of the biggest mistakes that we see people making is they'll see something on the internet, they'll see something in video format, and they'll think, I need that at my event, or I need that in my museum, and they'll skip the part of like why they need it. It'll be entirely like an emotional decision, and the challenge here is that there are so many more and more faked every single day. We get sent videos all the time with people asking us to do anamorphic illusions. People will see videos of that, and they'll be like, “I want that but interactive, can you make it?” And because they're seeing a video and the video is staged, and in some cases, the video is a complete composite. It's not even something that actually happened in the real world, they won't understand that it doesn't work from anything except for one very particular perspective. So, the person who's interacting with anamorphic content is not going to see what the person watching from across the street on a particular street corner is going to see, and the same thing with large-scale digital displays.  People will see these huge LED walls, and I think you saw this at our booth at LDI. When you walk right up to a big LED wall, you see the individual pixels, not the same image that somebody is watching from far away, so I think that those limitations are very difficult for people to understand and appreciate unless they've actually seen the installation in person. So I would say if you see something and you're planning to put it in an event, you're planning to use it in brand activation, go see that experience in person first. Don't make a decision about whether or not you need it until you've actually personally experienced it because seeing it on a video is not the same thing as what it's going to look like in real life. And then the other advice that I give to people when they come to me with the wow factor criteria is like, what do you want the takeaway to be? Is this a shareable thing? Do you want a hundred people to come to your event to put up a hundred different videos and tag you in them? What is your metric for success? Because if that's it, then the content's going to be very different than if you want a hundred people to enter their emails in order to play a game or you need to know at the end of the day what you're walking away from after you've put that activation in place.  I've seen different iterations of this stuff. The applications in classrooms, I think, is fantastic and it plays to kids at their whims and everything else; they want to be involved. I find it's quite different.  A lot of the ones that I've seen in public spaces like shopping malls and so on, where you see the kids running around doing stuff, interacting with it, but you don't really see the adults, and that's fine if it's aimed at kids. But I wonder sometimes, when brands do these things, that the only real interest is with children and adults saying, “I'm not doing that, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want to do this trickery in front of other people.”  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think that's a very fair point. One of the things that we noticed when we first started putting particularly interactive floors into retail spaces was that we still have an entire generation of adults, and I would count my own generation in there; we've been trained not to step on screens like it's your impulse isn't to go running through the light. The generations who are comfortable with that and who grew up with touch screens and expect everything to be interactive, I think they're in their twenties and early thirties now, so we are seeing that change quite a bit. I would say that from about 35 years down, we aren't seeing that hesitancy to interact with things, but I do think that we still have a long way to go in discovering how the content can be used.  A lot of times, it's to augment like physical experiences is how you get adults to engage think like axe-throwing. Adding really cool interactive graphics to an axe-throwing experience is something that's going to really delight an older crowd. Same thing with bowling alleys, making those interactive. So I think… So they're becoming Wii games.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, people think that there's a choice between virtual experiences in VR and physical experiences like you would have with a traditional family entertainment center. But what our software allows you to do is combine the two, so you have a headset-free experience that does have digital interactive components, but you're also engaging with something physical. So we do a lot of Air Hockey tables, pool tables, and things like that where you're still playing pool and using physical paddles, but there are interactive digital visual elements on top of that. That's where we're seeing unquestionable pickup by older people.  Yeah, so where there's tangible fun or some sort of activity versus so often when I've gone to trade shows, if I see some sort of an interactive video wall thing, please walk up to this thing and dance in front of it or wave your arms, and there'll be light particles and that's nice, but I don't see the business case here, and I don't think it's interesting for more than 10 seconds. Meghan Athavale: For sure, if you're in an environment where you're dancing anyway, having cool visual effects while you're dancing is like a good bonus, and I think that's how we have to think about it in terms of engaging an older audience, is you need to be augmenting something that they're doing anyways. You can't expect them to do an activity that they wouldn't normally do just because it's like eye candy. But if they're doing something anyway if they're already in a curling league and you can make their curling more fun… We're getting really Canadian here. Meghan Athavale: Right. I mean, I'm available for anyone who wants to try that. I've done soccer, I've done hockey, I haven't done curling yet. I would really like to make an interactive curling experience. But yeah, that's where you attract adults by helping make something that they want to do anyway, much cooler. Where did this come from, like why did you start this company?  Meghan Athavale: This is a very existential question. It's actually a pretty funny story. We started the company by accident. My co-founders, Keith Otto and Curtis Wachs and I, all worked at an agency together, and this was like 2010, back in the days when Instructables and a lot of those sorts of YouTube channels were just starting, and we started hanging out after work and just making stuff and it was all things that we would never get hired to make. We were designing our own touch screens. We created our own mist screen for projection. We did a lot of building projections and it was all for fun. We saw other people doing it all over the world. We thought it was really like a fun hobby. We started throwing parties to show off some of the things that we were making, and a friend of mine, Kayla Jeanson, who is an incredible videographer. She also has moved out to Montreal. This all happened back in Winnipeg, which is where my company is based.  So we're all back in Winnipeg. Kayla shows up at one of the parties. This was before Facebook, so it was an SMS-controlled wall where you were sending text messages, and it was making things happen on the wall. She took a video, and that video ended up going viral. We found out about it after the fact, and we started getting contacted by different businesses the University of Nevada, Reno reached out and said, “Hey, we'd really like to have something cool like this in our cafeteria.” and Curtis and I just looked at each other, we're like, wow, people will pay us to do this. We registered a business, and we all quit our jobs. We applied for CMF funding, and we launched as an agency designing these interactive experiences and, within the first two years, realized that the biggest challenge was once the experience was in place how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that it's going to continue running?  And that installation that we did back in, I think, in early 2011, in the cafeteria in Reno is still running, and part of it was just like starting by accident because a hobby that we were doing for fun led to some economic opportunities for us and the direction that we ended up taking was as a result of people liked what we did long enough to want to keep it running, to want to keep having us continue updating it. We've had a number of large-scale installations. There's one in Red Rock, Ontario, where they've done entire refreshes. We did our original installation for them in 2011 as well and just very recently replaced and updated a bunch of the software for them. The validation has been there, so the thing to focus on is how to make these experiences last, not how to make them cool for a week.  The company is quite small. I believe it's just like a handful of people, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. That's right. There are four of us.  And that's all you need to be because you're not getting into the weeds with the hardware, and I think you sell the hardware that you have through a reseller, Simply NUC?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we have a number of resellers, but Simply NUCis our preferred partner because they send us everything that they're selling so we can test it 24/7. So we're able to say with high confidence that anything you buy from Simply NUC is going to run long-term with our software.  I would like a bigger team. In all honesty, we had to let a few people go during the pandemic. I think one year in, we were like, okay, we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves with a larger team. So, I think we'd like to see some growth in the team within the next year or so. Because of the way that we've built our platform, we're able to outsource stuff that we can't do where we don't have enough work to bring somebody in-house for long periods of time, and there are also just amazing resources out there for outsourcing, now that didn't exist when we first started the company.  It's a small team. I don't anticipate that we'll ever be much more than 10 people. But a few more wouldn't hurt. Meghan Athavale: Yeah, a few more wouldn't hurt. I'd like to build in a little bit more redundancy, and I'm getting older, and one of these days, I'm hoping that there will be some sort of a succession. Because of the relationship that we have with our resellers and our installers, there's really not a lot of mission-critical stuff on our side. We push our regular updates. We create new content and respond to community requests and stuff. But not a lot of the work that we do is like on a deadline. It's a pretty chill working environment where we identify things that we think are going to be of value to the customer, and then we ask our customers, and then we build the thing. There's no pressure. And there's also a knock on wood at this point: not a ton of competition because it's still a very niche market. We don't feel the pressure to be like the trade show that you and I met on; it was the first we've been in business for 13 years, and that was the first time we've ever done a trade show exhibit. Oh, wow, and what was your takeaway from that?  Meghan Athavale: It was great. It was definitely time. We came away with quite a few new customers, and it was LDI. The reason we chose LDI as our first trade show is because there are so many companies that do events, and the total lifetime value of customers in the event space isn't as high as education would be or something where it's a permanent installation. There's just a lot more of them, and it's a lower-hanging fruit. We're hoping to bump up our revenue enough so that we can start expanding our team sometime mid-next year.  Do you have a reference case or a handful of reference cases? If people said, this sounds really cool. I can't really just walk into a classroom, obviously. Are there museums or public spaces or something like that where I could go see this?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are quite a few. What we usually ask people to do is if they want to see an installation of ours in real life and they aren't able to set it up themselves, just contact us, let us know what city you're in, and we'll find somebody in your area that you can go visit. There are a lot of live public libraries and museums and buildings that are open to the public that have installations in them, and then the other thing that people can do is we have a free evaluation version of our software that you can just download and install.  So, for people who are getting into this on a commercial basis, it's a really good idea to set up a system for yourself, test it out, and play around with the tools. Don't pitch it to your customers until you've tried it, please! So we make it possible for people to just install it for free and play around with it before they make any sort of purchase before they make any representations to their customers about what it can do.  Okay. All right. So, if people want to find you online, that's LUMOplay.com, right? Meghan Athavale: Yep. That's right. LUMOplay.com, and if you reach out through the site, you will be talking to me. My name is Meghan.  All right, Meghan. Thank you very much.  Meghan Athavale: You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring. Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer. Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product?  Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting.  So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this? Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here's what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that.  So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.”  That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud.  The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment. So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room? Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast. We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share.  And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out. Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants. We don't care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along.  On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement?  Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is.  But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it's not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution. I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.”  Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage.  So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution. In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms.  Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?”  The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don't have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most. Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for.  Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.”  Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70'' screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone's problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that.  You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane.  Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other. One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on. Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be building out this whole lump on the side of Ditto just to be able to replicate the service they were already using so they would switch to ours.  So we ultimately looked at that and said, this isn't the right fit for us, rather than trying to fight upstream and convince all of these customers that already have solutions to switch to ours. Let's just partner with all of these solutions and make it work really well. So we've partnered with the various Apple TV MDM vendors to make it really turnkey to mass deploy Ditto to hundreds of Apple TVs with literally just pushing a couple of buttons. So that's been our approach to it and that seems to be what the customer's like with us.  Yeah, if they're already using it, why would they go to something that's just dedicated to your application?  Andrew Gould: No matter what I do, I will always be inferior to a Jamf. They're a huge publicly traded company focused solely on MDM. I'm never gonna make an MDM as good as theirs, so why try?  What is your footprint, and what would you say are your core vertical markets?  Andrew Gould: The core vertical markets definitely K-12 and higher education in the United States. We have a footprint all around the world. We're in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. We have a lot of business users as well, whether that's in office space or co-working spaces have been a big business for us lately, as people are working from home but wanna get out of the house occasionally and go somewhere else. Those office spaces are looking for easy mirroring as people come in and out. But we're really focused on the K-12 and higher education market because this solution just fits so nicely into that environment. It works great in business. It works great in fast casual dining and all these other places that people use Ditto. But what's cool about Ditto is that it is so universal as a tool. It can plug in all kinds of places. We have churches that use it to show the lyrics to songs as people are singing along. There are all kinds of really interesting applications that we set out to get into flexible and adaptable tools and put into a lot of interesting environments.  When it comes to education, how is it being used in classrooms?  Andrew Gould: So you've typically got it running on the screen at the front of the room, whether that's an interactive whiteboard or just a TV mounted on the wall or projector, whatever. It's usually connected to that, and then primarily, the teacher is using it to push her screen from a laptop device up to the screen, and then we can support up to four devices sharing at the same time. So then students will connect and we have an add-on application for Windows and iOS where the teacher can manage who's allowed to be sharing. She can approve or deny connections to hide somebody if she wants to emphasize on her screen and not the other students who are connected to that. Then typically, when nothing is being shared, there's digital signage that's usually managed at the school level, but we do have some schools that allow the teachers to set up their own digital signage per classroom. So you're seeing that digital signage there and then it's spilling out into the hallways. They're putting TVs into hallways of even K-12 schools, higher ed common areas. They're running mainly just digital signage in those areas versus the hybrids that they're running in the classrooms.  Are school districts mostly using Apple TVs?  Andrew Gould: It's about two-thirds Apple TVs and one-third Windows devices, that's how our users break down. So it's not quite 50-50. I think it's trending more towards that 50-50 blend. Early on, it was very Apple TV heavy, and we're seeing a bit more of a skewback towards Windows devices.  I'm not sure exactly what's behind that trend, maybe it's the drive down of cheaper and cheaper Windows devices that can actually run 4k video and kind of stuff, the nooks, and the likes But yeah. So right now, the blend is really two-thirds Apple TVs.  What about collaboration displays that have systems on chips embedded in them, can you work with those?  Andrew Gould: So we've looked at the Android TVs and Samsung's OS and those sorts of things. The feedback that we've got from customers is that they are not really interested in that capability. The limitation of that is usually given the horsepower on those devices; we can usually only show one or two screens at a time. It ends up making Ditto, a hobbled product for it, and most of the time when people come to us, they've already got Apple TVs purchased or they've got a Windows device, they're already looking to use, and they're coming from the, “I picked my device, now I'm looking for the solution” approach, and the Smart TVs don't come up in the conversations that much. We're not opposed to it. If that's the way the market wants to go, we can surely adapt to that. All our technology is really flexible, so it's quick for us to repurpose a new platform, but just not what the customers are asking these days.  Yeah, and it's not like an Apple TV is expensive.  Andrew Gould: It's $150, and it'll run for probably 10 years before you have to worry about replacing it. They're really rock solid.  When you're selling into K12 in particular, are you selling district-wide or do you have to sell down to the school level?  Andrew Gould: It's typically district-wide. It's usually the IT coordinator or applicable semi-related role there that's looking to roll out an agnostic solution, and that's another place where we really shine is that schools are not one-to-one all the same type of device. You're typically seeing iPads in the lower grades, and then you're seeing Windows surfaces or Chromebooks as you get more into typing and writing papers and those sorts of things. So they want one solution that's going to work across the board for all of those things, and that's what Ditto's bread and butter is. So that starts the conversation off right away: one solution, you're supporting one product across, whether you have three schools or a hundred schools in the district, it's all the same solution, and then we can start the conversations if you realize digital signage, you've got all these screens in the cafeteria or the hallways, how are you putting information up there? And a lot of times it's, oh, there's a USB drive, and we go around and collect them, and we update them once a month. Somebody's job is to update the USB with the media and plug it back into all the TVs, and there is a much better way to do that. With a lot of schools using Chrome devices, is that problematic at all, or does it work with your system just fine? Andrew Gould: No, it works great with Chrome. So Chrome  OS used to have applications; they called them Chrome Apps. So we originally had a Chrome app that did all of this. That was in the store. And then Google wound down Chrome apps just because they weren't really being utilized all that much on the platform. So we went to a pure browser experience. So you just go to our goditto.com website, and you enter the room code that's being shown on the teacher screen, and then we just use the web RTC built-in technology to capture the screen and send it over to Ditto receiver and show it so you can actually share without installing anything on a device, and that works on all platforms that support the browser capture technology.  There are other options out there for certainly higher ed. You've got companies like Rise Vision that's particularly strong in K to 12 in churches and things like that, and some others How do I describe them, CMS software companies that are focused on that market, and then you've got the companies like Zoom that have video collaboration that have added on some digital signage capabilities and the Air Teams, where people who do similar screen mirroring. How do you match up against them and how do you sell against them? Andrew Gould: Yeah, so the Air Team and Immersive, they're selling proprietary hardware with a subscription service on top of it. So if you're looking for, “Hey, just give me a turnkey solution, give me everything. I'm not really worried about the price, I just want it to work.” Those are great solutions. But what we see in schools is they care very much about the cost and the pricing, and some of them have already made investments into hardware with Apple TVs or Windows devices, and they're saying, look, this is just extra cost that I don't need to do the same thing. So how we position against those is just, “Hey, you can use whatever hardware you want. We're happy to run on either of those platforms and if you've already got them, cool, just buy our subscription, and you're ready to go. You don't have to worry about buying a five, six or eight hundred dollar hardware device, deploying it, or managing it differently than how you manage other things.” So that's how we match up against those.  The more CMS type things that are focused on, digital signage in those very specific things. Again, those are the incumbents, those are the people that have been doing this; some of them have been there for decades doing this type of stuff. So we're not here to try and outcompete those companies. We just see that there are certain niches that maybe those companies don't fill as well, and we're content to come along and fill those in and keep improving our product, and one day, maybe we'll compete with them. Maybe we'll have a platform that we've decided, hey, we should just make it do everything for everybody and look at going after competitors like those.  But like I said, the market is big enough that they can have that niche. We can have this niche, and it's a very healthy business for us, and we're happy to keep doing that. There are a couple of things that we know how to do really well versus, maybe, trying to get too big too fast, trying to do everything all at once.  Was having the digital signage component added to it pretty important because you've got companies like Google that have Chromecast that costs 35 bucks or something like that, that can do some degree of screen sharing, and it would be people who are really cost conscious, they could just go down that path? Andrew Gould: Yeah, for sure. We don't really see many Chromecast in school-type approaches. For whatever reason, they still don't have basic security like onscreen code or passwords. They've only recently rolled out the ability to remotely manage those types of things. Adding digital signage wasn't really about competing with any particular thing.  The customers that we have and the ones that we're trying to get all value this functionality, and we saw it as a natural fit. It wasn't like we had to completely reinvent the product and take it in some radical new direction. It just seemed like a natural complement to what we were already doing and we talked with some customers. We're running two different solutions on an Apple TV, and they were trying to use Ditto for screen mirroring, and they were trying to use a different Apple TV application for digital signage, and they were trying to do crazy MDM scheduling, based on the class schedule, lock this app for Ditto, so it's open, and then when it's time in between class, walk the digital assignment solution, and we said, there people really want it that bad, maybe we can just be all of that in one and not force our customers to have to run two things like that. So that was the natural genesis of it versus we need to protect our position or something like that. It just made it evolutionary to move in a new direction. So, how seamless and intuitive is it?  Let's say, it is running in digital signage mode, the screen is, and the teacher decides, I want to push something to the screen from my laptop or my phone or whatever, and launches that session, does its thing. To then go back to digital signage, what's involved? Andrew Gould: You just start sharing your screen and stop sharing your screen. So it's directed from the device that wants to share their screen. So, when you open the app, you enter the room code. We make them fun, easy to enter, like red apples, big pineapple things that are easy, not like random numbers and digits that are hard for kids to type in. And they push ‘Start sharing' and boom, their screen's up there, digital signage fades out, screen sharing fades in. It's an instantaneous switchover, and then as soon as the last person stops sharing their screen, if you've got multiple people connected, it goes right back to the digital signage slide it was on when the person first connected. So it's very easy. There's no mode, nothing you have to tinker with on the screen itself.  So the management, whether it's the school, the district, or the individual teacher, they're using a browser to plan out their digital signage side of what the screen's doing? Andrew Gould: Yeah. It's all a cloud-based portal. So you can be in the same building, or you can be in a different state. We have businesses that are deployed with Ditto in offices around the world, and there are a couple of people that sit in California and they manage all the digital signage worldwide. So it's super easy right from the portal. And what's the commercial side of it? What are you paying? Is it a SaaS?  Andrew Gould: Yeah, it's a SaaS model. It's a yearly subscription. We offer a monthly if people are using this in bursts, but obviously, you save money by purchasing for an annual versus monthly. And it's per screen that's running Ditto.  So the other thing that we allow is, if you have multiple screens in a classroom, obviously, you can show digital signage on those, but we actually allow one device to push their content to multiple screens. So we're seeing, especially in some classrooms, you've maybe got a screen in the front or to the side or behind as they set up classes less like when I was in school where it was just rows, everybody facing the front now that these little pods of kids are sitting at tables and not everybody's facing the same direction, so they've actually got multiple screens in the rooms. So we just charge per screen that runs the software, and that's it. What's the fee?  Andrew Gould: So, it's $12.50 per month annually. So it's $125 per month if you're at 10 or more receivers in a school. Is that just for the screen mirroring, or is that for the functionality, including the digital signage? Andrew Gould: Yeah. That's for everything. That's one price for everything. We don't charge more for that. We view it as, “Hey, we took this thing that we charge this price for. It made it even better by giving you all the stuff, and it's the same price.”  And that includes the emergency alerts as well. So that ties into a protocol called CAP, which is how the National Weather Service and School Alert Systems all can send alerts. So we have a CAP server capability, where we can receive alerts from other servers, whether it's the National Weather Service, an alert system that, unfortunately, a lot of schools are having to deploy now, where it can push one button and text the parents and send a push notification and send all the alerts out to Ditto and Ditto immediately takes over and shows that alert. You get all of that for that one price.  Yeah, it sounds very much like this isn't a constrained compromise limited solution for the K to 12 market, it's gonna do pretty much what an average classroom and what an average school is going to need.  Andrew Gould: Yeah, we really tried to put everything in there because, again, we don't want people having to be like, “Well, Ditto almost does everything. It'd be great if it just did this one other thing, and then we wouldn't need this other solution.” The hope is that we can provide that one solution that everybody needs.  Tell me more about the company. It's been around since 2008. Is it privately held, or are you listed?  Andrew Gould: We're privately held. I'm one of the co-founders of the company, started it back in 2008 with my business partner. When we first started out, we weren't doing collaboration. We were doing iOS app development. We had one of the first 50 apps in the iOS app store. We could actually get to the bottom of the list. It was a TV guide app where you could put in the code and see what was on TV. It sounds like an archaic technology today but it was pretty cool back in the day, and then we got into the collaboration space in about 2012 when we released our first collaboration app, and then we've been focused on collaboration ever since.  Where's the company based?  Andrew Gould: North Canton, Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland but we have a diversified team present in a lot of states all around the country, but all the within the United States.  Is the majority of your business in the US?  Andrew Gould: Yes. That's where mainly our outbound sales are focused on. But, like I said, we have a really big following actually in Australia. A lot of ditto customers there, and we are working on expanding into Europe this year and into next year to really go after that. There's a lot more regulation and requirements, and apps have to work certain ways and those sorts of things that we want to make sure that we're compliant and respectful to those things and come into that market appropriately, but it's a big focus for us because we think the same needs exist there as they do everywhere else. Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of US and Canadian companies think they can just make the jump over, and then they get asked about things like GDPR and they're looking at the other person, “What?”  Andrew Gould: Yeah, or even just common things like in France, everything has to be localized into the French language. If you have one string in your application that's in English, they typically won't purchase. They value that. So we want to be respectful to those things, and they're not hard things for us to comply with. It just requires us to pay somebody who knows French to translate a list of strings, and then we can sell into those markets as well. Are you selling direct, or do you have channel partners?  Andrew Gould: Mainly direct. We have some channel partners that we started with right before the pandemic, and so we've seen a lot of that market move around, and so some of the channel partners that we originally partnered were more business-focused and the world has changed for business where people just aren't going to the office as much anymore, and those channel partners just didn't make sense.  So we're actually working through a sort of reset of that channel partner program to be more education-focused with the channel partners. But we have some really great channel partners in the US that we work with, whether they're distributors or they're resellers, whether they're just purchasing on behalf of the school and passing that through, or taking our solution and bundling it up with, “Hey, here's the screen you need and here's the speakers and the WiFi and everything,” and including us as a full technology rollout. We like to work with both of those.  If people want to know more, where do they find you online? Andrew Gould: Our website is goditto.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial there. You can set up as many screens as you want, and play with digital signage as much as you want for 30 days, and then, as I said, it starts at $150 per receiver for a single license, and then we have volume pricing above 10 and it scale scales down from there.  Great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.  Andrew Gould: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.

