Welcome to another episode of Stepping Up, where we explore the world of innovation, creativity and advocacy to aspire to greater and new things. I'm your host, Daniel Dubois. This week, I wanted to explore the world of women in agriculture. I was deeply inspired by Keith Linkaru, who is the founder of Helen's Daughters, a foundation which seeks to support women in agriculture with training and access to information and resources. After check-handing over ceremony this week, where funds were handed over from the Prime Minister's independence ball, I was moved by Ms. Karoo's candid thank-you speech, which spoke to the importance women played in feeding the nation and how they are often forgotten. In this episode, we head to Babano, where we chat with Ms. Karoo and two women agriculturers from Helen's Daughters, all immensely proud of what they do and so excited to show me around. A little later, you get to see how I did at Harvesting Eggs. Let's take a look at the first interview. Hello guys and welcome to another exciting episode of Stepping Up and right now I am here on Michael Lina's farm and we will get to meet her a little bit later. But right now we are zoning in to the lady of the hour, the founding director of Helen's Daughters. How are you Keith? Good, Daniel. Thank you for having me. So happy that you agreed to say yes to being a part of this interview here today. And of course we know that this week you guys were the recipients of some support from funds raised at the officers, not the officers ball, sorry, the prime minister's ball. So I was like, hmm, who is she? And the way she came when she spoke about what she does, and you know, everybody had to give the little speech.  So thank you so much for saying yes. So my first question for you is basically why farming and why women? And how did Helen's Daughters begin? Farming for me is close to my heart and second nature. I was proudly born and raised in the community of Fawasaw, Babano, and that community and like most of Babano is largely an agricultural area. And my background doesn't lie in agriculture. It lies in political science and international relations, which is a bit far, one would think. But when I noticed that the vision, like the perspective of the country was sort of turning away from agriculture and we were relying more and more on tourism, I felt that there were sustainable ways to sort of combine the two without neglecting any sector. And the reason I chose women is because I felt like women tend to be like the invisible force in farming, just like Miss Paula, Miss Michaelina, there's thousands of those misses in the country. And I'm sure you Daniel have probably known or know of someone who's a woman farmer. And I felt like a lot of times you don't hear their stories, they don't get the recognition for feeding the nation. And in general, they're overlooked. Just like I mentioned at the award ceremony, you can go into castries market and you'll see that 90% of the vendors are female. But when it comes to choosing like persons, farmers and so on for programs of financial assistance, a lot of times it's men. Because the idea is that women tend to be vendors and not growers. And I'm sure in the castries market is a good example of it, that most of the women there most likely grow their own produce. Absolutely, they do. They really literally feed in the nation. So let us know a little bit more about what exactly does Helen's daughter's offer. She was very specific, please don't drop my S. So Helen's daughters, what is it that you guys offer to any woman who is in farming or interested in farming? All right, well, we really focus on four areas. One is highlighting the role that they play in agriculture. So we do quite a bit of advocacy on social media, sharing their stories and what all our members are doing. The second one is we're quite focused on economic empowerment. We want, like Miss Michaelina had mentioned, for them to realize that there's a difference between a farmer and an agricultural entrepreneur. So we want them to run their farms as a business and we provide support in terms of business development. The third thing that we provide, which sometimes you don't find is linkages to the actual markets. Like a lot of our farmers who only vented in the castries market before now have contracts with Massey or formerly before COVID actually used to sell to hotels and restaurants large scale. So they would actually get a normal decent sustainable income rather than something that they're unsure of when they're vending. And the final thing is that we want to inspire women that normally felt marginalized like women farmers to feel like they can own positions of leadership not only in the agricultural sphere but outside of it as well. I must say that I'm deeply moved and inspired and it's interesting that we did the show moving backward because we introduced the farmers and really gave me a unique context for me to be able to do the questioning now. But not only that, I am inspired because when you hear about farming, you just think about agriculture and like you know, it's like probably older people and you know, not everybody wants to do that. But then when having that conversation with them, they spoke about how farming really is a means of empowerment for women and I am really moved and inspired by that and it's a means of empowerment and it doesn't matter how old you are or where you are and how small your backyard might be. Once you could get that plant in the soil and get it out there. So tell me a little bit more, how many people have you been able to impact and how far reaching is your support nationwide? Well nationwide, we're still quite a very young organization. I would say that overall in our programs and so on, we're this year marks three years since we're in existence and we've impacted about the lives of about 150 female farmers. Currently, we have two flagship programs. We have a six month capacity development program called the Rural Women's Academy that Miss Nelson and Miss Paula were part of. And we're actually running a virtual ag academy. Currently, it sparks through COVID and so on. And what we're doing is we are running it in collaboration with facilitators from the University of Cornell and it focuses on hydroponics, which is like more we're trying to also exactly and protected agriculture and so on. So giving them more modern options and more sustainable options for their farm. Would you say, would you say that COVID-19 changed? Well, you mentioned hydroponics, but probably before that, was it able? Did it change your programming in any way? And did it probably put a spoke in your way in terms of any of your plans? You know what's amazing about it? And I don't want to say amazing, but in a way, interesting because COVID-19, I think made the country realize that we can't put all our eggs in one basket. And it also made us realize the impact of a nation's food security. For example, if the trading routes had been completely disrupted, we would essentially be starving in a way as a nation. And Senusha is too bountiful. The soils are too fertile for us to be in this position. A lot of my farmers, like Miss Paula mentioned, it was a way for them. It was an obstacle for them to market it. But when they did, they noticed that people were really right now invested in trying to buy local and eat local foods, not only because of COVID, but also because there's like a new wave of trying to be healthier and live. Yeah, and it's everything is organic and, you know, not important, no GML. And, you know, it's true. It's a move and it's a wave. And it's interesting to note that again, the linkage that as a country, we can support that need and that demand for, you know, fresh fruits and vegetables to be able to to do that. Next question is 10 years from now, where do you see Helen's daughters? What will be your biggest dream and your biggest accomplishment? And what is it that you really want to aspire to? Ten years from now, I see Helen's daughters as spreading all over the Eastern Caribbean region. I see some of the women that we've impacted right now, like Miss Michaelina, to be ambassadors for Helen's daughters, to actually be facilitators that they've learned enough that they can actually teach other people as well. And also, I because of the fact that I know, like in my grandfather's days, he actually learned farming practices and agriculture in school. Technically, right now in Saint Lucia, we don't have those agricultural programs in a lot of our elementary. For some reason, I think that we do. I just don't know how much about what we learn in school is translated outside into the open world, you know, because I did agriculture and nobody liked agriculture. I never had a class in agriculture in all my years in school. I did agriculture, see? I remember doing it and I remember it had two components and it was it's there. So what school you went to? I went to S.J.C. And I went to Agiluria before that. That's a special, you know, being excluded from these, what do you call this, comprehensive subjects? Right. But they do have access to it, actually. They do, but I would say that when I mean like access to it, not only not in terms of secondary, but actually starting from in front and primary. I feel like it's important for kids to learn from an early age, where their food comes from and also for us to sort of revitalize the whole idea of the food pyramid, you know, like, I think that what we've learned before from the U.S. and so on is not necessarily the best in terms of what we consume. And we have to sort of retailer that to a Caribbean diet, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. I'm ready to start taking ownership of what is ours and that probably since you're in primary school, because even back in the days, you know, when you learn history, because I did study a little bit of history at a level, they talk about how everything was life was revolved around bananas. And like how on Fridays, children will not come to school because they're in there in the on the plantation helping their parents. You know, so why can't we not embrace that? And it's not only bananas, but all the other aspects to farming and agriculture right now. You know, at a younger age, we can really encourage persons. Absolutely. And when you look at the biggest economies in the world, the similarity that all of them have, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, France, China, they are huge. The GDP is agriculture contributes a big part to their GDP. You need to start focusing on a little bit more. And we have foundations like you who are taking up the mantle to encourage women to get into agriculture and to support the endeavors. How do you feel that you were selected this year to be part of the Prime Minister's ball list of recipients for support? I was actually pleasantly surprised when I got the call, I was honestly quite shocked again because the organization is young. But even though we're young, I think we're we're feisty. In terms of our membership. I could put this to that. So I think that and I don't think we're giving up any time soon. I think we've only just begun. And I would have to say that we're truly grateful because it was the largest amount of locally sourced funding that we've ever gotten to date. All the funding that we have received has come from outside and and grant funding. But this is really our first local form of support. And for me, that's important because oftentimes in Saint Lucia, we like to say we don't support one another. And to me, it was a testament on a national level that it was realized that women farmers do play a vital role and that money literally is going to go directly into our training programs and expansion. So it's quite exciting, you know, so even though we're sort of in grim times, but at least we finally have some solid a little bit more positivity is peeping out. Exactly. Yeah. But congratulations. Let our audience know how they could join Helen's daughter, Helen's daughters. Helen's daughters. And just let us know how we can contact you. Well, you can join Helen's daughters by simply emailing us info at Helen's daughters.org or you can go onto our website. Helen's daughters.org as well. And we are on WhatsApp on<PHONE_NUMBER> as well. So any questions we're here to answer and trust me, once you reach out to them, you have friends. I feel like I've made long friends here today and they will help you there. They say they're going to see my backyard to see how they could help me start my own little farm or my little any little thing, my garden. So we'll be right back. And when we come back, you'll get to see our two farmers that we met here today. And I actually got to harvest some eggs. So I'm looking forward to that. Stay tuned and we'll be right back. Good afternoon. And how are you, mom? I'm great fine. All right. So tell us a little bit more about your farm and what exactly you have planting. Well, I'm planting celery, Chinese cabbage, sweet peppers, bell peppers. Eggplants, Swiss chard. And over there, I have beets and lettuce, thyme and chives for now. Nice. And before we started the interview, Michaelina was telling me that one of the things that she looks forward to doing as a farmer is talking to her plants.  