spotlight. So for those of you who are interested in technical careers it's a chance for us to see what is it to be a software engineer or what does it take what do I need to do to become a product manager and we have awesome companies like Onisby, Carousel being represented here. I'd love to invite Amber on the stage and she'll be leading our first session with product managers. So please welcome them. Hello everyone so this is a career spotlight which means that we'll give an overview for each of you that well what's the product manager it looks like and also there are some common questions you may have. So we have Meredith from SC Powers and also yeah also we have Hui from Carousel. So the first question I think that maybe just you can introduce yourself like what you are doing now and what's your role in the company? Sure and I think a lot of people be kind of curious why would SP so SP stands for Singapore Power if you don't know you know we're the ones that provide the lights and the water and the gas here. So you'd be kind of curious why would they be hiring digital product managers. The company is going through a phase of digital transformation right now so my role is to help set up the product practice on the business side and to figure out how we can engage with our customers a little bit better with our brand. So currently I'm a product manager at Carousel so the team that I'm working with we help new users who just joined Carousel become first-time successful sellers because eventually the goal of Carousel which is a mobile marketplace is to help everyone to start selling the things that they have at home left unused so basically that's currently what I do. Because I know your YouTube's background needs a lot of feedback from IT background so I can't know why you choose product manager this role because people think that actually product manager is actually should be from IT background so yeah I well I'm a graduate of sociology and geography I actually wanted to be a teacher badly and then somehow I stumbled into the corporate world and found myself managing projects and pilot rollouts for a payment company called American Express and but I realized that not being able to code or at least I appreciate code helps me give a different light to product management and I think product managers all are generalists that you have to be good to manage you know stakeholders the business you need to know how to bring a product to market you need to know how to manage the product development cycle so you not necessarily need to code but just the process of bringing a product from inception to production and going to market is an important part of the whole product managers role. So for myself I graduated from NUS business school and I don't think getting to being a product manager is kind of like a linear journey so I've been with Carousel for about three plus years and I started out doing customer support so when I started doing customer support you know people write in to complain and things so I kind of understood the users pain points and through that I also worked with the Carousel team then which was quite small about less than 10 people and seeing them work really hard on solving problems for our users really made me really inspired and then after that I went to Silicon Valley for a year to kind of do a bit of like user research and also marketing internship there and it was then I really got like kind of into product and technology and I really saw what other companies were doing there with with technology to solve problems and just coming back I just started to put myself in a product role here at Carousel so I don't think you necessarily have to be technical it's a bonus but just being technically curious so for example like if your team is saying that they need like one week to do this thing you don't necessarily have to know how they are going to do it but as long as you ask questions why can we why are we doing it like this can we consider other alternatives just being curious about how it works would really help yourself become a better product manager yeah and I'll actually add on to that the part on solving problems you need to have a passion to find the solution and to be really curious of how to solve a problem so being customer focused would be a major part of being a product manager as well I found that there are many different paths for you to so the first one is that Meredith is come go to the company as a product related role while Hui is different is coming from like community manager so what's the difference between these two paths the thing which way is better I all I can't say that all roads lead to product managers because I'm sure the engineers in the room also part of the solution but we're all kind of solving the same thing for me project management and delivery it's also part of solving the problem right and I imagine customer support as well yeah I wouldn't say there's a better role but personally I do prefer product management because you get to kind of play a part in making that decision to help roll out solutions that helps solve users problems so that's the part where I feel it's actually more exciting to be in so there's no one prescribed path it's where we found our passions and then it ended up with product so in this case actually you may encourage people to look for the product role directly instead of maybe roll me into the other like to know the products first well I'm sure there a lot of students in the room so you know usually you won't know what you're calling is or you don't know what path is the right path and you would have to test and learn and actually that is a big part of product as well you try something you find what you like about it you learn from it and you evolve in the next role so it's gonna be a ongoing journey and then I mean for me personally it was doing quite a long time of product management I did my own business for a little while and then I went into marketing and then I came back to product because I realized that that is what I wanted to do and that is after quite a few years as well so yeah there is no prescribed I think no prescribed path you try you see what you like about it you tweak and then you move on try again and then you decide you don't have to decide right now I believe a lot of people out there they want to be for the manager so can you just summarize like three members or three trees that you think you want to recruit a product manager you want them to have the treats the characteristics maybe not three words but firstly you must have a passion to solve user problems that's very important to help champion the users needs because ultimately they are the ones using your product so you really have to go out there and understand them well yeah I mean other things like managing stakeholder expectations is also a challenge but if you're up for it is actually quite fun so there's it three plus three six no okay so for me it would be maybe a mindset that would be analytical and data-centric so a lot of decisions that we make as a product manager has to be data informed whether is it data coming from a user study or whether is it data coming from an analytics or results that you've seen so having that mindset is really important because I mean we would prioritize features throughout gut but it is always supported with data so I think that's one and I think what is really hard to find is kind of the persistence to want to get something completed and done because a product journey can be very long in fact when you launch a product that's not the end of the journey that's actually just the beginning you have to grow it you have to engage and you have to see how you want to define kind of fine-tune it and pivot it so maybe persistence is one of them to get things done and then communication skills I think the soft skills for product managers actually really important because you have to work with a big group or you know a small group of engineers and you have to work with them on a daily basis and then you have to work with stakeholders and they all come with very different temperament business thoughts so having a skill set for good communication and managing stakeholder yeah that would be a key as well I think it's really good to pay in yeah so in this case actually we will open questions the ground because the time is really tight so we only have maybe two questions so any of you want to raise questions you can approach the mic maybe only two questions so if you have questions for them if you want to pursue maybe PN or you are curious about this role yeah I have a question actually thank you for sharing about product management I know in some companies they work really closely with engineers have you ever had that in your experience did you ever feel that maybe having a technical fluency might have helped you communicate with a developer team better or any of that by any chance in your experiences so like just now I mentioned on technical knowledge does help but it's not really necessary but I have to say when I first started out in the beginning it was a bit challenging not to understand certain technical limitations but over time you really get better by asking questions and I think I was very fortunate to have my team the team of engineers that I work with they really helped me to understand what they were doing so I would ask questions like why are we using react why are we using this that and they would really explain to me why so that really helped me so it's not that you it's not that it won't be an advantage but then this is something that you would get better over time with yeah I think the technical I like the way you put it technical fluency comes with the experience I having that knowledge which is help us maybe get a better estimate or understand why some things implemented one way or the other but and since we have to work with the engineers on a very close basis I think that us that helps us appreciate their work as well because you know there is actually a lot of complexities implementing code but it's not necessary and for us at least for myself it was more of managing the stakeholders that was a lot of the job yeah any more questions no we really run out of time yeah okay oh yeah that from the coding community how do you see the challenge or how you see the transformation in the last few years that is it easy to find the talent did people locally or is there a shortage because globally it is a ward of talent today for product or for coding from coding perspective from the technical because you are doing digitization so you're looking for technical people but do you find it challenging to find the quality people locally I think in the last two years it was really interesting there has been a boom of talent and the schools have been kind of funding into that as well so from an internship standpoint we see a lot of applicants and and then when we expand a view of hiring coders we don't just hire from Singapore we hire from the region as well and there's tons of talent around the region for the last two years but on the product side that's a whole different thing and it's very interesting to see that the product talent is still quite little I would say and I think the product manager pool of people we keep seeing the same people shuffling around different companies one hypothesis I had was because a lot of product management functions are all centralized in Silicon Valley and very little real product management is that starts from Asia so you know we hope to grow and I hope to grow the product management skill set in our companies and wherever we go to yeah maybe we need to start another group that's for product managers because I know Karasaw is a startup very successful startup so maybe different from SP powers your opinions different from SP powers Jerry is the same so we also hiring engineers and also product managers it's been challenging to find talent so basically I think what other alternatives we could have is that you can find people interested in product management within the team and also groom them to become successful product