A packed issue full of AI content, what powers the internet, the real cost of food, offline-first, and an interview all about CK editor and TinyMCE.Full show notes here: https://chinchillasqueaks.substack.com/p/bd2d57e5-b110-4963-947b-5afaa19130c8

Connect with Beatrice Bruno   Beatrice Bruno, WYSIWYG, PGP  The Drill Sergeant of Life www.DrillSergeantofLife.com Cell: (720) 212-9780   Author | Speaker | Ghostwriter | Editor | US Army Veteran The Drill Sergeant of Life mission is to empower you to be all you care to be on the Battlefield of Life. You can be a Commander in Life! Be Bold and Courageous! God's Got You...   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrillSergeantofLife/ Website: www.drillsergeantoflife.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrillSergeantofLife/ Website: www.drillsergeantoflife.com Order Beatrice's Books here: The Baby Chronicles - Where You Were Before You Were https://amzn.to/3DHgqXK How to Get Over Yourself, Get Out of Your Own Way, and Get What YOU Want Out of Life! https://amzn.to/3lcTnxA How To Get Over Yourself and Let Go of the PAST! https://amzn.to/3REzHyE Chronicles of Grief https://amzn.to/3Yuxb0s Up the Down Escalator: Are You Really Saved? https://amzn.to/3jz3Wun God Has Prepared the Table! Why Aren't You Eating? https://amzn.to/3HCe6Cw   Connect with Terry Lohrbeer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2658545911065461/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrylohrbeer/ Instagram: kickassboomers Twitter: @kickassboomers Website:  kickassboomers.com   Connect to Premiere Podcast Pros for podcast editing: premierepodcastpros@gmail.com   LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.   Email terry@kickassboomers.com and connect with me online and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

Connect with Beatrice Bruno   Beatrice Bruno, WYSIWYG, PGP  The Drill Sergeant of Life www.DrillSergeantofLife.com Cell: (720) 212-9780   Author | Speaker | Ghostwriter | Editor | US Army Veteran The Drill Sergeant of Life mission is to empower you to be all you care to be on the Battlefield of Life. You can be a Commander in Life! Be Bold and Courageous! God's Got You...   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrillSergeantofLife/ Website: www.drillsergeantoflife.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrillSergeantofLife/ Website: www.drillsergeantoflife.com Order Beatrice's Books here: The Baby Chronicles - Where You Were Before You Were https://amzn.to/3DHgqXK How to Get Over Yourself, Get Out of Your Own Way, and Get What YOU Want Out of Life! https://amzn.to/3lcTnxA How To Get Over Yourself and Let Go of the PAST! https://amzn.to/3REzHyE Chronicles of Grief https://amzn.to/3Yuxb0s Up the Down Escalator: Are You Really Saved? https://amzn.to/3jz3Wun God Has Prepared the Table! Why Aren't You Eating? https://amzn.to/3HCe6Cw   Connect with Terry Lohrbeer Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2658545911065461/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrylohrbeer/ Instagram: kickassboomers Twitter: @kickassboomers Website:  kickassboomers.com   Connect to Premiere Podcast Pros for podcast editing: premierepodcastpros@gmail.com   LEAVE A REVIEW and join me on my journey to become and stay a Kickass Boomer! Visit http://kickassboomers.com/ to listen to the previous episodes. Also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.   Email terry@kickassboomers.com and connect with me online and on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