Well, I learned to speak to my plants from an older lady. She's dead now. And she was always speaking to her plants as well. So she told me, you must talk to the plant as you plant. You must talk to it to them as you weed. You must talk to them. And one thing she always emphasizes prayer, prayer before I come to my farm, because you never know. You know, and I just tell the Lord what you want. Talk to the Lord as if he's there with you.  How important it is for women and what the foundation does in terms of encouraging them and supporting them to be farmers. Well, gone are the days when women were dependent on men. Gone are the days, OK? And I used to depend on my husband. But since we bought this property, I decided to go on my own and to plant. Grow my own vegetables. I have a worker. He comes here on a morning and he works. And then it's very important because then I don't have to depend on him for everything. And it just gives me pleasure when I take my stuff to Marseille, that's why I sell. And next week, go to Marseille, collect my check. That is it. And the check is on my name. It's what to speak. It's on my name. It's not on anybody's name. But if anyone. So then, just with that, what can you tell women and young women? Because I'm so inspired by what I have seen this morning. A while ago, I was saying I want to be a chicken farmer, but now I want to be a produce farmer. And I want to do it all. What is it that you have to tell women, no matter what age? What message do you have for them? And why they should be interested in agriculture? Well, women, if you don't have the amount that I have, you can start small in your backyard. Use tires, boxes and start small because that's how I started. My husband was making beds on top, you know, until, you know, we bought that property. But when you start small, then you will you will want to expand and, you know, and have more and more and more. And it is a challenge for women to depend on themselves. And when you see we plant, we know that we are feeding the nation. We are feeding people, you know. And as the saying goes, eat local, buy local, you know. And that's what I do, buy local. I don't buy local, but I eat local because I am planting the same things I'm eating. And it sounds like you just take so much pride in what you do. Oh, yes. Some on mornings, sometimes I dream of my garden, you know. I dream of my garden sometimes. I dream of my garden, you know. When I have to harvest, I have to, I'm coming here around six to eight in the morning. My helper, the day before, I would tell him what I'm going to harvest and he would start and then I would join him. He would cut the stuff because as you see the plate is not, the place is not flat. So he carries it up to the shed for me. And I take care of it right there. And then my son would take me to Masi.  I collect my check the next week, you know. But before my husband used to collect my checks for me. He used to sell for me and he used to sell on his name.  So say the truth. I'm proud.  Expand my knowledge. Sometimes when I would speak to the other women. You know, I would learn from them. And because of Helen's daughters, I was able to have more crops growing. I was not planting radish. I was not planting beets. But then in speaking to the other women and. With Helen's daughters and having some of the facilitators coming to speak to us on farming, I said, oh my, but I'm no way. Look at what the facilitators are saying, but I'm no way.  That boosts me up. That boosts me up $10,000 in a month. He told he told me, yes, it depends on what you plant. I'll tell you what to plant, plant, try tomatoes, try carrots and cabbage along with your and have. And did you do that? I have not done it because it's just in March. We had graduation in March. Yes, OK. And the day of graduation, I was going to say graduation. What exactly did you do with Helen's daughters? How did they assist you? What is the first program that you did with them? Well, with Helen's daughters, I was introduced to Helen's daughters by the president of another group I am in. And then I decided to come on board and in coming, I never missed a session. It was always exciting and they used to encourage us to grow.  I'm not living from the time I joined Helen's daughters. I'm not going to my leave my house anyhow. When I come here, I always imagine sometimes I my skin on my top is matching, you know, because we have to I am doing my farming farming as a business. That's right. It's not anything on the sideline as a business. You know, and I love the soil. You know, I love playing in the soil. So what message do you have just to conclude our so what do you have to tell me who is thinking about being a farmer and getting into that side of things? How and what do you have to tell the nation and anybody watching the show about farming and why you think women and men? Why do you think it's important? It's first of all, I must tell you to join Helen's daughters. All right. I hope I can get a form again. I'm joining today. Yeah, you can get a form. You can get a form. As long as you have a backyard, you can start there. That will be yours. If the Lord permits and you buy a farm, you can expand. But then it has its challenges because, you see, eating foods from overseas is not the best, you know.  Buying the regular foods from the supermarket. And anybody can join Helen's daughters. Anybody. So tell them about, let us know about Helen's daughters. It's for daughters, not for sons, for now, women, for women. And Helen's daughter will daughters will inspire you. They'll encourage you. If we have a problem, we will call each other. We will, we have promised to visit one another's farms because we just started about a little over a year ago. But then joining Helen Helen's daughters will encourage you to move on, but do not be stagnant and to aspire to greater things, to greater things. Now I am looking forward to maybe one of these days, I'll go overseas to inspire overseas women. That's right.  And then the first thing I did when my children got older was to learn cake decorating. I do cakes, cake decorating on the side.  The two monies does not fight, you know, so I do that. But then in farming, I have. I get more in farming than than what you're doing than the cakes. And in fact, I don't have time for my house, because I don't have time for my house.  I don't want to live. But the challenges before I forget, before I forget, the challenge that I have is water, water, water during the dry season season. I have those four times there. They were given to me by Ika, because I'm a member of a group in Babylon called the producers, women's producers. And Ika gave me those four times. It helped during the dry season. But that's one of my challenges. It's the water to get it there, to get it. Although I will live just in 20s right over there, but I'm not having water all the time. Like today, I don't have. I have not had for the week. Praise God, a little water's rain is falling every night. So we can help, help, you know, but I love, I love to know what I do. You love what you know. I love what I do. I don't mind getting my hands dirty, my feet dirty.  My money is mine. Yes. Well, Michael, you know, thank you so much for chatting with us. I realize you put down the cutlass so you know, it's no longer a hazard. No, no, no, no, I'm just joking because I realize it's like an extension of you. But have my time there. I'm just there. I'm done there. I just have others a habit when I talk, you know, your cutlass, a part of it. Part of it. Thank you very much and all the best in all your future endeavors. And guys will be right back. And now we head to our second farm. I've been in the chicken farm business for 17 years. One time I met my husband, Jojo, but he's deceased now. And then it's two years of his passing and I'm still continuing doing the layers. I'm doing layers. I used to do broilers, but now I'm all into the layer birds. You need to let them know what's layer birds. Yeah, what's layers? Well, there's those who lay. Those who lay, but in the broilers are those you grow to eat for six weeks. OK, OK, OK. So when I get the birds at the beginning of it from the hatchery, I usually bring it into a place where I call a brooder. Leave it there for eight weeks, the layer birds. And then I dig them at six weeks. And after eight weeks, I put them into the larger pen, which is where I have them now. After a while, you can see where I have them. And then I feed them with grower. I'm started for eight weeks. And after I'm started for eight weeks, I give them grower, fine grower. I like the fine grower instead, because I feel the birds enjoy it better. And then after that, they consume more water. I'm de-beaking them for them not to peck each other and not to peck the eggs. That's the important. But some people don't de-beak them, but I like to de-beak mine. Yeah, and I like to de-beak them early. And I don't really have problems. Sometimes if they go through stress also, then they do that. Nice. So I know that you're on the foundation. You're on the board of the foundation. I hope I'm saying it properly. And she's a public relations officer of Helens Daughters. Let us know about the foundation and the work that you have been doing in your community. I have been mobilizing a lot of people about Helens Daughters, letting them know because of Helens Daughters. I'm being a better person today, to be able to manage my farm a little better. Because I did, I think, a six-week course with six months course with Helens Daughters. And that have brought me a better person today. I'll be able to manage my farm better because what I used to do before, I used to feed, full of the feeders. But I've seen that at a loss to me. So what I do, I know 200 birds supposed to eat a bag of feed. According to the amount of birds I have, I know how much feed I have to put into the feeder. So they consume that amount of feed for the day. And also it prevents rats from coming and eat the leftovers for the next day. So I'm saving on that also. So Helens Daughters basically help give you the information that you need and nice. How have other women benefited from Helens Daughters? And tell us why you think it's important women are in agriculture. What's the story we don't know about women who are farmers?   You can take time off to go and take your children at school, go and pick them up, you're having time to go and do your sales. You know, well, I can do my sales within that time, with that time. And then I have to make time for my family. So if you are employed somewhere else, it will be more difficult to make time for your family. But being a farmer, then I feel it's for me, it's easier for me to be able to make an income and also be able to maintain my family. So you see farming as an as an opportunity to empower women and women to be able to have their own opportunity to make a living, not just looking or sorting out and eating, you know, what to give them to your family.  