managers so it's also one of the ways to get talent so sorry we're really out of time so if you have questions you can ask them after I'm in downstage yeah thank you so much this is a very quick panel thank you so next one we'll have our data science panel so we have Emily from Ministry of Defense of Singapore and also Shreya from Uber and Lucy from Uber it's like a kind of Uber panel okay so in this case would you just brief introduce yourself like what you're doing now yeah hi my name is Anna Lynn I work with NINF or Ministry of Defense so I'm a data scientist in the psychology department so means I work with a lot of HR data the questions like I answer include like what makes a good soldier what are the risks of suicide and what are the traits of a good commander I also deal with questions of retention so what makes a person want to stay in the organization are there signs if a person wants to leave other questions I deal with are also like our foreign relations so for example you could analyze data such as weapons trade and then you can see the the health of the relationship between bilateral bilateral relationships from weapons trade data besides that I also had a stand with Disney research and there I also analyze the profiles of movie fans based on their personalities so I think one one good thing about being a data scientist is that you can apply the same skills on different types of data right and I think that keeps the job exciting because you're always working on new problems hi everyone I'm Shreya so I'm from NTU from a computer engineering background after graduation I worked in consulting for two years and I've been at Uber for the last year and a half and at Uber I've worked on a lot of different sort of functional domains so as Aniline mentioned if you're an analyst you actually get a chance to work with different kind of functions like marketing fraud so most recently I've been working with Uber eats so looking at restaurant analytics so which restaurants are doing well on the platform how do we retain the ones that are doing well how do we action on the ones that are potentially like low quality and things like that hi all so I'm a Rishi I'm also an analyst at Uber very similar to Shreya I studied here at NTU Electrical and Electronics Engineer and very shortly into my course I discovered that I was not really inclined to an engineering career path as such I worked as a consultant in IBM for a couple of years where I didn't really do analytics as such but I knew that I really liked data so I started including analytics just by myself into all my projects whether it was like project management or process improvement or like research I just started like building up my skills myself and then there was a timely opening at Uber and I have also been at Uber for about a year and a half being solving problems around the business but more specifically I do safety and fraud analytics which basically means solving problems such as how do we reduce accidents how do we remove bad drivers or bad riders from the platform as well as like how do we make our riders feel more safe and yeah all sorts of questions to make sure that everybody using the platform feels safe and comfortable. I know that actually data analytics is very interesting because I was denied as well so I know that by analyzing the data you can find something that other people take from granted but which it may be not the right idea and not the right opinion could you just share us share with us one interesting finding that people think it's true but it's not I mean through analyzing your data or any interesting project you think you are doing now. Is there any finding? I'm just thinking what I can share but I think you brought up a very interesting point is that people always have preconceptions about certain their own hypothesis and what is true and very often sometimes the data brings up something that is unexpected so our job as data scientists is actually to give the hard evidence to those assumptions that people make and actually there are quite a lot of times that people's assumptions are right and we just give the supporting evidence that yeah you are right just go ahead with this policy other times when people when we have to prove people wrong that's where the uphill battle starts it's like where do you get your data from are you sure your techniques are right and all that so I think it's a lot about communication and visualization as well so you realize that as a data scientist it's not about only crunching numbers it's also about communicating your conclusions to the your audiences so especially for policymakers when you're trying when the future of guys or your brothers or fathers you know that all the men in Singapore go through national service and our policy really affects more than half the country so whatever policy we roll up we want to make sure that is right but sometimes especially when you're working in a male-dominated environment some of the men we have egos is it this is something I've believed in for 10 years until this young girl telling me that oh no my data shows that you're wrong so how do you communicate that conclusion in a respectful yet in a thought in an assertive way yet respectful that helps them say face give them a backdoor to come down so okay actually you may see this way I understand but then you know these are repercussions if you go along if you follow all your own hypotheses are the country's they have to face later on so it's our job to make sure that we let them see two sides of the story yeah so I can't come up with a specific example as well but like so what we do at Uber mostly is when we roll something out if it's a campaign offers a product feature the analysts will always ensure that like there's an experiment that runs behind it and there's data that proves that what we're doing actually makes sense for the users so that's where we come in as the gatekeepers and like we keep the business lines honest in terms of ensuring that data is being tracked and data is correct when things are being reported I think well similar to what they said but one thing that we also do at Uber is that since we're a global company a lot of our things that work in one region may not work in another region like you'll see some problems specific to say the US or India but you try the same kind of product feature in say this region and it won't work out that well so I think a lot of the work we do is like testing those things on our region and seeing like what does this make sense or does this not rather than like all the engineers put in the efforts and they roll it out here and it's not really a useful feature so I'm not really allowed to say a lot about I can't really disclose a lot about it but I think it's like very specific to context and it's not like a open like it's not like a one-size-fits-all hypothesis I think that our audience had to be the analysts to figure out themselves so actually data is so hot nowadays especially for our workshops in the afternoon the data already sold out so in this case I I think the audience may want to know what skills is required to be data scientists because I know I know all of you come from different backgrounds but not CS background so people think that CS is so hot in data well statistics may it's also hot but they also want to know what's a real skill set then industries need and how can they become data analysts yeah so you're right I'm actually a psychology major I major in psychology icons and I stumbled upon stats by accident because I needed to do my thesis they don't analyze my data so I took a stats course and I found that it was really interesting and I was quite fortunate to have a very good machine learning lecturer which caught me interested in the whole field so I would say actually the most important skill is curiosity to when you see something that's interesting say hey you could cluster movie fans that's interesting how do I do that so you can start going online nowadays everything's on stack overflow just Google and then people have codes written up for you already and even provide the sample data set for you to try so as long as you have curiosity I don't think they are yeah it's very easy for you to access this field and as you mentioned like that you organize workshops and they're really popular so there's just so many resources for you nowadays and I'm also part of this group called data science SG that invites data scientists to share their work so if you're wondering about what kind of challenges you may face as a data scientist on the job these people will share like real time their experiences or these are the problems I face for coding these are the problems that I face while trying to communicate my findings etc so in short be curious go online and just Google and go for more meetups so the thing with analytics is that it's a really broad spectrum so analytics can be as simple as descriptive so where you're just telling people what the data tells you and then it goes on to being more predictive like where you tell give specific recommendations based on the data so there are different technical skills that you need across the spectrum but if you're starting out essentially you don't actually need a lot of technical skills like Anilin mentioned it's more about curiosity and asking the right kind of questions from the data yeah basically yeah there's no I don't think there's like one or two golden parts leading it up to being a good data analyst I think like it's a very generic skill set and just what you broadly need is like being comfortable with data knowing how to break down a big ambiguous problem into small digestible problems having a genuine love and understanding of data and numbers and yeah we live in a age where everything is very available online in terms of like courses and books and articles that you can all learn from and if you're super super passionate there's a lot of publicly available data that you can just like use and experiment and start solving solving problems with that already. So is there any hard skills that you want to recommend because some of the languages are Python and also one of my friends she is still in school they have two set of courses one is for neural network and the other one is for big data so she can only choose one so she spent which one she really she needs to choose so any hard skills recommendation or where to start maybe start from Excel start from R or stuff from Pycel. Yeah I think starting from Excel and R is pretty good because those are easier to learn and there's plenty of resources available to teach you that and yeah I myself have never used like neural networks a lot yet so I can't comment on that but I believe R and Excel are good starting point. Just one thing to add on as well like SQL is obviously like the basic data extraction scripting language so I think that's a must-have skill as well yeah I agree and maybe just to add on one more point you should try to focus on the problem you're trying to solve rather than the technique you are using because once you have an interesting problem you'll be very motivated to find whatever technique you need to solve the problem so and different problems require different techniques sometimes Python is better sometimes R is better sometimes you need neural network sometimes Excel will do so my advice is just find a problem that you're interested in and Google. Yes for people who are not from IT background or not from IT related major jobs I have to tell you that the only way I mean the first way the IT people to solve problem is to Google so Google is our best friend yeah so we will open the question to the ground I think there will be a lot of questions from you so can I know we I don't have questions you can raise up your hand so we can pass them back to you. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I work in this industry but I am going to do a completely shameless plug for something that's free for and almost everyone in this room qualifies for entry because of your genetic makeup I and another company in Singapore we periodically run day-long workshops called data girls so if you and they're specifically designed at people sort of not the people on the panel because you know what you're talking about they're specifically designed for people who have women who have curiosity about well this analytic stuff seems really hot how but I don't know anything about it so if you look up the website data driven dot sg and you will periodically see we run day-long workshops we just run to two weeks ago and you we start from the assumption that you know nothing so we explain what data is we explain what SQL is we explain and then at the end of it you're actually analyzing data and making a mini presentation to a pretend management group so if you're interested have a look and they're completely free yeah I know the questions there's so many hands girl they are like I thanks thank you so much for I'm sharing with all your experiences here so for someone who's interested in an entry-level position at data science what would you recommend should she just start applying for jobs because you said something about like having soft skills but most of the jobs that are online requires technical skills so maybe just a couple like suggestions and where she could start where she could start no not Google but rather a lot of times when I went for interviews I've been asked for my portfolio so projects I've done if you are looking at entry level most likely you wouldn't have any work experience but if let's say I'm the hiring manager and I want to search for someone who's curious because in this field everything moves so fast you know you may be a perfect expert today but if you slack for one year and then you'll be behind already so to me curiosity is very important and to find that I could look at your portfolio and see hey did this person do anything outside of school any other projects do you have a github account so github is like where you keep your code and what kind of problems you try to solve in your own free time so if you are in school right now this is something you can do in a free time say okay let's try solving this problem write a simple code and maybe post it on your blog and do some reflections what kind of challenges you face and how do you resolve them so from blocks and your github account hiring managers can tell a lot about what kind of person you are and how you persevere through these challenges how you solve them yeah and also it depends on your background as well so if you come from a more technical background even if you don't have the specific requirements if you can demonstrate basic programming ability even in other languages and if you can demonstrate critical thinking ability then maybe the hiring manager can overlook specific technical requirements yeah I think we mentioned a lot of like since we mentioned soft skills in general like problem-solving and being comfortable with numbers and data when you're applying for a job it makes sense like in your resume to kind of highlight how you've done that in your previous experiences or like any projects you've done at school or any extra curriculars that you've done at school and as for the technical part I wasn't technical when I joined but I found this website called data camp it's really very useful and has a ton of courses that you can do interactively learn and Python and all sorts of statistical modeling techniques so you can definitely do that in your free time to buff up your technical skills I think they can also join the cargo accommodation right yeah I can also write on your profile also there are a lot of hacks on also data girls so next week we will have an US MIT hack song so you can always join that yeah any last questions sorry we run the time yeah you risk hands first sorry to make sure that you're to make sure that you're very objective when you put a data and not pulling data to back up something you already suspect is true so the question is how do you pull objective data and not end up with a subjective cell data that confirms your existing assumptions right okay how do I make sure that I pull data that's not just backing up my own claims that's a good question so if your data I mean there are there are two things you need for analysis right the data and the technique if your data is lousy no matter how good your technique is your congratulations your conclusions may not be reliable instead of specific context you are thinking about when you ask this question okay okay okay so basically behavioral issues okay so okay for this I can say in that we do a lot of surveys and this is a prime example of how the way you ask certain certain questions can elicit certain responses from your participants so you can if things like pick two vocations you like versus pick at least two or yeah so subtle phasings will affect responses and it is actually a whole new area of work that we go into to try to refine our phasers to make sure that we get the objective responses that we need so at uber when we're analyzing something typically we're not the party who did the activity so for example if you're analyzing a campaign we're not the ones who executed the campaign so we don't really have a bias or like a motive to sort of tweak the data in such a way where it looks good so having an independent analytics function is very important in that sense where it becomes a gatekeeper to different functions in the company so that's one and I think the second thing is what we usually do also is if you're reporting something for example if x goes up y goes up as well what we usually do is really indicate what is the data like what is the x and the y like what is the underlying data said did we exclude some people did we exclude certain timeframes why did we exclude these people why did we exclude these timeframes that's very important as well because if you make certain exclusions like you said it can sort of tweak the message and it's very important to indicate if you have to eat it in certain ways I think in addition to that it's also useful to like benchmark for example if we're like running a campaign and we're seeing like did it have a good impact on the business it's also useful to benchmark it to other campaigns and see like did it do better like was the uplift even more than another campaign is it more than a normal day like benchmark don't see just the number by itself but compare it to a baseline so that also helps as well so I guess it's about replication benchmarking is the same like any academic study right no one study is perfect but if you find the same result multiple times then it's probably right and no set of data is perfectly objective there always be limitations so it's just about identifying what the flaws are and then try to replicate it with maybe a different data set the next time I think overall it's just being thorough and like making sure there's no like confounding variable that could have like affected it in a different way and like testing it for statistical significance so just making sure that your result is as objective as possible sorry this is the last question we can ask so you can communicate with them on the stage as well thank you so much for thank you so our last career spotlight will be as a group sub-engineer and developer group so we have three girls here oh kasha is from Microsoft and Kitab is from honey spay and also move to it from ThoughtWorks so it just the same the same first question what do you do could you just briefly introduced hey everyone it's a Saturday afternoon and I know we're holding you back from lunch but before I tell you what I do I just want to ask how many of you have actually gone on our website and you know say click that small button out there which says chat with us or you know okay and how many of you think that's really a human chatting with you well I'll just let out a secret to you it's in most cases I'm not saying all but in most cases it's actually a bot that's replying to you you say hey and it says hey how may I help you and then you start the dialogue with you it's mostly a bot these days and that's the part of artificial intelligence so why I'm saying that is because I do a thing like that I build bots and then I come here and talk to you people about it so that's my role as a tech evangelist where I go out and evangelize Microsoft's technology to audiences hi everyone I don't have very specific projects to share but I work as a software engineer at Honest Pee and that basically involves working on the problems that the business faces from time to time so some of the things that I've worked on would be like payment solution making sure that our payments go out correctly to the customers managing refunds etc and then also a lot of things related to your fundamentally a logistics company that's doing on-demand logistics in various spaces agnostic of the verticals it could be groceries food etc and so a lot of the play that we have is in the logistics space and because everything if you know when we started to rating with the process some of the things are manual but slowly we find ways to automate it and use technology to make things a lot more optimized and that's where my role comes in and so depending on you know what's going on I mean I get certain projects that I that would typically support the logistics business that we have hi I'm Muthu I work for ThoughtWorks so in ThoughtWorks we help our clients all their business problems by leveraging our tech skills in my current project I do something similar to Utkasha so we're developing a business intelligence application for our clients so what it is like is you can ask it a question like say your insurance agent you want to know in which month you can roll out new policies when are the clients most likely to pick up those so there are two parts to it one is the natural language processing identifying the intent of the question the user is asking and once you identify the intent going to the data and there's some data analytics involved as well to answer to give the user the right answer to the question so that's what I'm doing right now I know that all of you actually from IT background so which is very different from previous two groups so but a lot of people after they graduate they still want to switch to you know the sub engineer or developer you know have you met any people like that before in your career because they can this can be a good model I do I do math some before but I'm not sure about you actually I didn't have a computer science degree when I joined ThoughtWorks I think all you need is interest and curiosity like the previous panels mentioned if you have interest you can learn anything and I recently did a HPR article about how diverse teams are more smarter so I mean if you all learn the same thing or go through the same curriculum then we approach the problem in the same way which means we would not identify certain pitfalls in our solution or maybe we may not be that creative and a way to win what we come up with because we are all trying to think in the same way but we come from a diverse background then we get we all approach the problems in different ways so as a group we will come up with a much better solution than as individuals so I think people from all background should take up software development as a career. To add on to Mutu's point I have met people who have come from non-technical backgrounds and typically what differentiates I mean eventually you have to come in with a mentality that it's just a computer that's built by humans and so it really cannot be smarter than you or could even be doing things that are not you know that don't follow logic in a way right so when you see certain weird messages you know removing that intimidation from your minds and just just trying to logically break down a problem helps but actually what I'd like to mention is that sometimes when I graduated as a computer science graduate one of the things that I felt was that I needed to explore more problems that around me before I apply technical skills to it so I took a slightly a slightly non-conventional route where I actually went into consulting to look at a consulting field