In today's fast-paced world, it's all too common for business owners to become consumed by busyness without genuinely focusing on the crucial aspects of their businesses.    Entrepreneurs must prioritize their time and energy wisely, dedicating themselves to the most significant endeavors that will propel their businesses forward.   It's easy to get caught up in unimportant tasks and distractions, and become the bottleneck in your business. However, growth and success come from identifying and devoting your most productive hours to the essential elements driving your ventures.   By carefully managing your time and consistently aligning your efforts with your long-term goals, you can ensure that you make substantial strides in your entrepreneurial pursuits and you avoid getting stuck.   In this episode, Aytekin Tank shares insights on automating your busywork, and systematically eliminating unimportant things to focus on what matters most for your business and build a successful product or service.   Aytekin Tank is the pioneering WYSIWYG online form builder, CEO, and founder of Jotform, which Entrepreneur Magazine named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" in 2016, 10 years after it was founded.   Today, Jotform has grown to serve over 20 million users worldwide and employs a team of more than 500. In addition to his role as CEO, Aytekin is also a productivity and automation enthusiast and has recently authored the book; Automate Your Busywork. Do Less, Achieve More, and Save Your Brain for the Big Stuff.   Let's jump in!   Key Highlights From The Show:   [00:01] Intro and a quick bio of the guest; Aytekin Tank [02:34] How our to-do list is sabotaging our true productivity and the Hunter Strategy [10:47] Aytekin's to-do list technique, how long it is and why [13:32] Bottlenecks that are most common to entrepreneurs [17:41] The idea behind Jotform and Aytekin's strategies for building a successful product [27:12] A time when Aytekin was the bottleneck to his business [31:14] What inspired Aytekin to shift from busyness to start doing business [33:01] Strategies Aytekin gives in his book, Automate Your Busywork [37:48] How to reach out and connect with Aytekin and get his book [38:24] Ending the show   Notable Quotes There are two kinds of problems: urgent but not important and important but not urgent, but we are always working on the urgent and unimportant ones. When you are busy with all the unimportant stuff, it's hard to do the important things because you can get lost in them. You can build the best product, but no one will come and find it for you; you need to promote and market your product. When people are angry at your product, they are telling you something you should listen to because they want your product. You should grow from your business, not in your business; you should be designing the system, not be part of the system.   Resources Mentioned   Automate Your Busywork by Aytekin Tank The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal by Julia Cameron:    Connect With Aytekin Tank:   Website: https://aytekintank.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aytekintank/   ----- Help me inspire more (wannabe) entrepreneurs. Leave me a 5-star review. Go to https://ratethispodcast.com/interviewspodcast and follow the simple instructions.  