So you know, you can give them health everything because it's so costly to maintain health in this country. So if you have a healthy farm, you know what I'm producing, then you know that you can give your family a healthy meal. My next question for you is how has Covid-19 changed the way you do things or what has it done? Has it affected you in any way? And if so, how has it changed the way that you conduct your business? Before I used to just take my eggs to the other small shop in the cashless market, I used to just take my eggs to the shop and then I used to sell. But now the money has been so limited that I have to go from door to door to be able to sell my eggs. And I said that have been so good to me because some a lot of people didn't probably thought I had already forget about doing that layered thing. But since they see me coming to their doors and selling eggs, they said, are you still doing the birds? Are you still doing birds? So with that, that can help me. And then I can also bring in some more customers to my business. Nice. So to conclude, what message do you have for St. Aleutians and what would you like to see moving forward and speaking to Helen's daughters? What's next for you guys? I would like to see that the government help us a little bit, not only just talk, but to have a one to one talk with the farmers and have a concern because sometimes they more intend to tell you what they want to do for you, but they don't want you to hear what you need for yourself because sometimes you hold an empty bag and you know what you're going through. And I feel if they do that, I think we'll have a better St. Russia. And Helen's daughters now. And Helen's daughters. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. You told me that you have a task for me for me to go and pick up some eggs. Yes, I clean them and also pack them. A whole job. But anyways, guys, thank you very much. We'll be right back. So moved by this episode, getting to chat with Paula and Michaelina and understanding how they have empowered themselves to be independent and financially stable. If you have been thinking about starting a little kitchen garden, now is the time. And as our guests said, we must start small and be consistent. And now it's time for Link up. We head over to St. Vincent and the Grenadines to chat with Shabazz Ghan Manroo. He's a consultant in the Ministry of Youth Affairs, a radio announcer and entertainer. He talks about St. Vincent's COVID-19 response and reflects on the journey thus far. So Shabazz, thank you so much for joining us for this segment of Link Up. And as you know, we try to reach out to our regional brothers and sisters. It's been a while since we've done a regional Link Up with one of our colleagues from the CYDU movement. And we just want to know in short, how is St. Vincent doing today? We know that we could basically say we've passed that level of fear and we're now on that road to recovery and having to find a way to move forward, balancing, you know, lives and livelihoods and moving forward. So just let us know how is St. Vincent doing as of today? Well, I will say that today, what restaurant are we now presently? It is the fact that we weren't well prepared for COVID. We just assume COVID would have been like another hurricane that would have, for some great reason, just pass it by magically and head to the other islands. As a result of that, we have seen a lot of closure in businesses. We've closed over 350 businesses at the closure doors due to COVID and the country of the country and the access to the country. Now, persons lost work, but now we're in a stage of rebuilding. We're restructuring. We're trying our best to see how we could be more resilient because, you know, COVID hasn't finished it. Matter of fact, I think this is actually the middle of it. This is the middle of the storm and there might be another end. We have put measures in place to be testing as well as quarantining and make sure that persons that adhere to the guidelines, which was a problem for us earlier in the year, persons who weren't really paying attention, everybody was very jovial and they were ready for carnival and all of that. And I think St. Vincent was one of those countries in the region. They didn't close their borders. You guys, according to, I spoke to Arya, she was like, we jam in still here in St. Vincent.  And I guess you just got lucky and, you know, was on the ground. What's the feeling like? The feeling is on the ground. It's still a lot of this grunge because we did not have a carnival. But I think what we have to always prioritize is the safety and well being of all citizens as to our entire response to COVID administration wise, government wise, I will say that we did not have any plans to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude and we still don't have any plans to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude. What we have is a day to day struggle as to let's try this today and see if it works or let's try this tomorrow and if it don't work, let's try something else. There is no affirmative plan. There is no structure in place to say, OK, these are the measures we're putting in place to ensure our borders are still more or less open and what we work with about two weeks ago after the flight stopped coming, we noticed our COVID cases dropping to zero from 25 to zero. And after that, we had a charter from American Airlines who came to Sylvain to stand the Grenadines and immediately we were back in the 20s with cases. We actually now have 15 active cases. So we went from zero to all of these important cases. And I think that's something absolutely to be done about our borders for now until we have a proper concrete plan as to how to control the uncontained COVID as itself. Because what we have are important cases. We don't have local transmission and we reduced the quarantine period from two weeks, reduced it down to a week and now we're at five days and we only got back to five days because we took it to two days. Now I want to be candid and say that, you know, if you have to talk about the same Vincent story, you know, probably you could talk about what would you put on your hand as a success in terms of the whole COVID thing? For me, I could probably say that you guys are basically lucky and very brave because imagine this week we were supposed to have kind of all on Monday and Tuesday and it was very hard for some of us, including myself. And in St. Vincent, you're talking about you had a wetthread Friday. What really going on, boy? I actually got my credit back to my credit card. They say, well, the Airbnb, I had a residence in Lucia. They just can't, but it's down for this. But at the long end of this, Daniel, what I really hope does not become the result is COVID-19 as a pandemic. Growing into this standard is because we don't have the facilities to handle COVID-1, we don't have the expertise to handle COVID. And that is my main point. So the fact that we've just reverted everything to the conversation of normalcy, knowing that we have a pandemic on our hands, that's going to be a lot of stress. And a break of COVID. I mean, if we have over 50 cases, I know it's going to be a national emergency. We have to be a national emergency where our neighbors might not be in the position to help because everybody's trying to safeguard their citizens now as it pertains to COVID. While we're over here, just living our lives freely, living our best lives, basically to put it. So what I would really hope for and what I advocate for is for persons to be more aware that, you know, COVID is here, it hasn't gone anywhere. While as we may go down to zero and we bring in another plane, and we have another plane coming on Saturday, I believe, yes, another plane is coming on Saturday. So I am hoping that there are no positive cases on board that plane. But you can be too certain and the precautions, as I explained, are not in place to ensure that that person is contained and works. But for me personally, on the flip end of COVID, while businesses were shutting down, I took the opportunity to open a restaurant that has been doing. Congratulations. But so that would have been that would have been my follow up question, though. On the lighter side, what are some of the positive things coming out of the whole COVID situation? And like you said, you know, when there's a lot of disappointment and uncertainty and chaos, there's lots of opportunities. So you said that you open your own restaurant, talk to on the ground and nationally in St. Vincent, what are some of the amazing things you've seen citizens do to basically innovate and continue to thrive during this ongoing pandemic? What we saw that was excellent. You saw business houses, mountain pipes, and putting soap dispensers outside. You saw people doing that, even from their local houses in a large community where the populace in that particular space might not be one that is rich or wealthy. You see persons providing materials. You see persons making masks from their machines and distributes. Thank you. Going to the school and assistant teaching children how to properly sanitize how to properly wear their masks, how to save their themselves from COVID. It was a community effort and it brought the community closer.  But I think now as a society, we're more caring for each other. And we look out for each other as if I'm in the office and I don't have hand sanitizer, for instance. I know my colleague will already be more than happy to offer some hand sanitizer to me and it has been well. I mean, you see little children educating themselves on COVID, understanding, OK, these are the procedures that we need to take to save our ourselves to control the spread of COVID-19. And it has all been good. It has all been good on that end. We're not going to bring us to that place. But, you know, you can't you can't just disclaim the way how the universe works on certain things. Yeah, it's a it's a balance. It's a balance because even in St. Lucia and as much as, you know, we can basically state that we did really well in terms of how we handled it on the ground. You have we face a major economic problem. You know, lots of people are still out of work and, you know, a lot of people are just not too sure what, you know, when the next set of money is coming in. So, you know, I think right now this is probably the focus of the government right now trying to focus on how we could get money back into people's pockets and return life to some sort of normalcy, you know. And, you know, we still under state of emergency. We only lifted our curfew recently. It was up until 11. So our cases, our situation has been very stringent. Yeah, and it was up until I think for the longest curfew we had was five to nine p.m. So and, you know, people was off the road. People would be off the road. So I think, again, on the flip side, as much as we've safeguarded ourselves as much as possible on the flip side, you still have a lot of people who struggle daily to get things done and it's not over yet. You know, it's not over yet. But Shabaaz, thank you so much for speaking to us. I don't know if you have anything that you want to say to wrap up our conversation. Let your brothers and sisters know in St. Lucia, how is St. Vincent today and, you know, any final messages from you? I wish to commend you on this beautiful program that you have invited me to thank you so much for the invitation, of course. To Vincent, of course, remains beautiful as St. Lucia. To praise St. Vincent. Whatever. I have a Lucia at heart. I am part of St. Lucia for myself. But I wish you guys the utmost best. I hope that as a region we could all recover from COVID and get back to show in the world the beautiful islands we have to offer and also stabilise our economies and stabilise our people. Of course, I must commend your government for the steps that they took to ensure that the St. Lucia's uphold was protected from COVID. If only I were to be so lucky. But I must. I'm sure there are a few things that you can probably commend your government for. But, you know, I don't know. I don't know. Shabazz. Enjoy your day. Be safe and all the best. Yeah. And wear your mask and sanitise your hands. All right, goodbye. What an amazing show we had this week. I love reaching out and meeting people and learning about how they beat the odds. Work and aspire to greater things. If you know anyone who's doing something amazing in your community, please shoot me an email at stepping up758 at gmail.com. Thanks again for joining me. I'm your host, Daniel Dubois. Keep safe. And until the next time, don't forget to keep stepping up.