Hey YouTube Sorry about the glare on the glasses. I'm trying to figure this out. Um, I just got off the phone with a client of mine who's been He's constantly stuck in this How can I optimize what I'm doing? How can I what is the what is the best? Course of action that I can take right now to accomplish all the goals that I'm trying to accomplish The reason that I really want to talk about this. I think primarily is because this is Probably the biggest thing that I have struggled with in my life and in my career and in Trying to figure out what I should do next so things were simpler when I you know was living with my parents and it just got out of high school and Going to college because I knew that all I had to do was go to college and train and all I was doing was You know trying to chase powerlifting dreams, and I wanted to be the strongest dude I could be and I Didn't really care about school. I it was just a place. I had to be And and you know I didn't have to think about optimizing things quite as much But then later on when I started to think you know, okay Well, if I if I really want to be better at powerlifting, what's the best way to lift? That was one of that one of the worst workouts. I've ever written was like an eight by three snatch eight by three back squat eight by three bench press and I was just Exhausted using out like not getting stronger at all just getting worn out Just getting weaker And it's counterintuitive right because you're lifting heavy, but you're not lifting heavy enough to actually put more strength gains on and all you're doing is just beating down your nervous system. So it was a terrible idea and The reason that it was terrible was because I took I knew a little bit I knew just enough to be dangerous That's that's a phrase that we like to use at I fast and you know people in general You can use it in all sorts of different situations. Let's say so my new project is programming. So if somebody is Knows just enough programming to be dangerous, which is probably me right now You can start to throw in a bunch of code that doesn't run very efficiently and doesn't make very much sense when somebody's reading it and Maybe, you know, maybe is actually slow Maybe barely gets the job done, but doesn't work in every browser that somebody looks at it in There's there's a lot of and all that does is when you pass that project on You give that that person who's receiving the workload you give them extra workload because maybe you're not commenting in your Your program and so nobody knows what the hell you're trying to do You know same kind of thing with with training like I knew that lifting for triples doubles and singles That's what it was. I said eight by three, but it was like three three Two two two one one one or something like that Lifting for one to three reps is supposed to get me stronger, right? So more is better and that's where knowing that lifting for one to three reps is challenging for strength, but Doing it ad nauseam is not always the greatest idea You're not accumulating any sort of musculoskeletal fatigue It's purely nervous system and and in my case with the technique that I was using was purely joints Supporting me and then waiting until my muscle could shorten underneath them So that's a bit of a ramble. So The topic today is what is the best way to do Blank so we talked about optimizing and I talked with my client recently about this We just got off the phone and and he's he you know He's he's frustrated because he's trying to accomplish stuff But he's doing the opposite things and I'm not writing his programs and I don't want to you know step on anyone's toes who who might be writing his programs, but For him with with my experience with him it's You know, there's a lot of time and energy and focus spent on What is the best way to do? blank But not a lot of energy spent on doing that thing right, so Optimizing can be very distracting for people and and this is this is why I feel like I can talk about this because I've I've spent I just made it when one of the first big website projects that I had I spent six months planning it out because I didn't know anything about it and it made me feel more comfortable with it and now I understand what's going on, but Six months is way too long now. I can make a website in like five minutes And I'm not even kidding right if as long as everything selected like WordPress does everything for you all I was doing was was you know Prolonging the inevitable in the startup tech culture They talk about a minimum viable product. So Minimum meaning it's not as good as it could be but realizing that it never really will be There's there's no such thing as perfection. You're always chasing perfection, right? There's no such thing as being done You just give up so keeping that in mind I still want to Optimize what I'm doing, right?  I don't want to waste my time I don't want to put something out there that's not helpful for anyone, but it doesn't need to be perfect From the training standpoint, so what's the best way to? Put on me put on mass put on muscle mass So I need to be a certain amount of lean so that I can have enough insulin sensitivity to really use it to my advantage when I'm starting to gain weight and in my caloric surplus and that was this specific scenario here and What I will say is that Yeah, kind of if you got all your stuff together that works but Don't put too much of a priority on that We talked about adaptive thermogenesis, so when somebody loses a lot of weight This is the best example I had when somebody loses a lot of weight and they They they you know, maybe two months they've lost 20 pounds and then they pretty much stop losing weight So the body adapts to this new set point that they've been giving themselves So and you just think from a physics standpoint, there's fewer calories to burn, right? It takes fewer calories to live now that I'm 20 pounds lighter So now what I was doing the last two months is not enough so Taking that in consideration we can we can just kind of push forward. Maybe we need that instead of backing off Maybe we need to turn it up. Maybe we need to steer into the skid a little bit That way and that's kind of like the the main point that I want to make here is Don't like you don't have to think. Oh, well now it now it's not working. So maybe I need to fix it What you were doing was working Just keep doing it or if something Hasn't been working. Maybe you need to do it harder, you know, so that is that is a completely different physiologic stimulus It seems counterintuitive because you're kind of in that direction already So it's really easy to steer away from it and think oh, well, maybe I was off base here but I would I would encourage some people by saying, you know One of the quotes from my my good friend Jay Chung that has always stuck with me is people aren't as fragile as you think and that's that's the pot calling the kettle black, but I love you Jay, but You know, you you see some seal training or whatever for the Navy That stuff is really really difficult and really really taxing But those people are alive.  There's this podcast that Tim Ferriss did with Dorian Yates.  This is what I need to do This is what I was meant to do and he just went for it You know, can you imagine like I've had sore legs before but not for 15 years That's I mean that is prioritizing something. So, you know, if I if I want to learn how to program I'm gonna spend eight hours a day programming eight hours a day of dedicated work dedicated deep focus work Great book on deep focus and deep work is called deep work spoiler alert Deep work and it's from Cal Newport. I'm reading it right now. I'll link to that below to really really good Then on this topic so so another another side tribe Cal Newport has another books called so good. They can't ignore you which is after a quote from Steve Martin who somebody asked him how How did you get noticed? He just said be so good.  I've been trying to optimize like what is the I could do anything with my life what is it that I should be doing with my life and People would say follow your passion, you know, what are you passionate about? Just just go to school for that and then you can you can dedicate yourself primarily to that and Like it's it makes a lot of sense But only if you know what your passion is and the big point that Cal Newport makes in this this so good. I can't ignore you so good. They can't ignore your book is You don't know like how are you supposed to know what you're passionate about so Do more deep work learn more skills create what he calls career capital and then you can focus on things, right? And then you can then you can think man I am really good at this and I enjoy being successful at this I enjoy doing it now and then you just you've selected yourself to doing that If you think you want to be a writer, just start writing. Don't worry about Scrivener or what sort of note put notepad paper you should be writing on just whatever is next to you open up notepad in your Computer, which you know if you don't have a computer just write it on piece of paper Just write if you don't like writing. You're not gonna be a good writer. I Hope that isn't a facetious over simplification, but What is the best way to do X think of a good way don't think of the best way What is a Good way to do X and then do it


Theater anti-submarine warfare. We are in a fourth battle of the Atlantic right now. The activity in submarine warfare has increased. The best way to find another submarine is not necessarily with another submarine. That's like a needle in a haystack. ASW is a combined arms operation and let no one forget that. Theater ASW, big rock and very important.


