Alright welcome back. Now despite the development in the financial services industry, many businesses especially startups and SMEs are still unable to effectively raise capital to remain a go in concern or even take off in the first place. This is partly due to the stringent measures put in place by these fund providers to ensure that their limited capital is made available to organizations and invested in projects that will theoretically guarantee the best returns. Unfortunately, many organizations especially SMEs lack the capacity to scale through these hurdles because of their weak structures and the managerial inexperience of their founders and operators. Now my guest, Dalyntyn Onyagor has a diverse work experience in various companies and roles. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Aladdin Digital and now that supports Africa's economy by providing an ecosystem of solutions for gig workers and SMEs. Prior to that they founded an advice blacklist in an alternative database for chronic debtors and fraudulent individuals reported by verified online lending firms in Nigeria. Dalyntyn also served as the MD of Ocash, Nigeria under Opera Software AS where they handled business development, product development, strategy formulation and education and people management. Many thanks for Demi Dalyntyn on business insights. A whole lot of people seem to have issues to differentiate in between startups and small businesses. They seem to misplace one for the other. Are there similarities? Are there key differences? Can you just enlighten us? Well thank you for having me. The term startup is about five to six years old in Nigeria. I can still remember some of the earlier startups. Basically in the financial side, when they started with these small loans, what they called Nando loans or digital loans, I remember the first time I applied for a loan on a mobile app and within a few minutes I got a lot. I was like, is this possible in Nigeria that somebody is not seeing you physically? There's not a counterfeits. You're not feeling the physical form and within five, ten minutes somebody is willing to give you 5000 error. So that was the beginning of a turnaround in terms of financial technology. But right now we have various types of startups. But let me try to differentiate between SMEs and startups. I had earlier this year one of my billionaire friends, I would say billionaire friend because he has an oil and gas company in the southeast. He turned over as over 10 billion. It was my classmate actually. We went to the same school in the same class. We both read mechanical engineering and he just started me on WhatsApp and said, please how do I convert my business to a startup? He's somebody who has almost probably 100 employees, a lot of tankers, he has petrol filling stations, doing billions in turnover a month, but he wanted to raise 10 million dollars. So he felt he had to convert his SME into a startup. So I sent him some documents. So it's very critical. People are getting confused. People hear startups start up and they say, but have you been doing business and paying salaries? How do I become a startup? What is so special about these startups? You hear startups raising as much as $90 million. You have startups raising as much as $50 million, say $5 million. Small boys, 27 years old, has a two, three-month startup, has raised $10 million. And you're wondering, I've been in business for 25 years before this boy was born. How am I not able to raise $10 million? So it's very critical that we explain what a startup is and what an SME is. A startup is a young business that is designed primarily to grow very fast. And normally they actually use technology to bring new innovations into the public in terms of innovation. Let me use the term Babin Saloon. While some SME, for example, is not about growing fast and SME is more predictable and also in short term more profitable. While startups are not actually profitable, they deal with more valuation. I will break that in very, very, very shortly. Now, for example, I can see a Babin Saloon in my area and I feel there's still one more need for a Babin Saloon in my area. So I will go ahead and replicate that same Babin Saloon, but I not provide a better environment, cozy environment, better professionals, better staff, customer care. Maybe when you come to my Babin Saloon, I give you a bottle of wine or tea or coffee. It's still a Babin Saloon. So that business model has been established for donkey years.  But all you're just doing is adding, you're just like, you know, not reinventing the way but say, but you're just adding some level of finish to what already exists. That is a small business because you're not going to be replicating that Babin Saloon across Lagos in the next two years or across Nigeria. But a startup can start up today with a new innovation in Babin. Maybe it's bringing in a new app or a new technology that has not been seen before, a novel idea in that same Babin industry. So that's why startups are different.  But a startup comes on with maybe an app that Babs will hear automatically or an app that does something very funny. So when they come, they are able to raise more capital because they are bringing technology and into innovation. And they are designed to take over the market in maximum five years. While you are only after making sure at the end of the month you can cover your debts, both short term debt and pay your salaries and make some money for yourself. So that's the difference between SMEs and startups. So let me stop there then you can take it from there. Alright, so basically from all I can just infer from what you have said, for startups they have the benefit of innovation and technology to do things differently that the ordinary small businesses cannot do. Exactly. So it's not about their paid up capital or their financial levels per se. Exactly. So like I said, startups, you know, the world startups usually ride on technology. There are different type of startups. There are great startups. You understand that there are those in insurance. That's what they call insure tech. There's FinTech. You know, there's food tech. There's also prop tech, property. So two days ago a friend of mine called me and he's designing a platform that's going to actually fragment your investment to real estate where you can use your $10,000 and you own a portion of your building. And it's all just on app. Just put your account, fund your wallet and look at different buildings and different rents and then apply $10,000. You're not a shareholder in a building. So what you cannot naturally do previously, they bring in new technologies, something using blockchain for example, to verify who is who and