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to Savva Summit. We're so excited to have you. My name is Rebecca and my colleague is called Davana, and we will dive right into the Summit for Windows Admin Center. The title of our presentation is What's New and What's Coming, and just as the title suggests, we are speaking about what features we have recently added, and what features we are planning to add that you can anticipate. So a basic intro to the presenters. So my name is Rebecca Wambua on the right of your screen. I'm a Product Manager for Windows Admin Center. I deal majorly with feedback, incidences, the GPU tool, the events tool, and such and such. To the left of your screen is my colleague Davana White, and she's a Product Manager too at Windows Admin Center. Essentially, she deals with our partners that develop extensions with us, especially. She also deals with Azure Hybrid items, so you might have seen Azure Arc in your latest download. She built that. Yeah, so that's who we are, and we'll get into what's the agenda. So basically, before we dive into the details, we'll basically outline... I want us to do our outline for today's session. We're going to keep it concise but informative, so we'll start with a very brief product overview to set the stage. Whether or not you're new to Windows Admin Center or you're an experienced user, this will provide context for the updates that we are discussing. Then we'll move on to what's new. We have some very exciting features and enhancements that have been recently released, and these updates are designed to improve your experience and the functionality of Windows Admin Center. Following that, we'll look at what's coming, what's ahead. We'll discuss the future development in the pipeline, features, essentially, that we're working on and that you can look forward to, and then finally, we'll end with a couple of reminders. Just a few important notes to ensure you get the most out of Windows Admin Center and its capabilities. So our goal today is not just to inform you about the product, but to inspire you to utilize its full potential. So first of all, we will essentially get started with what is Windows Admin Center? So Windows Admin Center offers familiar functionality in server, modern server administration, and basically it's the future of server administration. Whereas you'd use a series of different tools to manage your Windows server, now we offer you one complete comprehensive tool that will actually take away the need to have all these other tools, and you can use it for your server administration. Basically, it's the future of server management. First of all, Windows Admin Center offers you familiar functionality. It brings together common system management tools that allow administrators who are used to the classic Windows management consoles to quickly find their way around. So this includes tools such as the firewall tool, events tool, performance monitoring, the VM tool, et cetera. Next, it's very easy to use and install. The Windows Admin Center is essentially designed to simplify the setup process, meaning you can get it up and running with basically no hassle. This ease of use basically extends to day-to-day management tasks, streamlining complex processes into user-friendly interfaces, et cetera. Also, WACC is designed to complement existing solutions. It doesn't replace your current management stack or infrastructure, rather it enhances it, meaning you can integrate it seamlessly into your environment, augmenting your existing management tools and processes. We complement tools such as Intune, MMC, et cetera. Another key feature is secure remote management with an emphasis on security. WACC allows admins to manage the system from anywhere while providing robust protections against potential threats. As you see, my colleague Davana will speak later on our secure call feature. Finally, it's Azure integrated. For those of you who are leveraging the cloud, WACC provides direct integration with Azure services. This allows you to have a hybrid approach to system management or a fully cloud approach to your system management. So you can get both benefits of on-prem or cloud, or if you want a bit of both. So basically, WACC is flexible, secure, and efficient, and it's integral to managing your Windows systems in the modern IT landscape. So next, we'll move on to what's new, which is quite exciting. So we'll start with the .NET upgrade. So basically, with a .NET upgrade, we are so excited to announce the public preview of the .NET upgrade for WACC, which you might hear referred to as Windows Admin Center V2 or the Modernized Gateway. So let's talk about what that means for you and your systems. The .NET platform is a core component of WACC. WACC is Windows Admin Center. And with this upgrade from .NET framework 4.6.2 to .NET core, we are laying the foundation of a host of improvements. Firstly, we want to give you improved performance.  Time is valuable and we're ensuring you spend less of it waiting on your management tools. Next, we have bolstered security. We've improved cryptography. Security isn't just a feature, but a promise. With all these updates, your management activities are safeguarded with the latest advancement in secure communications. This upgrade also brings cross-platform support, which essentially expands WACC capabilities for a wider range of OSs. For those of you who are in diverse IT association, you know that this means more flexibility and accessibility. And last but not least, we have implemented HTTP2 support. This modern protocol reduces latency, but also improves overall web performance, making your management experience smoother and more responsive. In conclusion, the .NET upgrade is not just an update, it is a way for you to enhance the security and the efficiency and the reliability of your WACC, your Windows Admin Center Modernized Gateway Improvement. Next, we will see the visual of how much we can see the difference in page load times. So the old gateway, which for these purposes of this presentation we'll call V1, we have a 10 seconds performance time. But then with V2 or the Modernized Gateway, you can see we have slashed that right into half and we have five seconds. So this is just our commitment to improving your experience in terms of performance and reliability. Next, we'll also like to announce to you that we're excited to discuss that recent update in the virtual machine management. So we have network adapter support on the VM import. So what does this mean for you? Now importing VMs will be smoother and more intuitive and it basically mirrors the familiar functionality that you've experienced in Hyper-V. This aligns the processes across different platforms, making your workflows more consistent and less error-prone. Additionally, we're making continuous progress on the VM to load times. With every single release, we're chipping away at the delays aiming for a seamless and rapid experience. This is part of our commitment to efficiency and performance as we continually reiterate. We understand that managing virtual environments is a key part of your job and these updates are designed to make that work easier. Whether you're spinning up new instances or migrating existing ones, you can expect a more fluid, efficient and secure management experience. Then here's a demo of this improved time. So as you'll notice, we had actually cut down time before, but now we are farther away chipping away at that time. So as you can see, this finishes at 13.2 seconds while the old gateway finishes at 21.4 seconds. We are basically shaved off seven seconds and that's still part of our commitment. So you should expect such and such coming more of that coming through. So as you can see, the performance history of our VM tool, the times have actually gotten less and less. So from 55 seconds all the way down to 32 seconds, lower to 20 seconds and now currently at 15 seconds. So we're consistently making improvements and it's still part of our commitment. Then now we can move on to trigger updates for the update tools. As we continue to, let's turn our attention to the updates tool which has received some significant enhancements recently. First, it's worth noting that WAC now allows for seamless management of both Windows 10 and 11 PC machines. These machines can also be utilized as gateways, streamlining your management infrastructure and providing a unified experience across your network. Most notably, we have a new updates. You can now trigger machine updates with the same ease and functionality as a server experience. And that's a big step. The ability to initiate updates in a timely, flexible, controlled manner, it's very important, especially to maintain system security and performance while keeping in mind that you do have day-to-day operations happening on these servers. So we'll now also like to show you that we are taking advantage of the feedback that has been provided to us. We constantly go through this feedback. We are continuously listening to what you're saying and we're taking it very seriously. So now we'll look at a basic preview of this process happening. So you'll remote into one of your servers or desktops and you'll navigate all the way down to your updates tool. And now you'll see at the bottom section of the updates tool, the options to restart an update. So for instance, when you restart, you do the update. So you can choose either to restart immediately what was, which was that before, but now you can schedule your restart and select a specific date or in a specific time that you'd like to do your updates that aligns better now with your business processes and the operations so that you don't feel like the updates are taking too much of your time. As demonstrated here, you'll get a notification at the top right saying that you have successfully installed your updates. So now I will hand over to my colleague, Davana White, who will talk about what's coming. Welcome, Davana. Hey, everyone. Thank you, Rebecca, for re-emphasizing some of the awesome features that we've released recently. Now that we've covered exciting features that are already available, let's talk about some of the things that we're looking forward to that are coming soon in our next release and beyond. And we're going to start with Windows Labs. For those who are unaware of Windows Labs, it stands for Windows Local Administrator Password Solution. It is a Windows feature that automatically manages and backs up the password of a local administrator account on your Microsoft Entra joined or Windows Server Active Directory joined devices. Password management is a crucial component of your infrastructure security. The Windows Labs team has partnered with us to create an experience in Windows Admin Center to utilize all these amazing capabilities from retrieving your passwords to being able to open the RDP tool in Windows Admin Center and log in without entering your credentials because Windows Labs will fetch them automatically for you. As of right now, we are still working on bringing the design to life, but most of the backend work has been completed. So let's take a super secret sneak peek at what this tool would look like. Again, before we get started, these are mockups. These are not entirely, not necessarily representative of the final design of the tool, just to get that out of the way. Please do not take these mocks as gospel. So here we have a table listing all the machines that are Windows Labs enabled within our domain. This table also includes the ability to reveal your passwords and copy your passwords. In addition, it also has vital information such as the expiration timestamp for the password and the password update time. Those familiar with our standard angular controls will not be surprised that this table also comes with the standard functionality that presents inventory count, a refresh button as well as search for functionality. If we make our way to the action bar, you'll see the ability to set the expiration time and reset passwords for multiple passwords at a time. Not only that, but you'll be able to open the PowerShell tool in Windows Admin Center of the selected machine or remotely connect into the selected machine all without needing to enter in your credentials, as long as the machine has installed and configured Windows Labs. With