The coverage of Sapphire Enverge of the event. We heard Jim Hageman-Snaabe this morning with a big keynote. We heard McDermott yesterday. Very good messaging, very upscale, elegant, you know, SAP Sapphire is quite an event. We're here with two executives from EMC, Sylvie Otten-Solid, who is heavily involved in the EMC and SAP activities. And Andy Citizen, who knows every customer on the planet, I think, and also very much involved in the SAP and application ecosystem. So folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you.  We're going to be at EMC World next week, and of course we do VM World every year. They're real technology shows, you know. I wouldn't define them as elegant. They're great shows, but, you know, this is a lot of suits, a lot of talk about wallets, right? What do you, what's your vibe here at the show? You know, what's great is, I don't know if they did some magic and shrinking it, but it is really tight walking through the floor here. There's people everywhere, right? There's no chairs to sit in. There's very, very few spots to stand even. It's very packed. The keynotes are packed, you know, and it's quite impressive. I think that, you know, SAP, you think of, Sylvie, you think of SAP as complex, low, expensive, but that's not what we're hearing now. We're hearing cloud, mobile, speed, personalization. Yeah, more and more customers are requiring, you know, these applications to ensure that they remain agile, that they remain flexible, that their infrastructures are agile and flexible and that they can gain efficiencies. I mean, in a world where, you know, we're all looking at our pockets to make sure that they're full. And, you know, it's very important to ensure that we do have an agile, flexible and efficient infrastructure for them to be able to rely on. You know, EMC got it all started with the whole cloud meets big data messaging, you know, a couple years ago. Actually, we started to talk about on theCUBE, I think three EMC worlds ago, and then, you know, EMC evolved that. And now everybody's talking about it, right? Last year, if you recall, you really didn't hear much about big data. Not here. I mentioned it, you know, 10 or 15 times in this discussion yesterday. Now, Schnabe, not so much today, but he talked about analytics a lot. And that's their big data play. So, Andy, you're starting to see customers make this stuff real, aren't you? I hope we have 30 minutes, because I'm not going to be able to stop. You're starting to see a message you talked about three years ago. You're absolutely right, and it has been proven to be true. What you're going to see from us a lot is transformation. A lot of transformation coming out, and if you look at what's transforming right now, it's the database, right? It's interesting. We all grew up in the 70s and the 80s and 90s with scale off, right? You know, build the big data center, support some of those traditional databases. Now you've got scale out. You've got MapR, you've got Green Plum, you've got MongoDB, all these fully sharded databases. And now we've got HANA, and we have an in-memory database. So how do our customers make the right architectural decisions when it comes to the database? This is a big expense for them. And as they stage, not only what should they do, how should they deal with what use cases and what's the right timing, that's where we're spending a lot of our time right now getting not only our game together, but working with our partners. So people at HANA are crazy. You heard the executive from Clarence today talk about he said, quote, we are blown away by HANA and the impact it's going to have on our productivity. That's quite a testament. Now, I've got to ask you, being with EMC, Snobby said, imagine a world without traditional disk-based databases. Imagine a world where all data is in memory. And now that was sort of a little slight of the oracle, I guess. But as EMC, you've got to be looking at that saying, times are changing and we either got to brace that change, or so what's your response to that? I heard something about the Stone Age in that comment. It was a great line. What was that? Let's share that line with our audience, because we haven't mentioned it today. You know, the Stone Age did not end because it ran out of stones. The disk age won't end because we ran out of disk. It's innovation. And ultimately, I would say it's the decision that matters, right? Ultimately, when you come to analytics, it's the decision, stupid, right? That's really what we all care about. What we're in right now is a period of great technology growth to apply that to analytics. So we're testing out new ways of going about that. But ultimately, we want to get back to where it's simple and automatic, just like an iPad, right? Or those types of technologies. And the comments around disk, this is a great target to prove out that we're going into new areas. We're going into solid-state disk. We're going into the new software that can do this. But reality is, our customers have exponential growth in data. We're talking to a customer that has a 60-petabyte Hadoop instance sitting beside their SAP instance. These things aren't going away. Disk is going to be here. It's going to look like something different. It's going to be 3,000 times faster, but it's still going to be part of the equation. We're going to have business continuity. We've got to deal with day mobility. All these things will continue to be core functionality our customers need. I actually wish we did have a half hour, because I'm going to come back to that comment. Sylvia, before we go there, I want to ask you about this whole concept of solutions. You're in a marketplace where a lot of application focus. And people don't really care about the infrastructure. So a lot of these people's infrastructure is irrelevant.  