Salman Paracha, Founder & CEO at Katanemo Labs, joins Corey at Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his vision for the future of SaaS application development. Salman and Corey discuss what led him to take the leap into founding a start-up, and Salman shares how he believes the future of SaaS application development is at an inflection point. Salman also explains why it's critical to focus on the outcome your customers experience over infrastructure, and shares his vision for future developers looking to build the next wave of SaaS applications. About SalmanBuilding high-growth, high-tech software products that affect the lives of millions of customers. 15+ years of experience in building successful products and highly effective teams. I am deeply interested in bringing the power of the cloud to end customers, large scale data problems, and delivering scalable services on commodity hardware.Links Referenced: Katanemo: https://www.katanemo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salmanparacha/ Email: mailto:salman@katanemo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salman_paracha TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And this promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud is brought to us by our friends at Katanemo, who is—when you talk to small startups, like, “Who should we talk to?” They invariably look around the room, figure out who they should throw directly into the grist mill, and in this particular case, they have selected Salman Paracha, who is the founder and CEO. Salman, thank you for joining me.Salman: Hey, thanks for having me. Second time.Corey: It is. And every time we talk, it seems like there has been an interesting progression in your career. Originally, when we first started talking, you were the GM of the serverless application repository at AWS, and of AWS SAM, the Serverless Application Model that most people know because of the giant psychotic squirrel running around the expo hall at events. Then you went to be a group VP at Oracle Cloud, and now you look around the landscape and decide, you know, what I've done my entire career? Worked at big companies where everything is, you know, convenient in certain ways. And that sucks. I want everything to be three times harder, at least, so I'm going to go start a startup of my own. Presumably. I'm assuming that is the thought process that led you here. What's the actual story behind why you decided to leave giant corporate entities and go to a small startup?Salman: Thanks for that intro. The primary reason to sort of pursue this dream was something was pulling at me for the past four to five years. As a person who considers himself a builder, the most happiest I am when I'm actually trying to ship software out for customers. And so, I've been pulling on this thread for a very, very long time, that the world of the modern reference architecture, as it goes more microservices and explodes in the face of developers, has gotten to a point that we are now being inundated with all these micro-primitives, if you would, on infrastructure that actually slow the rate of innovation down. And why hasn't there been a move and reversion to the other side?And so, as I looked around, and at my time at Serverless particularly, where we were trying to champion this idea of serverless compute where you don't manage your servers, I kind of was ruminating on this notion of how do you get to zero infrastructure? And the idea that how can we actually orchestrate out all the complexity behind the scenes and you can truly focus on what your application does. And in that part of the journey, I've been chatting with developers across swath of industries and varying degrees of sophistication if you would, and the thing that emerged is that the most complex, perhaps the most complex piece to build in the cloud is a SaaS application. And there's inherent complexity in sort of thinking through the various concerns of the shapes and sizes of your customers that you're serving, the security and safety controls that you have to give them, the operational burdens that you take to serve a very large customer versus a very small customer who is perhaps in your free tier.And so, I was pulling on this thread for a very long time, even at my time, somewhat, at AWS, having—I chatted folks like Twilio and Slack at that time, and I said, “I think there has to be a much, much better way.” It cannot be more; it has to be less, and that less is actually getting us closer to what we believe is the future of cloud infrastructure, which is no infrastructure. So, that's it. I mean, I think the core thesis was, “Hey, if I've operated at this intersection of hyperscale cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications for the past 20 years, what is the compression algorithm that I can apply and give to developers so that they can truly focus on building something phenomenal without having to worry about the complexity of the infrastructure, the security of the scaling of the operational, and the access logs, and all that stuff that they have to today focus on?” And then I'm very fortunate to have had a phenomenal team that have joined and humbled me in my journey here.Since last year, we have folks across the spectrum who have built these things at scale and at Lyft, at Dropbox, at Meta, at AWS, at Cloudera, and et cetera. And so, we've been really fortunate that we have a very firm belief of where we want to take the future of infrastructure and who we want to serve in that market segment. And I said to myself, I don't think I'm getting any younger. My parents, my South Asian parents, perhaps they're going to be more happy to see me sort of fight it out and battle it out versus just naturally climb the corporate ladder. Nothing wrong with that, of course.Corey: It's not too late to go be a doctor. I say that as someone who grew up in a Jewish home where there were certain expectations and pressures placed upon me that I continue to disappoint four decades later.Salman: Yeah, so anywho [laugh], on that front, so I think I'm kind of living to the expectations I had for myself 20 years ago when I joined the workforce, and I now have the great fortune to build alongside these amazing builders and see what we can unlock for the developer community.Corey: One of the challenges with the approach that I found historically has been Heroku did something very similar and then everyone tried to build the next Heroku, except for the company that bought Heroku, they were content to let that thing sit and never think about it again, for whatever reason. But another example would be something like NPM, the Node Package Manager, where it abstracts away stupendous complexity. You tell it to npm install for some project and it just starts scrolling huge amounts of text past and doing all kinds of work and your computer fans start screaming, and you're like, “Wow, it's doing an awful lot of fascinating stuff underneath the hood, and I really hope this works. If it breaks halfway through, I haven't first idea where to look under the hood to make sure that this actually works and doesn't break my application.”The problem that I have historically with the things in this space is it requires a certain element of trust. That said, looking at the things you've done before, the places you've been, I don't have to explain that to you. You have clearly spent your entire career in environments where mistakes matter because they're going to show very quickly to an awful lot of customers if they wind up getting out there. That feels to me like it's a significant competitive advantage versus, not to be disparaging, but a couple of founders fresh out of a boot camp who have never worked in the industry before, but they have an idea, gosh darn it, this is what they're going to build.Salman: You know, you'll find builders, and you'll have builders surprise you. And I, you know, salute all those who come out and start something new. I have a whole bunch of respect for that, just the courage that takes it. But there's an advantage that the team has, and we're very fortunate on having that advantage, having seen things break. And I think we're at this inflection point, perhaps now that there's been an incredible amount of effort done in the open-source community relative to [dis-established 00:06:56] standards.Like if you imagine, what, 25+ years ago, when HTTP and HTTP 1.1 came out, that created an explosion of people hosting these web services and HTTP-based applications. I think we're at the point where we can preserve the developer experience, preserve the operator experience, but never have to sort of have you tinker in the bowels of the infrastructure … to build a SaaS application. And I think that the interesting part of this is knowing how successful these projects can be, but also how complex they can be to manage. But if you (the developer) can just focus on dev experience and operator experience and ask what's the most pressing question to answer, which is…Can you know who (your customers) are and what they're doing in your system, and have the ability to shape their experience versus shaping the infrastructure?”I think we'll be in a much better state as an industry, we'll be much happier developers, we'll just be in a much higher place than we are today. Where as I said earlier, which is the modern reference architecture of microservices perhaps gives you some powers, but it really explodes the amount of choices and results in this massive drag on innovation. And that's that part of the lessons and learnings and insights that we have and we're going to compress that, hopefully, on behalf of developers as we build out Katanemo, particularly, you know, going towards this future of no infrastructure, zero infrastructure. So yeah, all respect to everyone who's building. You know, we've had the good fortune and we hope to pass that fortune back in terms of a product experience.Corey: This feels like a problem that never really goes away, at any scale, for that matter. I want to build out something new. Maybe it's just a ridiculous static site. Maybe it's some serverless-powered shitposting app. I have several of those in existence.And every time it's like, “Oh, you have a great idea for an application. Cool. Step one: do a whole bunch of infrastructure provisioning nonsense along the way first because that's going to be the important thing to get done.” And then, only then, do you get to start getting into the application logic and the rest. And it always feels like boilerplate, but it's specific boilerplate, in that it has to be right for this environment with this constraint and this use case, and it just feels like it's undifferentiated work that I don't want to be doing.Salman: I think that actually is magnified to a certain degree when you're thinking about an enterprise-grade SaaS application. And my impression is it's magnified of perhaps an order of magnitude more. Because in any modern SaaS experience, you would have to think through the list of concerns relative to your small customer base that's trying your product, teams that are relying on your experience that their workflows don't break, or perhaps large enterprises who you're trying to serve and upsell to. And that inherent complexity then gets baked into the choices on “Hey, should I have more nodes or should I have more concurrency or should I have more isolation boundaries? How do I think about security for multiple customers within my system?”And I think that's the really hard nut to crack. And we're focused there first because we believe we can serve that community really well, get off on the get-go, and then create the right level of experiences, perhaps for general business-to-consumer applications as well. But this problem, I think, it's magnified even more for the [unintelligible 00:10:01] dot community that's trying to start off with a developer-led motion but naturally wants to upsell to teams, organizations, and enterprises with their suite of services, perhaps a next-generation ChatGPT, if you would. So yeah, I'm with you. I hear you, and I think the problems amplified, in our view, to that other community that sort of struggles with this and has to hire specific talent to build that stack out.Corey: I have to ask, because I alluded to, it seems like every company has been trying to build the next version of Heroku, which when you distill down what the value would actually deliver doesn't sound that far removed from what it is that you're proposing to build. Hasn't this been done yet?Salman: So, I think the way we think about this problem is it's across multiple layers. And some components to this problem that's worth talking about. Of course, when you say zero infrastructure and no infrastructure, what does that even mean? Like, I think people naturally get confused. So, three weeks ago, we actually launched what we call our first set of capabilities on behalf of this community as we break things out in components, which is zero-trust capability.So, if you think about the space, there's a whole bunch of these undifferentiated essentials that you need to build something meaningful and serve users, teams, organizations, and enterprises. And Heroku is this approach was an abstraction—and a fine one, if you want to build a general purpose app that is just serving the consumer, perhaps. And we're sort of taking a very different position. We're saying we're here to solve you if you're building something that's going to serve developers, teams, or organizations. So, we are very different in terms of how we're approaching the market relative to what we want to go solve for.That's just number one. And B, as the thing that we recently launched, is how do we break this problem down on behalf of the community and be targeted to solve a particular problem? So, when I connected with developers in my journey for the past six to nine months as we've been in business, is that they felt that the modern state and fragmented nature of identity and access management is really complex for their application. Why? Because now you have this very interesting usage patterns for your applications.There's no longer users using something you're built. There are, of course, as I mentioned, teams, and of course, there's an enterprise component to this. There are machine keys for your APIs. And all these vectors now of uses all naturally become a threat vector that you have to protect for and they have to be neatly thought through from a access management strategy. And so, what we've set out to do is, like, how do we unify this experience today, and solve a real problem, which is you can effortlessly onboard any customer of any size and upsell through zero-trust capabilities like role-based access control, attribute-based access control, and give your customers the ability to achieve least privileged access?So, meaning how do you safeguard the most protected resources off your SaaS application and make sure they will be safeguarded, but if your users want to create for more sharing and collaboration experiences, you have the means for them to go achieve that without having to build custom logic, custom code, and perhaps spend, many months cycles and perfecting it? And that engineer that built it, and when it left, who's going to take over and maintain that piece of code?Corey: Not to mention you're going to get it wrong, and as a result, mistakes there have security implications that can be dire.Salman: I think that's where developers tell us, this is why—you know, I was talking to one potential developer the other day and the thinking was, hey, you know, it was really hard for us to, perhaps, let go of these security controls because we want to build them ourselves. And I asked them this question: “Where do you store your username and passwords for your applications?” Like, “I don't store them anymore.” Like, I think the reason why people have moved away from having these concerns is because it's a compliance security risk, it's a threat vector. And there are others who have hired teams and staff of experts to make sure that thing never breaks, on their behalf.And similarly, I think as you think about this multimodal identity experiences, this permissions experience that we have built for developers, we are the experts in this domain. We have advisors, past advisors from AWS IAM, perhaps people know that's a very popular. It serves billions of transactions a second, and securing cloud infrastructure at this rate of $100 billion worth of workloads. And so, we've got the expertise to help think through, like, what do developers need to create these safety guardrails, but with a phenomenal developer experience? And I'll give you an example of that, Corey.Like, in order for you to, sort of, interact with Katanemo, all you need to do is capture your API surface area in an OpenAPI specification or a GraphQL specification. And that submission of that specification means we know your resources, we know your resource model, your data paths, your access control mechanisms from the HTTP methods that you're exposing, and then we create the entire identity, customer identity, and finding permissions experience that the developer can expose to their customers in a self-service way to construct their own roles, construct their own SSO, construct their own access log controls, if you would, and just move past this, like, can we get to an enterprise-grade experience instantly as we serve, users, teams as effortlessly with us, and through their business lifecycle. Like, no developer is going to serve necessarily an enterprise on day one; they're going to get these teams really excited about their product and then they're going to have an upsell motion. But having to build these by bespoke experiences on onboarding and safety for each different cohort of the customers that they want to serve, that's just time away from stuff that they can build, cool things that are differentiating for them.Corey: One of the things has always sucked for me about building applications, even from an infrastructure perspective, has been that I don't know what I don't know. And I always feel like I am making a bunch of decisions now that make perfect sense, but when I start scaling or having to take this into a more serious environment, I'm going to have to throw so much of it away and backtrack massively. And oh, I shouldn't roll my own authentication subsystem and whatnot. But finding the right path forward that matches the current state of the art from an industry perspective really feels like a crapshoot, it's you're looking at all the horses, wondering which one you want to bet on and it carries a cost to get it wrong.Salman: In my time at Serverless, at EC2, even my time at Oracle, the whole idea was to make sure that we reduce this crapshoot behavior on behalf of developers. Of course, at AWS, at Oracle, it was very wide and horizontal in its appeal to any type of developer, but we have felt that if you sort of flipped on its head and go with a verticalized approach, and particularly target one persona and their use cases and their needs, that actually helps us, sort of, look at the problem very holistically and solve that thing just for them. And as I mentioned, we sort of focused on that SaaS use case, particularly, because we believe there's inherent and unbounded complexity there. So, this is just for playing from the experiences and learnings I've had in the past, which is, yeah, this stuff is hard. It's incredibly hard to get right, and just as, you know, the industry moved to hey, I can trust somebody else who's an expert here, we're saying we complete that story. And we look to the modern ways people access your applications through APIs and API keys, or users, or teams, or SSL, whatever, and we compress it, saying single API call to us and you get those capabilities out of the box so you can focus on what matters: moving fast, closing customers even faster.Corey: I think that is the grail that people are chasing. The problem I found, especially in the enterprise space, has been that it sounds great in theory, but in practice, it's a oh great, the old Model T story, you can get in any color you want, as long as it's black. And it's well, okay, that's a path, but it doesn't comport with our security requirements and our guardrails and our compliance objectives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Rightly or—more often—wrongly, people tend to believe that they are bespoke unicorns whose problems could never possibly be realized by anything that wasn't brewed in-house at their own company. I don't find that to be true, but I imagine you're getting a lot of pushback from that direction.Salman: I think there are two pieces of feedback that we normally hear. “Oh, hey. We built some of this stuff. How do we sort of untangle the mess that we have?” That's fine. We can help them we have some components that easily wrap around their experience and give them the ability to