Dean Mason, thank you for joining us. We're so excited to have you on This Is Purdue. I know we were talking before this. You traveled a lot with your family. You moved a lot, so you didn't grow up in Indiana. So what brought you to Purdue? How did you find out about Purdue University? Well, I knew of Purdue when I was going through graduate school because I was studying all the people that do the kind of work that I do, but when I really became engaged was when they had a job and it was a perfect job description for me. It had the keywords in it that I was looking for. I'm an insect behaviorist, and so it had insect behavior. And although it wasn't an area that I really had not studied, it was that keyword of insect behavior that's like, I want to be there to be at a place like Purdue, to be able to be at a research-intensive university was like this dream job, right? And so I applied and then, lo and behold, I get it, and here I am, 30 years later. Yeah, and now you've kind of, we talked about you built this community within West Lafayette. You have a lot of friends here. What, what has it been like living in the Midwest and you stuck around? Yeah, it's been wonderful. I mean I really have enjoyed, as I said, a move growing up all over the place and had lived around the Midwest, but not had lived in this area. But Purdue became a real home for me, a real sense of community for me. It welcomed me into the community. I adopted two kids as a single mom and there was a huge supportive community for here and the research enterprise was just amazing. So supporting me in my career and my personal life. So Purdue became home very quickly and not a place I wanted to leave. That's amazing. Okay, so walk us through entomology. When you were young, were you fascinated by bugs? How did this passion come about? It does not come back when I was a kid, although my mother swears this because my father called me Linda Buck. I don't think that had anything to do with it. I really became interested in entomology in graduate school. I did not know that you could have a career in this and this is something I tried to tell students all the time. Experiences that you have may shape a different path than you think that you're going to on your original pathway. And so I was going to be Jane Goodall. I studied animal behavior and I wanted to go and I studied animal behavior in graduate school. I was studying squirrel behavior, where squirrels go to the bathroom and trees is said marking behavior. And it was when I was studying them that I found that they had insect bites on them and I didn't know what they were. And I went to the entomology department and I talked to a professor and he said, I could tell you everything about that, but why don't you take an entomology class? I'm like, okay, I need some electives. And I took one and then I took another and I was like, so I found my passion through kind of an accident of going and talking to a professor and he was very engaging and lots of great advice for me. And so I went on and got my PhD in entomology. So it wasn't anything that I ever knew about it. I had this complete right turn of what organism I was going to study. That's kind of so I was in news and I came here to Purdue and then you know podcast didn't exist then. So I got this experience elsewhere and then podcast came about and I did a left turn as we were just describing. And I think that's kind of the longer you go and things like I didn't know I'd be a grad dean, right? I didn't know that that was coming down my pathway and so it's not things that you actually seek out. I mean some people know very much this is what I'm going to be and that's what I'm going to do, right? But for the rest of us there are many opportunities to be able to explore and something comes about especially at an institution like Purdue where you have all these opportunities around you and all these amazing researchers and interdisciplinary work is so critical that you come across something you're like, I really like that. Didn't know that existed. And you can dive into that. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you were on Jay Leno. You were on MTV's Road Rules. Tell us about these experiences. So I was starting to do some national media radio. I was doing some radio stuff for some commercial insect control methods and got some media training from that. And they came, the producers of Leno came to me and said we want an entomologist, want a woman entomologist to be able to do a segment on insects and it was for their bump weeks they wanted to be able to get sweeps and get, they thought that would bring in more an audience. Not sure why. But anyway, they asked me to come out and at first I told them no because it was during Mother's Day weekend and I had already planned to go down to my family and visit surprise my mother for Mother's Day and they said don't worry, we'll bring your mom out too. And so we went out, we spent the week getting ready for the show and working with the script writers and then taping the show and doing all that. It was a blast. And then once that went off, then other directors and producers came and started contacting and say, would you do this and would you do that? So that led to some really fun opportunities that I normally wouldn't have done as an entomology professor. How many people can say that? That's amazing. Do you have any mentors or you know, professors within when you were in grad school that really made an impact on your life path? Yeah, there was several. One, it goes back to my high school experience. So it was the Mrs. Brightman who got me excited about biology and encouraged me to say as a woman in science, you can do this, you can be successful in this and you need to do this because you have an interest in this and you need to follow your passions. And then the guy who got me into entomology, Professor Wayne Clark at Auburn University, was a big mentor who said you need to do that. But then I have several people and I would not label them and I tell students not even to label them as mentors because that puts a label on the context of the relationship. But people who have influenced me all through my career. Martin Jiskey, I was on the search committee that hired him. I worked on his strategic plan. He gave me the insights and details about being an administrator. My women deans that I have here at Purdue are all mentors to me in many ways of people that I can go to and talk to and ask them about things that I'm curious about. So you kind of frame it more as it's a friendship almost. It starts off as just maybe a question. I think if you go and you to say someone you be my mentor, it puts this label and it's heavy label sometimes. So what does that mean and how do both of us define that relationship?  Can I come talk to you about that or I'm curious about this job opportunity and you have that conversation and it may lead to another conversation and another cup of coffee and eventually it becomes a mentoring relationship but you've never defined it early on as that. And so these are people that come in and out of your life that have added value to your life and shaped who I am today. But I never would have gone and they may not even know that they've had that influence in my life. I like that. So you were an entomology professor at Purdue for years and years. How did this path to a dean come about for you? So as I was came before professor, I had had some university experience. I was chair of the University Senate. And so I started exploring opportunities across the university and understanding how it worked more than just in my faculty role, but how the whole institution worked. And I had an interest in working with students and a passion for connecting more and helping students out with the way that I had helped my own individual students that had come through my lab. And so a job came open in the graduate school for an associate dean position. And it was in two big areas that I'm really passionate about and it was diversity and working with diverse populations in graduate school and then professional development, which is something I always had a passion with with my own student in my own life. And so they kind of gave me the opportunity to say, if you want to start looking at ways to explore that in graduate education and not just work for entomologists, but to work across all these disciplines that we have at the university. And so that was the pathway in and then the current dean left and they asked me to be the interim. And I said, okay, I'll try it out, never been in and tried it out to see if I liked it and then decided to apply for the permanent job and I loved it. You've really expanded the grad school and it's grown so much under your leadership. What were your initial goals coming in as that dean? So there were four. One was to increase the area of interdisciplinary work. I knew in the area that I worked in as an entomologist that I worked on a team. And it was this team of researchers that allowed me to make sure that my work had greater impact. And so I know many of our faculty are working the grants went from sole PI grants to being able to have this team of people that you worked with. And so bringing that to the grad school was one to look at where we're doing and we've completed that we now have a master's of science and interdisciplinary studies. We have new interdisciplinary degrees that are coming through. So that was accomplished. The other one was to increase professional development opportunities. We weren't offering very many workshops at that time. Now we're offering over 360 workshops a year. So I have really expanded the opportunity and I think we can offer that to take that burden off the colleges to things that every grad student needs so that you don't have to replicate it in every department in every college. So that was a major one for me. Another one was to be creative to look at Purdue for life. We traditionally think of graduate education as traditional master's and PhD research emphasis. But to me graduate education is anything you do after you get your undergraduate degree. And the world's changing so fast information is changing so fast that people need to be able to get access to knowledge and maybe in small little bits they don't need a graduate degree but they need you know big data wasn't a thing when I went to school but it is now. And so maybe once you graduated 10 15 years ago you didn't need to know that but you need to know that for your job now. And so that opportunity to offer this wide variety of any period in your life to come back to Purdue and get the knowledge that you need. And so we've been working on that. So those were the kinds of things that I was looking forward to be able to do. And then the last one was to provide increased support for graduate students. Yeah because I know you know at a school like Purdue it's at a larger school any big 10 school really it's hard to have that dedicated like champion for these grad students. I didn't even know Purdue's grad school was as big until I started researching before this interview. But why do you think that it's important to become a champion for people like that and kind of represent this underrepresented population. So a lot of people don't understand graduate education because it's the smaller portion of people that get graduate degrees. And they are such an integral part of a major research institution. They provide that further that next step in that education and services that they provide to the graduates of the graduate school and the university. So we have our students that are a traditional research. They're doing all things that you read about on the news right of research doing not a big part of that is done at the labor of graduate students doing their research for their graduate degrees. And so people need to understand that. So we have our like our innovative magazine that goes out to alumni and folks be able for students to be able to talk about their research and say this is what I'm doing. So that's a big part of graduate education to understand. They also provide the value for teaching many of the students that we have are going to go on into the professoriate. And so they need that experience in teaching. And so they provide that. What if we think of a three legged stool with the mission of a land grant institution the research the teaching and then the outreach. The students are getting that experience and provide much of that outreach that we do. So the university if you're going to be a research intensive university you have to have graduate students. And it's my job to be the advocate for them to make sure that they get what they need so they get their