It's like plumbing in your house. It's kind of, you don't think about it until it breaks. And then you're like, oh boy, there's water going everywhere. So you're in solutions marketing. What does solutions mean to you? Maybe talk about solutions. What do you mean by solutions? I mean, it's a good question. Solutions are a lot of different things for a lot of different people, I think. But fundamentally what solutions are is really when you take the customer's needs and you package it up into something where it actually is the software, the products and services all combined into one offering that allows customers to address their needs from an overall product, software and services aspect. So if I look at the partnership pie, how much is sort of EMC delivered content or intellectual property and versus say, friends of EMC, guys like VCE, Cisco, Intel versus just the ecosystem. Right, and that's a very, very important point is one of the things that EMC is really founded on and based on is really this idea and similar to SAP in fact as well is this idea of choice. It's an idea that you can have a huge partner ecosystem in order to build better solutions. Solutions that actually address customers' needs in the right way so that you're using leading technology, best in class technology in order to provide the best solution for our customers. So Andy, you mentioned Hadoop before. I think you said a 60... Did you say petabyte? I did, yeah. I love Hadoop. Sitting on the side. As a storage person which is fantastic. But speaking of solutions, it's really hard to spin up a Hadoop cluster and you've got to have the right skill sets and there's all these new terminology like Pyg and Hive and HBase and it's like I don't necessarily have all those skill sets so we're having need of solutions. My question is do you see a world where those sort of that Hadoop on the side instance comes together with things like in-memory databases and the operational data? What's your vision there? Be a little bit salacious here or at least early in my conversations I think the cloud eventually gets us there, right? If you think about client server we did in the 90s. We spread out and we came back together. Consolidation is always a massive optimization opportunity. Right now we're looking for performance. We break things apart to get better performance. We look at in-memory to get better performance but ultimately we still have data centers. We still have costs. You think about the companies that are just a bunch of disks like Google where you've got thousands of people swapping product out because you don't have production systems. You have this kind of a mismatch of technologies. Primarily our customers are still saying we still want to come up with the best data center strategies. Whether we own it, one of our partners own it, if it's over the cloud. So I think what you're going to see is some common democracy of the cloud coming back in to bring these technologies back into a consumable model. What do you guys see that cloud as looking like? I mean, you guys put forth the vision of the hybrid cloud quite some time ago now. It's had to be at least three or four years ago and you talked to customers about it back then and they're like, sounds good but not ready to do it. We did some surveys back then and not a lot of people are doing it. That's changing a little bit, isn't it? You talking about that? Yeah, I mean, we have... The cloud has always been a business model to me. It's a technology that you could make a similarity comparison to mainframes. It's not technology-wise that different. What's changed here is the alignment of partners and the alignment of that technology to business processes. So what we're seeing is a maturation of that going forward. We're seeing more customers buying by the drip and buying at a service level. And the good news is we have the partnerships and the alignment today to offer that in a really attractive way. A lot of customers still want to have that iron on their own floor plan. So the good news is it's become less of a technical decision more of a business decision. Sylvia, I wanted to switch topics a little bit. We heard today from a couple of guests inside the EMC project. I believe it's called Propel, which is a real transformation. Are you able to leverage that in your activities? Absolutely. Talk about that a little bit. So EMC's IT department is actually... We do drink our own champagne. When we talk about EMC and SAP and VMware coming together in a three-way preferred strategic partnership, this is what we're doing inside EMC as well. And we are implementing this strategy. And in fact, we are 100% virtualized today in all of our SAP test and dev environments. And we are actually going to be launching in production very, very shortly. So another couple months or so we'll be launching... We'll be live in production, fully virtualized. So it's very, very exciting. And it's something that we're seeing already with our test and dev fully virtualized savings. Operational expenses are being cut. It's just a tremendous amount of ROI already. Dave, I got to second that comment and say, there's a lot of talk at shows like this. There's no closer to walk-to-walk than that. This is going to be a showcase. And everybody's going to want to stop unless our competition, our customers, SAP. This is going to be a really great story. It's a lot of hard work that we've been getting done, not only for ourselves, but our customers. There's going to be a lot of leverage from what we've done that the market can participate in. Yeah, this is a big deal. You don't undertake an initiative like that lightly. I mean, I'm sure it's a big investment, not only in money, but also time. And I understand it goes live July 4th, but poor IT guys get no break. I would not want to be spending my July 4th deploying a major system and then making sure, but hats off to them. They've been working really, really hard. But I do have to say that I've been to a lot of these conferences last year for SAP. And I've seen the EMC IT folks, specifically Bill Reed, who's been extremely helpful. And I see him in action. And it's really, really interesting to see customers who are really reaching out. One of the things that I saw and I read was that over 50% of requests for proposals now coming out of the SAP Center of Excellence, they're asking for virtualization. That's something that a couple years back we would not have seen. And it's really, really interesting. And it says a lot about what people are doing and how, and really they're looking for advice. They're looking to EMC, the infrastructure leaders in stores to understand how we can virtualize our IT environment. And they're really looking not just for the answers, but also for the approach. Just for the approach in terms of what do we do first, what do we do next. And it's fascinating to see that it really is amazing to see that you can leverage your own, what you're doing yourself to really help the customers around us. Well, Andy, I remember, I think it was two or three SAP hours ago. It must have been two ago. When you had a dynamic where a lot of the application heads didn't want to virtualize their SAP. Just give me all the expensive stuff and let me purpose-build it and leave me alone. And inferring from your comments, Sylvie, that that's changing. Can you talk about that a little bit? We came up with a technology, this convergent technology called VBlock. And I've always said the value of the VBlock is it took the performance and risk equation off the table. It became a, we essentially leveraged new technologies that greatly gave us performance that allow us to virtualize all at the same time. So now customers could get that performance improvement from their traditional and drive a virtualization strategy.  