who has the particular, how much stock you have in that particular property. So that when it has time for dividend share, you know how much you're going to get. So prop tech is arising of FinTech, insure tech, food tech, aggregate tech. All these guys are just using technology to do the same things that we know differently. And they are designed to grow faster. So that's why they also raise significant amount of money because for you to actually grow fast to get to the next level, you need to raise a lot of money. Okay fine. So how does one create a startup as it is? The first key to creating a startup is what are you innovating? What brand new idea or novel idea do you have? Or even if it's not a novel idea, you have a version of something. For example, there are a lot of FinTechs today that do the same thing. There are a lot of apps today that give out nano loans, you know what I'm saying? Last time I checked, there are over 500 apps on Play Store that give loans today. And so they're all doing the same thing, you know what I'm saying? And they're all called startups, you know what I'm saying? But they are using, for example, the difference is that the way they actually verify their customers might be different. The technology behind, the way they onboard you and the way they verify you before they give you a loan, maybe novel to them or they may have a patent for that type of technology that verifies customer what they give a loan. But you, the end user may not see the difference. But the investor knows that this guy has built something that allows him to de-failure rate or what they call the depth ratio to reduce. Other guys will be having 80% depth when they give out loans, the bad loans is about 80%, but this guy has 2%. So we are sitting in the same industry, but it has improved this process in such a way that investors' monies are not lost when they invest in him, so that's different. So the key word there is innovation and who is your audience? What are you bringing to the table? And how fast can you actually iterate, launch, do product market fit? That means I'm able to say, okay, this my product has a market, there's an audience for it, someone is willing to pay for it, and you're able to scale very fast. So that's what differentiates a startup from a small business. Okay fine, that really settles it now. But let's talk about funding. In my intro, I talked about funding challenges for startups, for small business, even for large businesses on the trail. But let's just focus on startups and small businesses. Before now, it has always been going to the commercial bands and dropping some sort of collaterals and scaling all the hurdles before you can eventually get these finances that you need for your business or to even obscure your business. But lately they have been talked about people starting businesses from finances they got from family and friends. We've talked about crowdfunding and private equity. Can you just share some of this with us? Okay, so funding is actually open to both SMEs and startups. But just that startups have a brighter chance to raise more significant money. Before I came here today, I was looking at a crowdfunding site called WeFounder.com. We are actually listed on WeFounder.com. We're actually raising some money right now on WeFounder. So I looked at a particular startup. This guy has raised $981,000 in the last two to three months, almost a million dollars. And I looked at the product. He has not really launched his product. You already had that funding already.  Everybody can go and check them out. $981,000 raised through crowdfunding. People are investing $100, $300 because they believe in the idea. He only has 100 customers who have only done transactions for two weeks. Okay, let's take it one step at the other. For some people may not really understand, there's been so much talk about crowdfunding, crowdfunding. What is it really and how does it really operate and work? So what crowdfunding does is that it allows you as a startup. SM may not be able to do that. So it allows you to actually tap into the community. So you share your idea on their platform and people see your idea and they believe in your idea and they can pitch in as small as $100, which is about $100,000 to buy shares in your company.  So that actually started mostly in America where they actually changed regulation in a few years ago to allow community rounds. Community rounds means that your customers, your family and friends and people in the public can actually become part of your company by just investing a small unit of $100 into your company and a lot of mega startups you know to their big companies started by crowdfunding. But for you to do that in most cases, you have to be a U.S. registered startup company. That's one of the advantages that startups have that SMEs don't have. A lot of these startups you see today, I don't want to call their names, they're all registered in the U.S. Even my own company Aladdin, who are headquarters in Delaware in the U.S. So we have to register a company in the U.S. and the U.K. So it has to be in the United States. Yes, because we have to get second approval in the U.S. You have to get, there's a whole documentation, the whole process that's involved. So it doesn't really come so easy. But it can be done. So I was among the first, my startup was the second startup in Africa to go on that platform and that was in 2021 when we entered on that platform. The second startup Aladdin to raise money through crowdfunding and we found that. But it was a whole lot of process, a lot of documentation, a lot of stuff. But it allows you to raise money easily from American people. I have a lot of American investors who just, oh, this is Africa. We like what you're doing in Africa. I'm giving you a thousand dollars. So give $10,000. So give $5,000. So crowdfunding is one channel. But beyond that also, venture capitalists are people who are actually designed to give you money as a startup. All right.  They're not banks. They're just individual, what would I say, finance companies or investment companies. Some of them are actually family investments.  