sort of move to a better state.But if we build this stuff as a meaningful framework using open standards, like OpenAPI and GraphQL, as the only way you interact with us today, that means that your customers can now build, have a framework in which they set their own security standards against your service, against your application. And I think that makes you getting out of the business of defining the security posture to giving them the ability to construct their security posture is using open standards so their teams can plug down their own SEIM tools if they have to. But you have that framework powering your security and safety experience, your identity and access management experience, without having to build it.Going back to the earlier thing that we talked about, we believe we're in an inflection point where standards do establish a lot of innovation, specifically in infrastructure, and we're going to leverage as much as we can on behalf of developers to bet on those standards. Like I said, OpenAPI, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, so that their customers can say, “Yeah, I get it. I understand your surface area. I can construct these things at least privileged or coarse grained. That's my choice. You're going to give me access logs so I know what I did, or who did what, when, and how, so, you know, I can confirm for my compliance requirements.”And they're off the hook. They're actually truly off the hook without having to think about, I think I can do it better because my customers are pi—or second, their customers put these requirements that take them and create [sort of 00:19:29] Rube Goldberg type of scenario in terms of their own stack. So, we think we have something to really serve the market and make it such that it's not necessarily bespoke.Corey: I think that you're probably right that there's a lot of opportunity to develop those things. I mean, you spent enough time at Amazon, for example, to have benefited from the realization of some of this. One of the nice things I have to imagine, about building a product or a service at AWS is so much of the infrastructure work has already been done. You're not going to convince me that individual service teams have to sit there and come up with, well, we need to implement a global, highly available block store. S3 already exists. It's right there. You can use it.Same with authentication in the form of IAM, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, a bunch of internal infrastructure stuff that's there and ready to go. Now, the counterargument, of course, is, as you're building this out, you don't have that, I guess, luxury anymore of big company, massive, awesome infrastructure there and ready to go, other than what is available to the rest of us mere mortals. So, I have to ask, is that the big part of what sucks about building SaaS these days or are you finding the friction and challenging parts somewhere else?Salman: So, it's a good question because Katanemo is built on Katanemo. It's a very [mind-tingling 00:20:46] type of discussion, but the one principle that we took is if we're going to build something on behalf of the community, then our product and service has to consume it as well, and specifically in talking about identity and access management for our SaaS service. Because there's nothing in the market that neatly solves this problem today. And should we rely on the cloud infrastructure and build on top of AWS and perhaps others in the market like Azure or GCP trying to do? Yeah, absolutely.We're not here to reinvent the primitives that are there for low-level infrastructure. We have a very strong non-religious belief that hey, we should leverage what we have, so we can move faster into market. So, we have a whole bunch of usage on, you know, openly speaking, we, when customers ask us, “How do you [unintelligible 00:21:27]? I'm like, “We use KMS for securing some of the things that we do on your behalf.” We have architected around the complexity on [unintelligible 00:21:34] groups and pools and multiples and trying keys and all that stuff. And so, we are trying to use as much as we can, but as I go back to this earlier notion, we're trying to develop a purpose-built experience that dramatically simplifies for that developer community.And tomorrow, as we go in towards our [unintelligible 00:21:51] infrastructure future, we will then design something very particular for that next community. And perhaps it's going to be a gaming community if we want to solve their problems. And that's going to be the ethos of the company. It has to be purpose-built, it has to be developer experiences phenomenal, not just digging any large cloud provider, but that is a missing component tree and how to think about it, and make sure that we can compress our infrastructure and systems knowledge so that they don't have to build it. And so, that's the mission that we're on. And we're, of course, very excited about what we're doing and very fortunate to have both the team and the backing that we have so far to pursue this a little bit further.Corey: You're putting your finger right on a very painful spot that has been resonating with me for a long time, which is that it feels like building something on top of AWS natively is a lot like going to the Home Depot and building a cabinet. Well, you go walk up and down the aisles and you pick the exact wood you want, the exact stain for it, the fasteners, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, whereas sometimes you just want something to store some bowls, so going to Target is going to be the better solution. But now you're so forced to go and build these things yourself from parts. And that just feels like it has been such a heavy lift for folks because there's so much you need to understand. And it's more or less a shipping of AWS's internal product culture.But containers, databases, networks, compute, et cetera, are all things that any customer building even a Hello World app has to think about. But that falls across five different talk tracks at re:Invent, for example. It's too much burden that has been put on the customer and as a result, I think that there's a lot of value being left on the table. I spend roughly equivalent amounts of money every month on AWS and on Retool. For AWS, I spent about 450 bucks to get about 450 bucks worth of infrastructure services.Retool, which is basically a WYSIWYG app that designs in-house applications charges me about 400 bucks for which I receive probably about 20 cents worth of infrastructure services, but the value it presents by stringing those things together for me means I am happy to pay it. I really feel like there's a massive untapped value in being able to deliver not building blocks, but conceived solutions that get out of the way and let people build the differentiated thing that they're in business to build.Salman: We feel the same way. I think part of this realization is developers who are building these things continue to stumble upon the explosion of courses and certification material and all that stuff to train themselves to do something. As of course, naturally, AI comes into play and the way that you know the future of applications continues to press upon, you have to build something quickly, you will see that this notion of just [hugging 00:24:32] your primitives or hugging these low-level infrastructure primitives is going to go away because the world is moving at an incredibly breakneck pace. And that will be true, but there is truly now an inflection point where everyone wants to move even faster.And our talk track with, I guess, our customers is, focus on what really matters to grow your business. And if you are a SaaS developer, or perhaps you're a gaming developer, or perhaps you're thinking very specifically in terms of vertical industry that you want to unlock, like, a healthcare company, for example, you should focus on great patient care, you should focus on great gaming experience, you should focus on great X, Y, Z. Don't focus on infrastructure. Infrastructure is not the outcome. The outcome is your customers are happy and you're going to serve them.And your customers are not all equal size, equal shape, and never will be, but you need to give equal shape, equal size, type of price performance or great experience to them. Because you're not necessarily going to spend the effort to make sure that your free tier is the most highly performant place for you serve your customers and leave your perhaps platinum or enterprise customers hanging dry, as an example. But yeah, I mean, I think that's the ethos of our company and the spirit of what we are trying to go build. As I said, we're humbled to be—I am humbled to be surrounded by folks who are much smarter than me and been better builders, and customers who are so excited about our journey. So, this is a good time for us at the moment.Corey: I understand the grass is always greener when it comes to looking at the road not taken. For me, I see one of the advantages of running a services business as I do, in that, well, I can start a services business on Monday and by you know, Friday or so, I have my first client lined up and I'm ready to start performing work and get paid immediately. SaaS on the other hand feels a lot more like a real estate adjacent, where you have to go ahead and buy the land and get everyone lined up and sink the massive investment into it to get it built up, and you won't know for years in some cases whether this is something that is going to catch on, much less even justify the cost of building it in the first place. Where are you on that journey as far as validating that you're building something that's resonating?Salman: So, we have design partners, we call them because they're shaping our product experience. And we don't call them customers yet, just because we're in sort of the early stages. But we have designed partners across four critical industries. One of them which is AI, as the booming next-generation AI company is going to be API-first, we have that use case that we can target really well. They're really early in their days and they need support across their business lifecycle. Hey, I'm just going to support three users tinkering of my product to 3000 customers in an enterprise.But that's one. We are very much engaged in the healthcare space because the healthcare is actually going through a very massive legal transformation through—well, what's happening there's this HL7 FHIR standard which is actually making healthcare records more interoperable. So, you actually can get patient records if you go from one doctor to the other and not be blocked by the healthcare Gods to say, “No, you cannot do that.” And that is actually creating a very net-new experience in the healthcare space, so we have very customers excited about how we can self-solve their problems in terms of identity and authorization. We have customers in the Web3 off-chain space.So, on-chain is all permissionless and it's a whole bunch of different type of development experience, but off-chain has very much of the same characteristics that you will find on a traditional SaaS application. They [need 00:27:56] about safety, you think about privacy, you think about users and teams and API keys and a whole bunch of stuff that sort of baked into it. And the general developer tools who are going from an open-source experience to perhaps a cloud service experience, they've got a really great project in the GitHub, they got a bunch of stars and they now have to think about how to provide a better value to customers? And they have to go through a journey.So, in those four general sort of in buckets is where we are operating right now. We're very excited about that. And, you know, this opportunity to talk to you is to connect with more folks, especially as we, as I travel in the to AWS New York Summit, or perhaps just meeting up through one-on-ones through Calendly, or whatever have you, and figuring out how we can unlock more value for customers in these use case verticals, or perhaps something that we haven't necessarily thought through yet.Corey: I think that one of the clear signs of someone who used to work at Amazon is that—I don't even have to ask; I already know the answer—of are you talking to prospective customers before you start building things? Whereas start to finish everyone I've ever met at AWS is highly focused on the customer experience, whereas when you talk to people building things who have not been through that, a depressing amount of the time, your question is, okay, so what do your prospective customers think about this? Like, “Oh, we haven't talked to any of those people, yet. Talking to people is scary and we're here to write code.” It's, “You might be surprised by what you learn.”And there's no immunity to it. When I started this place, I thought I knew pretty well what people thought about their AWS bill, and it turns out, I was way off. There were nuances of the way customers talked about it that I didn't fully understand. So, to that end, in fact, we can prove it relatively easily. What is something you have learned about your space since you started the company from customer conversations?Salman: Oh, we actually made a pivot into this space that we are in at the moment because customers told us that's something that they do not want to focus their efforts on. Repeatedly. We did not write a single line of code all up until November of last year, but once we got the signal from our, as I said, as I mentioned, design partners, they're like, “This is a problem worth solving.” They're like, “We're going to get to work for you. You have these use cases, you have these scenarios that are coming up in your conversations with your customers. Let us be that accelerant for you and be an extension of your team in some ways, so that you can focus on what's really, really, really important.”So, you know, I think that's just survival, Corey. Part, of course—naturally, of course, you work backwards from customers and that was the framework I used when I joined Amazon back in 2012. And even in my time at Oracle, that's been the ethos of my, I guess, my personal self. But in our case, particularly, we actually talked about a very different idea, we wanted to start, but then customers told us, “You know what? Don't start there. Start here.”And I think that's obviously, just the nature of surviving in through the first few years of your company existence is… getting people to say yes and getting people to say no, and then no, is actually really valuable in many cases because it tells you what to adjust to. And so, we adjusted here as a result of those conversations.Corey: That may be the best answer to that question I think I've ever gotten. That is a phenomenal way to approach things. We started building a SaaS product here and two months later, we sunset the SaaS product because it turned out that what we were building and what customers wanted were not necessarily aligned. I like you said didn't even write a line of code until last November, just because of the conversations were still shaping what was actually needed in the marketplace. You would be astonished how rare that is.Salman: I guess. The startup founders that I have the privilege to call peers, they actually taught me some of the stuff. So, we've got the startup founders we want to just connect on the founder journey, we're happy to connect. Just, but yeah, I think that the strength of the team is sort of making sure that we have our ears to the ground. Get out of the building. You got to get out of the building. And we've been trying to get out of the building as much as we can with Katanemo. And I think that journey just continues. The learning journey, the evolution of what we're doing on behalf of SaaS developers continues, and we hope to delight them.Corey: I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Salman: So, they can go to katanemo.com, which is where our website is, and they can learn a little bit about what we do today and also where we're headed with the venture. They can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Salman Paracha. I'm not super hard to find on LinkedIn. You search for me and say Katanemo or AWS and Oracle, I think you'll be able to get to me. I'm also going to the AWS New York Summit, which happens on July 26, I believe. I might run into you there.Corey: Oh, yes. The night before I'll be hosting a drink up at Vol de Nuit at eight o'clock. You're welcome there, as anyone who's listening. And oh, it's always a pleasure to go and talk to people doing interesting things and just talk shop. But that's the reason I throw the drink up.Salman: Ah, okay. I'll take you up on that. And good, we'll get to see each other face-to-face after some time. You can reach out to me, as I said, even basic email, and I'll say that to you, and LinkedIn if you're just a chat. And there's just so many ways to get to me. On Twitter, I'm @salmanparacha, and it should be a bit easier to find me.Don't hesitate to reach out or search or connect with us. We are eager to talk to folks who are trying to solve or crack this Gordian Knot on terms of the what they're building. And especially if you're building towards the next-generation AI application and think through safety, we believe we are years ahead in terms of thinking about safety in that space. It's early days for us there, but we're obviously interacting with customers and developers who are trying to think through, how do I now take what was understood to be a table stakes, okay, API-first experiences, [user seems 00:33:31], keys, all that good jazz, and provide safety for that? But I think the new world that we're going to live in is not only going to just be deterministic responses from APIs; it's going to be probabilistic responses from large language models. And we got something going on in that space, particularly. We feel fairly bullish on it. But more, customer conversations before we write a piece of code is important. So, just connect with us. I'm salman@katanemo.com, on LinkedIn, Twitter, and I will be quick to reach back out to you.Corey: And I will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:02]. And I've also filled out the contact us form on katanemo.com because I have a couple of problems it sounds like this might absolutely be a way to solve. Because otherwise, God help us all. I'm writing another login page.Salman: Right. So, just see Corey Quinn just signed up for our access. So, I will give you access. So.Corey: You think I'm kidding. I assure you I'm not. That's the scariest part is that I'm often being completely serious and people think I'm making a joke. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Salman: Hey, thanks for the time. I appreciate the opportunity.Corey: Salman Paracha, founder and CEO at Katanemo. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this has been a promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud brought to us by our friends at Katanemo. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with it insulting comment talking about how difficult it was to build that platform yourself from scratch because of all the infrastructure moving parts before it would take that insulting comment.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Steve Krouse about val.town, what it is, his philosophies on teaching people to code, the tech stack for val.town, and the benefits of inspiring kids to learn to code. Show Notes 00:36 Welcome 01:27 Who is Steve Krouse? Steve Krouse Future of Coding stevekrouse (Steve Krouse) · GitHub Steve Krouse (@stevekrouse) on Twitter Coding Classes for Kids & Teens | Coding for Kids | The Coding Space 03:06 What is Val.town? Val Town 08:35 Where did the inspiration for social dev environments come from? 12:52 WYSIWYG code vs being code first 16:30 How does val.town inspire people? 20:26 How do you prevent people abusing val.town? 24:57 What's the UI story for snippets on val.town? 27:31 Do you plan to support express? 29:03 What's the tech stack behind the front end of val.town? 30:35 What's the tech stack for the back end of val.town? 34:37 How do you measure for pricing? 37:07 Who is using val.town? 42:00 What's your methodology for teaching kids to code? 47:44 Supper Club questions GitHub - pomdtr/sunbeam: Generate powerful TUIs from simple scripts written in any language. Deno — A modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript A Small Matter of Programming The Unison language CodeMirror A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing Stripe Press — Ideas for progress pomdtr/sunbeam: Generate powerful TUIs from simple scripts written in any language. Seymour Papert woofjs.com Bret Victor Welcome | Future of Coding Tom MacWright (@tmcw) 55:54 SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× SwitchBot Wi-Fi Smart Lock Shameless Plugs Val Town Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets Wes Bos on Bluesky Scott on Bluesky Syntax on Bluesky