Unfortunately, when we watched the video of Japan and as the water rolled over the farms and the silos, that's what virtualization is doing today. No one's too big. We can attack it if it's a business decision, but the technology's not holding us back. There seems to have been a tipping point. I mean, the application development heads have a lot of power within organizations, but the business case is so overwhelming that that's shifted, hasn't it? You can look at half the cost twice as fast. That's kind of the motto as you go to consolidate. Don't get called the lawyers on me, but that's generally what we see, right? It's a real compelling event. Well, guys, I told you this would go fast. We're out of time, unfortunately. And I really thank you both for coming on, Sylvie and Andy, for coming on The Cube. A longtime Cube guest and a great one. And Sylvie and Newby, nice job. Thank you very much. And congratulations how well you guys have grown. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun and I appreciate all your support. We'll see you at EMC World. All right. We'll be there next week. And thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.


Hey guys, it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about all the series that I finished this year.  The finishing part less frequent, the starting part unfortunately more frequent. There's always a new series to start and then that just you have no time to finish the ones you've already started.  Yep, so I have made a list and I have eight, yes, eight series that I finished this year. So we're just going to go through them one by one and I'm going to tell you what the series is and how I felt about it in general and how I felt about its conclusion. This will be spoiler free though. So other than I mean if you think my opinion good or bad is spoilery then this is spoilery. But I feel like most of these you already know how I feel about it because I've already talked about it. At some point on this channel there's two on here that I very recently finished as in like within the last week. So you don't know anything about how I feel about those because I barely just finished them. So we're just going to go in chronological order because I made this list by looking at my Goodreads like reading challenge for this year. So the first one is Mistborn. Oh yeah, so for a couple of these, yeah for a couple. I say I finished the series in so far as like the trilogy. So in the case of Mistborn I finished the original Mistborn trilogy. That doesn't necessarily mean that I finished every book there is within the universe or expanded universe or saga or whatever. So for example Red Rising which is not on this list. If I was to have read just the trilogy but not the saga I did finish that. Anyway so yeah back to Mistborn I finished the trilogy. I think that was like the first book that I finished this year is Hero of Ages and I have a video on my channel which was the beginning the precursor the sort of the taste the teaser the trailer for Sanderson Gate because right after reading Hero of Ages I read The Way of Kings and we all know how that went. I don't want to say too much about Mistborn because I kind of already talked about how I felt about the conclusion of Mistborn. That was kind of the whole point of that video that I thought the series was really good up until the end then the end killed it for me and I had kind of trouble talking about in that video because for some reason I decided to make it spoiler free plus it was just that even if it had been spoilery I would have had to explain so many pieces of the trilogy that would have been a monstrously long video all to the point of just saying I didn't like it. Now that I didn't like the trilogy I would still say that I like the trilogy and when people ask for reading recommendations or specifically say oh I've heard Mistborn's good is it. I'll usually tell them that in general I think it's well written and for the first two books I really really enjoyed it I really really liked it. The third book for me personally killed it because I didn't like the sort of concluding message wrap up the way things wrapped up and the way things were explained I didn't like it. I thought it was heavy-handed and a little bit preachy so I didn't like that. I do want to mention this because it's relevant to another series that I'm going to talk about at the very end one in eight one in eight on my list. Mistborn people I mean people just hate me for dislunking anything Sanderson does because of reasons but specifically accused me of being a staunch atheist or that I'm seeing too much into it or if I hadn't known that Sanderson was Mormon that I wouldn't have decided to see this message in it and I don't think any of that is true especially the fact that people have said well you just don't like any religion in books whatsoever which is not true. I don't like when religion is preached to me in a book. I don't care if the characters themselves are going through something religious or are themselves extremely religious or something like that but I don't like if the whole point of a book has been to convince me of a particular brand or idea or way of thinking. That's propaganda. So spoilers the last series that I want to talk about in this video is another series where I didn't like the messaging and it's the exact opposite of Mistborn because the messaging is anti-religious and I didn't like that any better so for those who accused me of just being anti-religious and that's why I didn't like Mistborn I don't like it any better when a book's message