which was not technical consulting but it was purely social innovation and business strategy consulting because I felt like some of the problems that interested me most were social innovation related and I knew that technology has a lot of it can actually be applied in very very useful ways in these problems but to understand these problems and to really empathize with them I had to go to that route and then when I joined Honest B I found myself just a lot more aware a lot more curious in terms of asking questions or sometimes even asking my project managers or product managers why are we implementing this feature or like how does this help our customers and I feel like that helps me become a better engineer as well because I rarely find occasions where I haven't done enough research on a particular feature that I'm working that eventually you know after two three weeks of working on it we realized that we should have never built that feature you know so and that happens and that can be frustrating for many engineers and I'm not I feel like that background of coming from a of taking a slight switch and a detour also helps open your eyes so if you are from a technical background you know just be curious about other things around you and then that could surely benefit you even in your engineering careers true I mean with all the motivation and the skills that you need how exactly do you go about switching into a career in say software engineering there are a lot of ways you can do that one yes you will have to you know get hang of some programming languages but the idea is just understand what the motivation is as Ankita was also saying understand where your code fits in the bigger picture and then ramping up on programming languages is not really very difficult you know you have a lot of these courses available online so that's one and a lot of big tech companies actually host events coding challenges where you can go about you know showing showcasing your product or showcasing your code and if at all you stand chance there because there are a lot of techies who come there a lot of these companies who come there and you can actually go about networking with them and exploring possibilities to start up a career in software engineering so I don't think not having a formal education in software engineering should be a barrier it's about the opportunities you want to explore and trust me they are limitless but even so I think majority people still think it's hard because when many people from non-artic backgrounds non-artic related backgrounds the company will always ask why do I have to recruit you because you're from non-artic background so in this case how can they show to the company that they're actually capable to do the job I think it's mostly about the perception in the first place where you think that it's difficult I think programming and software engineering is as easy or as difficult as any other job it's about the intent to learn and trust me there's a huge online community which is always there to help you out you just post a simple question and you do get replies so first thing learning is not a challenge second when you asked why to why you should be recruited yes it's always a good idea to have something as a proof of what you're capable of so you know the github story that you were talking about you build your code you put it up there show the impact that it can have because it's always important to tie back the business value or the impact that your code can have and if it all you can demonstrate that very well I think that shouldn't really be a problem yeah I completely agree with a kasha that a large part of it a large part of it is actually perception because it isn't it isn't difficult but just looking at some of those terminal windows that some of you have looked at and you know looking at that feed in and then code in green and red color makes you think like whoa these guys are just you know I don't know what they're doing but actually when you get into it it's I'm sure Amber has also seen this in the you know in the boot camps that actually it's not really that hard so one is getting into the perception but to add to it initiative really counts so when when you're asked why should we hire you talk about your projects even if they're not technical and then you know show how you have tried to apply like maybe or maybe it's a non-technical project and then you apply it a really small you know a small piece in that which was actually technical like maybe you built a form to collect survey results right and you build the form yourself and building a form is actually a really simple exercise so some of these things can show that you are a fast learner and you're curious so those things would typically convince a lot of employers and then I guess one of the challenges that happens is when you actually get that job and you're in the company and you've come from a non-technical background you see engineers who have experience and this is where basically sometimes it could mean putting in that extra effort and those extra hours but there are always people who like to mentor like if you ask anybody who who has been working in the field and you ask them for the help there they would rarely tell you that they just cannot help so showing certain initiative interest in their work asking them questions and maybe trying to help them out with some of the small pieces that they're doing that can also significantly boost your you know confidence as soon as you join a new company and then from there on I think there's no looking back I agree with what both of them said so two points right programming is hard and recruiters look for computer science degrees when they recruit people for software engineering role I think both of them are just myths programming is not at all hard and recruiters don't look at your degree like they always see what you're capable of whether you have a computer science degree or whether you don't so you're all considered equals irrespective of what degree you have or even if you don't have a degree we have people really senior people at ThoughtWorks who never went to university so and as for me how did I cope with a software engineering job without computer science background I think when ThoughtWorks hired me what they looked for was potential and interest and I had an awesome team my first team was just awesome they were all mentors to me I learned everything from them so one was yes you have to be open to learning and there is that few extra hours that you might have to put in initially so that you have a bigger learning curve than people who come with a computer science background because they always start somewhere you have to reach that gap and then reach there and then it's all the same so and I think in Singapore which with all of these communities like TechLadies and CodingGirls and all of this I think you all have the support system and like online you have numerous courses free courses like Coursera courses all of them are good so I think if you have interest self teaching yourself or even looking for mentors shouldn't be hard yes very good points if you want to learn coding just come to CodingGirls and also TechLadies maybe yeah so in this case we'll open the question to the ground do you have any questions for them thank you for sharing your opinions and views on being an engineer I just have got a question because now you are and UX are booming so just just want to know your perspective on what's the difference between the UX designer and being a software engineer because you guys are pretty much related UX designer is one who designs the user journey like they empathize with the user they do user interviews they find out what the users really want and they suggest these are the features that we could do to product owners and between UX designers and product owners they have a vision for how the product should look like developers are the one who actually make that make that product or implement that idea so the developers have still still have to be convinced of that idea still have to believe in that product that the product owner and the UX designer has come up with but the responsibility of coming up with what how the product should look like is more with UX designer having said that that's completely true UX designers have a vision for the product in mind but in my experience at Honest be one of our UX designers is a computer science graduate and he's highly he's he chose not to go into programming but he's very very good at CSS for example and just you know more of the visual elements and the way that helps when programmers and UX designers work together is that you can actually discuss what's feasible and what's not because oftentimes the vision that you have for your website and certain you know you may want to have a drop down here and you may want to have a slider here sometimes technically those things can be maybe hard to implement and maybe maybe you can run into things like SEO challenges because of your design you had a certain vision but it makes your website very difficult for search engine optimization and that's where you know when when UX designers and engineers work together or if a UX designer has a technical background already not saying that that's a requirement or that's a barrier to being a UX designer that's when you can actually come up with a with a vision which is also it makes sense from an engineering point of view as well and it in general is a much much better design because it's come out of collaboration between the two I think they've pretty much covered it all so in a short line I think the UX designer comes up with the idea and the programmer just adds life to the idea that's pretty much about it one last question only have one minute left no questions okay okay hello as I know there's like a lot of programming language like Java Python Ruby all those so usually because we all know it evolves very fast in this industry so do you guys or as a software engineer do you prefer to like go in depth like deep in one or two verticals or do you prefer to you know go in a varieties of programming language or technical skills or which one is better that's an interesting question I think technology moves fast and it's very important to keep yourself upskilled so say Java and C++ and things like that they've got a pretty similar underlying architecture or similar underlying structure so it's not very difficult to really ramp up on the language as for me I particularly like Java a lot so I advocate for Java but it's not really necessary to know one or or like a lot of languages even if you're well-versed with say two of them it's very easy to switch to others yeah one of the things that I personally believe in is a software engineer is a software engineer and not a Java engineer or a Ruby engineer for example because many of the skills are very transferable the way you learn a language is very very similar you know you learn the syntax you and you pretty much Google like you know you learn Ruby and you're like oh I know how to do this in Java I know I know how functions work in Java how does it work in Ruby and then you know you find an equivalent like it's literally like learning Chinese and English and then you know translating something in Chinese to English and saying it outright and that's how programming languages are as well I personally enjoy it just as a you know everyone likes learning and you know sometimes you just want to challenge yourself with those extra things on the side and that's where I like looking at new languages and what is out there and you know building some side projects in a new language so that's just for my own personal interest and sometimes it comes in use as well professionally but I think it's just out of your own interest but pick up any language whatever it is and start small that's what I would advise I agree with Ankita you're a software engineer you're not a Java engineer or a Ruby engineer ultimately the fundamentals are the same all the languages are the same like they will have different principles based on whether you go for object-oriented language or a functional programming language but if you know one each it should be very easy to switch and same as her like I like exploring new languages I'm polyglot and it works I mean I'm it keeps me motivated as well when I explore a new language it's relatively unknown so that keeps me excited for a while but it also helps in my job that I get to apply whatever I've learned so it it works both ways and yeah once you know one language well it is really simple to learn new languages thank you so much so that's our thank you