The web has changed a lot over the past 25 years. Or maybe it hasn't. Enterprise content architectures are maturing and finally beginning to separate content from its presentation. But old-fashioned artifacts like PDF files still abound, and authors still expect WYSIWYG editing experiences. And when Karen McGrane reflects on her work 25 years ago at Razorfish she's struck by how the team structures and business practices they adopted there are still relevant today. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/karen-mcgrane/

Join host Marquis Murray as he sits down with Aytekin Tank, the visionary Founder and CEO of Jotform. Aytekin founded Jotform in 2006, creating a pioneering WYSIWYG online form builder that now serves over 20 million users worldwide. In this episode, Aytekin shares his entrepreneurial journey and the ongoing growth of Jotform, named one of the "Best Privately-Owned Companies in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine. As an automation enthusiast and author of the upcoming book "Automate Your Busywork," Aytekin provides insights into optimizing time and leveraging no-code automation tools. Discover how Jotform's powerful features make people's lives easier and free up valuable time. Don't miss this captivating conversation with Aytekin Tank on "In Systems We Trust."

Илья Бирман, арт-директор в Бюро Горбунова, автор книг и курсов, в гостях у Андрея Смирнова из Frontend Weekend. Подробнее о том, как в Авито практикуют метод целеполагания по OKR читайте в Playbook AvitoTech: https://cutt.ly/45MJtz3 00:00 Начало 00:52 Чем можешь быть известен моей аудитории? 03:18 Как занялся дизайном и не думал ли уйти из Бюро Горбунова? 05:47 Как строится твой типовой рабочий день? 11:36 Сложно ли переключать внимание между кучей дел и на чем потерялся фокус? 15:35 Почему до сих пор в блоговом движке не появилось WYSIWYG? 23:21 Обязательно ли «уметь зарабатывать на» каком-то занятии, чтобы мотивировать себя? 25:20 Что из себя представляет работа арт-директора в Бюро? 28:50 Как вписываются в ежедневную работу книги и курсы и по чьей иницативе? 37:19 Зачем твои курсы нужны дизайнерскому Бюро? 39:48 Как создавалась интерактивная книга про пользовательский интерфейс? 49:47 Сколько было подходов к книге про транспортные схемы? 54:28 Насколько тебе в рабочих и жизненных задачах помогает умение программировать? 1:00:15 Грустишь ли из-за того, что ни одна созданная схема метро не стала официальной? 1:03:31 Как искать мотивацию, ожидая изначально, что ничего не оценят по достоинству? 1:05:42 Откуда на ютуб-канале появилось видео с 12 млн просмотров? 1:08:13 Зачем публикуешь столько видео на ютуб? 1:13:50 Почему перестал делать новостной блог? 1:15:09 Кем бы ты стал, если бы в мире не было компьютеров? 1:17:49 Почему публиковал psytrance-музыку под псевдонимом, а остальное под своим именем? 1:20:44 Почему стоит переехать в Челябинск и думал ли переехать оттуда? 1:23:38 Как появился список кофеен по городам и где сейчас найти лучший кофе? 1:26:26 В чём сейчас главная проблема современного IT? Ссылки по теме: 1) Телеграм-канал Ильи – https://t.me/ilyabirman_channel 2) Интервью дизайнеров бюро Горбунова с Ильёй – https://youtu.be/K3AJynvowIs 3) Интервью с Ильёй на Дизайн-Просмотре – https://youtu.be/L25SJKi4AKg 4) Заброшенный сайт про биатлон – https://biathlontime.com/ 5) YouTube-канал Ильи – https://www.youtube.com/@ilyabirman 6) То самое видео про снукер с 12 млн просмотров – https://youtu.be/tX8OJQqicFw 7) Лекции и книги на сайте бюро Горбунова – https://bureau.ru/lectures/ 8) Типографская раскладка – https://ilyabirman.ru/typography-layout/ 9) Места, где Илья советует выпить кофе – https://ilyabirman.ru/meanwhile/all/coffee-places/

An airhacks.fm conversation with Richard Fichtner (@richardfichtner) about: the jcon.one conference, the cinedom and thunderdome, Digital Crafts Day, 80485 Intel with ISDN router, starting with Turbo Pascal, the ISDN extension card, prehistoric and Prince of Persia, Wing Commander, starting with SUSE Linux, ISDN router and asterisks, lilo the Linux loader, geocities and myspace, Internet Cafes and resetting the computers, Netscape Composer and Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, teaching HTML at school, xpage is a WYSIWYG, Florian Habermann the god of programming, xdev the low code / nocode environment, xdev is Java 21 compatible, xapi the framework, moving from Swing to Vaadin, the extended persistence context and EntityManager, PersistenceContextType.EXTENDED and interactive applications, Vaadin flow and WebComponents, GWT and Vaadin, xdev the Vaadin IDE, xdev a no-code IDE, SqlEngine a custom DSL for SQL with xdev, RapidClipse and Eclipse, Eclipse performance significantly improved in recent releases Richard Fichtner on twitter: @richardfichtner

An airhacks.fm conversation with Karol Harezlak (@karolh2000) about: C 64 with Datasette, enjoy gaming, The Last Ninja, the demo scene, adding demo to the game, the dark horse federation, Amiga 500, Amiga AMOS, stealing assets from games, learning assembler with 10 years, AMOS and STOS, building lottery simulation, Borland JBuilder and Delphi, working for JDeveloper, starting with internet in 1992, building a game chat, starting with Snowbaording and Skateboarding, using Apache Struts and JSPs, joining the NetBeans team at Sun MIcrosystems, working on Java ME, the episode with John Ceccarelli:"#216 Low Code, No Code, WYSIWYG …and some CRaC", lan parties in a cottage, JavaOne 2010, JDD conference in Krakow, Silesia Java User Group in Katowice, JUG Tricity, Microservices and The History Repeats, replacing JDeveloper engine with NetBeans, SQL Developer is based on NetBeans, working on windows manager for JDeveloper, implementing Oracle Developer Cloud, working on Pyrsia for JFrog, a distributed binary system, the hard System.out.println with Rust, Rust: one line of code can generate 50 warnings Karol Harezlak on github: @karolh2000

We've had some brainiacs on this podcast before, but the products Pathway Connectivity has engineered around switching, PoE and networking… well, suffice to say, you've probably used something they have or his team has built. Robert discusses, with Webster and Ron, how switches, designed for entertainment, are making their way into architectural lighting and “architainment.” Robert Bell a Consulting Director for Product Market at Acuity Brands and oversees the development of the entire Pathway Connectivity product line. Robert has been awarded multiple US Patents for lighting controls and networking which have been assigned to Acuity Brands. In 1992, he won the first ever Wally Russell Newcomer Award as the creator of WYSIWYG, the Emmy Award winning previsualization software. 

