Red is good. All right, awesome. Hi, everyone. We will get started. So thank you for joining us today. So today, we will be looking at a business case study, therefore not a deep dive technical exploration into WebPAC, which is creating and maintaining 30-plus faculty of medicine website with a Drupal distribution. This is also not the Google WebPAC package manager thing. So just to clarify, in case you're in here, for those topics. So today, we will talk about four things, the background, the requirements, and the background, sort of the story of how we ended up with this distribution. Talk a little bit about the implementation and an overview of that. Then we'll talk about how we supported the growth of this distribution in the organization. So it's mostly a people process. And then talk a little bit about the technology infrastructure that we use to support it. And so while your mileage may vary for the talk today, what we hope to accomplish in presenting this talk is that maybe you can gain some insights from the challenges that we have faced and bring them back to your own projects. OK, so good morning. I'm Roberta Brown. So I'm the digital communication specialist at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. I'm not used to adding that at University of Toronto part. I work as part of the communications office. And we're obviously dedicated to managing internal and external communications. And we produce a number of publications over the course of the year. Our award-winning magazine, I have the covers up right here. But we also do, obviously, dean's reports and those types of things. In my capacity as a digital comms person, I manage 30-plus Drupal websites and about, I don't know, 15 or so ever-growing WordPress sites. So I'm a little bit in two camps. Perfect. My name's Aiden Foster. I'm a front-end architect and UX designer. My company is Foster Interactive. And so we have been in business 12 years and we do a lot of work with U of T. So we've made the alumni website, Woodsworth College website, and most recently launched the University College website for them. And yeah, so if you're interested in getting in touch, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. So before we get into anything else, we really need to answer the question of what the heck is webpack? So I think depending on who you are, there's different descriptions of what this is. From a technical perspective, it's a custom Drupal distribution and it allows us to run 30-plus medicine sites that have a common branding and structure. We have a set group of features that people can choose to use on their sites. And our guiding rule for this product is really configuration, not customization. So we try to veer as far away from having any sort of really custom stuff done because it gets in the way of our maintenance. Yes, and this is sort of a walkthrough of some of the different installations of webpack. It's next. Okay, so how did we get to webpack? When I started in the faculty, the first thing that they wanted done was a revamp of our home faculty site. It was looking quite old and it needed a lot of love. And as we were going through that process, we realized that other departments and units needed to update their websites as well. And so we kind of had two problems. One was look and feel, which you can see over here, was varied and not identifiably always a U of T website, not brand compliant, but also units really didn't have the capacity in their own departments to be able to do a website rebuild. So they didn't have the knowledge and they didn't have the time. I worked with a lot of people that are admins that do comms off the side of their desk. So they needed help. And when we had done the faculty site, we did a lot of heavy lifting in terms of making sure that the website was accessible and responsive and met brand standards. So the idea was that the faculty takes the brunt of the workload and the cost and then they benefit by being able to use this product. So for the first year, it was all about just getting people onto the template. And as we got more and more sites on there, we realized that we sort of had some capacity problems propping up, hosting and support. So how do we deal with all these sites being hosted and supported? We were hosting on the U of T web servers and we were finding that that wasn't working out so well. So we made the move to Pantheon in 2015. And Pantheon we chose because they had the very specific set of developer tools but also security features that we really liked and it would really help us streamline the process of getting our sites sort of out the door. The second was maintenance. So we had our in-house IT team that was really meant to be handling maintenance. And then when we had bigger projects, we'd go out to foster to have that work done. And we're finding the capacity for the IT department was becoming a real problem. They didn't have the time to dedicate to the product and the product was very stable. So that's when we started a maintenance agreement with Aden's group and the IT department just stepped away from it. So now it's actually just managed between the communications office and an external vendor. So Aden's gonna talk about it. Yeah, so a part of the implementation question that we started with was, you know, we started with one website and then we needed another and then we needed another. And the sort of, it was planned but the demand that ended up happening seemed to be far greater than what we had originally expected at the beginning. So the first sort of solution that you can, you know, I guess perhaps the most obvious solution is scaling a website like this. Simply you copy the code base, replicate the database and change what you need for the second website and off you go. And the problem with this is as you increase the number of sites you have based from a common origin, basically you end up multiplying the cost of maintenance for those websites because they're all kind of unique, slightly different and if you have to update the modules on all of them separately. So that option was not a great solution in this case and probably in any case, basically. So another option that's available in Drupal which is really cool is Drupal Multisite. And what Multisite is is you have one common code base that runs a bunch of different databases and user files for those multiple separate websites. And while it is a powerful and flexible tool, it has problems of its own. Mainly it's a bit of a house of cards circumstance. If by some problem, something's not caught in a QA review and you push that code up to your main website, you end up with like 15 websites that all go down or have the same problem at the same time. Not to say that there aren't DevOps infrastructure solutions that can avoid these problems, but you really need a super strong internal IT and process put in place for that to happen. And we also find they're difficult to develop on in the sense that we had a number of sites that needed their own unique customizations and those become harder to manage in a multisite code base. So we ended up going with the Drupal distro and at a very simple level, when facing scaling, Drupal to me feels like it is a large box of Lego that comes with contrib and core modules and you can custom build exactly what you want for a website. And as I mentioned, that's not great from a scaling point of view.  So Webpack really has sort of two groups of feature sets, the core features like the landing page builders, editor tools and the theme. Every instance of Webpack has all of these pieces enabled by default. And then there's sets of optional features, news, events, faculty directory policies and FAQs. The individual instances of each Webpack website can turn on and off these particular packages of features so or have none of them at all. So the advantage of bundling these features is it gives flexibility and options to the site owners and it also has an advantage from a documentation point of view where if someone has a set of features, it will have the same kind of documentation requirements regardless of the website. So what these actually look like, we have the medicine website on the left which is kind of the Royale website that was the ancestor of all of them so basically it implements almost all the features and the comparative medicine website on the right with just a few features enabled. So you can see there's an example of the news feature and the events feature that appear on the medicine website and they simply don't appear on the comparative medicine website. But the landing page builder, which is a core feature is on both and it allows you to configure and implement some, you know, a nice robust layout in both circumstances but from a content perspective, the team, the comparative medicine team didn't wanna deal with the effort of producing news and events on their website or didn't want to. So the story of this evolution, it's like a long timeframe we've got here. We started off in 2014 and created the Faculty of Medicine website. Then internally, there's a group, the IT group at U of T cloned it twice and did that obvious solution, right? Like just copy it and spin off the two websites. That quickly, you know, the times three maintenance requirement that came out of that was a lesson that we're like, hmm, maybe we shouldn't continue on this path because we need even more websites. So in 2015, we created the Drupal distribution and got all three websites back onto that common Drupal distribution. We scaled up to about 10 websites in that year. And then in 2016, we actually had a number of users using these websites and they generated a whole bunch of features and ideas and things that they wanted to accomplish with the website that they weren't able to accomplish with the features that we launched with. So we ended up producing a number of different add-on components. So the faculty directory got a big enhancement and those kinds of things. And some of those websites, what's nice about it is some of those websites that are already live could add those on to their pre-running existing website and other ones just launched with different sets of things. Scaled to about 20 websites in 2016. And then in 2017, that was the time where even the maintenance of these websites on a common distribution started becoming a challenge to the IT team. And instead of, you know, instead of working on Drupal maintenance and support, they wanted to work on new product development, which is really their core mandate to make cool new things for the faculty. And so at that time, we took over maintenance and established it. Did an effort to set up some maintenance protocols, procedures and tools to make that easier for us as a team to manage. Continuing to scale the website. 