So we are good to get started. So yeah we talked about how God minister to Saul and how he sent him ananias and the believers in Damascus were so welcoming, they were so encouraging that the initial days of Saul as a believer was spent there. Now what does he do immediately after that? So Luke writes that he started preaching. Preaching Christ, imagine, we don't know when Luke says immediately was that days, weeks, months that he is referring to, the exact timing we don't know but like immediately means people still have the memory of Saul as a persecutor and during that period how would you like it if you know somebody today you look at that person as a persecutor, very dangerous persecutor and then you are hearing them preaching a sermon in front of your eyes, obviously you will not believe it, but that's what's happening. You have the persecutor immediately it says preached Christ in the synagogues. So one thing we have to understand about synagogues is they would allow any learned knowledgeable person to come and speak on any topic. So they allowed Saul to go and preach but little did they know that he is going to preach about Christ among them. The same person who was against Christ is preaching Christ. That is amazing, that is amazing and what is he preaching about the Messiah is saying that Jesus is the Son of God. If you recall in the book of John we are reading about the titles, Son of Man, Son of God. So for the Jews Son of God is again a very clear cut way of pointing to Jesus as baby, as the begotten, the father. So the Jews had counted that as blasphemy in the life of Jesus but here is Saul saying that Jesus is the Son of God. So everybody who heard Saul speaking about Jesus they were amazed and they asked they said is this not he who destroyed those who called on this name in Jerusalem and has come here for that purpose so that he might bring them bound to the chief priest. So they couldn't believe it. That an opposer is now a supporter but Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who dwelled in the masquas proving that this Jesus is the Christ. So what an amazing amazing thing that has taken place in two chapters here, chapter 7. Stephen is doing this, Stephen a man full of wisdom. He is arguing remember, he is debating, convincing people from other synagogues. One synagogue that was a part of the people that Stephen took over is Sicilia. We know that Saul was from there. Now Saul is doing that. I'm sure God filled him also with wisdom, with that wisdom. He is, it's his confounded the Jews meaning argued in such a way that the Jews have nothing to say and he is proving that Jesus is the Christ. So excuse me, this would have been marvelous in the sight of everyone. So when this is happening like initially maybe the Jews didn't believe that Saul has become a part of the way but as they kept observing Saul they must have understood, oh this man something has changed, a real transformation has taken place in his life. So the Jews, they were against the apostles. They were against the believers. So now once they recognize that Saul is part of them, they become against Saul. They were so angry with him that we read in verse 23 that they plotted to kill him. So what a change has taken place. He has moved from the team that was persecuting to becoming a part of the team that is being persecuted.  Maybe there were some loyal people whom he knew among the authorities and among the Jewish circle. So we are told that he came to know that they want to kill him. So he was aware and people are just waiting. It says they watched the gates day and night to kill him. Meaning if this man is going to go out of Damascus he has to go this way. When he comes over here that's it. We are going to get rid of him. So that was in their hearts and Saul knew that however the disciples who were with him in Damascus they came up with an idea and they thought to protect Saul how about we make him escape. If he goes to the gates the Jews will kill him. So let's figure out a method by which we can get him out of the city of Damascus. So what they do in the night they let him out through the wall in a large basket. So this is an unusual way of doing things. A large basket obviously we can understand here that it was a basket large enough to carry a human being. So quietly they made Saul escape. So from this you realize that see the church is not going looking for persecution even Saul he could have gone to the gates he could have fought with the Jews again but he didn't want to do that. So escaping in this scenario is a lot better so he just escapes the sea and persecution comes face it but don't go looking for persecution. Saul escapes persecution opposition and he is helped by the believers in Damascus. Maybe they only would have given him the wisdom and said Saul why do you want to argue with these Jews.  So he is let go. What happens to Saul after this you know. We understand that okay I need to explain one part which I have missed. Here in verse 23 it says now after many days were passed. So this is explained by Paul in Galatians chapter 1 verses 13 to 18 where we read that when he was ministering in Damascus he was not very well received. So for three years he fled to Arabia. So he fled and he was there for a while. So Damascus Arabia you know that's kind of the region where Saul was for about three years and then later on you know you also study that he spent you don't read much about him. You don't read much about him from now till you come to Acts chapter 13. So from Arabia and Damascus what are the places that Saul went to what is the kind of ministry that Saul did. You don't have a lot of information about that. So people generally say something like 16 17 years Saul was quietly ministering wherever the Lord led him. So you don't read too much about this public ministry. So at this point in the book of Acts we only see him escaping from Damascus and then there is what is called as the silent years of Paul unfolding. So we don't read too much about him but we know that you know God strengthened him. God he must have learned a lot about God and about ministry received all the revelation which he needed to continue the work in a strong way from Acts chapter 13. So between now we are in Acts chapter 9 between now and Acts chapter 13 you would have something like 12 years 12 years or 13 years that go by and only later you have the missionary journeys of Paul. So in this chapter so about the life of Saul what have we seen we have seen that he came zealously to persecute the believers in Damascus but he encountered the Lord Jesus on the path and he had a genuine life transformation a heart change and God ministered to him through Ananias. He was blind but Ananias came and ministered healing and also baptized him. He was baptized in water and then immediately he started doing the work of the ministry but he was not accepted. He was not accepted by the people and so and also the Jews started hating him. So to protect Saul the believers make him escape from Damascus a little more a little more about Saul we will see and then you know Peter comes into the picture. Okay it was 26 and when Saul had come to Jerusalem so from Damascus from Damascus where does he go? He goes to Jerusalem. He tried to join the disciples there so yeah this seems like a good idea because you know if you go to the if you want to call Jerusalem the head office you know you have all the leaders of the church in Jerusalem Saul must have thought let me go to the main place let me go back to Jerusalem at least there I will have protection I will have the wisdom of the apostles so he goes there similar to what the other believers even Ananias had that doubt I have heard about this man he's a persecutor all the disciples in Jerusalem also were very scared of Saul so we see they were afraid of him and did not believe that he was a disciple so they found it hard to accept Saul into their circle or their community of faith now we can imagine Saul would have been so disappointed thinking that I thought these main people will at least understand and be excited about what God has done in my life but the believers in Jerusalem they were cautious and they said okay we can't believe this man what if he is pretending and what if he gets us in trouble he'll come to know all our secrets this must be a plot of the authorities so they never believed him but it says there was a man called Barnabas if you remember Barnabas is from that that Levite background he's a generous man he's a good man okay we've seen that description of Barnabas now you see the attitude of Barnabas here Barnabas took him so he seems to be one with a personality of accommodating other human beings okay there are some people like this who who trust faster than the others so Barnabas is one such person who looks at Saul and he understands come on at this stage we should not leave this man he has had a genuine heart transformation so Barnabas takes Saul brings him to the apostles and he declares to them that this man has seen the Lord to is seen the Lord on the road to Damascus and that he has spoken to him he also explains to the apostles that this person has been engaging in ministry how beautifully how boldly he preached about Jesus in Damascus so all this information Barnabas is sharing it with the apostles to convince them not to be scared of Saul so because of what Barnabas did for some time Saul was able to be with the believers in Jerusalem coming in and out and you know later you find in his other writings that he talks about how he did not personally spend time with all the apostles except with Peter okay he just spent something like two weeks with Peter and that's about it okay so he spent some time with the believers in Jerusalem and that yeah so so yeah all right so then this is it and then he kind of is led from there down to Caesarea and then back to Tarsus so he sent back to Tarsus so we've seen so far in Arabia and Damascus like about three years and from there I told you we don't know too much about his whereabouts so here we read he goes to Tarsus and kind of you know just that is in our minds and then 12 years passed by and then Acts chapter 13 happens when he comes back into public ministry but for something for us to see here is how the believing community finds it hard to accept to somebody who has lived a life of a persecutor so far okay but an individual like Barnabas does the mediation he tries to convince the apostles that now Saul indeed is a changed man and they must accept some so that's how he manages to be with them for some time and then comes to Tarsus so that's about the journey of Paul and now we read that the churches what was happening to the churches now because initially we saw that no apostles were going and planting churches believers were going and planting churches so what happened to the persecuted church the region still had persecution okay just because Saul encountered God doesn't mean that persecution stopped persecution was still going on in the region and there were lots of churches also okay at the same time we see the churches in Judea, Galilee and Samaria were peace and were edified so in the midst of persecution what can we expect we can we might expect that people will be discouraged that people will give up on following Christ but that is not the case instead the churches had peace it says and they were edified or they were strong so this is how God works even today when we look at some regions in the world and we may think how can believers be strong in God over here but sometimes you hear of the testimony you