It's a $50 million set aside to invest in fast-growing startups. So that's why it's quite difficult for SMEs are quite limited. They always go to commercial banks. But some startups now are not designing products to help SMEs with their working finance. So for example, you have maybe a PO or I know some startups actually give you up to $10 million for your PO. And then they just fund it for you and they take that money back in voice financing and stuff like that. But to raise real money like $10 million, $5 million for SMEs is quite difficult because the venture capitalists cannot see that speed. They can't see that speed to growth. They're asking you, when are you going to dominate Nigeria? When are you going to dominate? When are you going to move across Africa? When are you going to move to London? When are you going to have a London office? They have very small businesses, not thinking in that direction. All the time. So that's the difference. So really, this is a psychology between startup and SMEs. So you want to actually make that switch. First of all, you must have an innovative product that is able to scale extremely fast to attract venture capitalists, angels, crowdfunding and all these other things that are available. All right. So but for what you have said, it's not really something that's also common for the small businesses. But how are these forms of funding popular as in the level of popularity in Nigeria? For instance, you've talked about crowdfunding, that you have to have some present in the United States. What about for private equity and venture capital? Do you really need so much hurdles per se to scale? No, no, no. You can actually be a Nigerian entity. There are a lot of Nigerian companies that actually raise money from venture capital. But for most venture capitalists, because they're also looking at short term investment. So let me just give you a start-ups are not designed to be profitable. And I want to say this clearly because a lot of Nigerians are not designed to be profitable. They are designed for valuation, they are designed for exits mostly. That's why it took Uber. Uber was operating for years and Uber was never profitable. But it was valued above 50 billion dollars. The value of the company was about 50 billion dollars. It's when they did an IPO, when they went public, all right, that all the guys that invested for years cashed out. So that's a start of the value. They're actually designed to grow very fast. Their value increases. You can see, for example, let me use the popular one called Paystack. Paystack was bought by Stripe for 200 million dollars. And Paystack was just about four or five years old there. But imagine a four or five years company being purchased at the rate of 200 billion today for a company four or five years old. Because it grew so fast, you know, and then they could see the value and it's supporting thousands of businesses doing billions of Naira in transaction per day. That is what Stripe saw. And they saw the potential to spread across Africa. And they put 200 million dollars on the table. So on that thing again, I want to point out that a lot of SMEs are, they're actually startups in disguise. How so? Yeah, because some of them have innovated a lot of things. If you go online, you see people that have innovated some technologies that can be skilled across Africa. But because they have the SME mentality, they don't understand the startup ecosystem. They are losing out on venture capital. So they need some sort of reorientation? Yes, reorientation, a lot of training. So I'm actually thinking about it because there are a lot of SMEs that have done things very innovative in the medical line, some in the beauty side. So even if you go to someone who would have designed a bike or so, a guy online who designed his own type of bike. And I said, I'm using scrap metal. I'm very beautiful bikes. But you understand that?  But I want a return on investment in six months. A venture capitalist can give you 100 million. I will not call you online for the next two years.  His calculation is that out of that 10, eight will fail, two will succeed. And the two that will succeed will give him back his money plus interest. So you can see that venture capital, they have a different mindset.  The chief will call you to VGC every two days to come and say, what happened to his 50 million? But the venture capital will give you 1 million dollars. And I'm sure they may not even call you. All they want is not your monthly report or quarterly report. Tell them how the business is going. Because they're betting on you that you're going to return that investment 10x. For example, someone, the guy that invested in Uber, the guy will say he got, I think he did absolutely something, 1,000 x his investment. Yes, one Uber, one public. He invested small money, but by the time Uber went public, he got the most 1,000 x. He became a millionaire and started investing in other startups from his one Uber investment. So that's how powerful a startup is. They give you the kind of, you know, when they exit the value of what you bought. You know, sometimes you can buy a startup when the startup is just one dollar per share. All right. And then by the time he's exiting, the value of that share is 70 dollars. So that's a 70x. So if there are so much advantages with the startups ecosystem and all of that, so how come the average Nigerian is not starting some sort of startup or something? Well, there is. I just, this is the evening, like if it's where I was in an event for startups. I mean, I saw startups everywhere. A lot of founders, they does this sticker, founder, founders. So someone was in there, over 20,000 startups already in Africa. And Nigeria is one of the leaders. One of the leaders in Africa is Nigeria. Nigeria gets significant amount of investment from other Silicon Valley or any other places. So the startup boom is already here. So people are now built and Nigerians are very, Africans are creative. Kenyans, Rwandans, people are creating a lot of stuff, right? So it's you that don't know, that don't know what really young people are creating startups everywhere, every day. So you see what we need to also educate millions of SMEs out there who have innovative stuff, but don't know how to package it. You know, I've heard a lot of people say, you can actually register your business for $500 in U.S. I mean, in United States, you can do it for $1,000. And then you have the U.S. bank account, because these are the things that those guys see. They don't want to invest in Nigerian entities. They want to invest in U.S. entities, where you pay your taxes, where you are fully regulated by sec and a whole lot of stuff. So that's why most startups have to register in the U.S. We have to attract foreign capital. Let's talk about Afro-global expansion. You know, there's a whole lot of issues happening globally with the wars everywhere. But let's talk about how this expansion is going in the midst of struggling and economy. Okay. So the honest, anybody who is smart will tell you that if you want to earn anything to the earning dollars, all right? So if you are a business that is still earning in Naira, you have a long way to go. And this cuts across both SMEs, startups, conglomerates, whoever you are. Okay. That's why