degree and the other things they need to be successful. And if you were talking to any grad students what what would you want them to see in you as their dean and kind of as their champion. So I the two words that I would apply to myself is an accessible advocate. So one of the things that I've tried to do is Dean is to make myself very accessible to the students available to them. So I do things like pop ups. I drive around on a golf cart and I stop and I pop up a tent and I give out popsicles and I'm there to talk about graduate education. So it may be to graduate students that's come by and say oh what are you doing and sit down and pop down in a chair and have a conversation. It may be to an undergrad that's going by and says what are you the dean of? Why are you here? And then I can say that you'll consider graduate education. And so to get them or parents walking by with their kids to arrange to be able to say you know this is the value of graduate education at Purdue. So being accessible to them I do coffee hours with the dean so I can't solve a problem that I don't know. And so to be not intimidating it's come by and talk to Linda. Linda wants to hear what you have to say tell me what's going on in your life and if there's an issue tell me about it and let me see if I can gain access to the resources to help you solve your problem. It's awesome because not all deans are accessible right? That's really special. And I think it's part of my personality too is I just feed off of other people's energy so to be around grad students I feed off their energy every day. Sure. So you brought the three-minute thesis and say it in six competitions to Purdue. Tell us a little bit about that and I know we were talking again before this but you're so into communication and you know being able to articulate what you want to say and not you know droning on and I know you have another story that I want you to share too but tell us a little bit about why communication is so important to you. I think there's two main reasons why communication is critical if we're going to do the research that we're going to do and students are going to study the things that they're going to study. We need to be trustworthy advocates for that research. One of the things that people don't understand is why oh they keep changing science they keep changing the results versus is good then it's bad and that's what science and research is all about is we learn something new we reevaluate we change what our recommendations are and then we do the next set of research that answer the next set of questions but if students can't do that clearly to the general public then the value of the work gets lost because people turn off because they don't understand what you're talking about and so to teach students how to have that ability to be able to talk about their work enthusiastically so I teach a class on being an engaging researcher and to be able to talk about it with enthusiasm you'll suck people in about what you're doing and they'll be curious about what you're doing and then you can educate them. The second one is that I think if students get excited about their work and talk to different people about their work then they themselves get engaged in it and when it gets really hard and you're hitting against the wall and the experiments aren't working or you can't solve this question that you're trying to solve if you go back to the roots of why what you're doing is important and you get that from talking to various people about what you do then that will get you through those really hard parts because you know the value down the road and why it's important for you to do the work that you're doing. Yeah absolutely and tell us about the final that they kind of have a set up just like this one. Yeah so I in this class on teaching students about being an engaging researcher we do a lot of improv we do a lot of impromptu speeches that they have to do and we teach them how to communicate getting rid of all the jargon and it's great because I have students from all over campus so somebody who's a romantic history major is trying to explain something to you know a computer scientist right or a biologist and they're like I don't know what that means and I don't know what that word means so we're able to go through and try to pull apart the language that they use and so then for the final exam what I do is I take them into a tv studio with lots of cameramen and all of that and I act like a crazy interviewer on a morning today show kind of a thing and I start asking the questions like I pretend like maybe they're getting the Nobel Prize or they're here for some award or some big conferences in town in New York City and we're interviewing them because of their great research and they have to be able to not know what I'm going to ask them this is crazy reporter and talk to them about what their research is and they have to be able to on the slide be able to talk about that and it's a great final because they're under the lights and the cameras and they just don't know what I'm going to say and then they get a copy of it at the end so they can see themselves have you ever had any students contact you after the fact and say hey I had an experience that was a little bit similar to this or well they did or they got asked to do it you know they became a professor and then they got asked to do an interview and they didn't have any media training and so they were able to reflect back on that conversation that they had that's awesome yeah it's fun um and in a recent board of trustees meeting there you did a presentation on how much the graduate school has grown I mentioned that before what does this growth mean to you it's record record numbers across the board yeah it's really exciting it's a time to be really excited about graduate education and graduate education and Purdue but for me it tells me that the message that we've been working on for the past four or five years as dean is getting out the students are understanding the value of a Purdue education the value of this research institution that they have the other things that we're offering the creativity of the new degrees that we're offering that are really timely and what students want that message is getting out because they're coming for the first time ever our number of online students that aren't coming to this campus outnumber the number of residential students we have and that even in my thinking about a professional development and how do we prepare those students for those careers it's a different process for the students that are here on campus and so it's great to be able to say the things that we've been doing the past several years the team that I've assembled at the grad school and the work that really is them that that team is doing is paying off because people are recognizing it yeah that's that's super exciting how would a colleague or a team member of yours describe your philosophy and your leadership within the graduate school well I'm pretty much I mean I describe myself as a servant leader that I'm there for them I try to do a lot of fun stuff to build our team because I understand to me that the team is really the important part of your work as a team it's not one individual I don't do one thing I have to have this team of people around me so I hope they would describe me as someone who's fun and willing to be adventurous and to pilot things I call myself the pilot queen if you want to try something let's try it if it's not successful okay we learned something if it is yay so I'm their I'm their champion in their cheerleader too for my team in the grad school yeah I could totally say that what is something you know our listeners a lot of them are Purdue alum a lot of Purdue community people listening what would you want them to know and understand about the grad school I think the most important thing is to understand the value of the work that the students are doing so anytime they hear the name Purdue or anything they hear about the work that we're doing it's because of someone probably in the grad school it's the graduate students that are doing that work that are on the cutting edge of where those disciplines are going and so anything you eat anything you build your tv your battery in your phone the paint that you have on your house the health situation that you may be going through the cancer research the furniture you know the woodworking the furniture that we build or the types of woods or trees or whatever is somebody at Purdue a faculty and a grad student are working on that and that that connection I want to make that tighter that people understand that you may hear about the professor and you may be here about the lab here but behind all of that there's probably a grad student somewhere in that mix that is doing that work and pushing that area of whatever that discipline is forward and and that's important I know we interviewed professor Ruan with his white paint yeah and he had this long list at the end and he was like I just want to thank all these grad students and started saying their names and I I loved that he was giving them a ton of credit as they deserve well then that's what we've been trying to do as and part of my dean job is to say when you interview the faculty member ask about the students that are in there because they probably are that labor behind a lot of that work and it's not just in the STEM disciplines there's you know we have the humanities here are very rich and very well developed and and so those students need to find value in their work and we need to be able to sing the praises of the value of all that work that's done here at Purdue so that people understand it's that whole complex that interdisciplinary part that we all need the social sciences and humanities and the STEM field all work together on many if we don't understand the people part we can understand why the button works on the computer right and so I think that value of that behind what graduate education is because most people don't get that part they just think it's you know they're getting another degree I mean I even had to explain to my parents why I was going to grad school you know why are you school so much longer okay let's see is there a favorite memory that sticks out whether you were a professor in your current role as dean well I think there's two and one the big one it's the commencement it's my favorite part of being a dean and I know a lot of people say that's crazy but it's such a happy time to see families and students who have worked so hard for this they may be the first person and the person who went to college right in their family or even to get a graduate degree to be now be the first one who as they walk across the stage say congratulations doctor so and so and to be able to say as I hood them to give that that's great joy to me I mean I just love that how many times you have a day when everybody's happy it's amazing and then there was a time when I was first going through as dean where I try to advocate for students as I've said that I think that's my biggest role and one of the things I did was to support the cultural centers to provide a grad student to help the cultural center meet the needs of graduate students each of those I'm sitting in a restaurant having lunch and the waitress came up as we were getting ready to depart and giving me the bill and I had a little folded up pieces of paper and gave me that piece of paper and she recognized me I hadn't ever met the individual and when I got out of the restaurant I opened it up and it was like you know thank you Dr. Mason for all that you do for graduate students and the cultural centers as an LGBTQ student this has been really valuable to me and I really appreciate the support and that to me was like whenever I get those kinds of students coming up and say thank you for what you've done it makes all the hard days worthwhile and it's a memory I have that note taped above my desk and I read it often it's one of those things that I try to tell students is keep those good things in a folder and pull it out when you're having a really bad day and it will make it an amazing day because you can go back over those memories of those times that you've helped the student to help them figure out their career goal help them through a problem I was talking to a colleague who's worked with you and she just kept saying Dean Mason is so accepting of everyone and an advocate for everyone why is that important to you when you think about you're encompassing everyone and you're so inclusive of everyone well I think partly comes from growing up and then a big part I think is I've adopted two kids from another culture than