Before I start, let me preface this by saying I am not an expert in AI-Generated Art. These platforms are still in their infancy, and nobody knows what the future holds for them or their effect on the graphic design industry, but I doubt they'll ever replace graphic designers. I've experimented with various platforms, read articles, and watched videos. I've seen both sites of the debate argued. Some people don't see AI-Art as a threat to our industry, while others are all doom and gloom, saying designers should start applying to work at McDonald's as flipping burgers will soon become more lucrative than designing things. I don't see AI-Generated art as a threat to the graphic design industry. And I'll get to why in a bit. However, I'm not so sure about artists and illustrators. If that's your profession, I suggest you pay close attention to how AI-generated art matures, as it will affect those creative people much more than it will designers. As I said, I'm no expert here. And these AI Art Generators are evolving fast. So what I say today may change soon. Who knows? I also haven't tried all the various platforms nor used the ones I have tried to their fullest potential. So some of what I say today may be wrong. If that's the case, if you know something I don't, please reach out to me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com. I would love to be educated more on the subject. First, a story. Before I begin my discussion on AI-Generated Artwork, I want to tell you a story that will help put my beliefs into perspective. I entered the three-year Graphic Design program at my local college in 1989. The first two years were spent learning and applying design principles to our projects. We learnt things like design history, colour theory, using grids, layout hierarchy, typography and more. And we were taught the different tools of the trade, most of which are no longer in use and are considered archaic by today's standards. It wasn't until our third year, once we were familiar and comfortable with what being a graphic designer was, that we were granted access to the computer lab. Computers were still new to the industry back then, and very few design agencies used them. When I started working at the print shop after graduation, the first two years of my employment were spent designing everything by hand before I convinced the owner to invest in Macintosh computers. I don't remember what year it was, but during school, a few of my classmates and I made a trip to Toronto for a graphic design trade show. It was the largest show of its kind in Canada and the third largest in North America. All the big names were there, including Adobe, Quark, and Microsoft, to name a few. I remember overhearing a conversation between two design agency owners at a demonstration put on by Adobe. They were talking about the introduction of computers to the design industry. Both were concerned that computers would harm the design industry by minimizing what they considered a particular skill set, that of a graphic designer. To them, computers took the “Art” out of being a “Graphic Artist.” With today's mindset, It's kind of crazy to think that back then, design agency owners thought computers would harm our industry. You can easily argue that computers have made the industry better. Having lived through that period, I can tell you that even though computers didn't harm our industry, they did change it. Drastically, in fact. QuarkXpress, Photoshop and Illustrator replaced the standard tools of the trade, such as wax machines, no-repro blu pencils and Letraset rub-on type. And I know a few designers who left the profession because they couldn't grasp the use of computers. So computers were introduced, the industry evolved, and the graphic design industry persevered. Microsoft Publisher Fast forward a few years, and personal computers are becoming more popular, with Windows-based machines outselling Apple. And Microsoft released a program called Microsoft Publisher that introduced an affordable means for anyone with a computer to “design” their material. Quark and Adobe software costs thousands of dollars which weren't feasible for most people. But Microsoft made Publisher affordable. And what do you think happened? The graphic design industry started to panic. With “design” software now available to the masses, designers would lose their jobs. But you know what? Microsoft Publisher was introduced, and some people changed their thinking about design, yet the graphic design industry persevered. WordPress. Around that same time, an innovation emerged called the World Wide Web. Businesses started embracing the idea of having a website—a way for people to find them over the internet. Computer programmers created the first websites. They were functional but lacked design aesthetics. And graphic designers worldwide took notice and realized an opportunity to apply their skills to something other than paper. Some learned to code, while others embraced WYSIWYG software, allowing them to build websites without coding. A whole new side of the design industry was created. And then WordPress arrived. This new platform allowed people to build websites using pre-built templates called Themes. The arrival of WordPress sent web designers into a panic. If people could build websites using a pre-built template, our design skills would no longer be needed. WordPress was going to kill the web design industry. But you know what? WordPress stuck around, designers evolved and changed their view of the platform, and the graphic design industry persevered. I'd say most web designers these days design using WordPress. 99 Designs. Fast forwards another few years, and 99designs is introduced to the world. For a small fee, clients could submit a design brief to the platform, and multiple designers would compete by submitting their designs and hoping the client chose theirs. The selected designer would win the contest and be paid for their work. The others received nothing. 99Designs was all the talk back then. It was an industry killer. Why would anyone pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to a single graphic designer when they could pay a much smaller fee and have multiple designers compete for them? Many designers worldwide tried to offset this intruder by lowering their rates, hoping to lure clients back from the dark side. But you know what? Designers quickly learned that to attract clients, they needed to sell the value and the relationship of working with them, not just the design deliverables. Because the designers on 99Designs didn't care about the client, they only cared about the subsequent contest they could enter. In fact, 99Designs helped weed out the most undesirable clients making it easier for the rest of us to grow. The graphic design industry persevered. Fiverr. Not long after that, Fiverr was launched, putting our industry into another tailspin. Whereas a design from 99Designs might cost $100 or more. Fiverr's claim to fame was that all tasks were only $5. It didn't matter if you need a logo, a poster, a web banner, or a booklet. Everything was $5. How was a graphic designer supposed to compete with that? The design industry was doomed. And yet, 12 years after its launch, Fiverr is still around. However, nowadays, people on the platform are charging much higher than $5, and graphic designers worldwide are still thriving despite the “competition” of Fiverr. The graphic design industry persevered. Adobe Creative Cloud In 2013 Adobe launched Creative Cloud, replacing their Creative Suite platforms. Whether you like the subscription model or not, there's no arguing that Adobe changed the creative landscape when it introduced Creative Cloud. Software that had previously cost thousands of dollars to own was now available at an affordable monthly rate, making programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, the bread and butter of most people in the design industry, accessible to the masses. Designers were no longer a unique breed with our special tools. Adobe opened the floodgates. Now anyone who wanted to tinker with their programs could do so. This created a whole new breed of graphic designers who lacked formal education. Even kids as early as kindergarten started learning Photoshop. For all our education and skills, being a designer didn't seem as prestigious as it once was. Clients would no longer need our expertise since anyone with a computer could be a “designer.” And the industry started to panic. But you know what? Giving people access to tools doesn't make them an expert. Clients appreciate the years of dedication and knowledge we have when it comes to design. It shows in the work we produce. So even though these tools were available to everyone, the graphic design industry persevered. Canva. A couple of years later, Canva emerged. It was touted as yet another graphic design killer. Canva not only makes it easy to create beautifully designed materials, but you can use it for free if you don't want to pay for their premium offerings. And there's a lot you can do on the free plan. Whenever you see a social media or forum post where someone inquires about hiring a graphic designer, you will find at least one comment suggesting they do it themselves on Canva. Did Canva steal potential clients from designers? Yes, it did. But did it kill our industry? Far from it. I'll argue that Canva made clients appreciate us more. I've had numerous people hire me after dabbling in Canva and realizing their creations lack that professional touch. So even Canva, the closest thing to a design industry killer, hasn't made that much of a dent in our industry. We still persevere. BTW, Canva recently announced their own incorporated AI Art generator. There will always be new design industry killers. It seems like something new comes out every few years, making designers panic. Do these things affect some designers? I'm sure they do. Just like everything else, there will be some people affected. But none of these things have made an impact on our industry. Or at least not in the way the nay-sayers believed they would. You can almost argue that these things have made our industry better. Can you imagine what it would be like if computers were never introduced? Or WordPress? And I'm sure many freelancers couldn't afford thousands of dollars for Adobe's software if they hadn't switched to a subscription model. This mentality dates back to Guttenburg's invention of the printing press. I'm sure caligraphers of the time panicked that this new invention would ruin their industry. But graphic design perseveres. The only people it ruins are those unwilling to evolve with the times. Now back to AI-Generated Art. By this point, you probably know my stance on AI-Generated Art. This innovation may seem like an industry killer. But only if you allow it to affect you. I see Artificial Intelligence as another opportunity for our industry to evolve. It's up to us to embrace these tools as just that, tools. I already see designers putting AI-Generators to good use. Katie, a Resourceful Designer community member, recently shared how she needed an abstract pattern for a background of a design she was creating. Instead of searching for a stock image or making one herself, she turned to AI. She told it what she wanted, and it produced something she could use. Katie also used it as inspiration for an annual report project. She asked it to produce a report cover design using blue and yellow triangles. It gave her a few options that she used as inspiration to create something herself. And these are just a couple of examples. As for creating full designs using AI, I think the technology is still a long way off. And no matter how good it gets, it will never be able to replicate the emotions we designers bring to a project or the empathy we feel towards our clients. I like to meet every client I work with. If I can't meet them face to face, I at least want to get on a video call. I do this because I want to get to know them. I want to see their personality and understand how they act and think. Because these things will help influence my design decisions. No artificial intelligence can do that. At least, as far as I know. And that's why AI will never replace a live graphic designer. And don't forget relationships. How often have I stressed the importance of building relationships with your clients over the years? Not only does it help you understand your clients better, which allows you to design better things for them. But relationships build loyalty. It keeps clients coming back to you, regardless of your price. AI-Generated Art has limitations. At this point. I see too many limitations with AI-generated design to affect us as an industry. Since every piece of generated art is uniquely created, it's tough to replicate should you need to. Say you're working on a marketing campaign and need several images. You ask an AI-Generator to create an illustration of a rocket ship flying through space, and it produces something you like. But now you need a different image of the same rocket ship landing on the moon. And maybe another of it returning to Earth. Every time you enter a prompt in an AI Generator, it creates a unique image, so there's no way to ask it to use the same rocket ship in future creations. The rocket ship will look different in each image. Even the style of art might look different. Plus, these prompts, the instructions you type into the generator telling it what to create, are very subjective. These two prompts “An elderly man is sitting on a park bench feeding pigeons.” “An old man is feeding pigeons in a part while sitting on a bench.” To you and me, they both mean the same thing. But to the AI, they could be vastly different. How does artificial intelligence interpret “elderly man” vs. “old man”? The smallest detail can drastically affect the output. Also, from what I can tell, It's tough, if not impossible, to adjust an image. Say you like the AI-generated photo of a woman sitting on a chair with a cat on her lap. But you decide you want it to be a dog instead. None of the systems I tried would let you make that sort of change. The best I could do was change the word “cat” to “dog” and rerun my prompt, producing a new batch of images with different women and chairs. There was no way I was getting the same woman in the second set of images. Again, maybe this is possible, but I couldn't see it. Conclusion All of this to say. Don't panic. There are people out there leaning on both sides of the fence. Some say our industry is doomed, while others say we have nothing to fear. I'm just one voice. But I don't think we have anything to worry about. And I have the history I just shared with you backing me up. Fiverr, Canva, WordPress, Creative Cloud. These “design industry killers” are now part of my design toolbox. Instead of taking work away from me, they allow me to do better work and do it more efficiently. I see AI-Generated Art as no different. I plan on embracing it and using it in any way I can. And don't forget—no matter what new “things” come out. Clients will always appreciate what a good designer can do for them. You can be that designer.

I've been dealing with a bit of internal criticism recently so it was nice to get this off my chest (or out of my head to be more accurate).In Episode #351 of 'Meanderings' Juan and I discuss: feedback from some fellow Brisbanites, why we are so committed to value for value, some changes to our release schedule, YOUI screwing over Juan and his car, compliments on Juan's sweaty armpits, why I've been so self-critical recently, ways I'm trying to fix my thought process and why we are 'what you see is what you get'.As always, we hope you enjoy. Mere Mortals out!Timeline:(0:00) - Boop eeee doooop(0:32) - Feed back from Trevor from The Iron Fist & The Velvet Glove(2:41) - Patreon/Paypal, fuck that!(7:02) - The way we record is somewhat scattered(10:41) - Juan's car insurance woes(17:24) - The things you own end up owning you(19:00) - Reinforce Juan's sweaty effort, not the outcome(23:21) - I'm in a funk(28:19) - Difference between knowing and feeling(31:22) - Do you ever look at someone and wonder "what is going on inside their head"?(32:18) - Fashion reflection of a DGAF attitude(34:34) - Do we get imposter syndrome?(36:55) - I completed my uncomfortable goal(41:58) - So what! What are you going to do about it?(48:55) - Same methods can work differently(51:30) - V4V: We will never take advertising nor sponsor money(54:11) - WYSIWYGConnect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcast/

We are joined by Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect and Head of Velo to discuss the transformation of Wix from a Website builder to an application development platform. Wix Velo enables developers to implement code that runs either on the client-side or on Wix hosted Node server, while constructing the UI using a WYSIWYG page editor. In this way, Wix provides an interesting alternative to app development frameworks such as NextJS and Nuxt. Sponsors "Request Metrics, who does performance monitoring and can help with issues like too much cumulative layout shift" Chuck's Resume Template Developer Book Club starting with Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs Membership Links Velo Twitter: @yoavabrahami Picks   AJ - The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine AJ - Mentour Pilot AJ - The Matt Walsh Show Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

We are joined by Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect and Head of Velo to discuss the transformation of Wix from a Website builder to an application development platform. Wix Velo enables developers to implement code that runs either on the client-side or on Wix hosted Node server, while constructing the UI using a WYSIWYG page editor. In this way, Wix provides an interesting alternative to app development frameworks such as NextJS and Nuxt. Sponsors Chuck's Resume Template Developer Book Club starting with Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs Membership Links Velo Twitter: @yoavabrahami Picks   AJ - The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine AJ - Mentour Pilot AJ - The Matt Walsh Show

We're really good at trying to camouflage what we don't want people to see.  You might think you're good at faking it, but you're not.  God sees right through it, so do the people around you.  Isaiah experienced a personal worship service that changed him forever.  It prompted him to change and to respond.  God asks the same from us today.  Listen in and be encouraged.