a lot of people are living in the country. A lot of strategic investors, you know, about GSK, a lot of people. So if you earn in Naira and then you come back to a dollar, you realize you're not doing well. You can make a billion Naira, you think you are doing well. You can make that one billion to a dollar. And compared to the investments you have made and the loans you have taken to get to that level of revenue, you realize that you're not doing well. So the Afro-global concept is a concept that talks about how do I also penetrate other African countries? Or how do I actually also earn money from diaspora, from Africans in diaspora? I need to earn in pounds. I need to earn in dollar. So you don't, so you don't do that thing. So that's that thing. As a business, sit down in 2025 to yourself. How do I actually, you know, change this business to also earn dollar, you know, apart from Naira. Because I will earn Naira today. Today's black market 1200, I don't know. You can see what it means. So before even, it's also actually affecting a lot of startups too. You know, for example, all the startups who are in the payment space, you do payment, they charge you 15 Naira, 100 Naira. How many 15 Naira transactions will you do to get one dollar? See, the rise that now, so what are some of the most startups today are actually beginning to expand to Kenya. They're expanding to Rwanda. They are going to other African countries. Some are actually having a London office, you know, because now in London, they want to get some license to start getting transactions that can earn in pounds or in from Canadian dollars or stuff like that.  And there are a lot of opportunities. I mean, if you look at what Ruto, Kenyan president did and Kagame, which is the Rwandan president, where they say by end of December, they're going to open up their countries. It becomes visa free for all Africans. So he shows you that the direction is that we are going to become a borderless Africa. All right, borderless Africa is a situation whereby you can actually access any African country visa free. And once that happens, the barriers to trade begins to shrink. Exactly. So that's what people like Aladdin, like my company now, we are designing a pan-African payment system where you can send money in less than one million to Kenya. You can send money to Tanzania, to Rwanda. So because we're positioning ourselves to be that go-to platform in Africa where you can do payments across Africa and also outside Africa. So because it has to start thinking in that direction that I have to push on my business to stop talking about Naira transactions alone, you know, organic cities, because those two currencies are also, you know, very volatile. And some other African countries. So you need to start thinking about how do I expand those within Africa and also internationally. If you have to survive the struggling economy, everybody should learn to end outside Naira. That's a secret to 2024 if you have to survive. All right, thank you so much. All right. So Dalintin, as we wrap up this now very quickly now. So what's the future of startups in not just Nigeria and in Africa? And what is your advice for people who are actually going or thinking about getting into startups? So the first thing I will tell you is that the startups in the financial side is almost getting saturated. I keep saying that because they say people are doing the same things over and over again. So if you're actually going to start the startup, please think of other sectors. What can I do with other sectors?  There are still innovations in engineering that we have not seen, agriculture, so many areas. But if you want to do a startup, come up with an innovation that is new or come up with maybe an improvement on an existing innovation that can actually, you know, disrupt the game. Once you have that and you have an audience, you are good to go. All right. So if at the SME, you have been struggling with your business, but you know that this idea is innovative. It can be a food drink or a new innovative food ring for health. Rather than you have patented, as small as that thing, you can end billions from it. All you need is somebody to package you and show you that this thing can naturally be a startup. People don't even know how to do PowerPoint slides. They don't even know how to do anything. So you don't even know how to package yourself to become a startup. There's an act. There's an added formula to becoming a startup, where you have an innovative idea, or else you end up being a small business. All right. Thank you so much. And that's indeed how much we can take on the show for today. My guest has been Darlentine Onyagore, he is the CEO and founder of Aladdin Digital. Many thanks for being a part of the show. Thank you very much for having me. All right. That's as much as we can take business insights or return to your screen. Same time, my name is Justin Acadone. Many thanks for being there.


A third evolution. I mean, I think you just talked about it. Going to serverless, FAA, from pass to fast. Doesn't sound good, doesn't it? I'm now using a fast. They've actually done a term for that, a spectrum of compute. Yeah, yeah. Oh, someone told me something the other day, which I thought was a bit strange, but maybe quite apt, born in the cloud. Because I guess the trouble with serverless and lambda is that you kind of have to architect your application this way from the beginning, right? You can't migrate your Windows 95 to lambda. No, no. Please don't. OK, I think we're still filtering in. Hey, someone can sit in my chair. It's warm. So you don't have to stand. Shall we just close the door? You're excited? Can someone just shout around the corner saying, it's starting, it's starting. Oh my god. I didn't close the door. OK, oh, there's a free seat right here. Just don't be shy. So does this work? Yeah, kind of. So I work with Daniel over there, who also helps organize stuff. And yeah, I think I feel like an astronaut, because I think we're using lambda technologies at work in a pretty hardcore manner. And I guess I'm just going to share what I'm learning. I've learned over how long we've been doing this, Daniel, like three months, couple of months. And where our work is spooled is a company called Spools. It's like the Netflix for Indian content. And this is a way of describing it. And what we've engineered using lambda functions is a content provider uploads the film to S3 that triggers off an encoding job to take a clip of that video and then furthermore crop it. And right now we're at about 10 lambda functions for the whole video ingestion process. And even though it's not quite production yet, I mean, well, it is production. I think it's a moderate success, somewhat. I mean, we've made some mistakes. And this is what I'm going to share with you. Oh my gosh, I didn't start the timer, 15 minutes. So yeah, this is why I titled it from the trenches. It's just like war stories. But I guess your grandfather one was a lot better than this one. A lot better, hopefully. So I can't actually see the screen. OK, so Yoss sort of introduced us to lambda functions. One thing, I think, here in the hate over there, he was saying that it's proprietary. No, no, no. This idea of function running in the cloud is pioneered by Amazon. But there are the Microsoft version, which is just damn similar. I mean, they're all very, very much the same, in my opinion. IBM OpenWISC, Google, whatever that. And the way that I think of lambda is basically just manage code environment in the cloud. And hopefully you guys got that at least tonight.  