2018, we did some minor feature updates. You're scaling up to about 30 websites. In 2019, we actually started doing, we came back and did an audit of the accessibility of the websites that we had on the code base because we had been, we had made sure that each website was passing accessibility when we launched it, but we actually kind of noted some problems that started to creep up because we weren't doing accessibility maintenance. And also keep in mind that accessibility tools themselves became smarter. There's greater clarity about how to interpret the rules that have just evolved over time. And so while they were accessible when we launched them, we were discovering they weren't accessible anymore and we needed to go back. And that's both from a code and a content point of view. These content writers got their training on how to do accessible writing sometimes five years before, right? And so there might be new team members, all of that. So just drift over time. So we did some audits, cleaned up some pieces of the code and also work with the site owners themselves to say, hey, here are some problems, let's start. Let's just, you know, not all at once, but just over a period of time to go through and improve that. Now in 2020, we have the conversation of, this is a Drupal 7 based distribution. We have to have the conversation of what are we gonna do moving into the future. So really from a maintenance point of view, it's clear what the advantage of a distro is instead of a cost multiplier for a website, you have kind of like a high upfront setting up a distribution, testing it and setting up your infrastructure. And then you get a small incremental cost increase per additional website. So, and you know, and just as another note that came through with this sort of evolution, as new features were evolved, initially we got a number of requests for people like I want this cool new feature for my website, just mine. And we started to try and steer everyone away from that to saying, how can we make that cool new feature something that's not just for your website, but just a feature that we can add into the bundle of features and make it available to everyone because it's much, much better to deal with. It has more value to the entire product suite than it does to the individual. And from a maintenance point of view, it is better not to have the unique customizations that are out there. All right, so supporting growth from a user management perspective. So I'm gonna talk about creation, communication and collaboration. So basically onboarding new users, user management and project management elements. So in terms of onboarding, we have a very set process for the onboarding. So whenever somebody asks for a site, if we take them through this process, we give them both communication support as well as technical support. So it's not merely, here's your package of website, there you go, go off. We work with them on their content to make sure that they're outputting a site that represents the brand in an ice way. Allowing us to really identify this process means that we can actually get people moving through this much faster and making sure everybody's on the same page. So all of the work that Aiden went through just now allows me to actually set up a site in a very short amount of time. That is not playing. Thank you. So this is actually me spinning up a site on Pantheon. It's actually, it means that I get to do this work. So I'm not a developer in any way, shape or form. But I can go in, set up the site, go in, turn on the features, do the initial layout work and get it ready to be passed off to the client. So I'm not dependent on Aiden for setting up a site. And likewise, the client, our internal client, doesn't have to wait a long time for their site because I'm not taking that at the door. Is it worth actually watching all the way through? I'm not sure. I feel like you guys probably know what it looks like to set up Drupal. This is actually real time. I did not speed this up any. This is just how fast I work. Yeah, this gives you an idea of what the... Yeah, so the, and the configuration that's happening here is a number of features being enabled and depending on what that onboarding process would be, it'd be like, okay, let's go in and activate the default ones first and then activate the optional ones that would be requested for that particular site. Yeah, so I make sure that our custom features aren't in override before I start turning things on. But we've got webpacked core and then we've got webpack optional. So those are things like FAQs or faculty directories that people might or might not use on their site. Okay, communication and user management. So this really takes two, two... Sorry, I couldn't think of the word. Training, so we do monthly trainings with people to, in terms of basic training to get people onboarding, onboarded and ready to work on a website. If they need to do something more elaborate, then that's sort of core level. We usually do customized training so they come into my office, I sit down with them and go through it. The other side is help desk. So of course they call me whenever something is broken. I get two calls. This thing is broken and how do I do this? Most of the time I can triage those things. There is a very small amount of those where I'm like, oh yeah, I don't know what that... And then I call that guy and he fixes it. And I'm like, oh, thank God, it's not my problem. Collaboration, so when it comes to maintenance updates, it's sort of a three-way collaboration between Aiden, myself and the end users. So I let the end users know when the maintenance testing is being done and so they, and I ask them to go in and actually do the testing on the sites. So they are the content owners. They know their content the best. So we actually ask them to participate in the maintenance updates. And because there's a big enough volume, that actually helps us really get to the bottom of problems most of the time, we find them pretty fast. In the first five test sites, it'll tell us. Aiden was nice enough to schedule a maintenance update this week. So I have to keep watch on my phone to find out if my users have a problem. It's like we scheduled the maintenance windows before the Drupal North event, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing that we do is hot fixes. So obviously, I think you guys probably know about that. So if a security update rolls out, it is critical to our systems that's patched within 48 hours. Faster. 24, yeah. And then much less frequently, we do new feature work. And especially because we're heading towards a migration to Drupal 8, we really would push back on any kind of a feature update at this point. Perfect, so now I'm gonna speak a little bit about the hosting infrastructure that helps make this all possible. And you need a couple things to make this like to manage more than one website. To keep yourself not up late at night. So the first thing is version control for code deployments. So in the ancient days, we would push websites up via FTP and Drupal has 70,000 files or something like that. So if there was a connection error on an upload, a random file amongst your 70,000 might be a problem. And so version control based deployments, basically what they do is they set an exact known snapshot of your website to somewhere. And either if there's a problem with your connection, none of the files go. It's sort of an all or nothing commit, which is very useful. The next piece of the puzzle that you have to have is a replicatable live and test environment. So some way so that you can take, you are 100% certain that the environments are identical from a hosting infrastructure point of view and that you can identically copy the site's files and content between those environments. The third component that we need is automated testing tools because we've got enough websites in place here that a human being really can't be trusted to manage all of those tasks to do quality assurance on them. And then the final thing is we need to include command line tools or maybe not command line. Some set of automated tools where just imagine each site launch to deploy a security update is like a 10 step process. Well, if you have a checklist of a person doing those 10 steps, and then you have to do it to 30 websites, the odds of someone making a small error on 300 tasks are pretty high. And so scripting and automation is a necessary part of the puzzle. And so we use Pantheon provides three out of the four of these things on the environment. So that's why initially we had launched on the U of T servers and you kind of have to do all this yourself and implement it all yourself. So for us, it just made sense to use that infrastructure. And what Pantheon sort of gives you by default is sort of three identical environments per website, dev test and live. And so that's very, that's part of that puzzle where we can have the ability to easily replicate our live files to either of these other environments and work with them. And so, and then from the infrastructure point of view, we would have say one account with Pantheon for the medicine website and another account for the comparative medicine, each of which would have three environments per account. And then we just imagine 28 more of them. So all of these accounts have these multiple different environments. And what we also have enabled with that infrastructure is what's called an upstream distribution. So that is the webpack distro, which you basically configure in the Pantheon environment. And if we push a change to the webpack distro and say we push an updated suite of security updates to the modules, the trip modules or Drupal core on the webpack upstream distro, what it does is each individual website becomes aware. Hey, there's an upstream change. And then you can just from inside of that infrastructure say, okay, let's try that out, that upstream change on just my test website. And so you can do that individually to each site. So our deployment plans look a little bit like this. We basically have the live website and we duplicate it out to an identical copy on the test server. And then we apply our upstream websites to that copy on the test server, trigger a number of automated tests to make sure that nothing has gone wrong with those updates. And what those automated tests are actually doing is it basically takes screenshots of a bunch of core pages on the live server. And then it takes a bunch of screenshots on the identical pages on the test server and runs an algorithm against them to see if there is any changes. And we would expect with a security update that the screenshots before and after should be exactly the same. Nothing should look different on the website once we just upgrade a Drupal security update. And so we run those test suites and the vast majority of the time it's fine and nothing exciting occurs. And then, so now we've got the updated test site. We're confident that nothing has happened to it. We get in touch with the actual site owner. So I reach out to Roberto and say, we're ready to go for them. We kind of do these things in batches. So batch one of the websites is ready to go. And she will reach out to the site owners and we will say, you have two days to take a look at your website or four days or whatever it is. And it's important part of that workflow that no answer is approval. So we have implicit approval and you can stop the deployment if you find a problem. But if we don't hear from you, that is you saying yes, it's fine to deploy. Then we get to the last step where we apply the updates from the Webpack upstream but we do not apply it, we apply it directly to the live website. And what we're not doing is taking that updated version of the test site and pushing it live because this process could have taken many days. So people are continuing to work on content on their live website. So we would have to say, no, no, no, you're not allowed to publish any new content on your website for this entire window of time. And so that's really not a feasible option given the workflows of all the site owners just for a maintenance release. And so we