is anti-religious. I don't like there to be a preachy shoved in my face message of any description so yeah that's Mistborn. Well if you don't know what Mistborn is uh I don't okay I don't know how to explain Mistborn. The premise is what if the bad guy won and then the magic system and it is based on eating metals and then the people who can use this magic are able to consume those metals and use those metals to power different types of magic and it's like really complicated and really filled with rules it's a very hard magic system which is kind of what Brandon Sanderson is known for so that's Mistborn. Okay much lighter and fluffier number two is the Winner's Trilogy which is the Winner's Curse the Winner's what's the second I always write what the second one is called the Winner's the Winner's Crime holy moly man that took me way too long yeah the Winner's Crime and the Winner's Kiss. I've talked about the series before the covers don't do it justice and or if not don't do it justice they just don't reflect what kind of story it is so you can like the covers if you want I mean I don't but if you like the covers that's fine but they do not reflect the type of story that it is neither cover version that series needs a new cover it's a YA slightly old school style fantasy that has quite like romance is quite prominently featured but not nearly as much as the covers would make you think it's a lot more if you wanted only romance out of it you would be disappointed because it's a lot more politics and intrigue and conspiracy and war and battle a lot more of that just more romance than a book that's purely political battle fantasy would have I really like the main character and there's something about Mary Koski's writing that is just so bingeable and unputdownable to me I I didn't want to pick those books up for the longest just because the covers made me think that they were exactly the kind of book that I would not want to read once I learned that they are not that kind of book and I did buy them it took me a while to pick it up and then when I finally did I I read the first one in all in one day and then I didn't move on to the next book for months and months not really because I didn't like it I just didn't and then when I picked up the second book finally then I read the second and third books back to back within like three days I think because Mary Koski's writing I just I just gobble it up like I can't stop reading it I don't know what it is about it it's not especially lyrical it's not especially cliffhanger II I don't I honestly I've I've tried so hard to pinpoint what it is about her writing that I just insatiable when I'm reading her writing I can't I wouldn't even see these books are my favorite or the shoes my favorite author or this writing style is my favorite but when I'm in the middle of it it's like MSG I can't stop so yeah I mean there are good books and that's not to say they're not they are definitely YA definitely fantasy definitely romance definitely I don't know they're fun there's like a lot to them the will there won't they and the romance was dragged out a bit too long for my taste but overall I really really enjoyed the series and Mary Koski has a new book coming out next year so I'm really it takes place in the same universe I think as the winter trilogy and so I'm excited about that and I don't love the cover for the new book oh my god it's so much better than the winners covers um next up I why I don't know okay why did I list it so early in my list so much for being chronological number three on my list is the ravens mark trilogy by ed mcdonnell which is black wing raven cry and crowfall actually read the whole series this year because I reread black wing and raven cry and then red crowfall I guess that's why it's so early in my list because I reread black wing pretty early in the year and that must have been when I wrote it down and then I reread raven cry and somewhat recently finally got to reading crowfall this is an extremely grim dark fantasy very industrial very political very filled with conspiracy and great and it's very great morally great characters and a morally great world it's dark it's dark af um one of the grimest darkest grim dark fantasies I've read I really enjoy it I have to be honest though the end left me scratching my head a little bit I am not entirely sure I know what happened because it got very magical at the end and something happened but I am not sure I know what the something is I'm gonna have to reread it because the third book I was really really loving it and there was some really excellent reveals and excellent political stuff going on the grit was grittier and the gore was gorier and I was into it and then we got to this real magical bit at the end where it's kind of like the climactic epic culmination of all three books and it got so wonky and bizarre with the magic that I kind of lost track of what the f was going on so I'm gonna need to reread that because I was like wait who who what but how did you overall I still recommend the series um I just I don't I don't know what happened okay number four in my list is Air Awakens and I have a whole video on my channel um that's about how to write a terrible book based on my experience with the air awaken series which I didn't like really any part of but I had an audio book that was all of the series in one long audio book so I just kind of plowed on through it and then made a video about wine's garbage so I don't want to say again too much about it because I talked if that video is like god be like 40 minutes I think where I just kind of went through all the ways like it chose to do a thing it shouldn't have chosen to do and then the things that it did choose to do that might have been fine it did lend badly and it's just like how not what to write like master class oh man that series is yikes yeah it's it's like elemental magic um but it's mainly a romance and a bad romance because okay if you're just gonna be an unapologetically heavy on the romance kind of series fine but the romance wasn't even written well so it really just failed on every level next is something that failed the the failure of this series isn't far more criminal than air wakens because air wakens never promised to be good and that is the never night chronicle by j christoff again I have a pretty lengthy video complaining about dark john the conclusion to the