know of some of the strongest believers from persecuted regions I am sure you have heard about some believers you know from I mean I don't want to take names of places because all this is being recorded but you know you understand right like there are regions in the world where it's not easy to preach the gospel there are restrictions there is threat to life if you speak the name of Jesus and yet right some of the strongest believers of their life stories we hear of from these places and it amazes us you see how this verse says the churches had peace peace in the midst of turmoil strength in the midst of turmoil doesn't mean that they were free no but they were strong even though opposition was there and walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit they were multiplied so can a church grow when there is persecution definitely the church can receive the work of the Lord okay the comfort of the Holy Spirit the ministry of the Holy Spirit and have that resolve it says they walked in the fear of the Lord meaning they wanted to do what God wanted them to do so then when people are living like that intentionally what happens God continues to work in the life of that church and in the life of the believers and you see that in the midst of persecution the churches are being multiplied people are being added they were it doesn't say they were added they were multiplied so persecution or no persecution God is faithful and the work of God continued in the different regions so and that is really beautiful for us to know and you see how Luke did not forget two chapters prior we were in Samaria that over there a lot of miracles happened you know wonderful Peter then John also came and they also did a lot of miracles and it didn't stop there we are told that those churches are going strong so when a work is started you should not forget that work but you see the pattern of the early church they used to think about the work which is started you don't abandon it you nurture it you continue right giving into that work protect it make it grow make sure that it is going well so that is the attitude of the early church so that's why Luke is still writing about the church in Judea church in Samaria in different regions okay so that's about the churches now what about the other Apostles we gave too much attention to solve in this chapter now Peter comes back in the scene the Apostles have not stopped doing their work Peter and John they went right they went to Samaria when they heard that the word of the Lord had gone there they went they ministered the baptism in the Holy Spirit now what are they up to they are continuing to go to different places to do the ministry so you find Peter went through all parts of the country it says so busy this is a if you open his google calendar Peter is very busy he has to go here they are all over the place and he's doing that he's going to various parts of the country that he came now to a place called Lidda okay so that was on his calendar so he went there when he goes there he finds a man by the name of Amius okay so Amius he is bedridden for eight years and paralyzed do you remember anybody similar to this in the ministry of Jesus anybody who's paralyzed bedridden yes okay yeah okay great so you're all are giving me references yeah we do see we do see paralyzed people whom Jesus healed and you know Jesus ministered very miraculously there was one person near the pool of bed bed sedah whom he said you know just just get up and then he was able to do that there was a man that four friends he brought they brought him he was paralyzed and Jesus told him also like get up take up your bed and walk and he was able to do that so Jesus was doing this in his ministry now what is Peter going to do when he comes across the same situation was this the first paralyzed man that now Peter was ministering to we don't know okay but earlier we saw lame man he ministered that miracle to the lame man so when he says Amius bedridden for eight years Peter does what Jesus did he says take up your bed and yes he says Jesus Christ heals you so you see Peter is very careful to give glory to Jesus when the lame man in acts three was healed he said right he said that the power in the name of Jesus has healed this man why are you looking at us as if we have done anything great but the power in the name of Jesus has given this man's strength and now Peter's saying Amius Jesus Christ heals you and the way Jesus said okay get up take up your bed and walk similar way you know sometimes you just follow the teacher if you have seen the teacher do that you also do the same thing so he says arise make your bed he does Amius the miracle happened immediately he did this person arose immediately so all who dwelt in Lidda and Sharon saw him and turned to the Lord so Peter ministered a supernatural healing what are supernatural healings miracles supposed to do they turn the hearts of the people towards God you remember in acts three when the lame man got healed it was at the crowd gathered and then Peter began to preach about Jesus you know how we did this this is how believe in the Lord Jesus now a miracle is taking place in Lidda what happens people their hearts are open so that is why miracles are very important healings are very important one is they bless the life of the person who is experiencing them and that person comes to know that God truly loves them but at the same time when healings take place it draws other people to God okay so we should really pray for healings we should pray for God to do more and more right healings in our churches today and that will show the power of God and people will will not be able to deny that truly he is he is a living God so in the ministry of Peter you observe that he went he ministered a miracle and then that became an opportunity for others to come and accept Christ what else happens okay now in a close by place called Jopa there was a believer by the name of Tabitha and you know this this was translated as Doc is her name okay Doc is basically wait both the names mean dear but just a name which was given to this lady but about this lady she was a good lady okay she was so good that it is said that she was full of good works and charitable deeds so somebody who was a blessing in the community unfortunately she became sick and she died so when they had kind of you know she died and they had to follow the rituals they heard that Peter had come close by so they invite him they ask him to come and minister to this lady because see the early church they really believed in miracles okay they believed in God's power and supernatural demonstration of God's power so when this death happens so they invite Peter and they tell him like please come without any delay come quickly in other words to this place so Peter he gets up and he goes so you just think about the ministry calendar of Peter I mean if it was us right do we do we really believe in the resurrection power of Christ do we really believe in the power of the Holy Spirit that you know every place we go there are healings taking place and if somebody calls up and says okay today you have come to this city amazing miracles have happened you know at the end of the day what happens you feel like wow great great day of ministry I've reached on the subject and people also experienced all these healings are great they let me eat some biryani and sleep right so you you might feel like that but almost immediately a word comes to us and says hey somebody has died you know in the close by area can you come faster can you come can you pray for that person how would you feel right unless you believed in the supernatural power of God you'd be like oh my goodness I just thought today's work is over I can relax and now they're calling me to raise a dead person how can I go okay that shows that you know we still doubt whether God's power can do the work or not but look at this you know Peter as soon as he got the next assignment come to Joppa Marcus Tabitha has died minister to her he gets up he's ready okay next assignment on my calendar now I have to go to Joppa to pray for Tabitha so you'll find them very active very passionate very trusting believing in the power of God they just go they just release the power they see the work of God being accomplished in every community so Peter goes and when he had come they brought him to that upper room they had kept her in in an upper room and you know in in those times they had traditions where people will be there crying around the dead person so there were some widows and their job was to cry loudly and it seems she was good with garments you know preparing garments so the tunics and garments which doctors had made they had kept over there and basically they were mourning they were thinking about her life over such a good lady she has done such great works and on and they were just mourning over there but Peter he puts them out he says okay everyone who's crying can you please go out and he melt down and he prayed over there and turning to the body he commanded he said Tabitha arise and she opened her eyes and when she saw Peter she sat up okay and then yeah he gave her his hand lifted her up it says and when he had called the saints and widows he presented her alive wow okay what what a fulfilling way of completing your assignment right so God had orchestrated Peter's steps so he was being led by the Holy Spirit to put different places and minister to the people that God had put on his heart and he was seeing the results in the work that God was calling him to do now just recently Ania's eight years paralyzed walking now Daakis Tabitha dead she is alive presented her alive and here also it became known throughout all Jopah and many believed on the Lord so you notice how the ministers the apostles the believers they would go not just not just preaching but also doing the supernatural works of God and that brought many people into the kingdom okay so same thing today like Jesus like Peter we can also preach heal demonstrate the powers of the power of God and that will bring many souls to the kingdom of God so after that it says that Peter he stayed many days in Jopah so he continued to stay in that same place with a man called Simon a tanner a tanner is you know somebody who deals with the the dead animals their skin to make leather so it was not you know it was not a very well respected job so it seems like Peter was staying with a person who's you know like sort of low in the society but he was okay to stay with this person probably because he was also a brother or a believer in the Lord so these are his activities in Lidda and Jopah so we can move on to the next chapter here okay and one more thought that I want to add about Peter is you know Peter he is he's a very devoted Jew and he was a very proud Jew okay but you notice that as he's walking with the Lord the the kind of people that he's ministering to he's becoming more and more open so he went to minister in Samaria Samaria is like a mixed breed a Jews and a foreign you know like background it's mixed and those people also not considered very highly but Peter is kind of softening up to minister to those who are not pure Jews and now he's staying with Simon the tanner it's a kind of a lower job but Peter's not worried about you know or you should be a rich Jew only then I will come and live with you no there's no such issues the humility of his heart he's able to understand that the gospel is for everyone and you know it's it's okay even if somebody is not rich but if he is a brother in the Lord yes and what tells me to stay with this individual I will stay so you know that preparedness to be anywhere be ready to stay in any condition for the sake of the gospel but that that heart of humility we are able to see in the apostles okay so yeah let me just stop here a little bit before I start off on Peter's ministry anything you want to add anything that is ministering to you okay so you're all still digesting what you're hearing that's my assumption okay anything maybe if someone can also unmute and share it would be nice if you had a different voice okay I'm