push those site updates to the live environment and we have a high degree of confidence that those are gonna go smoothly because we just did this very thorough test on an identical copy of it that's a couple days old. So that's why we can trust that deployment on the live environment. So what the automated testing tool actually looks like, it's called Backstop.js. These are sort of the snapshots of the sites in the before and after mode at a number of different breakpoints. It tests at like different sizes because you're CSS, you know, CSS regressions and basically these pink blobs. So this isn't a webpack website, but it gives the idea the pink blobs are diffs where it's saying something has changed. So this test has failed and actually do this test, all I did was run the site a couple days apart. So they published some new news and that's what you're seeing as the change happening before and after. And it's got this cool scrubber so you can like see exactly what happened. I mean, if you accidentally break, if your web font account expires, you know, and then the font suddenly revert from to aerial or something, your website, you might not see that like because you know, if you haven't, if you're not looking at that website day in, day out. So that's an example of a kind of thing where like automated testing is better than people because it can be so much more precise than an individual site or an individual person looking for problems. That being said, we still do manual testing. So they're like, it's not, you can't just ignore that step entirely but you do the automated tester just more thorough for catching typical kinds of bugs that we'll find. So looking forward to Drupal eight and nine and what are some of the lessons that I think we learned working with the distribution over this period of time is we ended up with like six optional features. And I think that's too many. What we ended up having to do was test every possible combination of every optional feature, which is fair amount of testing across your different components. So I think when we look at this on the refresh for the Drupal eight site, we'll try and reduce the number of features, optional features available, and then maybe implement some approach where we can hide the visibility of the features under the in the interface rather than sort of disable them from a code point of view, which should make it easier to test. Another sort of lesson that we're thinking about or a lesson we learned that we didn't see coming really was that the unique site customization. So individuals who are saying my site must have this unique feature. We knew that we'd have to build some time to implement that feature, that just makes sense. But what we didn't realize at the time was that those unique sites actually will increase the cost of the maintenance of everything overall because we might need to set up additional like additional automated tests for them and make sure that we run extra, that whole basically extra set of tests on top of what's already run there. So there's just something to consider with those each unique site, it increases your maintenance as well. So as much as possible in the future, we will say no, we will not, you know, instead of if that unique feature it could actually be turned into maybe a configuration option instead of a unique feature that would be better. And then the final lesson is really tied to accessibility where accessibility that we made sure we audit everything and it looks good when we launched it, but that is really not a one-time task. That is something you have to take care of forever. You have to make sure your content editors are aware of it. You need to pay attention and audit what's on the sites and have an effective communications channel so that we can speak with our audience and communicate what they need to do so they understand how to fix the accessibility problems in their own site. And that's it. Thank you very much, everyone. Does anyone have any questions? Sort of tangential, but I'm curious. How do you handle billing, budgeting for this kind of scenario, right? Like, you've got all these different clients, presumably Roberta, you're sort of the single-point contact for anything in this, folks, but you showed that you have separate hands-on accounts for each downstream client. Are you just, then is it just a pass-through or is there something more complicated in terms of how you, if I want a feature do I have to pay for it as my department or how does that all work? So there's two prices that go with Webpack. So the first is an initial set-up cost and we keep that very low. So it's a little bit over $3,000 to have your Webpack site set up. And that's meant to cover the cost of my time. Then they have the hosting cost. And the hosting cost is pretty much a pass-through from Pantheon. However, also with the hosting, they get the maintenance updates and the security updates and then support from me. So it's kind of, it's there, but it's not really accounted for. Really how we cover the maintenance cost is that it's just funded through the dean's office. And it just makes the most sense for us to do that because the brand improvement is enough to make a really big impact. So we just kind of bite the bullet on that and that's just the cost. So that wasn't a hard sell in terms of that branding improvement instead? Or was it? I mean, it was a lot of discussion, but our chief administrator was a really big fan of the project. So he made the space for it. So we've had good luck with it financially for sure. And sorry, you said new features. If somebody wants a new feature that not everybody else wants, they have to fund that feature themselves, but we don't allow for somebody to build a feature that is exclusive to their site. If they build it and it's implemented in Webpack, then everybody gets to have it. Because we can't have a site with one thing and not, like it has to be equal across the board. So that's our first in-page response to the development. Yeah, and if they can find other departments to split that cost with them, then we're all for it. Yeah, yeah. What are the criteria you have between choosing a Google and WordPress? Has he mentioned there's a bunch of Google? Yeah, our magazine site is actually, and our Dean's report site is hosted on WordPress. And that has a lot to do with not wanting to invest the same amount of budget in those properties. And those properties are much more simplistic. The complexities that we need for managing the faculty websites is just, Drupal makes more sense. For WordPress stuff, I can handle myself in-house. I can deal with the security updates and all that kind of stuff. So it's really managed by me and the cost is good. Wow. We don't use Pantheon for hosting, so the cost is really low. So, can you back? Do you keep the themes in our college style? We don't let them use anything other than the one theme that is available. So, yeah. And there are minor variations that have crept up because of, I think, more of the early customizations before the sensible rules of, if you make something, you have to pay for it for everyone. That was a great rule, but I don't think we started quite there. Yeah, I'm the only one that's figured out how to break it. There are, yeah, we have minor configuration and overrides per website. Secretly is something we can do, but definitely don't make that known as a general. She can say for that. Yes. Oh, the recording. The recording will go, shh. At that time. Because we sit in the communication's office and we guard the brand as well, when they come to me asking for, I just want a green box on the front of my homepage. My answer is, nope. Which makes me not so popular sometimes. Yes? Is there like a set of a guideline or like a guide for whatever someone wants to, if you're like close to a website for medicine, like those are the things that you should do, those are the things that you're not allowed to do, is you want to, if you want to add an event or use extra to your website, it's going to cost you more or something like that, or do you just give them everything and then they can. Yeah, like it. Go add it. They can use every feature that we have for no extra cost, it's a flat rate. It's only if there's a new feature that they want to add that in that case. Yeah. Is there like a limitation on what feature they want to add if they ask for a feature and they're ready to pay for it, you're all good to give them that feature? So, I mean, whatever feature development we do is going to impact over 30 sites. So, at a very basic level, I have to evaluate how that is going to impact the other three sites. If it is a feature that is going to be of use to many, like even a quarter of the sites, that makes a lot of sense. If it's going to be a feature that is going to make life more difficult for everybody else, then it's a no. And it doesn't matter if they want to pay for it or what, like it's just no. I mean, that's, that is the shackles and the benefit of this system. With such a lockdown way of doing things, which is needed, do you have either, you know, site owners department that go roll and just go do their own thing or try to do? Yeah, I, it's funnily enough, I had a department that went out and built almost an exact replica of our template because they wanted these color blocks on the homepage and we couldn't do that. So, like they, it's, the font is just wrong. But. So, did they come to you first and said no and then they went and. They hired an external vendor. Can you stop? They keep, oh. If I could, I would. U of T is very siloed. And up to now, the branding police have been very laid back. So, you know, we have a new AVP of branding so I expect that that's something that's going to see a bit of a turnaround. But on the other hand, it's not exactly the problem. But if they go and do that and then it breaks, you're like, well, I guess you're going to have to fix your own problem now and I don't have to fix it. It's always my problem. No. Because, like, I'm always the one they come to and they're like, my site is loading, it's broken, it's been hacked and I'm like, please fix that. And I'm like, dudes. Do security updates. What's a security update? Yeah, we've had websites that have gone out on their own and have ended up with real disasters.  And some units go out and they build a completely separate site and they're totally fine and everything's good. You must be approached by other departments outside of the faculty of medicine who are also interested in using, is this model available across a bigger number of departments or have you thought about how to make that happen? So we feel that the template is part of medicine's branding. And we have found that other schools and other departments have built websites that look very similar to ours. So we feel like they've been inspired by us. Which is nice, but we've never, we don't want it to go past our faculty because we feel this is part of the brand identity. I am, when I presented in Toronto last year, there were a lot of other departments because it's so siloed, who were looking for help and support. And a lot of them seem to be in dire need of a tool like this. And I expected it was something that could be made available to them if it would be something that they would embrace very unhappily. Arts and Science is working on a similar project to webpack except for theirs is on a multi-site instead of a custom district. Okay, well thank you very much everyone.