mine another race than mine and so making sure that they always we embrace them who they were one of my daughters is gay and to be able to embrace that community to me I want to be able to embrace all the students bring out the best potential of whatever they are and not to put labels on them but to be able to say you'd be the best at who you can be and shine the brightest of who you could be and so I think from my upbringing from that and then in my own family experience I want to make sure that I can help all the students who choose to come to Purdue to be their advocate whatever that might be for them no matter what their discipline is or whatever their background is if there's an issue that I can help them with then that's my job as the dean of the grad school is to represent all of them in their issues so that's awesome thank you for sharing that what advice would you give to today's Purdue grad student take advantage of all the opportunities that you have we you know so many students get so deep into the weeds and that's what we're kind of trained as graduate students is to get down into the weeds of that question that we're asking and what does it mean and all of that but we have to come back up every once in a while for air and this institution this town this community has so much to offer you as an individual and to be that complete individual to grow out all those skills that you have you know you ought to talk about all the little things that you want to put in your toolbox for the next adventure that comes take advantage of that one it gives you perspective on the thing that you're really the most important the things that you need to do it gives you kind of you can step back from that and get that perspective but you also learn all these other skills that are more important and sometimes even more important getting the job it won't be the degree that gets you the job everyone expects when you get a degree from a big institution like Purdue with excellent reputation that you're going to have the expertise in that training area you're going to be good at that then they're not going to question that it's all those other skills that come that are important as an individual that you may go work for a company or an institution or the government or whatever that you're going to bring to the plate and now is the time to continue to build those other skills and that's a role I think the graduate school needs to play and that we try to play and so step back take advantage of all the things that Purdue and I think a lot of students don't know all the things that are there because they never come up to the surface matter of fact we're doing a campaign this fall but did you know about all the things that you can take advantage of at Purdue as a grad student what would you say to someone who's considering and you know their next giant leap is attending grad school so ask a lot of questions it's really critical that you get in with a team a major professor a department that is going to match what you need everybody needs things differently different types of mentoring different types of assistance so first do the self-study of yourself and understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and then ask all those questions of the place that you're going go visit talk to the students that are in the program talk to the faculty tour the campus do you get a sense that this is where I belong for the next few years and maybe take some risks take and go to a place that I don't think I ever you know I'm from the coast I don't think I ever want to live in the Midwest try it out it's not forever you can try it out see if you like it and if you don't you can always go back to the coast right get out of your comfort zone get out of your comfort zone and enjoy it I think the community has a lot to offer and so does the university so check that out when you're going so that you make sure you get the right match what role has Purdue played in your life would you say oh my gosh professionally of course they gave me a job which was great and they've kept me in a job which what was awesome but I think the Purdue itself is the opportunity to explore both my research passions that I wanted that flexibility that I could be at an institution like this there were tons of research opportunities and resources available to me as a faculty member to be able to explore the questions that were fascinating to me and my students that was and then as a community it's given me the support to do the things that I like as an individual to explore the things that I like what I like to do in my spare time and the cultural aspects so they have opportunities that I can where I can volunteer my time it's been a great community for that so that I felt supported with that network in town and you've lived here 30 years 30 plus years yeah what does that Boilermakers spirit mean to you I think it's the can-do kind of attitude that Boilermakers have I find that when I talked to both undergraduates and graduate students it's that that we're at an amazing place and we we're going to we're going to solve these problems they're tackling some of the biggest problems that the world is facing and they're doing it with like we're going to figure this out and I think that's one of the things that Boilermakers do is we face the challenge we figure it out and then we take the next step I love that that's perfect um are there any other you know grad school opportunities that you want to highlight for us yeah I think there's a couple that I would say that a lot of people don't realize so a lot of students are able to do paid internships they go and they do internships with big companies that obviously can pay them and they can get that on the job experience but the grad school has opportunities for students who can want to do unpaid internships so we have a program called the Boiler Works program which they can apply to and then we give them financial support to cover what they would need for living expenses to get through this internship and then they can help local communities so there may be nonprofits in the area that would benefit from a student's expertise and they get real life experience so this is great town-gown relationship that we can help I think that's a great one innovated an opportunity for students to write an article that they can write about their research in non-technical terms that goes out to all our alumni and that opportunity for our alumni to be able to connect with students and bring back that experience of what is it like to be in that career and how did you take what you learned in graduate school and apply it to that career maybe you had some turns and twists and turns of your own right and you're now find yourself what is it that you did how did you find that path and can you give advice back to our students so an opportunity to come back and engage with our student population sure tell us about the graduate parents support network one of the things that's unique about graduate students is of course they're older they're a little older than undergrads right and you're wanting to start your family and so many people come back to graduate school and you're married or you're starting your family and you're young kids and now you're trying to balance kids and work and teaching and research and all of that and so on the GPSM we started when we could take this graduate talk to a graduate student that had a kid and she says I'm struggling to find a support system to be able to connect with other people that are have kids and want that and so we started this organization through the grad school and this network allows graduate students who have families to be able to find a way to find other people with families and support each other so it may be just a social network that they can connect through social outings but it also could be where they can do toy exchange or clothing exchange or advice what they're going to do and so that was hard during COVID because people were all isolated but now that we're back we'll be bringing the opportunities for them to get together and they bring a unique life experience to each other and then they can also support each other like I've got to teach this night and I don't have a sitter and I'll take your kids if you take mine and then you can I'll cover you when you do your final exam and so it's just an opportunity to connect with people to create that sense of community with individuals that are suffering through the same things that's a great idea well is there anything else you want to share with our listeners? You've been a delight thank you I think to understand that there's tremendous value in what the graduate students do in this community and if you ever are riding a bus or you see someone with a Purdue t-shirt and one of the things I know when I travel all over the world if you see someone in Purdue to ask them are they a grad student and what was their connection and to ask them about their research ask them questions about what they're doing and they're answering some amazing questions and take that opportunity to really dive in and have a cup of coffee over what that student is doing you'll find there are amazing people here at Purdue from all over the world 40% of our students are international so we have this wonderful community of individuals that are ready and ready to talk about their work that's incredible well thank you so much for joining us it was it was amazing you're welcome thanks it was fun


Hey girl friends, I'm Bianca Renee and you're watching Bianca Renee today and today I'm coming to you live from the shower I'm gonna film this whole video in the shower. So excuse the bathroom echo, but we're gonna do a little Conditioner battle today and wanting to do a video on my favorite conditioners But I have so many that I like that I don't want to leave anybody out So I kind of have to go back and like reuse everything But I want to wash my hair once a week so that could take some time So while I'm experimenting with some of my favorite conditioners once again I thought I might do a little live battle so you guys can see what conditioners I'm reusing again So I asked all of you guys to vote on Instagram which conditioners you wanted to go head-to-head and you guys chose The diva curl one condition decadence conditioner Versus the not-your-mothers curl talk three and one conditioner This is gonna be low-key a high-end versus like drugstore product And I'm really gonna put these two to the test and compare everything that you need to know about both of them So without further ado, let's let the battle begin Let's do this. It is obviously Wash day and as you can see my hair is very tangled so I'm gonna be looking for a conditioner with a lot of slip Victim number one. I mean Contest number one is the diva curl one condition decadence This is supposed to be the conditioner that you use from diva curl for the curliest of textures This bottle does have a little push top Which is my preference when it comes to conditioners in the shower I think it's just easiest to dispense this bottle is 12 fluid ounces and is sold for $24 and it also has in big writing right on the front. It's 100% sulfate paraben silicone free Our next competitor is the not your mother's curl talk three and one conditioner It's a three and one conditioner meaning it could be used as a leave-in a rinse out or a co-wash This one is also 12 fluid ounces, but it's only $7 on the back. You'll see that it's sulfate paraben silicone free This bottle has a pump which is a little bit harder to use in the shower If you don't have any type of shelf, especially when filming but let's get started now I did already wash my hair with the horisos curls hydrating shampoo I thought I should use a different brand so I'm not biased to any of our competitors to use something different And of course, it's sulfate free, but now I'm grabbing my diva curl one condition decadence conditioner I'm gonna use you know a good amount not too much. I'm only using it on one side now to be completely honest The very first time I use this conditioner. I actually didn't like it But what I was doing was scrunching it all up to the top of my head rubbing it around Wondering when my tangles weren't disappearing, but then I realized I was applying it wrong and then everything changed The best way to apply this conditioner or any conditioner in general is to smooth it down your hair You'll quickly notice that all the tangles will just fall down toward your ends And then every piece of hair is getting a little bit of moisture It's probably time for me to get a trim so it's a little bit harder to detangle up the bottom But I'm gonna add a little bit more