this new tool extension, password management and authentication is simpler, efficient and more secured, saving you not only time, but potentially thousands of dollars in damages from something like a cybersecurity attack. If you would like to learn more about Windows Labs, please go to the link at the bottom of the slide, aka.ms slash LAPS. This, again, this feature is still under development, so we do ask that you not take the mocks I shared with you as gospel. They're still subject to change between now and the official release of the tool. Next, I want to talk about our hybrid investments. Those of you that are familiar with Windows Admin Center might have noticed our continued investment in our hybrid experiences, including our Azure portal offering. With infrastructure being increasingly hybrid these days, cloud integration is crucial because it ensures that you can not only easily manage your on-premises infrastructure, but also your Azure connected and cloud infrastructure. I am going to talk about our cloud offering, but first I want to talk about our Azure hybrid services. Lately, we've been focusing on three hybrid services, Azure Arc, Azure File Sync and our newest service, Azure Migrate. In the 2311 release of Windows Admin Center, we expanded the scope of Azure Arc onboarding to include onboarding at scale from our all connections page. You may have noticed that many of our Arc experiences are currently in preview today. Going forward, we're looking to bring these experiences up to general availability quality, and we're starting with our roots, the Azure Arc for Servers tool, which is accessible in settings when you're connected to a single server. Again, this redesign and feature is still in development and it hasn't been released yet. You're getting a super secret sneak peek here. We've given this tool a bit of an updated look and provided some additional information about your connected machine agent within Windows Admin Center. That way you can quickly get the status of your machine without navigating away to the Azure portal. We're also investigating ways to surface this additional information, such as agent less heartbeat and agent version, on the other areas that we provide Azure Arc status, such as the all connections page that I mentioned on the previous slide. If folks have thoughts about things they'd like to see here, please let me know or provide feedback through our feedback platform. In addition to the work we're doing with Azure Arc, we've also been working closely with the Azure File Sync team to improve the Azure File Sync onboarding experience in Windows Admin Center. Soon you can expect to see an updated error handling experience, more actionable error messages, and things of that nature, making getting started with Azure File Sync even easier through Windows Admin Center. We've also heard your feedback on the Azure Migrate Assessment Experience for Hyper-VVMs and are working on improvements in this space as well. We're working diligently with the Azure Migrate Team to determine how to provide you with an easy and useful experience to kickstart your migration journey through our familiar UI. Stay tuned for updates in this space. Now I would like to talk about our cloud offering. Our Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal offering lets you manage your Azure IaaS VMs and Arc-enabled infrastructure. The Azure IaaS VM offering is a generally available product and the offering to manage Arc-enabled infrastructure is in the public preview state. Our offerings provide you simple one-click deployment and connection experiences that make the management of your on-premises and cloud infrastructure possible through the single pane of glass that is the Azure Portal. Once you've deployed an IaaS VM or onboarded your machine to Azure Arc, there's no reason to go back to on-premises. There's no reason to think about how you need to connect to VPNs or RDP into your machine or any of that anymore. It's all provided through the experience we have built for Windows Admin Center in Azure. There are a lot of unique features that are currently specific to Windows Admin Center in Azure that are not on-premises and will likely never be available on-premises, meaning that this Windows Admin Center in Azure offering provides a ton of additional benefit to you, the user. This includes Azure RBAC access control, faster load times using the Azure Content Delivery Network, monthly updates, automated certificate management, and AAD authentication. In the last few months, we've widened our support matrix to include the use of just-in-time access and enterprise proxy support. We've also simplified the deployment of Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal, making it easier than ever to get started managing your infrastructure in depth through the cloud. Perhaps most excitingly, we are also planning on releasing support from Windows Client VMs. I'm gonna let my colleague, Prasitarora, explain what this experience is going to look like. Let's take a look at a new feature coming to Azure Virtual Machines running Windows Client, specifically Windows 10 or 11, Windows Admin Center. Windows Admin Center makes it seamless and consistent for you to manage your Windows Client operating systems natively from the Azure Portal. Let's take a look at how this works. Here, I've deployed an Azure Virtual Machine running Windows 11 Pro. On the left here, you'll see a new blade introduced called Windows Admin Center. For those of you that have used Windows Admin Center to manage your Azure VMs running Windows Server, you'll see a very familiar experience being introduced to Windows Client. Windows Admin Center in Azure unlocks incredible capabilities for the Azure Portal by providing you with an interface to manage the actual operating system of your Windows Client device. Windows Admin Center is the modern replacement to RDP, providing you with a native set of tools within the Azure Portal for complete OS management. It works by deploying a small agent on the Windows Client VM that accepts and processes operations made in the Azure Portal in near real time. Let's go ahead and deploy this agent. You'll have to go through a one-time installation process, following which you'll land on the connect screen. Access to the privileged operations that Windows Admin Center provides is controlled by an Azure RBAC role called Windows Admin Center Administrator Login. Ensure that your or your admin's Azure AD identities are part of this Azure RBAC role before using the tool. Now I can connect and start managing this Windows Client device. Windows Admin Center works exactly the same whether it's managing a Windows Server or Windows Client VM regardless of OS version. I can now use this tool to view my certificates, events, manage firewall rules, get a native PowerShell session, view my security threats, and so much more all within the Azure Portal. And finally, let's talk Windows Server 2025. I know we're all buzzing about the upcoming release. For Windows Server 2025, there are going to be a ton of new PowerShell Commandlets that will allow IT admins to do even more with their Windows Server infrastructure. Our team has selected some of the crucial experiences for which to create a management UI in Windows Admin Center. Here is a very rough map of those features and what you can expect once Windows Server 2025 is launched. Again, the launch of Server 2025 is a ways away and what I'm talking about today is subject to change, but I wanted to give y'all a little sneak peek into what we have planned. The first area of investment is the GPU P tool so you can continue to manage your AI workloads among other processes. For those of you familiar with the GPU tool for Azure Stack HCI, we expect the GPU P tool will look and feel similar to that already existing tool. Next is the improvements to the updates tools that you're able to grab all the latest security updates. And while we're on security, there will also be an expansion on our secure core compliance feature that will help your server stay secure and compliant. And lastly, to make it easier for IT admins to install the latest build of Windows Admin Center, we have built a setup that we're hoping to get inboxed with the Windows Server 2025 OS that will streamline the process. So now you don't have to deal with any of those long forms and not only that, it will be compatible with the Windows Server 2022 OS that's already available. And finally, it's going to be quick and simple and I'm going to show you that in this next slide. Before I begin, please know that things in this demo are subject to change, as I keep mentioning. Here we have a VM running Windows Server 2022 and this is the Windows Admin Center inbox setup. Upon clicking on it, it's going to ask for admin permissions to execute. And from here, if you'll land on this wizard, that will give you a standard intro into what Windows Admin Center is. Clicking on the next button will kick off the prerequisite checks, validating the system's OS, properly configured network and firewalls, and if there's available disk space before downloading the latest generally available version of Windows Admin Center. This demo is actually downloading the preview version of the modernized gateway, which I have mentioned previous, which Rebecca talked about earlier in these slides. But once it's downloaded, you can click install, start the installation process and within a couple clicks, you'll have Windows Admin Center installed and ready to use. I want to finish out by giving everyone a couple of reminders. These are primarily going to be relevant for folks who have made a Windows Admin Center extension or planning on developing a Windows Admin Center extension in the future. As a reminder, Windows Admin Center was built to be extensible and anyone can build an extension on our platform using our publicly available SDK. For more information about extensibility in Windows Admin Center, reach out to me directly or visit our documentation at aka.ms slash extend WAC. The first reminder is that with our 2311 generally available build of Windows Admin Center, as well as the public preview of our .NET Core Build, we have updated our Angular framework from Angular 11 to Angular 15. This also includes a majority of our extensions. In order to get the latest and greatest functionality as well as updated security, we highly encourage all of our development partners to update their extensions to use Angular 15 as soon as they can. If you're not sure how to get started, we've provided an update guide in our public documentation that includes the requirements for updating step-by-step instructions on how to update and troubleshooting steps in case you get stuck during the update process. We know that for our long-standing partners, our previous update from Angular 7 to Angular 11 may have been a bit arduous. That's what the feedback I've received. So this time around, we've also built an update command into our public-facing SDK that should perform much of the update actions for you. Instructions and troubleshooting steps for using this command are also included in this public documentation guide. If you read the guide and still find yourself stuck, that's totally fine. Please feel free to reach out to us at wacextdevsupportatmicrosoft.com or reach out to me directly. We are more than willing to help you debugs. You can keep your extension up to date with our frameworks and getting all the latest goodness from Angular. In addition to the framework update we've done recently, folks should also be aware that the .NET upgrade, otherwise known as the modernized gateway effort, will affect new and existing extensions. As Rebecca discussed earlier in this presentation, the modernized gateway effort involves a move from the .NET version 4.6.2 to .NET Core, which is a huge shift. We've taken this opportunity to rewrite the Windows Admin Center backend to be more efficient and flexible, which also included considerations for increased extension flexibility. The benefits of this rewrite will be most noticeable for those who have or are considering developing a gateway plugin extension, which are extensions that enable API communication from the UI to your target node. These extensions are the only extension type that communicates