Guest and fellow thoughtbotter Stephanie Minn and Joël chat about how the idea of specialized vocabulary came up during a discussion of the Ruby Science book. We have all these names for code smells and refactors. Before knowing these names, we often have a vague sense of the ideas but having a name makes them more real. They also give us ways to talk precisely about what we mean. However, there is a downside since not everyone is familiar with the jargon. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Stephanie's previous talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0dC5RmxcFk) Non Violent Communication (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71730.Nonviolent_Communication) RubyConfMini (http://www.rubyconfmini.com/) Ruby Science book (https://books.thoughtbot.com/books/ruby-science.html) Connascence as a vocabulary to discuss coupling (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/connascence-as-a-vocabulary-to-discuss-coupling) Wired series "5 levels of teaching" (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLibNZv5Zd0dyCoQ6f4pdXUFnpAIlKgm3N) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined with fellow thoughtboter Stephanie Minn. STEPHANIE: Hey, Joël. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. Stephanie, what is new in your world? STEPHANIE: Thanks for asking. I am on a new project I just started a few weeks ago, and I'm feeling the new project vibes, I think, kind of scoping out what's going on with the client with the work that they're doing. Trying to make a good impression. I think lately I've been in that mode of where can I find some work to do even when I'm just getting on boarded and learning the domain, trying to make those README updates in the areas that are a bit outdated, and yeah, just kind of along for the ride. One thing that has been surprising already is that in my second week, the project pivoted into a different direction than what I was expecting. So that has been kind of exciting and also pretty interesting to see sometimes this stuff happens. I was brought on thinking that we were working on rebuilding the front end in React and TypeScript, pulling out pieces of their 15-year-old Rails monolith. So that was kind of one area that they decided to start with. But recently, they actually decided to pivot to just revamping the look of the existing pages in the Rails app using the same templates and forms. So it's kind of shifted from more greenfield-esque work to figuring out what the heck's going on in this legacy codebase and making it a little bit more modern-looking and cleaning out the cobwebs, I suppose as we find them. JOËL: As a consultant, how do you deal with that kind of dramatic shift in expectations? STEPHANIE: I think it's tough because I necessarily wasn't in those conversations, and so I have to come at it with the understanding that they have a deep knowledge of the business and things that are going on behind the scenes that I don't, and I am coming in kind of with a fresh set of eyes. And it definitely raises some questions for me, right? Like, why now? What were the trade-offs that were made in the decisions? And I hope that as a consultant, I can poke and prod a little bit to help them with the transition and also figuring out its impact on the rest of the team in a way maybe someone who is more familiar with the situation and more tied to the politics of the org might not have that perspective. JOËL: I have a lot of questions here. But actually, I'm thinking that onboarding as a topic would probably make a good standalone episode. So maybe we'll have to bring you back for a future episode to talk about how to onboard well and how to deal with surprises. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. What about you, Joël? What's going on in your world? JOËL: I'm doing an integration with a third-party gem, and I am really struggling. And I've gotten to the point where I'm reading through the source of the gem to try to figure out some weird errors, some things that come up that are not documented. I think that's a really valuable skill. Ideally, you're not having to bring it out too often, but when you do, being able to drop into the code can really help unblock you or at least make some amount of progress. STEPHANIE: Are you having to dig into the gem's code because you weren't able to find what you needed from the documentation? JOËL: That's correct. I'm getting some cryptic errors where the gem is crashing, and I'm finding some lines in my logs that point back to the gem. And now I'm trying to reconstruct what is happening. Why is it not behaving the way it should be based on the documentation that I read? STEPHANIE: Oh, that's tough. Getting into gem code is uncharted territory. JOËL: It's nice when you're working with an open-source gem because the source is there, and you can just follow the stack trace and go through the code. Sometimes it's long and tedious, but it generally gives you results. It definitely is intimidating. STEPHANIE: Yeah. When you're facing this kind of problem where you have no idea where the light at the end of the tunnel might be, how long do you spend with it? At what point do you take away with what you've learned and try to figure out a different approach? JOËL: That's a good observation because digging through the source of a gem can definitely be a time sink. I think how much time I want to budget depends on a variety of other factors. How big of a problem is this? If I can't figure it out through reading the source, do I have alternate approaches to debug the problem, such as asking for help, opening an issue, reaching out to somebody else who's used it, complaining about it on The Bike Shed and hoping someone responds with an answer? There are other options that I can do that might leave me blocked but maybe eventually give me results. The advantage with reading the source is that you're at least feeling like you're making progress. STEPHANIE: Nice. Well, I wish you luck on that journey. [laughs] It sounds pretty tough. I'm sure that you'll get to one of those solutions and figure out how to get unblocked. JOËL: I hope so. I'm pursuing a few strategies in tandem. So I've asked for help, but I'm also reading the source code. And between the two of those, I hope I'll get to a good solution. So, Stephanie, last time you were on the show, you talked about your experience creating talk proposals for RubyConf. Have you heard back from them since then? STEPHANIE: I have. I will be speaking at RubyConf Mini this year. And I'm really excited because this will be my first IRL conference talk. So last time, I recorded my talk for RubyConf, and this time I will be up on a stage in front of real people. JOËL: That's really exciting. Congratulations. STEPHANIE: Thanks. JOËL: What is the topic of your talk? STEPHANIE: I will be talking about pair programming and specifically pair programming through the lens of a framework called Nonviolent Communication, which is a framework I learned about through a friend who recommended the canonical book on it. And it's a self-help book, to be totally frank, but I found it so illuminating. It really changed how I communicated in my relationships in my personal life. And the more time I spent with it, the more I realized that it would be a great application in pair programming because it's so collaborative and intimate. I've experienced the highs and lows of pair programming. You can feel so good when you are super connected with your pair. You make a lot of progress. You meet whatever professional goals that you might be meeting, and you have someone along for the ride the whole time. It can be just so rewarding. But it can also be really challenging when you are having more of those interpersonal conflicts, and navigating that can be tough. And so I'm really excited to share this style of communication that might help others who want to take their pair programming to the next level and get the most out of that experience no matter who they're pairing with. JOËL: I'm excited to hear this talk because pair programming has always been an important part of what we do at thoughtbot. And I think now that we're remote, we do a lot of remote pair programming. And the interpersonal interactions are a little bit different there than when you're physically in a room with each other, or you have to maybe pay a little bit more attention to them. I'm really excited to hear that. I think that's going to be really useful, not just for me but for a lot of the audience who are there. STEPHANIE: Thanks. Joël, you have a talk accepted at RubyConf Mini too. JOËL: Yes, I also had a talk accepted titled Teaching Ruby to Count. And it's going to be all about series, enumerators, enumerables, and ranges in Ruby and the cool things that you can do with them. So I'm really excited to share about that. I've done some deep dives on these topics, and I'm excited to share that with the broader Ruby community. STEPHANIE: Nice. I'm really excited to hear more about it. JOËL: Did you submit more than one proposal this year? STEPHANIE: This year, I didn't. But I would love to get to a point where I have a lot of content on the backburner and can pull it out when CFP season rolls around to just have some more options. Yeah, I have all these ideas in my head. I think we talked about how we come up with content in our last episode. But yeah, having a content bank sounds really nice for the future, so maybe when that season rolls around, it is a lot easier to get the ball rolling on submitting. What about you? Did you submit more than one? JOËL: I submitted two, but this is the one I was most excited about. I think the other idea was maybe a little bit more polished, but this one was a newer one I came up with towards the end of the CFP period. And I was like, ooh, I'm excited about this. I've just done a deep dive on enumerators, and I think there are some cool things to share with the community. And so that's what I'm excited to share about, and maybe that came through the proposal because that is what the committee picked. So I'm super happy to be talking about that. STEPHANIE: Nice. Yeah, I was just thinking the same, that your excitement about it was probably palpable to the committee. JOËL: For any of our viewers who are interested in coming to watch the talks by Stephanie and myself and plenty of other gifted speakers, this will be at RubyConf Mini in Providence, Rhode Island, from November 15th to 17th. And if you can't make it in person, the videos will be published online early in 2023. And we'll definitely share the links to that when they come out. So as we mentioned in your last episode, thoughtbot has a book club where we've been discussing the book Ruby Science, which goes through a lot of code smells and talks about some various refactoring patterns that can be used to fix them. Most recently, we looked at a code smell that has a very evocative name; it's called shotgun surgery. STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's a very visceral name for sure. I think that is what prompted this next topic that we're about to discuss because someone in the book club, another thoughtboter, mentioned that they were learning this term for the first time. But it made a lot of sense to them because they had experienced shotgun surgery and didn't have the term for it previously. Joël, do you mind giving the listeners a recap of what shotgun surgery is? JOËL: So shotgun surgery is when in order to make a change to a codebase, you have to make a bunch of little changes in a lot of different files, a lot of different locations. And that means that all of these little pieces are weirdly coupled to each other in a way that to make one change, you have to make a bunch of little changes in a lot of places. And that results in a very high churn diff, and that's a common symptom of this problem. STEPHANIE: Nice. Thanks for explaining. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! Airbrake's debugging tool catches all of your project errors, intelligently groups them, and points you to the issue in the code so you can quickly fix the bug before customers are impacted. In addition to stellar error monitoring, Airbrake's lightweight APM helps developers to track the performance and availability of their application through metrics like HTTP requests, response times, error occurrences, and user satisfaction. Finally, Airbrake Deploy Tracking helps developers track trends, fix bad deploys, and improve code quality. Since 2008, Airbrake has been a staple in the Ruby community and has grown to cover all major programming languages. Airbrake seamlessly integrates with your favorite apps to include modern features like single sign-on and SDK-based installation. From testing to production, Airbrake notifiers have your back. Your time is valuable, so why waste it combing through logs, waiting for user reports, or retrofitting other tools to monitor your application? You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: I think I came away from that conversation thinking about the idea of learning new terms, especially technical ones, and the power that learning those terms can give you as a developer, especially when you're communicating with other people on your team. JOËL: So you mentioned the value in communication there. Some terms have a very precise meaning, and so that allows you to communicate a very specific idea. How do you balance having some jargon and some terminology that allows you to speak very precisely versus having to learn all the terms? Because the more narrow the term is, the more terms you need to talk about all the different things. STEPHANIE: That's a great question. I don't know if I have a great answer because I think I'm still on my journey. I have always noticed when developers I work with have that really precise, articulate technical vocabulary, probably because I don't. I am constantly referring to functions or classes as things, like, that thingy over there talks to this thing over here, and then does something. [laughs] And I think it's because I maybe didn't always have that exposure to very precise technical vocabulary. And so I had an understanding of how things worked in my head, but I couldn't necessarily map that to words. And I'm also from California, so, I don't know, maybe some of that is showing through a little bit. [laughs] But I've been trying to incorporate more technical terms when I speak and also in written form, too, such as in code review, because I want to be able to communicate more clearly my intentions and leave less room for ambiguity. Sometimes I've noticed when you do speak more casually about code, turns out other people can interpret it in different ways. And if you are using, like you said, that narrower technical term for it, that leaves less room for misunderstanding. But in the same vein, I think a lot of people are like me, where they might not know the technical terms for things. And when you start using a lot of jargon like that, it can be a bit exclusive to folks earlier in their career, especially since software as an industry we have folks from all different backgrounds. We don't necessarily have the expectation of assured formal training. We want to be inclusive of people who came to this career from different places and make sure that we are speaking the same language. And so it's been top of mind for me thinking about how we can balance those two things. I don't know, what do you think? JOËL: I want to speak to some of the value of precision first because I think there are a few different points. We have the value of precision, then we have the difficulty of learning vocabulary, and how are we inclusive of everyone. But on the topic of precision, I don't know if you saw not too long ago, another fellow thoughtboter, Matheus Sales, published an article on the thoughtbot blog about the concept of connascence. And he introduces this as a new set of vocabulary, not vocabulary that he's created but a vocabulary that is out there that not that many developers are aware of for different ways to talk about coupling. So it's easy in a pull request to just say, "Oh, well, that thing looks coupled. How about this other way?" And then I respond, "Well, that's also coupled in a different way." And then we just go back and forth like, "Well, mine is more coupled than yours is," or whatever. And connascence provides a more precise, narrow vocabulary to talk about the different ways that things are coupled and which ones are more coupled than others. And so it allows us to break out of maybe those unproductive discussions because now we can talk about things in a more granular way. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I loved that blog post. It was really exciting for me to pick up a new term to describe something that I had experienced, or seen in codebases, or felt the pain of, and be able to describe it more accurately. I'm curious, Joël, if you were to use that term next time, how would you make sure that folks also have the same level of familiarity with it? JOËL: I think on a pull request, I would link to Matheus' article depending on...I might give a little bit of context in a comment. So I might say something like, "This area here is coupled. Here's a suggested refactor. It's also coupled but in a different way. It's because we've moved up this hierarchy of connascence from, you know, connascence of names to some other form" (I don't have them all memorized.) and then link to the article. And hopefully, that becomes the start of a productive discussion. But yeah, having the resources you can link to people is great. And that's one of the nice things about text communication on a pull request is that you can just link to external resources that people can find helpful. STEPHANIE: To continue talking about the value of precision and specialized vocabulary, Joël, I think you are a very articulate communicator. And I'm curious from your perspective if you have always been this way, if you've always wanted to collect technical terms to describe exactly what you want to convey, or if this was a bit of a journey for you to get to this level of clear communication in your technical speaking and writing. JOËL: It's definitely been a journey. I think there are sort of two components to this; one is being able to communicate clearly to others; make sure that they understand what you're talking about. So for that, it's really important to be able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. So when I'm building a conference talk or writing up a blog post, I will try to read it or go through my slide deck and try to pretend that I am the audience. And then I ask myself the questions: where do I get confused? Where am I going to have questions? Maybe even where am I going to roll my eyes a little bit and be like, eh, I didn't agree with that leap of logic there; where are you going? And then shift back in author mode and say, how can I address these? How can I make my content speak to you in an area where maybe you disagreed, or you were confused? So I kind of jump between moving from the audience seat to back to the author and try to make that material as much as possible resonate with those people. STEPHANIE: Do you do that in more real-time communication, such as in meetings or in pairing? JOËL: I think that's a little bit harder to do. And then it's maybe a little bit more of asking directly, either pausing to let people interject, or you can ask the question directly and say, "Are you familiar with this term?" That can also sometimes be tricky to manage because you don't want to make it sound like you think they don't know anything. But you can also make it sound really natural in a conversation where you're like, "Oh, we're going to do this thing with a strategy pattern. Have you seen a strategy pattern before? Are you familiar with this? Great, let's keep moving." And if not, maybe it's like, "Hey, let's take a few minutes to talk about what the strategy pattern means." STEPHANIE: I think you are really great at asking the audience about their level of familiarity with the content, especially in book club. I have definitely experienced just as a developer pairing, or in meetings, or whatnot times when people don't pause and ask. And usually, I have to muster up the courage to interrupt and ask, "Hey, what is X, Y, and Z?" And that is tough sometimes. I am certainly comfortable with it in a space where there is trust developed in terms of I don't feel worried that people might question my level of familiarity or experience. And I can very enthusiastically say, "Hey, I don't know what this means. Could you please explain it?" But sometimes it can be a little tough when you might not have that relationship with someone, or you haven't talked about it, talked about assumptions about your knowledge or experience level upfront. And so I have found that to be a really good way to build that trust to make sure that we aren't excluding folks is to just talk about some of that stuff, even before we start pairing or before a meeting. And that can really help with some of those miscommunications that might come down later in the process. JOËL: It's interesting that you bring up miscommunication because I think sometimes, even though certain jargon can be very precise, sometimes people will not use it to mean exactly what its dictionary definition is. And so sometimes two people are using the same term, and you're not meaning quite the same thing. And so sometimes I'll be pairing with someone, and I'll have to sort of pause and say, "Hey, wait a minute, you're using the term adapter in a certain way that seems to be a little bit different than the way I'm using it. Can you maybe tell me what your personal definition is? And I'll tell you mine, and we can reconcile those two together." Sometimes that can also feel like a situation where maybe I'm hazy on the topic. Like, I have a vague sense of it, and maybe it does or does not align with the way the other person is using it. And so that's an opportunity for me to ask them to define the term for me without completely having to say, "I have no idea what this term is. Please, oh, great sage, explain the meaning." STEPHANIE: Are there times that you feel more or less comfortable doing that kind of reset? JOËL: I think sometimes the fear is in breaking flow. And so you're doing a thing, and then somebody is trying to explain something, and you don't want to break out of that. Or you're trying to explain something, and you have to decide, is it worth making sure to explain a term, or do you keep moving? So I think that is a big concern. And there is just the interpersonal concern of if there is less trust, do I want to put myself out there? Does somebody else maybe not feel comfortable you asked them to explain a term? Maybe they're using it wrong. It's not always good in a pairing situation to just come up and say, "Hey, that's not technically the adapter pattern; you're wrong. Let me pull out The Gang of Four book. You see on page 54..." that's not productive. STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure. JOËL: So a lot of it, I think...and maybe this ties into your topic of communication while pairing. But ideally, you're working constructively with a person. And so debating definitions is not generally productive but asking someone, "What do you mean when you say this?" I find is a very helpful way to lead into that type of conversation. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great strategy because you're coming from a place of curiosity rather than a place of this is my definition, and it's the right definition, and so, therefore, you are wrong. [laughs] JOËL: It's interesting the place that jargon occupies in our imagination of expertise. If you've ever seen any movie where they're trying to show that somebody is technically competent, they usually demonstrate that a person is competent by having them just spout out a long chain of jargon, and that makes them sound smart. But I think to a certain extent; maybe we believe it in the industry as well. If somebody can use a lot of terms and talk about a system using this very specific jargon, we tend to think that they're smart or at least look up to them a little bit. STEPHANIE: Yeah, which I think isn't always the best assumption because I've certainly worked with folks who did throw out a lot of jargon but weren't necessarily, like you were saying, using it the way that I understood it, and that made communicating with them challenging. I also think what true expertise really is is having the knowledge that when you use a jargony term that not everyone might be familiar with it, having the awareness to pause and ask someone how they're doing with the vocabulary and be able to tailor how you explain that term to that other person. I think that demonstrates a really deep level of understanding that doesn't get enough credit. JOËL: I 100% agree. Jargon, vocabulary, it's a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. So the goal is to communicate clearly to others and maybe to help yourself in your own learning. And if you're not accomplishing those goals, then what's the point? I guess maybe there is another personal goal which is to sound smart, but that's not really a good goal, [laughs] especially not when the way you do that is by confusing everybody else in the room because they don't understand you, to make you try to feel smarter than them. Like, that's bad communication. STEPHANIE: Yeah, for sure. I've definitely experienced listening to someone explain something and have to really think very hard about every single word that they're saying because they were using terms that are just less common. And so, in my brain, I had to map them to things that made sense to me, and things that I was familiar with that were the same concepts. Like, I was experienced enough to have that shared understanding, but just the words that they used required another layer of brain work. Maybe we could have found a happy medium between them communicating the way that they expressed themselves the best with my ability to understand easily and quickly so that we could get on the same page. JOËL: So you mentioned that there are sometimes situations where you're aware of a particular concept, but maybe you're just not aware that the term that somebody else is using maps to this concept you already understand. And I know that for me, oftentimes, being able to give a name to something that I understand is an incredibly powerful thing. Even though I already know the idea of passing objects to another object in this particular configuration, or of wrapping things in some way or whatever the thing that I'm trying to do, all of a sudden, instead of it being a more nebulous concept in my head or a list of 10 steps or something like that, now I have one thing I can just point to and say it is this. So that's been really helpful for me in my learning to be able to take a label and put it on something that I already know. And somehow, it cements the idea in my head and also then allows me to build on it to the next things that I want to learn. STEPHANIE: Yeah, absolutely. It's really exciting when you're able to have that light-bulb moment when you have that precise term, or you learn that precise term for something that you have been wrestling with or experiencing for a while now. I was just reminded of reading documentation. I have a very vivid memory of the first time I read; I don't know, even the Rails official docs, all of these terms that I didn't understand at the time. But then once I started digging into it, exploring, and just doing the work, when I revisited those docs, I could understand them a lot more comprehensively because I had experience with the things (There I am using things again.) [laughs] and seeing the terms for them and that helping solidify my understanding. JOËL: I'm curious, in your personal learning, do you find it easier to encounter a term first and then learn what it means, or do the reverse, learn the concept first and then cap it off by being able to give it a name? STEPHANIE: That's a good question. I think the latter because I've certainly spent a lot of time Googling terms and then reading whatever first search results came up and being like, okay, I think I got it, and then Googling the same term like two weeks later because I didn't really get it the first time. But whenever I come across a term for a concept I already am familiar with, it is like, oh yes, uh-huh! That really ends up sticking with me. Matheus Sales' blog post that you mentioned earlier is a really great example of that term really standing out to me because I didn't know it at the time, but I suppose was seeking out something to describe the concept of connascence. So that was really cool and really memorable. What about you? Do you have a preferred way of learning new technical terms? JOËL: I think there can be value to both approaches. But I'm with you; I think it generally is easier to add a name to a concept you already understand. And I experienced this pretty dramatically when I tried to get into functional programming. So several years ago, I tried to learn the language Haskell which is notorious for being difficult to learn and very abstract and technical. And the way that the Haskell community typically tries to teach things is learn the fundamentals first, very top-down, learn the theory, and then, later on, you can do things in practice. So it's like before you can write an actual program, let us teach you about applicatives, and monads, and all these things that are really difficult to learn. And they're kind of scary technical terms. So I choked out partway through, gave up on Haskell. A year later, got back into it, tried it again, choked out again. And then, eventually, I pivoted. I started getting into a similar language called Elm, which is similar syntax but compiles to JavaScript for the front end. And that community has the opposite philosophy when it comes to teaching. They want to get you productive as soon as possible. And you can learn some of the theory as you go along. And so with that, I felt like I was learning something new all the time and being productive as well, like, constantly adding new features to things in an application, and that's really exciting. And what's really beautiful there is that you eventually learn a lot of the same concepts that you would learn in something like Haskell because the two languages share a lot of similar concepts. But instead of saying first, you need to learn about monads as a general concept, and then you can build a program; Elm says, build a bunch of programs first. We'll show you the basic syntax. And after you've built a bunch of them, you'll start realizing, wait a minute, these things all kind of look alike. There are patterns I'm starting to recognize. And then you can just point to that and say, hey, that pattern that you started recognizing, and you see a bunch of times that's monad. You've known it all along, and now you can put a label on it. And you've gotten there. And so that's the way that I learned those concepts. And that was much easier for me than the approach of trying to learn the abstract concept first. STEPHANIE: Monad is literally the word I just Googled earlier this week and still have a very, very hazy understanding of. So maybe I'll have to go learn Elm now. [chuckles] JOËL: I recommend a lot of people to use that as their entry point into the statically typed functional programming world, just because of how much more shallow the learning curve is compared to alternatives. And I think a lot of it has to do with that approach of saying, let's get you productive quickly. Let's get you doing things. And eventually, patterns will emerge, and you can put names on them later. But we'll not make you learn all of the theory upfront, all the jargon. STEPHANIE: Now that you do understand all the technical jargon around functional programming, how do you approach communicating about it when you do talk about Elm or those kinds of concepts? JOËL: A lot of it depends on your audience. If you have an audience that already knows these concepts, then being able to use those names is really valuable because it's a shortcut. You can just say, oh yeah, this thing is a monad, and so, therefore, we can do these actions with it. And everybody in the audience just already knows monads have these properties. That's wonderful. Now I can follow to step two instead of having to have a slow build-up. So if I'm writing an article or giving a talk, or even just having a conversation with someone, if I knew they didn't know the term, I would have to really build up to it, and maybe I wouldn't introduce the term at all. I would just talk about some of the properties that are interesting for the purpose of this particular demo. But I would probably have to work up to it and say, "See, we have this simpler thing, and then this more complex thing. But here are the problems that we have with it. Here's a change we can make to our code that will make it work." And you walk through the process without necessarily getting into all of the theory. But with somebody else who did know, I could just say, "Oh, what we need here is monad." And they look at me, and they're like, "Oh, of course," and then we do it. STEPHANIE: What you just described reminds me a lot of the WIRED Video Series, five levels of teaching where they have an expert come in and teach the same concept to different-aged people starting from young kids to an expert in their field as well. And I really liked how you answered that question just with the awareness that you tailor how you explain something to your audience because we could all benefit from just having that intentionality when we communicate in order to get the most value out of our interactions and knowledge sharing, and collaborative working. JOËL: I think a theme that underlies a lot of what you and I have talked about today is just that communication, good communication is the fundamental value that we're going for here. And jargon and vocabulary can be something that empowers that but used poorly; it can also defeat that purpose. And most importantly, good communication starts with the audience, not with you. So when you work back from the audience, you can use the appropriate vocabulary and words that serve everybody and your ultimate goal of communicating. STEPHANIE: I love that. JOËL: So, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on The Bike Shed today. And as we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, what is a really fun piece of vocabulary that you've learned that you might want to share with the audience? STEPHANIE: So lately, I learned the term WYSIWYG, which stands for What You See Is What You Get to describe text editing software that lets you see and edit the content as it would actually be displayed. So that was a fun, little term that someone brought up when we were paring and looking at some text editing code. And I was really excited because it sounds fun, and also, now I had just an opportunity to say it on a podcast. [laughs] JOËL: It's amazing that an acronym that is that long has enough vowels in the right places that you can just pronounce it. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah. JOËL: WYSIWYG. That's a fun word to say. STEPHANIE: 100%. I also try to pronounce all acronyms, regardless of how pronounceable they actually are. [laughs] Thanks for asking. JOËL: With that, shall we wrap up? STEPHANIE: Let's wrap up. JOËL: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed, or reach me at @joelquen on Twitter, or at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

On the podcast today we have Raitis Sevelis from Visual Composer, and he's here today to talk about the how you should use your WordPress page builder with pride and explain to your clients the many benefits that it brings to your workflow. There was a time when page builders first came around that they were somewhat spurned in the community. Not by all, and not for long. They were doing things in a new way, and sometimes new hurts. Gone were many of the technical barriers to creating sites. No more need to be wrangling template files and inserting shortcodes here there and everywhere. Page builders allowed a whole new audience to come to WordPress and build site for themselves as well as for their clients. Raitis thinks that sometimes we hide our page builder skills a little; assume that clients will think that less of us for using them. He has the opinion that we ought to be talking about how we use them more with our clients, and explaining how their use us making websites faster, cheaper and more easy for non-technical users to maintain and amend.