conditioner to those ends That's used with the driest parts of our hair and that way all those little tangles can just smooth on away Ta-da all Tangle-free my curls are moisturized I was able to tangle without any silicones or harsh chemicals and now this side is complete. Oh I forgot to talk about the smell the diva curl decadence Kind of smells like Play-Doh. I Mean, yeah Play-Doh. It doesn't smell bad, but also doesn't have like a super floral or like You know exciting smell but doesn't bug me and it doesn't linger So if you're sensitive to smells it doesn't last very long and here's the amount of shedding from finger to tangling Now let's grab the not-your-mothers curl talk three in one conditioner The curl talk is probably my favorite not-your-mothers line for obvious reasons But this one does have the pump top which as you can see is kind of a struggle Especially when trying to film this conditioner has a much thicker consistency than the diva curl decadence and it also smells Amazing. I love the smell the entire curl talk line. It's kind of like a fruity like light scent But it is a lot thicker as you guys can see going to rub this together and smooth it down my hair Just like I did for the other side I've also noticed that all the not-your-mothers conditioners kind of have the same consistency So if you're a fan of one of them, you'll probably be a fan of all of them Just read the front of the bottle to see which hair type that particular conditioner or shampoo will work best for now back to the detangling I am going to smooth it through and I do think that this kind of feels initially more moisturizing just because it is so much thicker, but I don't know the diva curl decadence might have a little bit better slip But for being more than three times the price. It's not that drastic of a difference So as you can see I was still able to finger detangle with ease usually if I can't finger detangle and I have to grab a brush That's how you know that the conditioner doesn't have enough slip for me But I'm now completely detangled and you can see that my curls are kind of more clumped together And that is because this is a thicker conditioner If you like bigger curls or your hair is more dense or thicker You might like the not your mother's better whereas if your hair is fine thin or low porosity You might like the diva curl decadence better and here's my shedding on this side basically the same amount So here is the not your mother's side and here is the diva curl side What do you guys think comment below if you have a preference because you've already tried both of them Or which one do you think looks better one of the benefits of the three-in-one conditioner is that at this point? I can either rinse it out or I could leave it in and go straight to my styler or I could use it as a co-wash meaning not using shampoo in between wash days Technically you could do the same thing with the diva curl decadence It just doesn't say that anywhere on the bottle But I know many stylists I recommend that you just leave it in as I leave in as well I like to do one quick pass of water through my hair Just so I don't have too much product on my hair Especially because I have low porosity hair which is more prone to product buildup and after I washed out everything My hair still feels moisturized a very good thing to check for when trying out different conditioners The diva curl side feels very moisturized. It looks shiny and defined Whereas the not your mother's side also feels just as moisturized also shiny also defined This just kind of proves that you don't have to spend a lot of money on high-end products to get good results If you enjoyed this video and want me to do more battles between different products Make sure you leave a comment down below. Let me know which two products want me to put to the test next If you enjoyed this video, make sure to give me a thumbs up and subscribe I post two new videos every week once on Friday and once on Sunday And make sure to follow me on Instagram at Ms. Bianca Renee. I'll see you guys next time. Thanks for watching Bianca Renee today


Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the executive editor for Data Diversity. We would like to thank you for joining this month's installment of the Data Diversity Webinar Series, The Heart of Data Modeling, moderated by Karen Lopez. And this month's series is sponsored by Embarkadero. Today Karen will be discussing the best data modeler as a lazy data modeler, and just a couple of points to get us started. Due to a large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we'll be collecting them by the Q&A section in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions by Twitter using hashtag heart data. You can also access the chat section in the top right corner of your screen to engage with Karen and each other throughout this session. As always, we will be sending a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the recording of this session and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce our speaker for today, Karen Lopez. Karen is a senior project manager and architect at InfoAdvisors. She has 20-plus years of experience in project and data management on large multi-project programs. Karen specializes in the practical application of data management principles. She is a frequent speaker, blogger, and panelist. Karen is known for her fun and sometimes snarky observations on data and data management. Mostly she just wants everyone to love their data. And with that, and you can also follow Karen at Data Chick on Twitter if you don't already. And with that, I will turn it over to Karen to get us started. Hello and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Thank you for that. How can people follow DataVercity on Twitter? At DataVercity, of course. Perfect. Perfect. And DataVercity.net, right? Yes. On the intertube. Perfect. Well, I wanted to thank everyone for showing up. I hope you're having a beautiful summer or winter day, depending on where you are. I know we're having one here. You know, coming up with topics for these things. This year, we're trying to do things that are more about the core, the heart of data modeling. And I think for summer topics, it's good to have something that is full of snark yet very useful. So I'm hoping we found the right sort of level of both of those today. And yes, I'd love for you to tweet and share today's event. You can copy me at DataChick and use heart data, which is our hashtag for this webinar series. Shannon went to a great bio that I gave her about me. But basically, I want you to love your data, and I want to confess that I'm very, very lazy.  But I want to know how lazy you are. And now we always go through this is like a great test. So pulling. I want to ask you if what sort of automation features have you used in your own model tools? So macros, naming standards, templates, but mostly automation, scripts that you've written, any of those things. I want to hear about it. So have you used them? Have you used them and given up? You used a lot of them, and you have a whole development team and projects and projects managers dedicated to your doing that.  Last chance for your votes. Kind of see the initial returns. So that's kind of interesting. So what I'm seeing on my screen, because I don't get to see what you're seeing, is that a few of you, 28 of 135 here, said, no, you're not using any. 13 of you said you tried and gave up. 41 says we used them a lot. And one of you said you have a whole development team dedicated to that, and I think we're all very jealous. 52 of you were so lazy, you didn't even vote on the poll. I want to give you a gold star for that. So now the next poll question is, have you shared any of the scripts, macros, naming templates, do-dads that you have developed for your data models? And so yes, you have. No, you're not allowed to. Don't know where to share them. Or no, not at all. And we're going to talk about this whole sharing of scripts and models. I should have added another poll that asked, would you like to use other people's scripts and have them? That would have been a good one. And then I could have done the analysis of people aren't sharing them, but they all want others to share. So you get about 20 seconds to jump in. And it looks like 34 of you have shared them before outside your organization. 12, you aren't allowed to. 11, about the same number. Don't know where to share them. 40 of you haven't shared them at all. Just don't share them. And almost 60 of you just had no answer. Again, a gold star. So some of the comments that people are saying is you haven't given up, but you don't use them often enough and you share them internally only, or that you've used other people's macros. I use other people's macros all the time. So it turns out that a lot of you are lazy. That's good, especially given how we're using that today.  So my goal for today is to make all of you the lazy data modelers, as well as to share your laziness throughout. We talked about this.  I'm going to attempt to do some demos and screenshots and whatnot of some of the automation features in some tools. Of course, we only have one hour for this whole thing, so this isn't going to be a how-to. I'm going to show you some demos of the macros that I've developed and I'm going to explain sort of the reason I had to do a macro and not use some other feature or not sit through and slog through an 800 entity data model and do all this stuff manually and give you some backstory about it. And then, of course, 10 tips for being more lazy. But why this topic? So I started out, and if you're experienced like I am, you know that data modeling tools, you know, for the longest time, we couldn't even, and even still in some tools, you can't just say, okay, I've got this beautiful data model with my 100 subject areas. Now just go print all the nice beautiful diagrams from my tool, all of them, all at once. Just send that job to the printer. I'll go wander over and stick another couple of reams of paper in the printer. But just go do that. No, the way you have to do it in a lot of tools is open each subject area or submodel. Go to file and print and then settle your settings and then print it. Hope that you have enough video memory on your really small under-spec work machine and hope for the best. Well, I was a lazy person and I decided my first foray into writing macros was figuring out a way to automate that so that I didn't have to do it. And I'd love for you to share in the chat some examples of ways and ways that you thought of of being lazy, either out of frustration or because you got tired of messing up doing 100 of the same change over and over again. So you can quote me on this, the title to this webinar, the best data modeler is a lazy data modeler. And in today's session this sort of came about, it's a thing I've been using for a while, but it also came about from a blog post on my website called the best data modeler is a lazy data modeler. And you can go read up on a little bit of a rant that I have there on why people should be more lazy, but most of the content in that post has made it into this webinar. So this is what most people think when I say I'm a lazy data modeler and why I want to be one. And these are just examples of things I do in my life when I'm not preparing data models. They're things I do while I'm not cutting and pasting sheets of paper and taping them all together to make one giant printout. What I'm doing while I'm not going through and adding a create date, modified date, modified user to the end of all 800 tables in my data model, what I do in, let's just say, the life outside of modeling. Now not all of this is fun.  But it's not just about having free time, just to be lazy. It's about focusing the activities that I do as a data modeler to make better data models. So in a lot of my webinars, I've mentioned that I think most data modeling is more about forensics than creating things. I'm trying to be like Quincy MD. I'm talking to users, trying to get to the truth. I'm investigating data. I'm looking at source systems. I'm mapping source systems to target systems. Those are the hard things.  I want to provide better service to my customers. I want to build better quality data models, data models that are more accurate, that reflect the requirements as we need them today, as well as our near-term requirements. I want to build flexible data models. I want to build data models that perform well. I want to have time to learn about my target DBMSs, so I want better databases. I want to provide better support to my teams. I don't want to be an obstacle to them, and I want to give them all the pieces of the data model, and I want to tailor it to their needs. Not just generate one report or one diagram of the model, but tailor diagrams and reports, one for the DBAs, one for the devs, printouts for the users that are different than for the DBAs, but I can't do all that manually.  