with Windows Admin Centers backend in depth. And as a result, these extensions will need to be upgraded from the existing framework to the new framework, which uses .NET Core and standard ASP.NET controllers. The amount of work that will be required for this migration really depends on the complexity of your extension, as well as how well you've previously adhered to Windows Admin Center's design principles. We've composed guidance for installing, using, and testing your extensions with the modernized Windows Admin Center gateway, which include information on how to migrate existing gateway plugin extensions. The guidance also includes sample code, and that can be modified to kickstart the migration process. While tool and solution extensions shouldn't be affected too much by this backend change, it's good practice to test your extension anyways to ensure that it will work with the modernized gateway. We've now published this guidance in our public documentation. If you read this guidance and have additional questions, please email WAC, EXT, devsupportatmicrosoft.com, or again, me directly, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And lastly, I wanted to briefly call out some of the ways you can stay connected with Windows Admin Center and our work. I've made multiple callouts to our public documentation as I've been speaking today. The public documentation can be found at aka.ms slash WAC docs. Additionally, we've talked about two different builds of Windows Admin Center throughout this presentation. Our latest generally available build, version 2311, can be downloaded through the aka.ms slash download WAC link. For those of you interested in the GotNet Core upgrade build, which I highly recommend trying out, especially if you are already familiar with Windows Admin Center. It's currently in public preview and can be downloaded through the Windows Server Insider Program. We've included a quick link here at aka.ms slash WAC Insider. We do encourage you again to try this build out and provide feedback. It should look and function very similarly to the current generally available build, but with all the security and performance benefits that we discussed earlier in the presentation. We are also on X, formerly Twitter, under the handle server MGMT, please give us a follow. And finally, as you're using Windows Admin Center, you can provide feedback to us about the product through the link aka.ms slash WAC feedback. That's all the content we have for you today. Thank you all so much for attending and listening to how we're continuing to improve Windows Server Management through Windows Admin Center. I've included our names and contact information on this slide. If you have any further questions about our presentation or Windows Admin Center generally, please feel free to reach out to either of us via email. In just a second, you're going to see a slide with the opportunity to provide feedback. Your feedback is incredibly important to us, so please take the time to fill out this feedback form. Thank you again.


Hello mobile app development students, Dr. Lehman here. So we're going to get started today on the meat of the course and actually building some apps and just getting some of the real fundamental concepts down. By now, you should have completed everything from the first days module on Canvas, which is focused around installing Android Studio, knowing what to expect, knowing how to use your book, and just making sure everything's configured for coding to get started with, which we will do today. So my goal in this video is to introduce you some of the really big fundamental concepts of Android application development. And that is views, layouts, and how these two things interact through one another with events. So there are two labs that go along with chapter two of your book that are posted for this week on Canvas for your head's first Android development book. And what I would say is, watch this video first. You may get kind of rung up in the jargon, do the labs, and then come back at the end and watch this video again, particularly the second half of the video. Hopefully it'll kind of make the fire hose you just drank from in the labs make a little bit more sense. So let's get into it. Before I do that, before I start getting into some slides, I'm going to turn this webcam off for a couple of slides. OK. So the major components of Android applications. Android applications are oriented around this concept of activities. That is a key word that you need to use. It will come up over and over again. Activities define what an app is, what it does. When you interact with an app on your device, each screen is usually a different activity. Now when we get into the code, activities have are comprised of two things. The first is a Java class. And the second is a layout file that is written in XML, Extensible Markup Language. Now these two things serve different purposes. First of all, remember, everything under the hood in Android boils down to a Java class. So whenever you see Android running, it's Java code. It's Java. The stuff on the screen is Java. The logic is Java. Everything is Java. The Java class for an activity is responsible for doing the logic, doing the processing. When a user taps a button and says search for X, that X gets sent to some Java code and the processing happens there. And then when the processing is done on the Java side, the Java code updates the content that you actually see on the screen. So if you press the Play button, it's going to toggle that Play button from showing the Play icon to a pause, or maybe it's going to highlight or change the color of something. The second component of activities are the layout XML files. The purpose of these layout XML files is to specify the basic boilerplate of what you see on the screen. What are the buttons? Where do they go? What color are they? How big are they? Text boxes, what's in them? Text content itself, what does it say? And where are they arranged on the screen? That's what the layout XML file does. Now, everything in Android is Java. You could specify your layout using just Java code. But if you have worked with Java GUI code at all, you know that it is not pleasant. And you have to write a whole bunch of Java GUI code to get anything at all on the screen. So the good folks at Android, what happens is this XML file, you specify what buttons and things that you want to see on the screen in XML. And then behind the scenes, what happens when your app starts up or when an activity comes on the screen, their Java engine runs over, grabs the XML file, and turns it into all the Java GUI code so that you don't have to. So the XML file sets the stage for how a screen looks or an activity looks. Views, what are views? Views are a keyword in Android. The view is a Java class that is the basic building block for user interface components. They occupy a rectangular area on the screen. So you can see here in this clip from Spotify. Views are rectangles. They're not circles. They're not triangles. They're not weird shapes. They're rectangles on the screen. And a view draws what you see inside its boundaries. And it's responsible for handling events. So there are several views on this screen. There's one, there's a rectangle for the word search. There's a rectangle for the text box. There's a rectangle for this microphone icon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Each one of those things are views. Any screen that you see in an Android app is a hierarchy of views. Okay, so these things are arranged in a particular way. This text box actually has things within it. There's some organization down here at the bottom as well. So there's a hierarchy of views. That is what you are looking at. But it's a hierarchy of Java classes as well that kind of contain one another. In general, there are two types of views. One is a widget and one is a layout. So not to be confused with the layout.xml. Okay, and we'll talk about what these two types do. But why are they called views? Let's just throw a quick little bit of history in here. Way back in the 70s, the very first GUI operating system was in the Xerox Alto, right? And if you've seen pictures of old Mac and even old Windows, they kind of look pretty similar, right? This was the very first GUI system. And it was written in the Smalltalk language as well. Well, Smalltalk evolved out of it. And what people found out, the developers of these systems found out when they were building them was, man, there's a natural logic and a natural benefit when you're coding these systems to think about pieces separately. And those different pieces led to the model view controller pattern, okay? This was really the first GUI operating system. And what they discovered was, it's useful to separate these concepts of model, which is the data. The view, which is the stuff you see on the screen, and the controller, which is the logic that processes the data and then sends it up to be displayed. It's just a very useful way of organizing the code instead of trying to have this code all mashed together, right? We actually will physically separate these things into classes, right? But anyway, that's the origin of the term view. It goes way, way, way back. All right. So what are widgets? Widgets inherit from the view class. Widgets are the things that create, they are concrete, interactive UI components, things like buttons and text boxes, right? Things you can touch and interact with. In Android development, you are typically not responsible for coding up your own widgets for like what is writing the really complicated intricate code that draws a thing on a screen and does it consistently for different screen sizes and orientations. You don't have to worry about that. Android comes prepackaged with a whole bunch of these basic widgets, like buttons, like sliders, et cetera, and you just need to use them. You need to call them and invoke them in the appropriate way. So as I mentioned, there's lots of different widgets. Here's the base home screen for Spotify from that I showed earlier. These words at the top, if you just wanna show words or text, that's a text view. A box where you can type in text, that's an edit text. These four little squares here, these are what's called a card view. We'll get into that much later. This little heart here is a toggle button. It's got a state associated with it. Either it's on or it's off and the picture's different. And then the play button here, that's just a generic button. All of these things are classes in Java that you will instantiate and manipulate to get the things to look the way you want on the screen. And as I mentioned, there are lots of different prepackaged widgets for you. These things are spinners, like you wanna flick up and down. There's a switch over here that's got a state that toggles back and forth on and off. You may have seen pop-ups like this that kinda show up on the screen, temporarily and then go away. These are called toasts in Android. And then also, if you have an Android phone, you've probably seen this button that just kind of appears down at the bottom of a screen that's hooked into some critical function. That's called the floating action button. All these things are widgets that you can kind of pull in and use in your system. And we will start out in your first chapters of your book using the most basic ones, which are text views, buttons, and edit texts. Start small and then grow. So just a reminder, taking a step back, a screen in an app corresponds to an activity. Activities are created by defining a Java class and an accompanying XML file. Activities contain views or widgets. These views or widgets are defined and arranged in the XML file. The Java class holds the logic to deal with button presses and selections and things like that. So the XML file sets the stage, but then the Java is gonna be responsible for reacting to user interactions. And then after the Java file deals with the user interaction, it's gonna update those views programmatically from within the code. All right, this again, a little bit to digest. I'm gonna recommend maybe at this point, you probably, you know, if this isn't making sense, go out to your labs, do the labs, and then come back and let this sink in. All right, there's another type of view or that we