never night chronicle this one hurt the most this year because I really loved never night until this year and I have since gotten rid of almost all of my never night books that's how much dark dawn ruined it for me I loved never night and I really loved god's graves the second book dark dawn not only was it bad but it retroactively made me dislike the first two books because what the first part of what I loved about the first two books was what they seemed to be leading to it kept teasing where this is all headed leading clues for you to wonder about where this is going and dark dawn is the reveal is the thing you've been working towards and to find out that you haven't been working towards anything that's all just been a big joke then I can't enjoy never night or dark gods grave anymore either because they just feel like tricks no pun intended that it's just a big lie it's a big con to get you to read this and then the dark dawn was pulling the curtain back and seeing that Oz is just a failure of an old carpet bagger dark dawn is oh god it pissed me off so much I don't want to again be spoilery and I do my video on dark dawn specifically I talked I did a non-spoiler section in the beginning um and then also did spoilers so if you want to know anything about dark dawn I have a whole video but no no uh next up is a book series that yeah these last three I haven't really talked about at all on my channel at least not this year and this is the half drowned king series I keep thinking there's a name for the series because that's also the name of the first book it's the half drowned king the sea queen and the golden wolf I pretty much read these back to back I might have read something in between but I pretty much read them back to back this is a viking historical fiction series that is based on the sagas of king herald it's clear that the author has really studied the Norwegian history and has really studied the sagas I believe the author herself is either from actually I think she might have been born in the US but she's clearly of sort of Nordic descent her name is Linnea um harzöker I think that's how you say it the series is very very viking if you want that if you want a very very viking book then the series is fantastic I really really really enjoyed it if what you want is sort of viking light but mainly like a romance or mainly an adventure story that kind of has a viking aesthetic you probably won't like this because it's very very very much the sagas basically what she's done is taken the sagas of king herald she's had some artistic license with sort of combining some characters into one adding a couple events that didn't happen in the sagas messed around with a little bit but mainly she's because the sagas don't really delve into human emotion or motivation it's just sort of events so she's taken the saga of king herald and started to sort of apply her more modern storytelling to sort of try to figure out what would have made these characters do this what would what would the characters have been feeling when they made these choices and so novelized it in a way that really fleshes out these characters that are featured in the sagas so that they are sort of flesh and blood three-dimensional people but it is it is expansive it it covers many many years in multiple generations it follows multiple perspectives of these vikings who are killing and fucking and having children and fighting with each other and betraying each other and loving each other and swearing oaths to each other and it's a lot of that so if you have no interest in a bunch of vikings doing viking-y things for three books don't read it but if you that sounds great to you then i highly highly recommend this series i loved it and then the last two um are the ones that i finished in this last week and so number seven on my list is the folk of air trilogy by holly black so i just ran queen of nothing and i still like the series but queen of nothing i'd hesitate to compare to never night because i did end up liking i gave queen of nothing four stars but the it's sort of this kind of similar situation to never night where the first two books led me to think this story was going somewhere else i from the cruel prince and the wicked king what i really liked about them and set them apart for me was how cruel and how gray and how unlikeable the characters were which to me is unique in y a y a tends to have if you do have a morally gray character they still have a redemption arc or a tragic backstory that explains why they are the way they are heart of gold that they're trying to hide reasons for what they're doing as opposed to just being evil and the cruel prince and wicked king seemed to me to be a story about some selfish ambitious and wicked people who you know have sort of toxic feelings for each other and why not why not write a story about wicked cruel selfish people being into each other queen of nothing kind of pulls back and is more like all those other y a books that i was talking about where oh no there's reasons there's explanation and redemption and all this kind of thing and not completely but it did kind of soften things a lot and make everyone a lot more likable and as i grimace is i like reading about likable characters and i start to say that i don't but that's what was unique about the series and then ended up not being the case so i feel a little bit tricked a little bit betrayed by that ultimately the queen of nothing was a really fun story and i enjoyed it and it didn't really it's not so much that it didn't live up to what it was promising it's more just that i had a different impression or i had assumed made assumptions about where it was going what kind of story it was that rightly or wrongly so there's there's nothing about the cruel prince or wicked king that would suggest that you can't have a redemption arc i just didn't think that it would and i kind of loved that about the books is that it didn't seem like the kind of story that would bother with their redemption arc so you can absolutely have a redemption arc there's no reason you can't i was just kind of loving it when everyone was just kind of wicked and evil and i really liked that about it so queen of nothing is great and if you like the series you'll probably like queen of nothing and i'll probably really read all three of them but yeah it was too it was too happy it was too nice and the last series