So that's my goal for that. So a lazy data modeler is a better data modeler, but that doesn't mean we're doing this to avoid work.  But when I talk to a lot of modelers, either in sessions or on my projects, one of the things I've heard is that modelers aren't using a lot of the automation techniques. So the first one I hear is there's such a huge learning curve, I don't have time to learn it. And we're going to talk about that one in a minute. The second one is I'm not a programmer. I'm not a programmer either. I think I was a programmer for a good 18 months at the start of my career, and I knew I didn't want to do that. A lot of people don't know that there are automation features that they can use and automate away a lot of their junk data modeling time. And by junk data modeling time, I mean that time of literally the examples I gave, adding the same attributes to every entity. Responding to a bulk change request, like to rename customer to client, to what else, to change all of our VARCHAR data types to in VARCHAR data types. All of those things, those tasks, are something that a computer can do not only faster, but close to perfectly. Whereas humans, it will take a long time and it will be error prone and we will miss out on things. The other issue that I really want to put a lot of weight on today is that no one shares their scripts or their macros or whatever it is that we're talking about for automation. And this is, as the years progress, this has become more and more of a problem. And I work with a lot of other communities, DBAs, devs, even business analysts, that share their content, like their non-proprietary content like crazy. And I think there's a lot of myths going around in the data modeling community or sort of people stuck in a mindset of, you know, that we haven't got into this sort of mindset of open source and sharing and common licensing to make everyone's jobs easier, which means lazier. So people don't know they can automate things because maybe automation came in your tool sets and even though our tools have been around for 20-some years, the automation features are either fairly recent or they keep changing and being upgraded or they're hidden away someplace else or they only work outside the tool. So maybe people have never even clicked on that feature or gone there or they went there and they saw a bunch of code and some very oddly named list of things and were perplexed. They had no idea what to do when they clicked on something or they ran a script because a sample script came with the tool. It broke their model and they never want to come back to working with the automation or they tried to do it.  This is common to anything that's new and if we talk to accidental data modelers who were told they needed to do a data model and were handed over or went or ER studio or power designer or one of those tools and told go do a model, they'd experience this exact same thing. Maybe they've done a data model before by reverse engineering a database and they got a nice diagram and they think of data models as diagrams but we know they're not diagrams. We know that it's a whole application and that the diagrams are mostly just a print out or just a view of the data model or a way of interacting with the data model. So these exact statements that we data modelers say about automating our data modeling are the same ones that people who automate things say about our data modeling tools and yet we look at them and say what do you mean it was too hard? This stuff's easy. You just drag this. You click on this. You do this. This is where the two sets of skill sets can come together and work together to make each other's lives better. So yes, there's a learning curve but one of the great things is most of the tools come with samples and we can access shared scripts if we're sharing them. You can build the equivalent of a Hello World script that's very easy to do and once you do that, you just start expanding on it. I think you could spend 20 minutes a day or a week learning a bit more or you could spend 20 minutes a day or a week making a business case to get a developer or scripter to help you with these things. You could get some training or you could join an online community or forum to help you work you through how these scripts work. So here's some of the community resources you have. So Embarcadero, thank you Embarcadero for sponsoring this webinar. They've just created a new community site on their website. So the old one which was called EDN is now being transitioned over to community.embarcadero.com and there are forums where you can go ask questions where you can ask specifically, I'm looking for a script to do this, has anyone done this before or which of the sample scripts and there's a lot of sample scripts that come with your studio, which ones they were. Irwin also has online communities at irwin.com and the same sort of thing and a lot of the people posting here are people that we've all known in the Irwin community for a long time. Irwin was one of the first communities to have online communities. I used to host these online communities for all of these tools and that sort of died off as the vendors took up the slack and provided their own communities. But you can get macros or macros support here. SAP, which owns Power Designer, also has a community for Power Designer. So this is part of their formal SAP community network where you can go ask questions and get help. You can have a community in a news group which you can access through some Google properties. This has probably been around the longest and probably where you could find some great automation tips for Power Designer. So one of the feedback I got from a couple of my webinars has been that I'm not pausing to take questions and it's a lot harder since we're not doing panels anymore. I used to be able to multitask that. If you need to catch up on the coffee and the mosquito repellent, we'll do that in the after show. So there is a question about how does Erwin handle automation like this? I'm going to show you some examples of those things in a minute. Auk is a powerful programming language for text processing. There's all kinds of things you can do with the output of a data modeling tool. Also a great tip from Jason says from a Unix professor, if you're going to do something more than once write a script, if you think you only have to do it once, write a script. Yes, I've heard that one before. That's awesome. Also some comments about some tools are very difficult and others make it easy. You know, the funny thing is, is that depending on your skill set, one person's easy is another person's awkward. So I'm definitely going to address that as I show some of the examples. Any forms or script samples for InfoSphere data architect? I'm sure there are. I didn't look into that. But I'll try to follow up with that afterwards. And so while I was looking at your questions in the chat, if you actually have questions for me, try to put them in the Q and A section because depending on how much chat you guys get going, I might not see all the questions. So the other objection that people have is I'm not a programmer. And I say great, not a problem because some tools require or pretty much demand that you have real application development skills, tool sets that you understand what multiple inheritance and threading and object isolation and all these things are. Some tools just require scripting level skills. You can use some tools to record keystrokes and then generate a script. So in ER Studio, which I'll be showing you some of my macro, some of the functions that I put into the script, I did by using a Microsoft Office feature that allows you to record your steps as you do something in Excel, like intertext into a cell and then color it and then maybe underline it and center it. You can record a script in the Microsoft scripting language, which is Visual Basic based, of course, VBA based. And then that will give you kind of the general syntax for the Office objects and the Office automation that then you can incorporate into your tools macros and you might have to slightly change the syntax. But generally the syntax in Office that you might use in your data modeling tool will be either exactly the same or very similar. All the tools come with sample macros and scripts and some of the sample macros and scripts and we'll look at it, just kind of do some really scary, silly things. But I think they're there to expose you to the concepts of selecting a model, opening a model, choosing things, selecting things and only doing actions on the objects that are selected and iterating through all the diagrams and then all the tables and then all the attributes and then all the relationships. Those kind of provide a framework for how you can automate some of your lazy tasks. And then some tool vendors provide places for organizations and people to share their macros and scripts. And all of these together can help solve this, but I'm not a programmer because I'm not a programmer either. I don't share the scripts. I talked about that. This community has a long and infamous and sad history of not sharing scripts.  I've tried many times in my online communities to set up macro exchange points. I know Embarcadero has, I know CA has. I'm pretty sure that SAP does. We build these places, but no one comes and shares their scripts. The way the rest of the world does it is through online collaboration things like GitHub or even private scripting areas within your organization, whether it's SharePoint or JIRA or some of our Team Foundation server, places where you put all your scripts together and share them. So I understand that there are legal issues and that people are concerned about sharing their work. Certainly you wouldn't want to be mailing your data model around outside your company if that was considered proprietary information. But there's kind of this, it's well recognized in other parts of the IT community that non-proprietary scripts that do things in a very generic way, like backup and restore a database. That's not proprietary. And there's really only about, there's probably less than a dozen ways that one could do that. In fact, there's even some IP law that says that these scripts aren't even works of art because they're not complex enough and they're not a creative work of art. They're just scripts. And I think that these legal obstacles that I keep hearing about, of course if your boss says you can't share them, then you can't share them. But I think people are assuming that everything that they do at work can't be shared. And yet I see all these other communities have been doing this for decades and not just open source companies, but sharing scripts widely. They blog about them. They release them in a Creative Commons license that allows other people to improve them. And we're going to talk about this incremental approach in a minute. This is where we need to be. It's time for data modelers to join this century. And I would so love if like 100 people would go tweet that right now. It's time for us to join this century. So what kinds of lazy does Karen think you could do? Well, I think of scripting and automation really in two different buckets. There are probably more of these. There's internal model crud. So things we do inside a model to create, update, and delete objects and properties. So naming standards was the original automation of being able to automatically generate, say, physical names based on the logical names for creating new columns, such as what people call the audit columns, the create date, the modified date, the last updated by reason codes, adding IDs to everything. That can be highly automated. And then there's some more I'm going to show you in a bit for applying indexes and constraints. And just, you know, there's hundreds of different things, types of things inside your model is not thousands. And most of these automation interfaces allow you to do them that way. But then there's external to your model productivity. So things that you can do, like I said, generating a diagram, a image file of every subject area, printing them all, generating custom reports, making backups of your model, managing all the supporting files like a naming standards template or a forward engineering template or configurations or standard data models or templates that you use. And the more you can automate about these things, the more likely they'll be consistent either across your models or across your modelers and your workstations. So there's some automated naming standards that people can do. And most of these have examples that I call metadata stuffing. And I blogged about this once.  