I'm a bit of a Unix old school sort of guy. Who's used Plan 9? Just me. Just me. But I'm a big fan of the Unix philosophy, doing one thing and one thing well. I think that buys into the whole idea of lambda functions. But furthermore, I mean, everyone's familiar with this sort of fine grep. Do you guys use Unix? Oh, god. Oh, god. But it's pretty much like Unix, but on steroids, I would say. And also, it's unlike pipes. Like for example, when you're doing with Unix pipes, handling error cases is quite tricky. And the cool thing about Amazon Lambda, I think, is that you can actually save the event so you can replay them, which is pretty interesting.  Events is a bit of a nightmare. So yeah, this is what I told you guys already. Oh, sorry. So somewhere out there, hopefully, I won't defocus. So yeah, we're using Lambda at work. And furthermore, we're also using DynamoDB. This is important because when you're using DynamoDB to use things, you're probably going to end up having to use JavaScript. I'll probably get onto that. And we probably made a one mistake because we split up all our Lambda functions with serverless framework, which Joss was speaking about briefly. You can combine things, which is probably a bad idea. But now we've invested in doing separate things. We probably made a mistake there.  You could just use the AWS CLI, but it's quite naive. You have to do everything manually, zip it up, and then you do deploy somehow. But serverless is not just a way of describing this way of computing. Serverless is actually a company that provides tooling. And that's what we use. There's another one called Apex Run. And this is the main tools that you use to deploy your Lambda functions. The other one we're using is the core serverless. It's an NTF project called Lambda Locom, which for if you're running a single Lambda function, serverless seems to be overkill for one function. Lambda Locom just allows you to run your Lambda locally with what you would like to do, the PNJS or the handler, and one event. And that's it. And you won't have to do a whole overhead of your serverless with YAML files. The important thing to realize is that when you're developing, serverless especially gives you tooling to develop locally, which is really important, because you might be on a crappy internet connection somewhere in Asia. Another important tool, which I like about the whole Lambda thing, is you can, which I do pretty much on all our Lambda stuff, you can SNS subscribe. So basically, when a movie flows through this sort of 10 Lambda functions, I can have good visibility of all the events that are happening just with a subscribe, like an email subscribe, which I find quite useful. So yeah, the cool thing about Lambda on AWS at least is that you get free logging. So every time that Lambda function runs, you have a great log. Every time you console log, you have a great log of what actually happened. There is a bit of a downside to it. There's a little bit of delay. You're probably familiar with it. But I find the log very, very useful, because you don't have to worry about instrumenting your program so much. It's just there, and it's very robust. Another good thing is that it makes you think in these sort of events, which you can basically store as files.json, and then you can use that as test cases. You can use it to make sure that your functions are idempotent. I never know how to pronounce that word. Did I say it correctly? Idempotency. And another thing is that you might be worried about the long iteration cycles, but when you do it locally, it's quite fast. And it's got like added benefits with serverless that you can set up web endpoints really, really easily with it, which is damn useful. So the not-so-good thing is that I guess this applies to the whole cloud thing.  So for example, I start writing a program, and then I deploy it, and it doesn't work for whatever permission error. And then I have to add it back, add the permission in there, and then run it again, add the permission. I wish there was a way of sort of running the function. And then depending on what resources it used, it would just come out with a policy that it recommends I use with my function. Does anyone else find policies just painful? OK, there's one other person. So the next kind of painful thing is that you do have options as Yoss pointed out of using Python or Java or what is the other one? There's probably another one. But you really need to use JavaScript, because it's the most native one. You're dealing with SNS event JSON. You're dealing with using doc clients on DynamoDB. You really do want to use JavaScript. And when you use JavaScript, you painfully realize that you have to learn promises as what we had to do to make everything synchronous and kind of manageable. Who's familiar with JavaScript promises? Well, I found it quite a steep learning curve. And it's kind of like I didn't want to use too many libraries. But I guess the good news is that our new node versions will have better like async await things to help you code in JavaScript. There's things like, yeah, you're kind of limited by cloud formation, which can be quite slow, like not everything you can define in cloud formation. So that kind of limits you. You just need to be aware of it, really. And one thing that we found with the serverless, I mean, is there anyone know how to solve this problem? Is that it's polluted our S3 sort of namespace with all these serverless things? Because it uses S3 to stage the deployment.  Is it just me that hates that format?  