on my list is the one that i already kind of mentioned when i was talking about mistborn and that is his dark materials by philip holman once again just like with mistborn i by this i mean that i've read the original trilogy i've read the golden compass the subtle knife and the amber spyglass i have not read the expanded universe kind of books the prequel or the sequel or the novellas i haven't read any of that yet i do own the book of dust the secret commonwealth and um i'll probably get the novellas these books to me progressively got worse i gave five stars to golden compass hundred percent stand by that i really liked the golden compass and the subtle knife i gave four stars to because it started to seem a bit messy a bit preachy kind of doing too many things but it was still introducing some really interesting concepts and expanding the world a lot and there was still some interesting magics and new characters that we were meeting um and so it still seemed to have a lot of potential even if it was getting a little messagey and then the third book seemed to forget all together that there was a story and was just all about the messaging it was like a thinly veiled allegory and i gave it three stars because it was great just like with hero of ages i gave three stars to hero of ages so for people who you know act like i've done a bad thing i still gave it three stars the amber spyglass was just so preachy and so obviously drawing trying to send a message rather than tell a story that i i couldn't enjoy it it was still a creative idea there was still really creative things being done some of the character moments i i did tear up um because i had gotten attached to the characters so there were some emotional moments but it was so preachy and in an anti-religious way so honestly i feel like one of the reasons that i hate super preachy books isn't even so much that i don't like the preachiness of it it's more that i feel like i'm being insulted that my intelligence is being insulted that you think that if you tell a subtler story that i won't pick up on the message because plenty of subtler stories out there if you examine them there's an argument to be made for the fact that what you might come away from it is an impression that a certain kind of a thing might be good or a certain kind of a thing might be bad i mean honestly every book has of that to some extent because the actions of the character either lead to good things or don't lead to good things or maybe the message is that it doesn't matter what you do and it's a nihilistic message i mean every book it has its own sort of set of values guiding it because the person who wrote it has a set of values guiding them and um i can read your book and judge for myself um and just see what you're saying for myself i don't need you shoving it in my face i'm not an idiot so when something is being preachy i just feel like the author thinks i'm an idiot so i don't really care if you ultimately want me to feel like religion is good after i've read your book i don't care if you want me to think religion is bad at the end of reading your book i care that you think i'm too stupid to pick up on whatever your message is so you decide to make it so obvious and so woven in so tightly to every single bit of your story into the magic into the characters into what happens to them into the words they say into the everything about it is just all about driving home this message i'm like okay fuck off like i i'm not an idiot i could pick up on your message without all this so please put your bullhorn down i still like this series which is what i say about miss born too so like everyone who can go suck a dick who says that i'm being unreasonable i can still criticize a book i like it yeah i fully intend to read more books by philip pulman and i would have said that i fully intend to read more sanderson books but the reaction of the fans has put me off the idea just because it's left a bad taste in my mouth being attacked that way that said i originally did intend to read the rest of the miss born books the second generation or the second era or whatever it's called they're kind of all tainted by hate that i've got and continue to get so i might in secret read some more sanderson and just never talk about it on the internet because you know but i got time for that let me know the comments down below if you finish any series this year if there any series that um i mentioned here that you are currently reading or that you also finished or that you now intend to pick up um i post videos on saturdays so like and subscribe and i'll see you next saturday


OK. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming along to our talk and we're here to talk about from zero to a multilingual Next.js site powered by Next for Drupal and Drupal recipes with one command. My name is Josh and we have my colleague Mario here as well and we're both here from Wonder. We are an agency with officers in three different countries, Finland, Latvia and Estonia and over a hundred of others work there and we've been a member of the Drupal community since we were founded around 13 years ago. And yeah, today basically we're here to talk about this project and feel free to to kind of check it out while we're speaking to you as well if you like. It's available on GitHub. The link is right there and it's called Next Drupal starter kit and it's an open source template for decoupled projects or projects that use Next.js on the front end and Drupal as the CMS. Before we get into our project specifically, let's just rewind a little bit and talk about why we like Drupal. We'll hear at Drupalcon and what is it that makes it so special. Well, one of the things is that it's got a really kind of solid foundation and it's module system. And with that it delivers a lot of our clients needs straight out of the box before we have to actually write any lines of code. And what that means is that if you look at this graph here, Drupal kind of takes care of a lot of what we need to build for us out of the box. And so that we, as developers and builders, we can spend much more time focusing on the actual features that our clients need rather than just kind of putting together the things that we might have to do for every project that doesn't use Drupal, all the kind of plumbing and that kind of thing if you think back to the DrupalVill analogy, Indrease is known