So we have a program that will tell us what time it is. That's useful. What would make it more useful is if we didn't have to run it over and over again to check and see what the time was. But if we could just set it up and let it run and let it continually tell us what time it is right now. To do that, we're going to use a couple of new tricks. The first is a while loop. So here in line three, we see the word while. This is a special word to Python. You can't use it for a variable name. It's a keyword. And to Python, while says, as long as this thing in the parentheses says to keep going, then there's a colon and then an indented section of code. As long as this thing in the parentheses is true, then keep running this indented section of code over and over and over again. In this case, we put the word true in there, which is another special word to Python. So this says that as long as true is true, so for forever, never stop. Keep doing this code in the loop over and over again. Now, computers are really fast, so we want to slow it down a little bit. We'd like to print the time only every once in a while, ideally every second. Luckily, because of the time package that we're working with, we can use a trick that it has called sleep, where we give it a number of seconds. You can see here in the documentation, it explains. You pass it a number of seconds, and this will just pause the program. Whatever it's doing, it'll just stop and meditate and take a deep breath or a few thousand deep breaths, and then after this many seconds, it'll pick back up what it was doing. So what this code does now is it imports our time package and then sets up a loop that's just going to run forever. It pulls the current time in a formatted string. It pulls out the portion that is the time only, and it prints it, and then it sleeps for a second. It waits for a second, and then it does it again. And when we run it, we can see the result. We can see the time occurring, and then once per second it goes back and pulls the new time, pulls out the hour, minute, and second, puts it on the next line of the screen, and keeps going. This is pretty cool. Now we have a clock that we don't have to re-run to figure out what time it is each time we want to know. We can just always look and see what the most recent one is down at the bottom, and we know that that's the time right now. When introducing while loops, we also introduce a new data type. True and false are a data type that's very special. It's called Boolean, and it can only have one of two values. It's either true or it's false, and it's really good at doing things that require logic, checking whether something is the case or is not the case, or checking whether some combination of things is true. Boolean is something that's going to come up a lot in programming. We have some fun examples coming up here in a little bit, but right now this is one of the purest, most simplest things where we say while, true, do this thing, and true will always be true, and so it'll just keep doing that thing forever. We left out an important piece here. If we use a while loop, this program is going to keep running forever. That's not helpful. We're going to want to stop it and start it, especially if we're making changes to it or turning off our computer. To stop a program that's running in the middle, at any time, for any reason, you can type Ctrl C. If you're in the window that the program is running in and you don't like what it's doing or you're done with it, Ctrl C will just kill it wherever it's at. We're going to use that here as our way to stop our clock. With our while loop running forever, if we let it.


Well, it's a disaster. The thing called Agile has fallen into disrepute, one, because they don't do it properly. Two, they don't get good results doing it. They hardly ever talk about results. But if you look at things like a Standish report, you'll find that Agile is only slightly better in its huge failure rate to Waterfall. And that's only because it gets some feedback rather than none. But for the decades of popularity, it really hasn't got much to brag about. And most people realize it is primarily driven by the racket of selling certifications which have no meaning and have no credibility and have no results to brag about. So let's feel at your damning indictment there, Tom. What do you see in the future today? What's the way forward? The title of my talk is Agile Engineering. There's nothing wrong with the idea of doing things in small steps. But the trick is to get really good results from the projects. When you have like 40% of all projects are total failures and another 50% are partial failures and less than 10% are successful. And this has been going on for decades. We don't have any good methods. Our methods fail, fail, fail. And we're so used to it, we think it's normal. So what has to happen is that people have to stop using methods that don't work. They have to, management has to demand results, good results, early results, continuous results, measurable results. Part of the problem is management has put up with this and pays the price, for example, on large government systems such as health systems. The systems spend eight years failing and then they ask for another $8 billion or $1 million to keep on failing another eight years. And they say we're doing Agile by the way in their programming. But the key thing to look at is what the Standish Group looks at. It is to look at the failure and success rate of the projects and use that as a criteria for what to do and what not to do. We're not good enough at doing that. Got to study the projects that are successful and say, you know, why don't we do projects more like that? And we know what successful is and we know how to do it.


We're going to look at Mark chapter 12 today, verses 1 through 12, and I'll read to you the passage and get into our study, which will include some background and some information that I think we need in order to understand why Jesus is giving this particular parable. So I'll give you information concerning that in a few minutes. But here we are in chapter 12. Let's look at verses 1 through 12 together. Mark chapter 12, beginning at verse 1, reading to verse 12. Mark writes, then he began to speak to them in parables. A man planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a place for the wine vat, and built a tower. And he leased it to vine dressers and went into a far country. Now at vintage time, he sent a servant to the vine dressers that he might receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from the vine dressers. And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty handed. Then he sent them another servant.  And again he sent another. And him they killed. And many others beating some and killing some, therefore still having one son is beloved. He also sent him to them last, saying, they will respect my son. But those vine dressers said among themselves, this is the heir.  So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard. Therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine dressers and give the vineyard to others. Have you not even read this scripture? The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes. And they sought to lay hands on him, but feared the multitude. For they knew he had spoken the parable against them, so they left him and went away. And so Jesus is continuing his response to the chief priests, the scribes and the elders. As I mentioned to you, this is what made up what is called the Jewish Supreme Court or the Sanhedrin. They wanted to know who gave him his authority and they wanted to know who gave him this authority so he could do the things that he was doing. Now that week he had written into Jerusalem to the thunderous ovation of the people. He also had cleansed the temple, driving out the merchants as well as the money changers. After cleansing the temple, he began ministering to the people. And there were many in need and he began to care for them. Matthew 21 14 says that the blind and lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. So as he did so, the religious authorities became indignant towards him. They were terribly upset at what he was doing and what he was saying, but they were hamstrung. You see in Luke 19 47 and 48, Luke writes that he was teaching daily in the temple, but the chief priests, the scribes and the leaders of the people sought to destroy him and were unable to do anything for all the people were very attentive to hear him. So the angry religious leaders were so upset that they had confronted Christ. They demanded to know where he got his authority to do the things that he had been doing. While Jesus responded to the question with a question of his own, he said, was John the Baptist ministry from heaven or was it from men? So the leaders were caught in a dilemma. They knew it. So they refused to answer him. At that point, Jesus refused to answer their question. You see, they had willingly refused to receive the truth. So he left them in their rejection. So at this point, Jesus continues responding to those who are questioning him and he's doing this by giving them a parable. The parable illustrates their rebellion against God as well as the rejection of him. Now he's aware that they're intending to put him to death. They had desired to do so ever since he had performed a healing on the Sabbath. This recorded in John chapter 5 that he had healed a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. The man was in Jerusalem in an area called the pool of Bethesda. And there was a superstitious belief that an angel would stir the water and the first person entering the water would be healed of whatever disease they had. So as a man had been waiting for the stirring of the water, Jesus approached him. John tells us in chapter 5 verses 6 through 10 when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been in that condition a long time. He said to him, Do you want to be made well? The sick man answered him, Sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water has stirred up. But while I'm coming and other steps down before me, Jesus said to him, Rise, take up your bed and walk. Immediately the man was made well, took up his bed and walked. And that day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said to him who was cured, it's the Sabbath. It's not lawful for you to carry your bed. So in question about the healing, the man who had been healed said it was Jesus who did it. In John 5.15 the man departed and told the Jews it was Jesus who had made him well. Well that incited the religious leaders to interrogate Christ and to accuse him.  