sorry to put you on the spot but what are your thoughts anything that you are specifically thinking about yeah yeah go ahead I can hear me first yes yes yeah one thing I'm learning about in the life of science in wonder is it really matter in the ministry is it really is it really yes yes aren't we didn't get the last part you said science and wonders is it really yeah it's really matter in ministry is it really needed yeah yeah okay so uh yeah yeah very good yeah so aren't um uh I don't know if you made it you it's a statement that you said or a question but I'll anyway answer it uh we how did people come to know Christ we've seen even in Samaria even Jerusalem now with that jopa there is a lot of supernatural healing miracles you know science wonders and that's how the church is growing in all the regions so today if we are going to do ministry without the supernatural power of God uh it is not aligned to the way the early church did it no so it's important that's the point it is important yeah but uh some of the believers out here they are usually they are scared of these uh science and wonders no so how are we going to handle in that kind of situation yeah see I do understand that people can be um very they can be they might be uh cautious because they have had a poor experience earlier okay uh but what do we see Jesus doing what do we see the apostles doing they they continue the work aren't so I feel people can be scared but we should not let that stop us okay you we should continue to minister in this way uh and we will believe that the genuine will uh diminish the effects of the the falls or the the count of it okay example I'll tell you you remember when God called Moses to bring the people out of Egypt he goes to Pharaoh and over there in the court like there are sausages there are black magicians and uh Moses he throws the rod okay and he does all these signs where the rod becomes a snake uh and all so even the magicians are able to do that but does Moses stop doing uh his his uh demonstration of the supernatural no he also continues the magicians also continue but at the end of it what happens the snake that is produced by Moses's rod eats up all the other snakes so one lesson we can learn from here is the enemy will also do supernatural things okay but we should not stop we should keep continuing God will work in people's hearts so that's that's uh I mean that's how we go about it does does it make sense aren't yeah sure sure so let's just continue let's just continue we should not get worried what what will the people say and all that um yeah so that's about the supernatural and uh one more thought I'll add to it see Satan no he will always try to make a count of it of something that is valuable he won't waste time on something that's not valuable so when he knows that these signs wonders and miracles are valuable what is he trying to do he's trying to bring an imitation okay so if there is an imitation we know that this is valuable so we should not stop yeah yeah very very good question haren yeah anything else class any anything else that you are thinking about okay haren shares about her background yeah where she comes from a certain denomination within the way they did not believe in the supernatural yeah yeah haren uh a lot of denominations don't believe but again you know we have to be bible based it's not about what our denomination believes it's about what the bible says and in the bible we see emphasis on the supernatural work of God Jesus did it the early church did it so how is it wrong yeah true true yes right so yes class anything else from your side based on what we have looked at okay so uh so far we have seen you know the change of heart that people are having the uh journey of Paul the beginning of the journey of Paul we have observed uh and and even in the life of Peter right God is transforming his heart I told you he's a Jew he's very um uh stuck on his own way of doing things like in general that's that's how uh we have painted a picture of Peter but slowly things are changing for him he has ministered in Samaria he is staying in uh Jopah in Simon the Tanner's house and now what is God going to do in the life of Peter so we have a little bit of time maybe two three minutes I will just share and then we will pray and wrap up so act chapter 10 in this chapter God is concerned about a man called Cornelius so it says there was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius a centurion of what was called the Italian regiment a devout man and one who feared God with all his household who gave arms generously to the people and prayed to God always wow you know when the Bible describes a person it's so beautiful and there are good people who uh we see like Barnabas it says about Barnabas right that he was also a giver he was a generous he was a good man says he was a good man then uh we who else did we see the person okay fine now uh we are looking at Cornelius and Cornelius also it says he was a devout man he feared God he gave arms so the Bible is describing you know a good life and and uh somebody who's living their life like this praying giving they were actually showing their devotion to God okay and we will understand that Cornelius is not a Jew not uh a Jew and yet his heart is devoted to God and he's trying to practice all the things which are necessary to uh fear God okay verse three and about the ninth hour he has a vision remember God is speaking how does God speak dreams wrong things uh angels you know an angel comes and tells the apostles you go you know you go back to the temple you go preach that so communication of God again Cornelius he receives a vision in a vision and in the vision an angel of God okay so that's the way my God is speaking to him what what does the angel say name remember Saul uh Ananias Cornelius so God is speaking to the individual and when he observed him he was afraid and said what is it Lord you see people are responding to the communication of God and saying what do you want me to do where do you want me to go Lord all of them are responding Cornelius is saying what is it Lord meaning what do you want me to do then uh so the angel replies and says your prayers and your arms have come up for a memorial before God now send men to Joppa and send for Simon who's serving this Peter he's lodging with Simon Natana whose house is by the sea he will tell you what you must do isn't this so beautiful that the Holy Spirit is directing people to go and meet other people imagine today you know in our churches if this happens if let's say Dave has a dream about uh somebody in his place where he's staying right now he has a dream and says you know brother uh again brother John he stays in this place he's praying I want you to go Dave I want you to minister there and then you know uh let's say Siddharth has a dream and God is showing him I want you to go down to this particular area street number seven go to house number this there is a person there he's a good person he has lived this life so well before me and you know I want to minister to him I will minister through you if God makes these supernatural connections in our life today wouldn't that be amazing but you see that in the early church Holy Spirit is speaking giving people visions directing them to cross paths with each other so that's really like you know a wonderful very dynamic exciting work of the Holy Spirit taking place among the people and you see here there is a man he's not even a Jew but he was devoted to this God right he was devoted to God and whatever he did in the name of God God recognized it and you see so when we pray when we give for God in the name of God all these things come before God and God always remembers those things so God is saying look there is a man he has done these good things and I remember it and I am going to do something in his life today so God was intentionally God minister to Paul on the road to Damascus God minister to Amias when he was paralyzed God minister to Tabitha when she was dead okay and now God is ministering to Cornelius because of his good life and that's the way God is ministering to people in the book of Acts so let us just pray right now we will close because time is up and we will pick up from where we have stopped in the next class I will pray Heavenly Father we thank you Lord for your grace Lord your mercy Lord even as we have had the time to study and learn Lord from your word from the book of Acts Father we pray that this word will revive our spirits Lord and Lord we believe that what you have done Lord in the in the book of Acts in the lives of the people the Lord you can come you will do that in our lives so today Father I just speak and declare dreams visions Lord communication Lord from heaven into each one's life Father all the students Father God every listener and I just pray Lord that you will pour your spirit on each one of us and Lord we pray that Lord we will see greater wonders and not greater things done in our lives Lord even greater than what we are seeing today Father God in these chapters Lord we thank you once again we come at the rest of the time the glasses into your hands lead us and guide us Lord bless you in Jesus name we pray amen amen so thank you class and I will see you next week in Acts God bless have a good day bye for now okay thank you bye thank you bye bye


All right, everybody. Thanks for joining Jenkins advocacy and outreach sick meeting today is September the eighth. And on the agenda. I have a G sock update DevOps world discussion. And I think our biggest discussion will be on on October fast. Anything else that we should add to the agenda. All right. No, I'm good with that. So I had an action item from when Gavin joined us for this call to do a monthly Jenkins newsletter. So I have initiated the form for that. So basically what we want to do for it to do is to look like this. So Gavin gave us the example that this is what matrix does on a weekly basis but what we're going to do is we'll start out with a monthly basis. And we're just going to, you know, just pretty much get an update from each of the sick teams for, you know, get their update at the end of every month and post it or push it live via blog via blog and their discourse channel. Yeah, just posting monthly updates begin every month and I'm shooting for the first one to go out in October that first week of October. But I think it's pretty straightforward with the example that Gavin gave us so we'll try that and then we'll see how it goes and then we'll tweak as we go along as we get more experience under our belt. So I had received or I had a link. Oh, I saw I see the link to that form. So I completed that for as the doc SIG, but I think we would want Kevin Martins to do it as the doc SIG so we need to ask him. And Bruno, I think you'd be a good one to do the platform sake. So we may want to have Bruno answer the form there. In my case, I'm not sure that the form is an ideal format because I'm much more accustomed to writing things with Mark up and embedding hike up hyperlinks, but it's worth trying and then we see what where we go from there Alyssa. Okay. So I had on here, Mark, so we have the advocacy and outreach SIG infrastructure documentation. And I thought it might be a good idea for us to get a governance update as well. Yeah, and platform, and then UX, am I missing anything else. I think those are the active ones right now. So choices and and certainly the SIGs that you listed are good and governance makes a lot of sense as well. Absolutely. Okay. Just adding they're depending on the season. They're temporary SIGs like the GSOC one, or the special short lived. Right, right. And maybe maybe we put that under events or under advocacy and outreach. Yeah, maybe that is a just a subtopic of advocacy and we make sure that they covered I agree with John Mark. You're right. Yeah, definitely. I think it would go under advocacy and outreach and events is like a sub bullet of that. Thank you, Mark. So a request to promote Bay Area meetup decline or not related to Jenkins. Is this the one that you put in mark. I just barely added that. I just wanted to