yesterday. And so we live in a world now where decoupled Drupal has been kind of touted as the future for a while. For some of us it is still the future. For some of us we're already working with it. But it is still quite tricky to work with at times and we found that on our own projects at Wonder where we have a number of client projects, big and small that are using the decoupled approach. Some of those challenges, for example, are with synchronising between the back end and the front end of the website. There's multiple ways of dealing with that, but whichever way you choose, you're always going to hit some kind of difficulties doing that, whether it's multiple repositories and kind of keeping those in sync. Obviously MonoRepose also have kind of positives and negatives and so on. And also there's so much choice in the ecosystem now that there isn't really any established way, any kind of one way of doing things. That has positives, of course, but it can also lead to a lot of analysis at every point that you want to solve a problem. There's a million ways of doing it and no established way just yet. And this can all lead to making it a little bit harder to switch between different projects and more difficult for developers to jump from one project to the other or to help out. And that leads to fragmentation and different ways of doing things between different teams and different projects. And so this is the point that we're at now with decoupled projects. At least this is what we've experienced, is that what's kind of being taken care for us is now smaller. Drupal is doing less for us, or in a way it's kind of doing as much for us, but there's more that we then need to add on top of it to handle all of these decoupled situations and all the things that I've spoken about. And so now the developer is a little bit less only kind of building these features over here and they're having to spend more time on the plumbing, on the basic kind of infrastructure just to get to the point where they can actually start working on the things our clients care about, which is of course the features that they actually want us to implement. And so next Drupal Starter Kit is our kind of solution to this and it's about simplying the process of creating a decoupled project and that allows the developer to then focus on building the features that matter. Yeah, so as George was saying we've had quite many of these decoupled projects over the years and at some point so we are constantly looking for ways to improve them for procedures and so on. And so at some point we found this project, which we have liked very much and we don't say it just because people from Chapter 3 are in the audience today. It's called, well, you probably, you might have heard of it. It's called NSGS for Drupal and it is spearheaded by Chapter 3 and contributors. And we thought maybe just to give you an idea we could go and pay them a short visit. So this is the website of the project and it details quite nicely what is included. And in short, this project is the combination of a Drupal module or a set of modules and MPM packages that together allow you to create this decoupled environment, right? Where Drupal holds the content, holds the users and then your users will interact actually with that next JS front end. We will not go through everything here, but I just want to say that there's quite a lot of documentation and guides. There's also quite a lot of available code on GitHub for different scenarios. So if you haven't checked it out, our suggestion is to give it a look. So if you want to get started with this setup, then you have to follow some steps, right? Install Drupal, apply some patches, enable the modules that you will need and then configure some entities, configure some content types and then create of course the front end. They have provided MPX, create commands for that, but then you get something which is kind of bare bones, right? And then it's up to you to continue. Then if you want to enable, for example, preview mode, which is of course very useful and a very required feature, then there's some more steps. And also if you want to have on-demand revalidation, there's more things that you need to configure. All in all, this is totally doable, right? But if you start thinking of having projects and trying to have them working in the same way, we thought that, yeah, but maybe we could automate a little bit of this and also build on top of it. And so we go back to the presentation if I manage. Yeah, wrong direction. So this is where we started from, right? So we thought, okay, we want to use this next Drupal. It's a very good open source project and we want to have an easier way of working with it. So we added quite many bullet points on top. I will try to go quick here. So we added some sensible defaults and adding more and more features that we always need in our projects, right? So, for example, multilingual features a bit more like what you get with Drupal out of the box. We wanted to have one repository that would have both frontend and backend in the same place. We wanted to set it up for our hosting system called SILTA, which is also open source. And yeah, we wanted to automate away all that configuration. And for that, we found Drupal recipes, which is also a very interesting initiative for Drupal core. And then also we wanted to have a bit more out of the box, right? So some default content types that we normally have, right? So page frontend, front page article. We like to use paragraphs in our projects. So have some example paragraph types for the most common things. Media items, images, videos, file, the translation of the content and the interface. We also have, we always use elastic search for the search part. Sometimes also as the engine for this decoupled. Solution. So we wanted to have that as well. Some simple support for web forms. Also we wanted to demonstrate that you can use user registration and login, which is not so straightforward in this decoupled setup. And also we wanted to give some nice example content so that when you spin this up, you don't start from an empty page, but actually from a working site. So, yeah, time for demo. So, yes. Josh. Josh. What does it mean that it's not connected to the internet? Yeah. Hey, it's loaded here. All right. Oh, look at that. We have it. Cool. Good. Basically, this is hosted on GitHub and you can go and get