care about, another category, aside from widgets, which are view groups or layouts. So a view group is the way that you're going to arrange and order the widgets on the screen. By default, if you just put stuff on there, Android will probably just put them from top to bottom against the left-hand side of the screen, and they won't look pretty like this. If you wanna get things arranged and prettified relative to one another, you need to use a thing called layouts or view groups. Okay, so a view is something the user can see, a widget. A view group is an invisible container that defines the layout structure, okay? So for example, right, in chapter two, you're gonna start working on an app that they call the beer advisor, right? And you can see here, we got a couple of different widgets on the screen. This is a picker or a spinner. These are two buttons. This is text view. This is a text view. But they're arranged a little bit. They're not terribly pretty yet, and that's okay. We're mostly working on just the basics. But they do have an arrangement. And you will be introduced to the designer in Android Studio, which is a graphical way of placing things. And this is the blueprint view from the designer. And these rectangles that are kind of around the different widgets, those are the view groups or the layouts. And they're being used to arrange things, right? So these things are actually arranged vertically. We've got the spinner here. And then we have another group. We have a group here of these two buttons that are arranged horizontally. But this group is embedded in the bigger thing, okay? So button, a group containing two buttons, a text view, and then a text view, okay? So you'll get into it, don't worry. The layout I'm gonna bring myself back now, since I know you miss me so badly. The layout that your book goes through from the start is called the linear layout. Now way back when your book was first published, the linear layout was the default layout that Android Studio set all layouts to. Now Android Studio will set the default layout to be something called a constraint layout. We are not there yet to constraint layout.   The linear layouts orient their views that are inside of them, either horizontally or vertically. Easy peasy, right? They're either in a row or they're in a column. But you can nest them. This one, for example, has a vertical column, but inside of it is embedded a horizontal linear layout, okay? Super simple, follow the instructions in the lab. Change things to linear layout, follow the instructions in the lab to kind of get a feel for what's going on. In chapter six, we're gonna move to the more modern constraint layout, where instead of just having things in a row or a stack, the position of everything on the screen is made relative to one another. That's handy for a variety of reasons. We will get into it later for now. Stick to the simpler linear layout. Okay, so some terminology. Let's go over some jargon. These are things that you will see and hear when discussing layouts and when discussing styling of these layouts in your layout XML file. Those concepts are borders, margins, and padding, okay? If you've come from HTML and CSS, web development land, you are familiar with these terms. They are the same thing, okay? So first of all, the content of a widget, right? We're speaking predominantly about widgets here. The content of the widget is the thing that is shown. Text, the button kind of shape and color and picture. That's the content, okay? The content of the thing. The border is the edge of your view element, okay? So if you were to look at this in the blueprint view, this is the border. It does not exactly correspond with the content, okay? For example, buttons have a little bit of space around whatever the word is and the actual visible border. You may see the border on the screen. You may not see the border on the screen. In any case, all views occupy a rectangular space on the screen. The edge of that rectangular space is the border, okay? The margin. The margin is the space between borders of widgets. These two widgets have no margin between them. This widget has a pretty large margin between its right edge and the right edge of the screen. And this guy has a top margin from between itself and this view group up here, okay? So margin, spaces around the borders, spaces between the borders of elements. Padding is the space. These are all just terminology, things you're gonna become familiar with and you need to know the difference between, okay? Padding is the space between a border of an element and its content, okay? So you wanna have the borders really far away on your button from the content. You trigger the padding. You want the buttons far away from one another. You mess with the margins, all right? That's how, that's what you're going to do. So come back to the slide if you find yourself getting confused about borders and margins and padding, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So let me talk for a minute about the layout file in Android Studio. You're gonna get familiar with these and comfortable with these because this controls the basic styling of the elements on your screen, okay? So remember, every activity has an associated layout XML file. Now the layout is specified in XML. So I wanna make sure that you're clear on your XML jargon. When you see XML, the things are gonna be inside of these angle brackets, right? So look for the angle brackets, an open bracket and a closing bracket. Sometimes it's gonna have this forward slash at the end of it, okay? Just depends on a variety of things. This thing is called your element or your tag. This is a whole unit, right? It's a whole unit, an angle bracket with a closing angle bracket. These, this is the element, text view. Sometimes it's called a tag, but this is an element. This is going to map to a Java class, right? There's a Java text view widget, okay? These things in here are attributes. Think of them, if we're thinking of text view as a Java class, think of these things as the properties or fields or class variables, right? So the text view layout width variable, the layout height variable, the text variable. The values on the right hand side of these assignments are the variable values that you would put in the Java class, okay? And that is in fact exactly what is happening. Android is going into this XML file and converting this XML into a concrete Java class. And I mentioned earlier why Android does this because GUI code stinks in Java, it stinks in general.  That's what's happening. It's just easier to specify them in XML than to specify them in Java, okay? All right, so another thing to keep in mind, XML tags in your layout files are nested to create a hierarchy of views. Hierarchy of views, remember, that screen that you see is a hierarchy of Java views, of elements, of widgets and view groups and all sorts of good things. So the root tag, the root of every single layout in the XML file is going to be some sort of layout. It will be linear layout in the beginning here when you're working through the first few chapters. So the screen around its border is defined by a linear layout and then you've got things inside of it. Note that this linear layout, it's got an open tag and then a closing bracket, but there's no little slash here. That's because down here at the end, we've got our closing tag. And what this is saying is that there's a linear layout, but inside of it are these text views, this text view and this button view, okay? So you can nest things. Now you can only nest inside of layouts, inside of view groups. You cannot nest inside of widgets. That doesn't work, these two guys are widgets, right? Also, the order of these elements matters. Right here, we've got the text view appearing before the button. If you swap these around and move the button up here, the button is going to appear before the text view, okay? So order of elements matters, nesting of elements matters. You will get exposure to this and you will get practice with this as you get into your lab, okay? So final thing that I wanna cover today is like, all right, you've got your very basic activity composed. You've got some buttons on the screen, you've got some text on the screen. What is happening when a user clicks on stuff, okay? When they click on stuff, you have to find this layout file that puts stuff on the screen and it draws it for you and great. When the user clicks on something, say this button called find beer, this example is taken directly from your book. What happens is an event fires off and in the XML file, you will define something called on button clicked. This button gets clicked and it triggers this method inside your Java class. The Java, so this Java class gets fired when the user taps the button, or excuse me, this Java method gets fired when you press the Java button. You're gonna find that names matter, right? So this name on click find beer will also appear in your layout XML file, okay? Names matter, capitalization is extremely important. Okay, so this on click find beer method fires and then it does some stuff. It pulls out, you will find this used over and over. I'm not gonna go into what these things do right now. You'll get explained in the module. Find view, this code fires. It does some processing, does a variety of stuff, does whatever you need it to do. And then importantly, at the end, this Java code winds up updating the view, okay? So you will call a Java method in here and it will dynamically, magically update what the user sees on the screen, okay? So this is the event comes in, you process it in the code and then you respond by updating the view, okay? This is the pattern of event-driven programming. This is the way you need to think. When you get into your Java code and you're writing Java code, it's not executing top to bottom. The different methods that you will specify in your Java code get triggered or fired off by events in the user interface, okay? That's what's gonna happen. So think of each method that you're writing inside your Java code as something that is gonna be triggered independently. All right, the magic of find view by ID. You are gonna see this method many, many, many times. What does it do? Well, in your XML view definition, in your XML layout file, your views will most often have an ID, right? They're gonna have an ID attribute with a value, okay? This find view by ID method or function call, this r.id.brands is gonna correspond, whatever value you put here is gonna correspond to this element here in the XML file. What this function call does is it returns the widget, the Java class, a text view that is associated with this ID, okay? So this method, if all this is confusing, go through your lab first and then come back and grok this again. This magic function, find view by ID, is the glue. It's the map, it's the dictionary, it's the phone book for getting the Java object, the Java widget you wanna change and manipulate and do stuff with that you have defined in the XML file, okay? And the index, the name, the lookup value, the key is this ID right here, okay? So this function call, find view by ID gets the Java object that you want to manipulate, the Java version of the widget that you specified in the XML file, okay? So you'll see this thing over and over and over again. So last slide, right? When users are using your app and clicking on activities, when they click on something, they are interacting with the view that you specify in the XML file, in the layout file, you will then handle that interaction in the Java class through special methods and in some cases, some handlers, which you will see what those are. And then you are gonna update the view from your Java code to reflect the result of the computation, the result of the interaction, whatever happened, okay? So read up, I've got a link here to the official Android documentation, read up, really try and understand this event process response pattern. You need to understand the relationship between the layout file and the activity Java file. And you need to understand how the views are kind of shared between these two things, all right? That's it for me. Take a look at your labs for the day. Hit me up if you have any questions. It's a lot of work, slog through it and good luck with everything.