So by metadata stuffing, I mean if your shop says that every table has to be prefixed with TBL underscore and that the first two characters of every table name have to be an abbreviation for the subject area for which it belongs to. And then even in this blog post, I talk about a real-life example where we had to have a three-letter ID of the DBA who was responsible for doing all the work on that table. And I'll let that sink in for a minute. That's metadata stuffing. So I'm not a fan of these naming schemes, but we do have naming schemes that we like to apply, like naming every view with view or V in front of it or all dimensions this way and all facts that way. You want to automate this because, again, it's something that takes a lot of time and needs to be explicitly 100% accurate so things that humans are terrible at and that computers are great at. But you might have to deal with physical constraints of your DBMS. So the common one, Oracle and DB2, only allowing 30-some characters in a name. But your logical names, you know, you've made them free and easy and open and long so that you get names like retail transaction line item modifier event, and now you have to wedge that into 32 characters. Or worse, even 18 or three. You can apply these constraints either with the native features of your tools. So lots of tools allow you to do that or through some other type of script that would allow you to, you know, change all spaces to underscores or remove all spaces or change any special characters to spaces or underscores. So there's all kinds of things you can do with automation and all kinds of tools have these features that are built in and they're fairly similar, not quite exactly the same and how they do it. But sometimes the naming tools aren't enough and I'm going to show you some examples of that. So let's look at some tools. So CA Irwin Data Modeler. It has a full-blown API object model where you can build a completely separate client to do automation against your internal tools and the external typechains. They have active scripting. It's based on visual basic, so VBA visual basic for applications. And it's documented online. If you search for Irwin API reference guide, I don't get a support.ca. I have hard time finding things for the right version of the tool. So I just search for API reference guide version nine or 9.6 or whatever version of the tool that you're working with. And I find that an easier way to find this resource. There's also an Irwin's knowledgebase.com and in this base they have this Irwin API tutorial spreadsheet. And I think I can show that to you. So that basically is a spreadsheet, but it's not just a spreadsheet and I have these clickable things disabled right now because I can show you how behind those clickable things are, I should know how to change this. So that you can see some of what happens here. Basically there's code embedded into that spreadsheet that goes and does any of the things that are clickable on there. This is code that has been distributed as sample code and like I said it's embedded into this spreadsheet that does things like delete objects from your model, hardened data types, find certain physical names, rename some attributes. Now this is not how I think of automating my model, but certainly you can think about how you could embed some automation features into a report that you distributed for instance something like having a user go through the objects and potentially being allowed to update definition names or definitions or something like that. So this is intended as a sample resource for automating in Erwin. So that's one resource for you. So what happens in SAP? So SAP, sorry, in Power Designer they have ability to automate things using whatever languages you have, Java, VBScript, C, other languages. It can be executed inside the tool, but because these are text files just like the other one, just like in Erwin they can be searched outside the tool and you can go to infocenter.sidebase.com and search on power designer, macros and automation. So some examples from their documentation is, and you're going to see something that looks a lot like this. So this is something that is getting the current model and getting the objects in it and it's going to do something throughout. So it's going to scan a script and it's a visual basic script. So embarkadero has a macro language inside the tool based on sacks basic that is very similar to VBScript. So when I brought up before that some people find it something very difficult to work with is some olden experience and one of the very first programming languages I ever learned was basic. So when I go to use VBScript or sacks basic, that's how I think about automation. It's how I think about working with code. See I told you I'm olden experience. But that's very easy for me. But for people who are used to working in less procedural language, less scripty like languages, it's actually harder for them to work in there and they're going to be naturally drawn to a more object oriented. So someone saying in the link it doesn't appear to be live anymore. So I just captured that today. Maybe if you search for, so that's probably what ended up in my URL that was much longer. So if you just search for power designer macro and automation, you'll find the documentation for power designer. I believe they're at version 16 or something. So I'll try to update that link, get you the proper link before we distribute the slide. Sorry about that. But within barcadero, so the macro language is there. The documentation is inside the ER studio tool. That doesn't mean there aren't resources probably outside of it, but the documentation is there. So let me see if anyone else has any questions before I go. Nope. Doesn't look like it. I'm going to pop over to, let's start with ER studio. So what I have in ER studio is a data model. So this is an adventure works data model. You don't need to read the model right here. I have my usual objects all on the left-hand side. But the macro and automation features are down here. And basically they are, I have macros that I have written, almost all of these have been derived from the sample ones that come when you install the tool. You just have to go find them but I'll show you one. I'll show you sort of the interface. So you can have this area where it's going to show me things. You can have multiple tabs open and the macro language is right in here. You can edit it in here. I tend to use another editor. But this one's pretty good. So I define a bunch of variables and it iterates through. It gets me the active diagram and then I get the active model. So the model I have open. And then it figures out whether I've got a logical or physical one. And then I have to fill in where I want these images. So what this macro does is it generates a PNG file which is like a JPEG image of every data model. And it names it according to the diagram which is kind of the subject area and the submodel name, the subject area name. Now one of the issues that I needed to solve as I built this iteratively. The first time I built this I just had it go generate a PNG and it was just named like one, two, three, four, five of all the things. And I thought well that's not a good thing. I want to put a proper name to the image file so that when I put these out on a shared file server that I know what it is without having to open it up. And then I found out well we have these beautiful background colors and that makes it harder to print and harder to read. So I don't want to do that especially if people were sending it to a black and white printer. So it goes through and I can set the various properties that would normally have to set up in a wizard of what the image quality was, what type it was, what size it was going to be and everything. So if I go through and in most of these tools when you automate the undo isn't going to be available to you. So that's definitely true. So what's happening is this used to be something that would literally take me an hour in a data model that had a hundred submodels to go do this. But now what I've done is created something that I had a custom name. So kitty demo adventure works is the name of my model and log means logical not physical and then it's got the name of the submodel or subject area and it pulls its version number from the version property on there. And then I can go see, hold on, let me go find this. So imagine this was a shared drive and what you were doing was every day printing out an image where anyone who wanted to see your data models could go do self service to go get an image because this used to be a real interruption time suck for me as people would come in as could I get a print out of the employee data model and I'd want to do that for them. Now of course we have portals, we have ways of generating reports that have these in here. But this is to supplement and compliment that where people just want to go and have a print out. They don't need to have to go log in, they can just go find something. Now the other thing I can do as I'm going to talk about later at the end is I can have this macro run as a job and just run every morning or every night and print out the working copies of my data models of the ones I'd like to share.  So there's other, I can go find columns and tables that have spaces in their name and the reason I needed that for one project is yes, I can use a naming standard for that, but this was solving a specific problem of people who were creating new things, other modelers who had a different naming standard because they had a different target DBMS and we kept ending up with names that didn't match our standard and our standard was camel case or initial cap case and I could quickly just search for problem things and this was a problem for us. We also had some DB2 specific issues about generated expressions which are calculated fields where we had to use all fields that have certain suffix on them. We wanted to automatically generate a really complex calculation for them, calculated field and expression so it was removing some special characters but not all special characters, what we considered special characters and also turning them to all uppercase and that's what the uppercase thing did. One of the more complex things we had to do was automatically create indexes for certain types of attributes such as foreign keys or primary keys. Now in a lot of tools that something that you can have automatically done at creation but if you reverse engineer a model or if you've compared in something it doesn't necessarily mean that those things get created but you can't just run a splat type script that just recreates them because what do you do if there's multiple foreign keys on a table you don't want them all renumbered and renamed all the time because they ended up being in a different order in the object model of your data model. So it needed to be a little bit more complex than a naming standard template or a naming standard utility. And what we've done is it goes through our entire model and goes through all of the columns and for foreign key columns it creates an index using not just our naming standard but to preserve the names that are already there in case there are duplicates so if there's already a name we don't want to touch it but if there's more than one we want it to increment so you can see we have one where we a table where we have at least seven of these things so we don't want to go back and rename all the indexes. That's something you just can't do with an automatic naming feature. So the other things that I like and this is highly borrowed from existing macros that were done at embarkadero years and years ago is exporting some metadata into my Excel is stopped. Now what this is doing is it's pulling just the stuff I want to report out of my model in the format I want it and I can choose the colors I want and yes there's some native features. I can export metadata out of a model using some reporting features or export to CSV but then every time I wanted to publish this to something then I would have to bring in that CSV data, format it according to the way but now with a macro I can do things like add the project or the company logo, the times, pull the things that I really think are relevant and not just all of them I can choose how they're described. Now there are things that I can do to just customize this view in a way that maybe the modeling tool vendors don't want to express it but maybe we have unique ways by calling