note that we had received a request from somebody hey please promote a CICD meetup but it really had no, no relationship to Jenkins, not even just no direct relationship it made no reference to Jenkins it had no indication that Jenkins was was going to be called at all. And so I thought, for me and with Gavin Mogan's agreement we said let's not promote it. Yeah, right. And it didn't look linked to the CDF either. No. Right. No, it's, it's with armory. And yeah they are not linked with CDF I don't think. But basically it was general CI CD, come eat sushi with us and talk about CI CD. I didn't felt I also felt that it didn't have anything that specific or call out to Jenkins. So yeah and I think we would open a can of worms if we allow for support this request, because we will eventually get more requests like this really make sense. In the ASOCK update, we are scheduling for our final, final presentation via John for October, although John Mark is struggling with the four project contributors to come to finalize a date it is challenging because the contributors are back in school. So we will attempt for October. So fingers crossed that we will have a date for for October. I want to hold a job for them to have a public presentation and them handing over the bait and or to talk to the future generation. Contributors so we'll hold it and we work hard to have a place and I want them to present it live, rather than just recording them. Yeah, we could. I think they did a fantastic job last time so why not this is this is the closure so it would be a good way to go out. And then we will follow up with their blogs, each a blog for each project after the after the Jenkins online meetup. So again we're shooting for October for that. DevOps world, the contributor summit of the final almost final pretty much final agenda is now available and I pushed it out via the discourse channel. And if there's anything else that anybody wants to chime in add to that please just go ahead and chime in but I think we have a really good outline for what the day looks like. And then contributing to the open source workshop so I will let either John Mark Bruno or Mark you talk to this because I know you put in a lot of time and effort into it. Yeah so we've got a we've got a 90 minute workshop that DevOps world will be hosting on that will help people make specific useful contributions to the plugin of their choice. We've selected a group of 25 plus plugins, and we're preparing answers for them so that if they can't do it, they'll be able to look at our answers. So the idea is, they start, they try it. And if they're successful, great. And if not, they look in the back of the book, and there is the answer and they say, Oh, that's what you did or oh that's what you did. We'll help them. And as a result of this there will be a new tutorial posted to www.jankins.io focused on helping developers do these kinds of small improvements, small but valuable improvements to Jenkins plugins. Yep. Great. Look forward to people joining us in that session. Yep. We'll be very lucky to have all three of you there. It will be fun. Yeah. Okay, so the next topic is is October fast so Jean mark or mark I will hand this over to you. Well I can I can start and then ask for marks. So the first thing is October fast currently everybody is eagerly waiting for the starter to pull the trigger on the race to say so there was a first enigmatic tweets from October fast with just eyes is looking. Everything prepared, but there's no official announcement yet everybody's waiting and asking about that. So, we are preparing. We are thinking getting everything ready for it, but we're not going out in the world with any announcement or, or whatever. So, what's been discussed here are just ideas that we've been working on internally as soon as a starter pulls a trigger for the race. Then we'll start to come out with explanations blog posts and several initiatives around that. Mark, do you want to add something on this introduction. Okay, so the, the, I think the areas of interest topics or areas of interest bullets are a good one for people to understand. There really are at least two different ways that people can contribute to hacktoberfest that will help Jenkins. One is as a Java developer, where I'm interested in doing Java development. I'm a student at the university, I'm a high school student I'm experienced with Java or not. In there I think our best, our best path forward is use this improve a plug into developer tutorial and guide new contributors there saying hey choose these will need to identify which plugins they can submit to because people are willing to review their request. And in this link here you'll see a link to 25 plugins that john mark Bruno and I you don't need to click the link Alyssa it's it's, it just opens a list of plugin names it's not very helpful, but the, the, the hat what was assigned the hacktoberfest topic to them, so that new contributors can click that and choose one. And then they follow the steps in the tutorial, and the end result is a useful poll request that can be reviewed by people who care about and are willing to review that poll request. So the Java developer story I think is a pretty good one here. Now, now there are other other stories this one is is a simple story there are other more complicated stories that we could consider right now that was my first thought. We did the other idea what we'll do anyway so this is very good access to try to get as much attention and energy on it the other thing that will do when we start is remind every plugin maintainer and or core to pinpoint or prepare the buffet of work that can be done for newbies but also experienced Java developer and get them get them going. So, we'll talk to the maintainers to say we're here. It's, it's part of growing the community teaching people new things that they get prepared I like the analogy of the buffet. Continuing on the analogy of the buffet a big effort that we're also going to do with the maintainers is to actively weed out spam like pull request that just annoying distracting and somewhere disrespectful for the for the work. So there will be communications aimed at maintainers that are an active role in there because it's creating the buffet but also teaching the people how to discover these new food so you can build a complete analogy. So, this is for the developer. Mark, there were some good ideas that have been discussed in the documentation sake I believe this is a very good very good topic for people. Right and so the documentation is is this sort of another area and another facet of October fest contribution documentation contributions are most often even a lower bar than Java contributions. Right, you can you can do documentation contributions and have no development experience whatsoever. So the doc SIG has been going through and will continue to go through throughout the month of September, looking to identify things that are good first issues. And those are really intended for people with no Jenkins experience. In addition they're highlighting things with the hacktoberfest label that are biased towards people with Jenkins experience. There are some where hey I want to contribute I've been a Jenkins user for a while. I can use my skills to help that. And that's a different level of contribution, but it requires that preschool and if we get novices attempting to do those they're more likely to generate spam or to generate non useful content. And then, as a specific the docs migration page in the developer tutorial is actually specific to documentation, but it has some of the same challenges is hiding under the Java developer topic that it needs to be done against a plug in repository where the plug in maintainer is actively maintaining the plug in. And many of the plugins that are actively maintained have already done this transition. Yep. But there's still how you say that laggers know people that that are. Yeah, there's like it's just like it's just a word. There are still nine over 900 plugins that need to have this transition done. Oh, but that over 900 plugins is mostly the plugins that are in the behalf of the Jenkins plugins pool that are have small installations or relatively low usage. But worthwhile contributions just to streamline the base clean it up and and making everything ready for the next iteration so it's not lost word work at all even if they're just a couple of so so the documentation part. Now I'm selling here but I'm super enthusiastic about the different things. In the October fest now we're going to communicate about that once the race starts so we we we preparing we have ideas we we're preparing the communications but we wait for the start. There's no sign that it will not take place. It will take place that probably checking rules. Back to you Alyssa. Okay, the next item CDF advocacy increasing I think mark this is yours so I know that Roxanne shared with me that she posted Kevin's blog, the Jenkins 2.361.1. And she also said that she would promote it as well so anything else that you need to add to this. Yeah so so and I liked how they framed it. It's Jenkins turns 18. Jenkins has reached legal adulthood. Congratulations everyone in the United States Jenkins could vote if we're a person. So, the good I've seen the seen the tweets very good, very good. Now the additional reason I put this on here is that I just forwarded to Alyssa, an email message from our copied Alyssa on an email message from Michelle Martinville, copied Fatih did your man she have some additional promotional efforts that CDF is doing, they're proposing a video series. And they've asked us to be part of that video series. I think their plan is to actually do the presentation in November with recording in late October, or yeah so late October or early November. So I've, they asked me some questions I offered them some suggested topics. I conspicuously mentioned john mark and Bruno on some of those topics congratulations to both of you. Yes, there are topics that are already familiar to you and so. No topics are decided yet, but, but the conversation has started in November is the likely sharing of those with recording to happen in probably early November because I responded to Michelle that I'm out of the office until between October 10 to October 27. She said, Mark, we think we want you on the broadcast so we'll, what if we did them after you get back. So she was okay with that too. So any questions on the CDF advocacy efforts. Yeah. So I'll follow up on that with Michelle just to make sure that we that they have what they need and we stay on task with regards to dates. Great. Thank you. Thanks very much. I was just a naive question. A little bit out of topic but are the CDF advocacy meetings, did they start again or did I miss the invite or. No, they haven't started. Oh, they they still I did ask the question but it wasn't answered. Right. They did answer my question with regards to bevy and meetup. At this time, they will, we will continue on with meetup, keep meetup until they decide what is important to everybody before switching over to bevy because bevy is much more expensive. And we need to get all of our ducks in a row before we transition there. But as of now it's still meetup.com and of course, you know, zoom we're still going to keep it. Yeah, and nothing more about the meetings. Regular meeting. Yeah. Well, I have enough to keep me busy. Don't worry about that. I didn't want to miss important. Yeah. I don't know if that should be part of this meeting, but I applied to a few online conferences lately to talk about Jenkins. So maybe I'll be able to do it. I don't know the answers yet. So most of them are online conferences and also a few conferences that will take place in the real world next early next year. So we'll see hopefully I'll be able to talk about Jenkins outside of my office. Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Yeah, keep us posted. If you do get accepted, we'd love to add you on the on the calendar for the events calendar for Jenkins. Okay, good. Okay, so we can stop the recording. I need to stop the recording. You're the one.