Alright, I was watching a time series forecasting YouTube tutorial and this video is going to be a little bit of a roast, meaning I'm just going to critique one little thing that I saw here and in a spirit of goodwill I think that this guy is a much better YouTuber than I am. So go ahead when you copy this, click on his video and like it.  In this notebook there was a review of time series patterns, a view of the data, test train split, creation of time series features and a training of XGBoost. Finally there was a RMSC score, a very good RMSC score and that's where it ends. So I'm going to start here. The first thing I was curious about was is there any missing data or is there any missing time stamps? At first glance just running this little cell here doesn't look like there's any output for this data frame so that means there can't be any missing data, right? For time series one way to just verify that there is no missing data is to do a left join on a grid of dates where you start with the first date in the data frame and go to the last date in the data frame and so that's what I've got here. And the next thing to do is to merge that grid of dates onto your original data. I also clean up the dates a little bit because there is a little bit of extra fluff in the beginning and the end of the time stamps and then I can look at how many nulls there actually are. So before there was zero nulls here I think there's somewhere in the 30s. So a relatively small set of time stamps are missing but it's still just good practice to make sure that you are looking for these time stamps and imputing them. So now that we know there are missing values the next step would be doing imputing. So why impute missing values? First it's just good practice. Given that this data set is huge because it's at the hourly level and the number of missing data points is around the 30s there's not really going to be an impact in performance. What I mean is that if we do some imputation work here we're still probably going to be getting the same RMSE score. There's a couple cases where NA's become serious. Of course when there's a large fraction of missing values it can become very difficult to get good forecasts. I also want to make the point that missing values closer to the forecast origin are going to have a larger impact on your forecast. In the example here I will only impute on the training set and I'm going to remove all other features with the data loan I can recreate all the other features so that's not a big deal and it's possible to bring them back in the end. Since imputation relies on like features alone I could also take the opportunity to add like features in fact I was planning on doing that in this video and I did actually make some cells some notebook cells with some autoregressive feature creation but I thought that I would just leave that up to you guys go ahead and try to to make your own autoregressive features with a similar method that I use for imputation and what I'm going to show is just a very naive fill down method it's not it's not maybe as robust as some other time series imputation methods but this is better than nothing. So I just grab the training set and with that training set I just pull a example row to show that it is missing so after doing that left join this is one of those timestamps that just didn't have a target. This cell right here what's happening is I'm adding an hour to date time and it's a little bit counterintuitive but when you make lags you add you add time and then you left join that back onto the data frame so that's what's happening in this cell. I compare the missing timestamp target with the imputed timestamp target just to make sure that things went well. I can also run the dot is null but again this just doesn't mean too much until after you do a left join on your date times. So at this point in the training set all of the target variables should be imputed and we can concatenate this back with the test set and then we have a fully imputed clean data set ready for time series forecasting. At this point you can go ahead and recreate some of those same features that the youtuber had before and you can make your own autoregressive features but instead of maybe adding an hour to your lag features maybe you would add a week or a month or a year depends how far out you're forecasting and that's it. I hope you learned something new and we'll see you next time.


Hello, welcome to SSUnitex, you see this side and this is continuation of PySpark interview questions and answers. So in this video we are going to see one more real time scenario based interview question. So here let's assume we are having two input data frames. First is containing the student and second is containing the student marks. So these two input data sets that we are having and in the output we just want to have the student information and it could be having a student ID and student name from the student data set and percentage and the result that we need to calculate by using the student mark data set. And here as we can see how we can calculate the percentage so percentage simply we can calculate whatever the student ID we are having based on we will be going to sum the marks and divided by the total count of those. And next we can see the result so how we can get the result. So for result here we are having certain conditions. So if the percentage marks is greater or equals to 70 then that will be distinction and if the marks between 60 to 69 then that will be first class if the mark between 50 to 59 then that will be second class if the mark will be 40 to 49 then that will be third class and if percentage marks is less than 39 that student will fail. So what approach we will be following for getting this output. So here like these are the steps that we will be going to follow. First of all we will be going to combine these two data frames. So by using join we will be going to combine these two data frames. So you can see the ID and name we are getting from the student and the subject and marks we are getting from the student marks data frame. Once we have joined between these two data frames we are having a single data frame. Now here we will be going to calculate the percentage. So how we are calculating the percentage? So for this we are going to do the group by on ID and name column.  So by using that we will be going to create another data frame with the percentage marks. Now here we are having the final data set. So based on this data frame that we have created we will be going to create one more data frame and this data frame will be having the result as well. So here we will be going to use the case statement. So inside the PySpark we can use the when and otherwise condition for getting this result. So let me quickly go inside the browser and we will try to do the same in practical. So here let me try to execute this query. So it will be going to create these two data frames like data frame 1 and data frame 2. Data frame 1 is nothing but the student data frame and data frame 2 is student marks data frame that you can see. The first thing that I told you we will be going to do the join between these two data frames. So we can simply join data frame 1. Here we can go with join and inside that on which data frame we want to join. So we want to join on data frame 2. Second it is asking like what condition on which condition we want to join. So the condition is here we can see data frame 1.id column. Similarly we have data frame 2.id column. So on the basis of id column we just want to combine these two data frames. So let me try to put this in other data frame maybe df join and let me display this df join. Let me execute and we will see the output of this. Here we can see it is having id name from first data frame id subject marks from second data frame. Id is coming twice so we are not required to have the id twice. So let me try to remove the id which is coming from data frame 2. For removing those we can use the drop and under that we can specify data frame 2.id because we want to have the unique columns in the output. So now we can see we are having only this unique column. So once we are having this the next operation we just want to try to get the percentage marks instead of this mark. So for this we can simply use df underscore join. And here the first thing like we are required to do the group by. Second on which column basis we want to do the group by. So group by should be on id column and the second column that will be name column. The next thing we are required to use the aggregate operation. So for using aggregate operations and functions let me try to import the function first. From pyspark dot sequel dot functions then we can go import a stick. And inside this aggregate we are required to specify our aggregation. So the first thing we just want to do the sum of this mark. So we can go with some and here we can specify the column name. So the column name we can specify mark. Now once we have done this let me put this into another data frame that could be df underscore percentage. And let me see the output of this df underscore percentage. Let me execute and we will see the output of this. So it will be going to have the sum of mark. But our requirement is we just want to do the aggregate on this mark. So it will be having the percentage. So for this after doing the sum we are required to divide this with the count of a stick. Let me try to execute. So it will be getting the actual percentage. As you can see it is having this percentage here use the alias name. So how we can do the alias name. So let me try to add this operation inside this brackets. And for this we are required to use the alias name. So that's why I have put this inside a bracket and let me use the alias here. And this alias this may be percentage. Let me execute and we will see the output of this. So here we can see it is having the percentage column now. Now the last thing we are required to check this percentage value. If the percentage value is greater than 70 then that will be distance. So how we can do that. So as we have created DF underscore percentage data frame. So here first let me try to select. So as we are required to have all the columns. And second here we are required to specify our conditions. So first I am going to use when and the condition is DF dot. Here we need to check the percentage. So if this percentage value is less than or equals to if this percentage value is greater than or equals to 70. Then we are required to specify the output of this as distance. Now once we have done this we are required to specify another when condition. And on that when condition we can specify DF dot percentage less than 70. And DF dot percentage greater than or equals to 60. On this condition it will be first class. And this should be coming inside the bracket only like this and we can close this bracket. The same thing we can do for the second class third class and fail as well. For the second class the condition could be less than 60. And here it should be 50 and for this it will be second class. And this should be third class. And the last condition that could be for fail. So we can specify fail here and this could be between 40 to 50. So here we can specify less than 50 greater or equals to 40. And for the last one here we could specify that should be less than 40. On that scenario this could be fail. Now once we have done all these let me put this into another data frame that could be DF final. And let me use the display of this DF underscore final and we will check the output of this. Okay it is saying index syntax just because of this. It should not be double M percent it should be only single M percent. Let me execute and we will set the output of this. So it is saying like DF is not defined because it should not be DF it should be DF percentage. So let me try to use the DF percentage in all the places. And so as in the output of this we could see all these four columns and it is having ID name percentage earlier. But the result column we have added by using this when condition. So I hope guys you have understood how we can write the query for getting this output. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you like this video please subscribe our channel to get many more videos. See you in the next video.


No, the initial call was for a suspicious vehicle when it first also arrived on the scene. He ran the tags and in fact it was the stolen vehicle, which time a backup officer responded to the scene. Both officers exited the vehicle as they approached the driver's vehicle. The driver struck the original officer at the time. The officer's fire several shots striking the driver and she was pronounced at the hospital. So, did you say both officers opened fire on the driver? Yes, both officers opened fire.