Jesus said to them, My Father is always at his work to this very day and I too am working. For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him. Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God. So in their mind, Jesus Christ is what is called a Sabbath breaker as well as a blasphemer and both of those charges are capital offenses under Jewish law. Well from that point on it was common knowledge that the authorities wanted to kill him. In John 7.1 it says, After these things Jesus walked in Galilee for he did not want to walk in Judea because the Jews sought to kill him. With this in mind, this parable exposes their hatred as well as their rejection of him. Notice in verse 1 how it begins. It begins in this way. He began to speak to them in parables. Now throughout the New Testament Jesus often gave instructions to his disciples and he used a method called the parable. Scholars differ in the number of parables that he gave but they're between 37 and 39. When you see the word parable, especially in the biblical sense, a parable has been called an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. It's through parables that God uses what is familiar to communicate to people what is unfamiliar. And Jesus used parables in his teaching to share insights into the kingdom. Approximately one-third of his recorded teachings come through parables. Parables have been called mirrors and windows. That's because we see ourselves in them and they help us see life through them. And it's through the use of parables that the same message will actually awaken one person but it will harden somebody else. Well, he's giving this parable here and he says in verse 1 that a man planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a place for the wine vat and built a tower. He leased it to vine dressers and went into a far country. And so he's illustrating the kingdom of God by using the image of a vineyard. A rich landowner, he says, planted a vineyard, which is very common in agricultural Israel and he put a hedge around it either by piling up rocks or cultivating a hedge of thorns to keep animals out or to hinder thieves from entering in to steal his crop. Notice in verse 1 it says he dug a wine vat. A wine vat was sometimes dug out of bedrock and then it would be elevated. The grapes would be crushed, the juice would run down a trough and it would be bottled and stored. It says he built a tower in verse 1. The tower he speaks about is what is called a lookout post. It was used to watch for thieves. It was a shelter for workers. It was used for storage. And what this is intended to communicate is that the owner showed a great deal of care for the vineyard. In verse 1 he says he leased it to vine dressers, went into a far country. So when everything's in order he leases out his property to tenants. And after doing so he goes a great distance away and he leaves them on their own. Well, vintage time came it says in verse 2. And he sent a servant to the vine dressers that he might receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from the vine dressers. And they took him and beat him, sent him away empty handed. Again he sent them another servant and at them, at him they threw stones, wounded him in the head, sent him away shamefully treated. And again he sent another and him they killed many others. Beating some and killing some. You see, when an absentee landlord leased the property, he would be entitled to a portion of the fruit. And this is how they paid their rent to the owner with the fruit. The renters would have none of this. They reacted to it violently. Notice how they took his servants, they beat one, they stoned another. Finally they killed the third. Well, in verse 6 it says therefore still having one son, his beloved. He also sent him to them last saying, pay will respect my son. He says they will respect my son. Besides this son there is no longer any he could send. This, when it says his one son, his beloved, this is the son of his heart. This is his one and all, surely they will respect him. But the vine dressers, verse 7, said among themselves, this is the heir.  So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard. Let us kill him. In Psalm 2 verses 2 and 3 it says, the kings of the earth set themselves. The rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Messiah, against his anointed. Saying, let us break their bonds and pieces and cast away their cords from us. So instead of respecting him, they conspired to kill him and steal the property. Now originally they were swatters. And now they're murderers and thieves. The murder of the son is premeditated. They in no way confused him with the servant.  And so as we look at this parable, the story illustrates the extreme grace and patience of the landowner. It also reveals the callous, murderous hearts of those who rejected the son. When you consider all the good that Jesus had done, it's hard to fathom this kind of hatred. As we've gone through Mark from chapter one up to this chapter, he has taught the people, he's preached the gospel, he's loved the outcast, he blessed the babies, healed the sick, he cleansed the lepers, gave sight to the blind, he drove out demons, he forgave sin, even raised the dead to life. When he spoke we've seen how the people listened intently, how they would marvel at his gracious words. He called the religious leaders into account. That pleased the people, like it says in Mark 1237, that the common people heard him gladly. The common people heard him gladly. And that's how it was in Jesus' day and it is still this way in our time. The Christian faith has never been attractive to those who don't recognize their own needs. It is the common person who can identify with the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is very often the average person who's aware of their need of help from God. When Paul was writing to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter one, verse 26, he said this. He said, brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were mighty. Not many noble were called. And so Paul says not many wise, not many mighty, and not many who are noble have been called. When he speaks concerning the wise, that speaks of philosophers. Not many philosophers have come to faith in Jesus Christ is what he was saying. When he says not many mighty, the word mighty speaks of those who have influence as well as power. When he speaks of noble, this speaks of those who have high birth, what would be referred to as nobility. Now these things, wisdom, might, and nobility are the three claims to aristocracy. Culture, influential power, and noble birth. Those are the three claims to aristocracy. So it's interesting how even in our day this kind of reaction to Christ continues. Those who consider themselves intellectuals, those who refer to themselves as influencers rarely trust in Jesus Christ. A recent example comes to mind. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, cultural influencers made their voices heard. Some of you perhaps read the comment by the artist Pink. She said in the name of your Lord, never listen to my music again. Okay, I don't think I've heard it. I want to develop this with you for a moment because that kind of stood out to me. She wasn't the only one who was saying things. You had others who were saying things of the same kind of comments and all. And I thought, well, how interesting that you think that your comments are so important that I really care. But they do. And it's really interesting to me in that way. So I wanted to share this with you. In many ways, modern entertainers have assumed the role. And this may seem to be, what's the word? Maybe mean-spirited. And I don't intend it to be those who know me know I don't. Those who don't know me, let me tell you. I don't mean this to sound as mean as some people might consider it. But it's true. And therefore, I'll say it to you. In many ways, modern entertainers have assumed the role of the court jester or the joker. Now, right there, I'm going to point something out to you. The jester was an entertainer during the medieval times. He used music, storytelling, and comedy to amuse. Jesters often wore a hat, and you can see that, with bells. That was supposed to be a crown. They would hold a scepter. That denoted their status. Being under the protection of the king, the jester would talk and mock freely with impunity. They entertained kings but didn't advise, speak for them, or have any real authority. Well, today, many entertainers have taken upon themselves the role of intellectual influencers. They have forgotten that people pay for their musical or acting talent, not their opinions. We don't look to them to give us insight into life. We look to them to amuse us. We recognize that they live in a world that we have no understanding of. Those with this kind of fame often surround themselves with others who are also famous. They create a world populated by people like them, but they don't understand average people. And this makes the message of humility and faith distasteful to them. You see, the church is not and has never been filled with wealthy intellectual nobility. It is filled with those who recognize spiritual poverty, their need for God's help. Like Jesus said in Matthew chapter 5, verse 3, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  And by selecting those the world has no use for, he showed the death of his love and his grace. And so today we have people who think that because they can entertain us that they also should educate us. And that's not true. You pay for their lifestyle when you buy their record, when you go to their show, when you watch their movie. That doesn't give them the right to tell you how to think. The Bible, the Holy Spirit, the Word of God teaches us how to think. The Word of God teaches us how. And that's why I don't have, see, it could sat, we're living in a