something mandatory or optional versus null or not null or required or not required. I've also used this on one project to produce reports so that some of the characteristics were done in another language so instead of saying mandatory or optional I was able to say in the language what they were. Now one of the things about using macros that work this way in most tools is that this is very fragile. Like if I started working on this Excel spreadsheet it would just start printing where I put the cursor. Some of these macros are things that you have to set it and literally take a break. Go have coffee or go work on something else. So this isn't quite the same thing as a native feature but the tradeoff of getting exactly what you want out of it can be really good. Now one of the reasons why a lot of us have started automating some of these Excel reports is that while most tools have beautiful reports that you can extract out, they're kind of known for having a lot of white space and a lot of pages. Being able to customize things allows me to compact the data and also to just do exactly what I want in the format and the content that I want. So I think I can stop this now. But you can see while this is very similar to the sample macros that came out I was able to customize it the way I wanted it. So here's a really short example of I just want to quickly, this is a selection one sorry. I'm not even paying attention to my own documentation. This allows you to pick some entities and selectively produce just their table like this particular macro, prints the tables are selected and their definitions. Very quickly something I wanted to do and I didn't have to go through a port generation thing and exclude a bunch of stuff and it didn't take me 15 pages to print it out. I'm saving trees as well as mosquitoes. But my goal here wasn't to show you about these specific macros but to talk about problems that I had that were taking a lot of my time that were impacting my ability to service my end clients and my end clients were both users and project managers and business analysts and DBAs and devs by developing these macros. And I've improved on some of these macros over time to get it to do what I want to do. You notice my macros aren't that complex. There are some over here in the sample macros that have a full blown interface where you can choose which files you want and what drive you want it to be on, how you want to name things. And if I had more time I'd add more of those features. One of the key things about working with automation is to just think of it as something you're going to build incrementally. You're going to leverage other people's work if they'll share it with you and constantly make it better. Once I sat down and decided I needed to develop all these macros and do it all at once and make them perfect at once, I'd probably still be sitting here months later which would keep me from doing it at all. So that was ER studio. In Irwin, I told you they have this API interface. I showed you the sample that they have with Excel. But just like in most tools, the number one way we get exposed to automation is through just sort of functions and functionality. So for instance, you know, I can look at how I want to physically name a table based on its entity name. But if I wanted to expand on it, I could do that. And I could say, you know, I want to add the words kitty table at the end because I'm metadata stuffing. I want everyone to know that kitty that Karen worked on the store table. That's a crazy one. But maybe I want heaven forbid if you work in the shop that requires you to have the table name prefixed to every column name. You don't want to do that manually. You want to do that in an automated fashion. So that's where these physical naming structures as well as sort of the naming standard templates come into play. And also hardening of them. So the other thing to think about is as you run these macros and especially use these naming functions inside of tools is sometimes when you set a physical name, no matter what happens after, you don't want it to be reset, especially after you've already gone into production. So you can do something called hardening in most tools where you say even though I created this dynamically named object, at some point I want to break that link so that if I change my naming standard or if we just decide now we're going to allow a few more characters, you definitely don't want to go change all these physical names. You usually won't want to go change all these physical names because the development and the migration cost of doing that will be significant and you will not be loved and valued. So those were some examples of some automation. I wish we had more time to cover on it more but why I want you to be lazy is to take mindless tasks, anything that computers are great at and humans are bad at and that take a lot of time and automate them because you are hired for your brain, not for your good looks. You need to be spending your time on tasks that involve thinking and analysis and deciding not just click here, click here, click here, click change this, go add these 100 objects. This will give you more time for modeling and not for printing and reporting and it will give you more time to help be a good friend and a good advocate for your developers and DBAs and we all want that. Now I wish I could also spend another hour talking about PowerShell. So PowerShell very quickly is a feature that comes with Windows now I think starting in 2007, definitely in Windows 8. It's a Windows feature that allows you to automate almost anything. So I have PowerShell scripts that I use for creating virtual machines and configuring and installing software and restoring databases, sample databases into them and I use these for my test databases. I use them for training as well. And I have again built the I and other people that I work with have built these scripts to automate both virtual machines and things we do on Windows, both locally and on premises as well as work I do in the cloud in Microsoft Azure. And it allows me to go do a whole bunch of things consistently very quickly. So I can fire up a virtual machine in the cloud. I can install, I can have it have SQL server on it because that's what I work with and install ER studio and get the license key all set up and do a restore of some test databases I use. I can do my testing and then I have another script that goes through and shuts down all my virtual machines and just do that. And setting up a VM takes a few minutes to an hour and I'd rather spend that hour not doing that and not patiently waiting for wizards to go and things to click. Let the computers do the work that they're good at. But just about anything in Windows or Azure that you can do, PowerShell can do. And we joke in some of the communities that I work in that PowerShell is a cult because people start using it for things that go beyond what it was used for. But I could use PowerShell to run a job and a Windows agent or a SQL server agent to, you know, I can have all these options of tasks, of scheduled tasks that I can create. For instance, I could create a scheduled task to go fire up ER studio and run these three macros every morning even if ER studio wasn't running. I can't do that inside ER studio. I can do it because I have a combination of Windows automation, so OS automation together with my modeling tool automation and I can make those all work together. So I have these rules for being lazy. Don't spend your time doing things that a computer is faster and better at. Automation is your friend. Don't try to do it all at once. Don't get crazy. Don't be part of the cult where you're trying to do everything the modeling tool does in a script. So for instance, I've seen people, you know, hand generate all the DDL using the scripting language when they could just use the features of their tool. But I do have some macros that if we had had time I could show you that generated a series of permission grants based on some unique rules that we had. I just generated all of those to a text file. So technically it was DDL. But it wasn't my tables and structures. It was just a bunch of permissions that I wanted to use to grant permissions for like QA users, test users and developers and some read only grants so that every time we went to build a database we had those. And yes, I probably could have done that in a SQL server tool. I could have done it based on a spreadsheet. But I was able to quickly iterate through all my tables and all of my users in my model and generate those scripts just the way I wanted them to be. I want you to focus on mindful things, not mindless ones. Don't be doing junk data modeling tasks. And then finally a really important thing. If you've automated it you must ask your vendors to make this a feature of their tool. So I'm still perplexed why it takes so long to print an image or open up every subject model and do something to it. I think those are some of this automation ought to be built into our tools. So let's summarize a bit. Automating boring tasks are going to make you happier and happier data architects are better data architects. Automating all these mindless things is going to make your boss happier. Automating tasks makes for much more accurate work. If you have to do something 100 times over and over again I'm going to guarantee to you you're not going to do the same thing. Saving time for you and your team members is going to make everyone happier and a happier data model is a happy data model. Learn these automation features. Use them in your tools. Learn some power shell. There's a lot of resources I'm going to show you in a minute. Never run a script on your production models without testing and understanding it completely.  Some of the scripts there are nifty little scripts that you shouldn't just run. The problem with the scripts is a lot of them you can't undo what's been done. A lot of them might cause layout problems with your models even if you could undo them. You need to read through the script, understand what it does even if it came from the vendor because those are samples. They're there for you to learn. They're not there explicitly for you to just run willy-nilly to see what it does. You should ask for developer support if you need that for your tools just like anything else.  You should look at all the activities you do every day all day and question whether they need to be done and if they're mindless boring repeating tasks you should try to automate them. You should free up junk modeling. You should just put that in your status report that you freed up some junk modeling to do mindful things.  So some resources there in the slide I also wrote about and gave a presentation called the best DBA is a lazy DBA which also has some of these features not quite the same. The place you want to go for PowerShell help is right here in the script center. There's videos, tutorials, blogs, funny videos and songs and GitHub which is where I'm going to start putting my scripts that I'm going to share under a shareable license and I hope that you will join me there and also post them to your communities. So find three tasks right now that are junk modeling and start thinking how you could automate them. You're going to go search for some macros. You're going to make it your own and use it. So that's as much as I have for the presentation. I'm going to check here for questions and I asked for spell checking definitions back when it was logic works and only took them 20 years to add it. Yeah. So in a lot of dev tools that I use, I end up having to generate some report into word and do the spell checking there and then it's really difficult because if you have initial case objects it makes it hard but you could just generate the definitions and do spelling and grammar checks that way. And you like my space slipper so do I and I'm wearing them right now actually. They're kind of what I do when I'm lazy. So are there any other questions out there? I don't see any coming in. What that means is that it's probably near time to end the recording but Shannon do you have anything to add? Just want to thank Embarcadero again for sponsoring today's webinar and as always this is fantastic Karen and thanks to our attendees for being so engaged in the chat and everything else so let me turn off the recording for you and just a reminder I will be bringing out the slides and a link to the recording within two business days so for this webinar by end of day Monday.


They actually get lost, huh? No. They have like that piece of tape. They're supposed to be like a line of the aircraft. They just get towed. Or less where they are. But everybody else is weird.