But that's why you have to use Python. Yeah. I hate Python for other reasons. Oh my gosh. Why do you use JSON instead of JSON instead? Yeah, like Apex Run uses JSON, which is nice. I mean, any JSON files are still available. Yeah, I know what you're saying. But mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. OK, so all right. So yeah, Amazon at JS SDK. It's a bit of a nightmare. I want you to mention that also a big benefit of obviously using JavaScript is that you can start doing your front end, which is naturally probably going to be a web application and, again, in JavaScript. So other things that really, really annoy me is that you can't put too much stuff in your handler. It's a bad idea. Don't do it. You're kind of going to need to keep your hand quite slim, in my opinion, and keep maybe the functionalities in a separate JS file, which you can test and do separately. The really, really bad thing is that there's no debugger as far as, is there a debugger? Fuck. My boss, I had an ex-boss, a really good guy. He always used to say to me, if you're on a project and there's no debugger, think about leaving that project. It sucks not having a debugger, especially when JavaScript probably does have the best debugger in this industry, arguably. I'm sure just Amazon just need to basically get it out of. I'm hoping Amazon have the solution. I hope they have the solution. But it is really quite painful right now with no debugger. So this is why I say keep your code separate so you can test it out of the context of your handler. It's slow logging. I mentioned that. When there is an error with your handler, it can be quite tricky to just go to the exact log. I mean, I don't know if you have a nice workflow, but when you're running lots of landers, hundreds of them, and there's one error, it's really difficult to track it down in CloudWatch. There's someone know a way of doing this, because it really irritates me. Another thing I don't really like is that you typically use JavaScript. I'm quite new to JavaScript. Like, for example, Sebastian is a pro. He's a ninja. And then when you upload the node modules, you know how it is. It's like, I get nervous. I get into sweats. It's like, what's there? You don't have good visibility. Is it out of date? Because with the cool thing, what you want to do with lambda functions is just deploy and forget. But with 400 megabytes of node modules, scary stuff. I'm hoping Amazon will solve a lot of my complaints with step functions is a way of saying if this lambda function fails, do this. It's a way of orchestrating your lambda functions, which is sorely needed.  X-ray is supposed to be like a debugger thing. But when I looked at it, it didn't actually help me. But there are like, what do you call it? Startups that are kind of solving this problem, I think. But I'm just reluctant to use a startup solution sometimes. You know how it is. So yeah, to conclude, I'm sorry, guys. It's 2017. You all have to learn JavaScript. You've got no choice. Who's one of these Java stalwarts here? I feel sorry for you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I do recommend serverless, even though it's a little bit annoying. I don't think there's anything better than it. If it is, just let me know. I did link, oh, crocky, I'll put the presentation below on the video or something like this. But there's a link to serverless examples, which are a really good way to start. And despite my complaints, I think lambda is definitely like a step up from ECS. ECS is a nightmare, in my experience. And I personally have given, written a couple of stupid, what do you call it, websites that use lambda functions in the back end. For example, this one. This one is a lambda function that has phantom.js as a binary that basically, if I put a URL there, you can't see. Hopefully nothing too embarrassing. It basically uses phantom.js, retrieves that, outputs that to PDF, and embeds it in there. So now you can tell your boss, I can print the internet now. Just give me a URL, boss, I can do it. So that's using a lambda function. And it's pretty quick.  So you can do these little things. And I love it because you can just sort of like, fire and forget. Oh, this is a little-known feature about the sort of integrations you can do with lambda. This one is integration with SCS. So if you email that, I'm probably the only one who has this complaint. Do you ever get emails and then only look at the text part? I don't read HTML email. I just. It's 2017. Does anyone read text email? Anyway, this project, which no one seems to care about, I don't know why, because it's awesome. It rips out the HTML part, so it just shows you the text part of the email. Are you doing anything of that kind? No, it's an iPhone, Doug.  It does have an ancient browser, though, called Safari. Heard of it? OK, I got one minute left. Yeah, so I think it's, I like it because, yeah, you can write something, you can deploy it. And I don't know about you guys if you've had little side projects, but this feels so much more relaxing. You do a side project, you deploy it into a lambda function, you just know it's going to work. It's going to work into the future. And that's just like, well, that's how I feel about it. Yeah, that's pretty much it, guys. That's all I had to say about serverless. I really want you guys to get onto it. So I'm very happy to hear from you if you have any question about it. Because the sooner I genuinely feel that it is like some sort of advancement in computing technology. So the more Singaporean businesses and more Singaporean peeps start using it, I think it will make us smarter than the next silly country. OK, any questions? Oh, yeah. What's the most complex lambda function you've deployed in? How much does it cost you to run this? Oh, I could probably show you even now, shall I? No, it's, no, what would you say is the most complicated one, the video encoding DRM one? That's quite complicated. Actually, if you look at all the functions in this virtual machine itself, none of them are complicated. Because what was said in the beginning, you could split everything into any kind of function that you could solve. Every function is kind of easy to understand on itself. And so I just start to cheat them all together. Yeah, that's the good point. I think the first one that you gave was the most complicated one, the first one. And that's one of the questions of the binaries. So our first question is to actually extract video metadata out of an appropriate file. FF probe. So we use a mix of the FFM and FMF to get back the dimension of the source file to kind of perfectly guess how much black board is off the left, what's in the right, what's in the middle of the left. So an SPO is called the knowledge of data function that triggers a system code to run FF through the FMF to get all these information and solve back the dimension. I think that's the most complex in CPU terms. Oh, you're worried about the cost, right? Yeah, the high-precision CPU, but it's got to be an instance for running a lambda function. The lambda function ends up cheaper. I don't know. But you can't run long-running. You can't do long-running. Yes, I don't want to do it. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, high-precision. You've got to remember that lambda functions are limited, not just the environment, which is like 500 megabytes. So you can't really do a big video. I think the max is like five minutes. You can run it, keep it going. And then I realize that it's very quiet. Yeah, so you don't do long-running things. If you have a complicated lambda function, probably doing it wrong is what I would say. Keep it simple. Yep, sorry. Like in my project, any publicly exposed APIs that do some sort of significant computational stuff that would.  Yeah, I imagine. We do, and we use just a basic authorizer. I think the max is just a callback from the video recorder that's basically taking something and start storing it in a way that's a few minutes second for it. Yeah, that is not something. We just basically use a name, column, password. Yeah, so that's not public facing in that sense. No, like if someone is sitting on a line, and he's sitting on the edge. Well, my print the internet thing is open to the world. And yeah, it's kind of expanding on the other question from before, did you ever run it through? No, I haven't seen any remotely significant costs for the lambda. I mean, maybe, what was that say? Maybe later? Maybe later, sure.  Yeah, like, I've done that. No, to be honest, I haven't seen. This is what I really struggle with. People ask me about the cloud. Everyone asks me, what is the price? What is it going to be? I can't really tell you, but I know it's going to be a ton less cost than your probably existing infrastructure or the way you architect it currently. No, it will cost only 10 for the amount of time. Yeah. So if you have a job that needs a CPU 100% 247, that's at that point when I know more the right stuff. In our case, when a movie is a film, it's important to know something. That's not something that happens, let's say, when you really receive a lot of content at the end of the day, I don't want to get an EC2 for 10 as the reason to move from an EC2, we had an EC2 before, no more EC2 for 100% function. Yeah, the costs are pretty dull. You've got to try it out. In fact, if you manage to make an expensive lambda function, you've got to share the code with me. It would be interesting how you did it. Any more questions? Oh, sorry. Share the transition. Well, I sort of hinted about this earlier. You kind of need to architect. I think this phrase born in the cloud, you have to architect for the lambda function to begin with. There's no real migration path in my opinion, unless everything's maybe broken up into JavaScript functions already, which is probably unlikely in your app. So yeah, I wouldn't say there's a, is that, did I answer your question kind of? Yeah, you need to re-architect, sorry. Yep. How is the accession handling? Accession handling is, it works. It's just like JavaScript, I guess. You can, I'm not a huge error person, but the way that I usually write them is, because we're using promises, but it's a promise reject. And then it depends actually if you're doing like, if you have like your lambda attached to HTTP event, you have to worry about your HTTP responses. But normally you just do a call back with your error, and then your lambda function just ends, boom. So yep, it's pretty simple. I like it. I'm excited about it. Why do you put on the JavaScript what's wrong with it? Why should we not use the other languages? Because they're not as, let me know, let me know. No, what do you have for Christ's sake? Who invented this UI, some idiot? I think JavaScript, I have the feeling that it's way more native and better supported than the other languages. I just have that feeling. It's probably, it's not based on anything. And it makes it easier to deal with JSON, it makes it easier to deal with the DynamoDB. I mean, has anyone used DynamoDB without using something like Dock Client? Because that's insane. Because it's horrible to use without the AWS Dock Client abstraction, in my opinion. You have to worry about types all the time, which is boring. OK. Any other questions? Oh, yeah. OK. So how easy is it to set up your Lambda serverless functions on backends that are sort of, like, maybe like a CDN would do it. Like, you put it closer to your users for different users. Oh, well, you know what you call it. It's pretty straightforward to attach to HTTP event. You get an endpoint, then you put that behind CloudFront. I've done that pretty much with all my demos, yeah. Because the CloudFront gives you the SSL with your domain. Sorry. It gives you a domain. And then, obviously, you set up your CloudFront not to cache on the post and the other, to whitelist the headers, right?  Yep. But what about running, like, because you're just what about Lambda on different? So in some data center. So can you run it for Singapore user in Singapore? Can you run it for the US user in the US? You could do, I guess. There is CloudFront at Edge, but OK. Yes? There's something called Lambda Edge. But it's very limited. I think it's not worth getting too excited about. Don't get excited about it. There is new technology called Lambda Edge, which is in beta or something like this. And that is a game changer when it actually works. Because the idea is that every CloudFront pop around the world, there's a ton of them. There's a zillion. The idea is that you can run your Lambda function on that pop. Never mind a region on the fricking pop. So now, your user experience for your users potentially all around the world is like 20 millisecond roundtimes on something actually happening. That is phenomenal, in my opinion. It's usually the user experience for something happening, API something, is like 200 milliseconds. I mean, that's a big. That's Lambda Edge with Lambda Edge. Yeah, it won't. Lambda Edge right now is for just rewriting headers and things like that. Kind of boring stuff. But maybe it will get more amazing or something like this. I think, like, Fastly is doing something like this, I heard. I was watching some YouTube video. So I think the future is JavaScript running on the edge, JavaScript running on the browser, JavaScript everywhere. Isn't it exciting? It's kind of scary, actually. But yeah, good work, Sebastian, with that JavaScript thing. It was a good bet. OK, that's enough. Thanks, guys, for coming once again. The videos are going to be online. Oh, jeez, I must not forget this. If anyone wants to talk about something somewhat interesting, ideally for me, something that you've just learned from work, something practical that's not.