time where people say, oh, you shouldn't say that. I don't know why you say that, but some do. No, you should speak the truth. In love, you should speak the truth. Entertain me, but don't advise me. Gestures were not intended to be advisors. They were intended to mock society as it is. That's why you see comedians today who are afraid of being canceled. Well, comedians were supposed to call into question what was going on. That's what made humor humor. They're afraid to do that now because if you do that and go to a college campus, they won't allow you to come on. Why? Because a college campus used to be a place where ideas were to be wrestled over and then thoughts were supposed to be proven. And that's what education is supposed to do. And now what it is, is if you go and you disagree with them, they'll cancel you. You can't come in. That's nonsense. Education intends to look at both sides and come to a conclusion. And I don't want a gesture to tell me how to think. And if you don't, and if, you know, this sounds mean, I know. That's what I'm saying. The society that we live in is odd. All I'm saying is something that would have been normally said a few years ago and now, oh boy, that's mean. No, it's true. It's true. Think about it. I don't want a joker to tell me how to live. I just don't. They're supposed to entertain. And see, the intellectual elites during the time of Christ rejected him, even as during the time of Paul, he would say that there aren't many who are wise and noble and all of that. They're not influencers. Why? Because God has chosen the poor. God has chosen those who have no status because he showed his grace in doing so. And that's how it worked then, and it works that way now. I don't need them to give me insight. If they're going to do anything, you can amuse me.  They don't understand what my world is all about. See, that brings us to the religious leaders, the nobility that didn't receive Christ. Except for a few, the majority rejected him completely. John in chapter one, verse 11, said it like this in his gospel. John the Apostle said that Jesus, he came to his own and his own did not receive him. In spite of all the wonderful things he did, the majority rejected and even despised him. Isaiah 53 says he is despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And we hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised. We did not esteem him. In John 15, 25, Jesus said, this happened that the word might be fulfilled, which is written in their law. They hated me without a cause. And so Jesus is giving a parable, and he comes to the point in verse nine, he asks the question, therefore, what will the owner of the vineyard do? And once again, as a rabbi, he asks the question to expose their hearts to themselves. You see, according to Matthew, Jesus' opponents are the first to supply the answer. In Matthew 21, 41, it says that they said to him, he will destroy those wicked men miserably and lease his vineyard to other vine dressers who will render to him the fruits in their seasons. So when spontaneously giving this answer, they condemned themselves. They were trying to trap him, but they ended up falling into a trap themselves. Like it says in Proverbs 26, 27, whoever digs a pit will fall into it. And he who rolls a stone will have it rolled back on him. And so Jesus is giving a parable. Let me reconstruct that parable and look at it a little deeper. The owner and the vineyard represent God and the people of Israel. How do we know that? Well, Psalm 80 verses eight and nine says this. You have brought a vine out of Egypt. You have cast out the nations and planted it. You prepared room for it and caused it to take deep root and it filled the land. You have brought a vine out of Egypt is in reference to Israel. The tenants represent those who reject God and Jesus. Isaiah five verse seven, the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel and the men of Judah are his pleasant plant. He looked for justice, but behold oppression for righteousness, but behold a cry for help. Verses two through five speaks of the servants. The servants are the prophets. The prophets who called the nation of Israel to repentance throughout its history. In spite of God calling the nation to repent, the response was violent rejection. In Jeremiah chapter seven, 25 and 26, it reads, Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have even sent to you all my servants, the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them. Yet they did not obey me or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck. They did worse than their fathers. In Matthew 23, 29 through 31, Jesus said, What do you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites? Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous. And say, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.  In verses seven and eight, it says those vine dressers said among themselves, This is the heir, come let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard. The arrival of the son resulted in the tenants assuming that the father is dead. And land that was unclaimed for three years, became the property of those who were working it. They would have thought that the land would automatically become their property. They would think that the sole heir has come to claim his inheritance, and since the owner didn't come, but the son did, they thought they could take the land.  And so verse eight, the son was killed. That is obviously Jesus. Therefore, verse nine, what will the owner of the vineyard do? Well, as you've already seen, they spontaneously supplied the answer and Jesus agreed, realizing that they had condemned themselves, they immediately responded. In Luke chapter 20 verse 16, it says that he will come and destroy those vine dressers and give the vineyard to others. And when they heard it, they said, certainly not. One of my commentators that I use when I prepare Bible studies pointed out that the term certainly not, the word certainly not was a very strong, the strongest word in the Greek to say God forbid, this should not happen, is very strong. You see, Israel was about to reject Messiah, but in turn would be rejected by God. God is about to create something entirely new called the church. In Romans nine, 25 and 26, Paul said, as he says also in Hosea, I will call them my people who were not my people, and her beloved who was not beloved. And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, you are not my people, there they shall be called sons of the living God. For centuries Israel had been the chief stone in God's plan of redemption.  Out of all the nations on the face of the planet earth, Israel had a unique relationship with God. In the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy in chapter four verse 34, it reads, did God ever try to go and take for himself a nation from the midst of another nation by trials, signs, by wonders, by war, by mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes. Has this ever happened before? And the answer was no. You see when unbelievers saw Israel, they saw a miracle nation. They knew that God was with them. When Israel was under Joshua about to enter the land of promise, there was a woman there by the name of Rahab. We all know the name Rahab. We usually supply the harlot because that's what she was. Rahab the harlot. But Rahab made this comment in Joshua, comment in Joshua two verse nine. She said, I know that the Lord has given you the land that the terror of you has fallen on us and that all the inhabitants of the land are faint hearted because of you, you have brought terror to the hearts of people because we know that your God is with you. By the way, God is with us too. We need to remember that. We need to be aware of that. And the response of people sometimes give to the church is actually a fear that we may change the world that they want to live in. Be aware of that. And Rahab said that we know the Lord has given you the land. We know that the terror of you fell on us. The inhabitants of the land are faint hearted because of you. Well, despite this, the pagan world considered Israel useless and rejected the nation and still does. So when Jesus is parable, this stone is more significant because the stone is Jesus and not Israel. So Peter and John, I'll give you an example. Peter and John went to temple at the hour of prayer. And when they did so, they encountered a man who was crippled. And as he was there, he would lay in a certain place and had done so for some time. And here comes Peter and here comes John. They're going in at the hour of prayer. They're going through what is called the beautiful gate. And as they're about to enter into this place called the beautiful gate, Peter stops and looks down at this man. And he says, look at us. You all know the story. He says, look at us. The scripture says the man expecting to receive something from them looks at them. So he's anticipating that they're going to give him alms.  He was begging. That's how he made his living. And because people would go in at the hour of prayer and all that would mean that there were religious people and religious people are better at giving gifts to those in need. And so when Peter says, look upon us or look at us, this crippled man is expecting to receive some money. But that's when Peter made that famous statement, silver and gold have I none. But such as I have give I thee in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I say unto you, rise to your feet and walk. And the scripture says that Peter reaching down, took him by the hand and began to lift him up. And as he began to lift him, he received strength in his ankles and his legs. And before you know it, he's walking, he's leaping and he's praising God. And the people see him as he's clinging to the apostles there. He's rejoicing at what God has done. And when this takes place, the people come and they gather around, thinking that these men who had performed such as amazing work, Peter especially who had done this work, they're thinking to themselves, these men are amazing. And Peter begins to speak and he says, don't look at us as if something special is about us. No, it's not us at all. And he begins to preach and it says in Acts 4, 10 through 12, Peter said, let it be known to you all.  Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. And so he preaches to him later, Peter wrote in 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 6 through 8, Peter wrote in Scripture it says, see I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame. Now to you who believe this stone is precious, but to those who do not believe the stone the builders rejected has become the capstone and a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. They stumble because they disobey the message, which is also what they were destined for. So he makes it very clear who this stone is and what's going on. And so the answer in verse 9, he will come and destroy the fine dressers and give the vineyard to others. Matthew says in chapter 21, 43 and 44, therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation bearing the fruits of it. Whoever falls on this stone will be broken, but on whomever it falls it will grind him to power. He's going to give to the world a new reality called the church. And the church is intended to bear fruit and the church is intended to bring glory to God and reach the world. And he's saying to them this, if you will not have me as deliverer, you will have me as destroyer. If you don't want life, then you're going to end up being judged. He says in verses 10 and 11, have you not even read this scripture, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone? This is the Lord's doing and it's marvelous in our eyes. You present yourselves as experts of scripture. When Jesus says, have you not read this? That is very severe criticism of them. These are what we would call the THC, the doctors of theology. These are the most astute. These are the best educated. These are the most brilliant. And yet he says, you've never even read this. Have you never even read this? That's quite a slight to them. You're boasting of your knowledge and that's what you do. You boast of your knowledge of scripture. But you fail to see me revealed in it. In John 5.39, he said it like this. He said, you search the scriptures. That word search is a word that can also be translated with the English word ransack.  So you move something here, move something there, open up a drawer, you're searching. But the stronger word is ransack. Somebody who is perhaps a burglar would understand what ransack means because when somebody is burglarizing, they're ransacking. They're taking things apart. They're taking the bed apart. They're looking underneath it. They're pulling drawers out and dumping things on the floor. They're going into closets, moving everything, throwing. That's called ransacking. Every police officer knows that. And I know one person in here understands that too. But it's going into and thoroughly taking it apart looking for something. That's the word that Jesus chose to use when he said, you search the scriptures. He wasn't simply saying, you kind of look into them. He's saying you thoroughly ransack it. You take it apart, word by word. You search the scriptures. For in them you think you have eternal life. And then he goes on to say, these are they which testify of me. You have thoroughly ransacked and still missed. You haven't seen me. That's why he would ask the question, have you never read the scripture? You thoroughly ransack, but you're missing me. You're moving things to the side, looking for something that's not there when, in fact, I was there all along. And that's why he speaks to them in that way. He said, this is the Lord's doing. It's marvelous in our eyes. You have rejected the one who is the chief cornerstone. Now, again, this is his last week of ministry. He's moving towards the cross. He's warning them again. He's saying, this is another warning to you. You have missed who I am. What was their response? Verse 12, they sought to lay hands on him, but feared the multitude, for they knew he had spoken the parable against them. They left him and went away. What was their response? They perceived his meaning, but instead of repenting, they desired to kill him. Their response was retaliation, not repentance. You see, in the end, Jesus is the foundation stone of salvation for those who trust in him. And if he's rejected, he is the judgment stone that brings crushing judgment. In Matthew 10, 32, and 33, he said it like this, whoever confesses me before men, him I will also confess before my Father who is in heaven. Whoever denies me before men, him I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven. You see, like Matthew said, whoever falls on this stone will be broken, but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to powder. Either you receive him as savior, or you stand before him as judge, and that's what he's saying here. These people have rejected him. They perceived that he was speaking to them in a very straightforward way, and their response was they wanted to lay hands on him, but they didn't because they feared the multitude, but they knew he had spoken the parable against them, and they left him and went away. See, we have our options. I'll close with just a practical application to this. I don't think that the first time I ever heard the gospel, the real gospel, not just somebody's ideas, but a scripture, I was not open to it at all. I didn't want to hear it. I only heard it a couple times. I was about 17, I was on the beach, actually 16, I was on the beach, Newport, I believe it was, and while I was there, here comes some Jesus freak, and he had some Bible tracks, and he brought and handed me a Bible track. Now, I was always respectful to those who believed. I was not one of those who was disrespectful. I respected their beliefs. You believe that, that's fine. So the guy came, and I still remember, I was laying there and was surrounded by all these girls in bikinis, and you're giving me a Bible track, and you're wanting to talk about God, and I was very uncomfortable. I have to be real with you. I was 16, less than 17 years old. I mean, you've got to be kidding. And he's wanted to talk to me about heaven and judgment and hell, and I don't want to hear this. Are you kidding? But I was polite. I still remember, and I was polite, and I said, well, thank you very much. He hands me a Bible track, and I said, thanks, I still remember thinking this. I still remember thinking, maybe when I'm older, I'll come to become a Christian. I already thought I was. I'll begin living my, quote unquote, faith out, but right now, are you kidding? There's a lot of sinning to do. I actually said that. There's a lot of sinning to do. I haven't ever, you know, and there are all these things in my mind. I want to do this and that and these and that. There's too many sins to say. Then when I'm old, I actually believe that perhaps some of you may have or perhaps you may still. I thought when I'm too old to sin, then I'll become a Christian. I discovered you never become too old to sin. There's no sinner like an old sinner. That's a fact. You can lie. You can lie when you're a kid. You get busted, right? But when you get older, if you practice it, you can be president. I mean, it's something you can actually do, right? You can actually. I had to say it. I'm sorry. You don't outgrow sin. You don't outgrow sin. I have older people in this room starting with myself. And I can tell you, you don't outgrow sin. You actually make it something that you practice so that it becomes a lifestyle and you're known for your sin. You learn to lie. You learn to steal. You learn to cheat. You learn to do the things you ought not to do. And you can get so good that you seem to get away with it all the time. That's a fact.  Of course, I'm not saying that as a lifestyle is when you realize I need help. I messed up. I lie. I was one of those guys that I would actually create lies to tell the people just because I enjoyed telling lies.  So I became a pastor.  I was a very good thief. That's why God's grace amazes me. A lying thief and I'm a pastor. It amazes me the grace of God.  By the way, if you don't hate the sin, you're probably not gonna be set free from it.  It has to be something you hate. I hate this about myself. I hate the way I treat people.   I hate these things about myself. I got there and that's when I began to pray and say, God, help me. I am tired and I could tell you, I don't want to go too much into this, but I can say it, that's how the Lord saved me.  I hate making my parents cry. I can't have a relationship with a young lady without breaking her heart. Take an advantage of her. I can't stand this about myself anymore.  God, help me, oh wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death? I got there. I guess all of you who are saved did too. I got there. I don't want this, but the will is present. The ability to perform that which I desire is not. God, help me. Give me the strength. Do something. That's where the power of the Holy Spirit comes in. That's where God makes you into a new creation. Old things are passed away. Behold, all things become new. And that's how that works. That's salvation. These people did not want it. They wanted him out. As a matter of fact, they'll make sure he's out when they have him crucified at the end of the week on Friday. They don't want it. And so Jesus told them straight up, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord's doing. It is marvelous in our eyes. Messiah has become the chief cornerstone. That stone, if you fall on it, you're broken, but if it falls on you, it'll crush you. You have only two options. Be broken or be crushed. They chose to reject the brokenness. They eventually were crushed. And that's what happened with them. They were crushed. It says again, they sought to lay hands on him but feared the multitude, for they knew he had spoken the parable against them. They left him and went away. They were not willing to be broken. And not willing to be broken. The only thing left to them was judgment. Thank God that when the Lord convicted us by his Holy Spirit through his word, thank God that we said, God be merciful to me. I am a sinner. I need your forgiveness. I need your grace. I don't want to live this way anymore. Please forgive me. Please save me.   That's the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. He changes you because he's so good. He's so good. Father, we love you.