What's up everybody? Jason here with jazzybyscasebreak.com. 2022, Penini Flawless Baseball just sold out again, guys. This is a two box case break. Picketing number four. And here we go, guys. So Kev at the top. Kind of Derek there with the Nationals. This is the second to last case that was already sold out before, even like three, four days ago, guys. This has been sold out for like two weeks already. So, appreciate you guys, of course, grabbing spots. I know it got delayed from two weeks ago, so people had to wait a little bit longer, but it's been worth the wait, though. Let's see what we've got. First one is a showcase quad relic, is Zach Gallion that's going to Kev in the Diamondbacks. We have a Kirby Puckett, nice four out of five relic. Minnesota twins going to Ed. That's awesome right there. Joe's gonna get tired of doing all his train whistles today, guys, honestly. Seth Beer, six out of 15. Another one for Zona. And a Tony Sanson, and again, this guy's also been like in every case, I feel like Cincinnati Reds, John. We got a Alec Munoz, six out of 10. That is Blue Jay's going to Ed. We have a Teosgar Hernandez for Toronto, 16 out of 15. We got a Josh John, 19 out of 20. Texas Rangers, that's going to Ed. Then we got a Five of Seven, Jeff Bagwell for Houston. That's Nicholas with the Astros. Let's go with the in-case cards, guys. Oh, I guess we should show it. How about a Bobby Whit Jr., one out of 20? That's our first rookie in-case card. This is case number four. One of 20 for the Kansas City Royals, that's going to Inku, very nice. And how about a Legends Babe Ruth Diamond? Yankees, that is going to Martin. 17 out of 20. Nice, we got our first rookie in-case. Very nice. Let's move it along to the next one. All right, we got a Cabrion Hayes and O'Neil Cruz du Relic. That's a nice one there for the Pirates. Going to Sportport, there you go, Jeremy, on the board. We got a Jumbo Relic there of Bobby Whit Jr., so nice break for the Royals. Inku, 14 out of 20. More Royals, that is Jackson Coar, four out of 15. We have a Brandon Morris, that's Los Angeles Angels Edition, four out of 10. Four out of 10, Angels is James Hannah. We got a Momentus autograph there of Christian Hernandez, nice little prospect there for Chicago Cubs. Cubs is David Chan. And we got a Luis Gonzalez, four of 15. Nice patch autograph there for Zona, going to Kev. And we got a nice little Star Swatch signatures of Henry Davis, 14 out of 25, nice three-color patch. That's going to go to the Pirates and Sportport. Last one here is a little Joey Vado, premium ink, four out of 25. Cincinnati Reds, going to John. All right guys, here we go, good luck. Then we got a Jacob DeGrom, double Emerald, four out of five. Nice one there for the New York Mets. Mets is Nestor. Then here's your Otto. And it is a great big Boppy, four out of five autograph for Boston. Red Sox, going to Raymond. Solid air right there, man. And there you go, folks. Another case down of Follis Baseball, number five is coming up next, six is in single digits. And Immaculate Baseball is going to be in an R&B soon, guys. So I appreciate it guys, jazbscasebrakes.com.


Welcome to the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. Here at SOAS, our MSc Politics and International Relations program allows you to take a general approach to the study of domestic and international politics around the world, or specialize in a particular field. International Politics and Security, Politics in Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, or Central Asia, as well as Africa and the Middle East. We also focus on comparative political theory, or the politics of conflict, rights, and justice. Together with our students, we study how politics works beyond Western lenses. We explore political patterns in the rich and complex worlds of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. We also study issues cutting across these regions, and how they connect with other parts of the world. As a SOAS student, you'll pick from a range of modules that you won't find elsewhere, covering our regional specialisms and tailored to address key global issues. You'll join a diverse group of scholars, as well as a politically aware, famously proactive, and globally influential student body. Our graduates leave SOAS not only with an understanding of the most important political, economic, and cultural issues of our time, but also with the portfolio of skills that employers seek. Our degrees and pathways are relevant for anyone working in, or intending to work in, government and diplomacy, international organizations, and NGOs. Think tanks, advocacy groups, journalism, global business, or the academy. Study at SOAS to gain the tools needed to understand the world around you. We'll encourage you to make a difference and become a catalyst for change.