Hi everyone. My videos don't always play when I transfer them over, so I'm being a little extra difficult. But my name is Ritu Rahman. I'm a postdoc in the Langer Lab, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we've been engineering loving muscle and using them in machines. So I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and my first-ever job was not an engineering job. It was just like a minimum wage thing in a biology lab where they wanted to study.  So what if you're drunk all the time, but you work out a ton, do those things cancel out? So my job was to be in a basement for several hours a day my entire summer.  And I learned a couple of things throughout this process. One, drunk rats, adorable. Very bad on treadmills. But the other thing that I learned was that the cool thing about these rats, right, is that their skeletal muscle, this actuator they were using to move and walk around, was dynamically responding to its environment, and they were able to tune its function to a changing environmental load. And nothing I was learning to build with as a mechanical engineer in my classes was able to do the same type of function. So I started thinking about this idea of, like, why aren't we building machines using living materials or using biological materials? So I went to grad school at the University of Illinois, and I spent my first year or so there developing a range of high-resolution 3D bioprinters for patterning cells and biomaterials in complex 3D structures. And this stuff was pretty cool, and most people use this kind of technology to reverse engineer or pattern living cells into tissues or organs for, you know, you're sick or you're disease or damage, and you can replace that tissue with, like, a 3D printed heart. And certainly that's a very worthwhile thing to pursue. But something that people weren't pursuing as much, and I think because they weren't thinking about it from a mechanical engineering perspective, is why not forward engineer or use biological materials to perform some non-natural or hypernatural functional behaviors? So that got me kind of into this idea of robots. So I was very lucky to work in an NSF center between MIT, Illinois, and Georgia Tech, where they were also thinking about this idea of building robots using biological materials. So if you think of a robot very broadly defined as something that senses, processes, and semi-autonomously responds to its environment in real time, you can think of a biobot as something that uses a biological material to perform one or all of these functions. And the hope with these kinds of robots is that maybe they would be able to harness some of the capabilities of biological materials and be able to accomplish some higher-level functional behaviors, like self-assembly or self-healing. So robots can do a lot of different things, but one thing that most robots all need to do is sort of generate force, and in often cases produce motion. So to do this, I've decided to really focus on actuating robots using biological materials, and I really took inspiration from ourselves and our bodies. We use skeletal muscle to move and walk around, and it's designed and evolved to be able to do that. At the microscale, it's these two protein filaments kind of sliding against each other, but at the microscale, you get these large contractions. It's very powerful, it's much more efficient, both from a battery sustainability time point, because it just uses sugar, but also from being able to produce large forces from small volumes than most synthetic actuators. It's also very modular, so it can bulk up very easily, and it's very practical. We have a lot of cell lines readily available to us to be able to build in the lab tissues using skeletal muscle. So knowing all of those things, we again took sort of a bio inspired approach to design. So if you think about muscle being stretched across your articulating joints and tethered to your bone via tendons, every time a muscle contracts, you get these large locomotions. You can do the same thing by 3D printing sort of a skeleton for the robots, having like a flexible beam, that's the articulating joint, two stiffness, high stiffness pillars at the end that are like the tendons, and the muscle sort of you make by mixing cells and proteins together and letting them self assemble to form this dense 3D tissue that's coupled to that skeleton. And what you see on the right there with those sort of long green fiber like things are the contractile elements of skeletal muscle or myotubes. So, you know, they can, like I said, sort of the interesting thing that we wanted to show is that muscle could be used to generate force and produce motion. And you can imagine that if these muscles are tethered to a completely symmetric structure, every time they contract, they do this. But if you have an asymmetric structure every time they contract, they can move for a locomot. And I have three minutes, I will race forward. But we did a couple other things such as switching to a more modular design where we switch the muscle to rubber band like structure and made it optogenetic. So then we were able to, even in a completely symmetric structure, only by highlighting one part of the tissue get the robot to move in one direction or turn and locomote so they could sort of move around and navigate a 2D substrate. And the cool thing about these things is because they were made out of biological tissues, we were then able to go in and show that they could do things like recover from damage that synthetic robots can't do.  But if you treat it with a healing sort of protocol, you add in some new cells and teach them to exercise, they can completely recover their functional production, force production after a couple days post damage, which is something that traditional robots just cannot do. So we've done a lot of other scientific progress in this work. But the thing that I'm most interested and excited about is that we've translated this into the classroom where we teach undergraduate classrooms both at Illinois and at MIT. We teach everyone any kind of person who's interested in making but making with biology how to make these sorts of robots and target them at their own functional applications. And I won't talk about what I've been doing for the past couple of years in the Langer lab, but essentially I've been sort of looking at other parts of this robot. In addition to muscle, how do we integrate neuronal processing and control and higher level decision making behavior, or how do we integrate smart synthetic materials and harness the best of the synthetic world into these kinds of robots and machines. But my eventual goal is to start my own lab where we design sort of these biohybrid implantable devices that can sense what's going on with our body and tune the treatment that we receive to our individual and personalized needs. So the huge multidisciplinary effort and I would just like to thank every lab and student that's worked on this with me. I do want to highlight a couple of resources. If you're interested in this more broadly, just like a thousand word essay talking about this, we had something come out in science about a year ago. It's like a broad audience targeted thing. And if you're really interested in just doing this in your own lab, we also have a nature protocols paper that came out a couple of years ago that tells you everything from like where to buy the media to what tweezers work best for you. All right. So thank you.


Hello, friends and supporters. My name is Michelle Elmer. As you may know, I joined the Latin American team for Code Pink earlier this year. And since then, I've been so impressed of all the meaningful and exciting things Code Pink has done. I'm extremely proud to be part of this organization and happy to share with you our 2019 achievements. Since 2015, children under the age of 5 die in Yemen every 10 minutes from acute malnutrition as a result of a U.S.-sponsored war. At Code Pink, we have worked on a broad-based campaign with other peace, human rights and humanitarian groups to pressure Congress to end U.S. engagement in the Saudi-led war. But after Trump vetoed it, we knew we couldn't stop there. So we worked on our boycott-Saudi campaign to server ties with the Saudi regime until they end their war on Yemen and the repression of women, journalists, and those who engage in peaceful dissent. Instead of investing in diplomacy and life, the U.S. is constantly preparing for war and draining resources from programs that invest in the well-being of people. In 2019, Code Pink worked with our partners so that our society divests from weapons manufacturers. We also attempted to convince mayors and presidential candidates, as well as candidates for Congress, to refuse to accept their contributions. One of the big winners in making huge profits out of global suffering is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. So we were also busy making ourselves heard everywhere he went. In companies that manufacture and sell... After 16 years protesting the iPad conferences, we successfully convinced nearly all of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to refrain from attending its annual convention. All of the Democratic presidential candidates are boycotting AIPAC. Why is that? Last time around, Kamala Harris went, she had a talk with them. This time she didn't. Why? Because MoveOn.org and Code Pink, which are on the fringe, told them to boycott that. This was some major victory. Next, we launched the Skip the Trip campaign to discourage new members of Congress from joining AIPAC's propagandistic trips to Israel. Disgust by Israeli war crimes and committed to BDS, our movement for equality and justice in Palestine is growing rapidly. In 2019, we continue to fight against the Trump's administration's attempt to provoke a war with Iran. Holding Iran to a new level of accountability for its destructive behavior, especially its lawless pursuit of ballistic missiles. Thank you. In the world community wants to keep the Iran nuclear deal, our allies are the Germans, the French, the British. They want to keep in the steel. The world community wants to keep the deal. Let's talk about normal countries. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. Is that who our allies are? They are the biggest threat to the world community. And let's talk. You're hurting me. You're actually hurting me. At the same time that we led two peace delegations to Iran, we came back with first-time stories about the devastating effects that the US sanctions have on the Iranian people. We joined youth from all over the world for the youth climate strike. We reminded everyone that war is not green and that the US military is a major polluter. For two months now, every Friday, Cold Pink and over 200 of our friends march with Jane from the Fortifier Drills Friday to drive home the connection between the climate crisis and militarism. In April, Cold Pink and popular resistance founded the Embassy Protection Collective to protect the DC-Venezuelan embassy from supporters of a US-sponsored group. Joined by dozens of coalition partners and hundreds of activists, including Reverend Jesse Dexson, we upheld the principles of international law by exposing the history of US coups, sanctions and support for repressive, undemocratic regimes throughout the world. We also exposed that point to Pompeo, war criminal Elliot Adams and other coup leaders. We advocated for whistleblowers. We supported fearless Congresswoman Rashida Talib and Ilhan Omar against the Trump supporter campaign to demonize them. We worked with the Poor People's Campaign, called for peace in North Korea, travel to Cuba. We stood in solidarity with the Bolivian people in the wake of the US-backed coup in Bolivia. In 2019, we did a lot of exciting and important things. In 2020, we need to and we will go into a higher gear. We enter 2020 facing violence, militarism, racism, Islamophobia, global inequality, climate chaos, too many weapons and the largest military budget in the US history. We know to affect change, it takes more than elections. It takes local organizing, disrupting the status quo, resistance, engagement, coalition-building, action, strategic thinking, elevating the stories of those suffering the abuses of the war economy and the US hegemony, and it takes diplomacy and love. The love of humanity, the one love we need for peace, justice, a healthy planet and home. And that's what Code Pink is all about.