it. And what you see if you go there is, well, the code, right? So there's a folder for Drupal, for directory, for next, and then all the needed configuration to have a working system. We also made an effort to have a decent readme file, not one of those where it says nothing. So, yeah, here there's a detail of the features that you get and the specification that you only have really one requirement, which is Lando. So there's various solutions to have local environments. We have standardised on Lando, so that's what we are using here. So, basically, all you do is you check out this project and then follow the very clear getting started guide. All in all, basically you need to run this one command, right? Setup.sh. And that will do quite a lot of things. So, now, like in a cooking show, we have made the pie beforehand. Initially, we thought of running this live, but I guess it's good we didn't, right? Okay. So, basically, in this terminal here, we have run the command. If I find it there. Right. And very quickly, we can go over in broad strokes with what happens. So, first, the Lando setup is a spin-up. Well, if you, I don't know how familiar you are with this, but, basically, Lando is a local, a bit like DDEV, is a local setup based on Docker containers, right, in the shortest possible way. So, here, all the environment is set up for you to host this whole thing, the Drupal part, but the elastic search and also the front end part. Cool. Then, more Lando, more Lando stuff. Lando is happy and it has worked. Cool. Right. And then we installed Drupal. So, we installed Drupal starting from the minimal installation profile, the one that doesn't have anything in it, not even the blocks and stuff. And then, here, there's the recipe magic, which is something that isn't the process of being added to Drupal core, but you can apply a patch and use it already. And we have set up these recipes. And what you get out of this is all the back-end configuration. Then, we go further down.  Here, the next JS front end is built in production mode. And then, many of you will recognize this migration runs, right? And at the end of all of this, you get two links, one to access the back-end and one to access the front-end. So, let's go to the front-end. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, what? It's blocked. That's interesting. Oh, no. It's here, but as soon as you click anything, it will not work again. Oh, no. Okay. This was the faraday cage room, apparently. I'll try to connect to my hotspot. Which may or may not work. Well, a bit of demo effect needs to be expected. Something. All right. Do I dare to refresh? Yes. All good. Right. So, basically, after all that list of commands, right? So, you started from having nothing and just checking out the project and running that one thing. This is what you get. So, it's kind of a small demo site with all the features that we discussed before. So, you get this front page that starts with a hero component. And the images are fetched randomly each time when you do the migration. So, this time we got this nice courgette. Anyway. Or green beans, whatever. Right. So, then you get some text. Then you get a listing of the latest articles. Right? We talked about the content types. And then something that teases Webform, but says you are not logged in. Then some more articles there.  Because, of course, clicking there takes you to something that looks like a view. It's not really a view, but it looks like it. Where you have these example articles with one which is sticky on top. Right. Then, going over the header, we have a search system.  And you have a basic faceted navigation system and also a working search. So, if we type through there and we type it. Actually, it should work also if you type it wrong. Anyway. Right. So, you get some results and then you can filter them down. We've seen it before, right? But this is not super straightforward to set up. Here you get it. With zero effort. Okay. Then. You have an account menu that we stop. Where you can log in. And also we make the migration. I am the slowest typer in the world. Okay. And so the migration will create a couple of users for you to try out. So, MrTestUser1 now is logged in. And now we see that the web form is actually showing up. So. Wait. No. Josh, what's going on? This is not my laptop. Please do an A. Act sign. Which language do you have? Anyway. You're telling me you don't have the Finnish keyboard layout which is the best in the world? Okay. All right. Anyway. So, if I submit this and I get I see this success message, right? So now the web form is being submitted to Drupal. And it's saved there. We also have added an example of a dashboard page where you know, in the next yes this is generated as your own private page. And then here as an example you can see the beautiful web form submission that we just made. So, yeah, this is supported and again this is one of the features of next for Drupal. Then we have worked on the language support and basically we have our languages that we normally work with. So we both work in Finland and so while Finland has two official languages, right? So Finnish and Swedish. So those normally need to be there and also English and so basically here you can switch to a different language, right? And you will see the article translated badly by Google translate into the correct language. It seems like a sylifie but it's an example of those things that Drupal gives you, right? And you're used to that. But in the couple applications it's very common that if you switch the language then you just go to the front page for that language because it's a bit tricky. I mean that we have added to the front and set up. Then here behind the hamburger menu if I manage yes, there's a hierarchical menu which is also something that you always have to solve in these decoupled projects, right? Not super straightforward. And so there's nested things and you can then visit those pages. Pages are built again random images so hopefully nothing crazy. It's a bit like Italy. But yeah, so these pages are built with components, right? So we have some text, we have a link, we have an image, we have a video and then we also have a accordion which then has paragraphs inside it which is another thing which is slightly tricky that we thought of including. And yeah, I think that includes the front and demo, right? So let's have a very quick look at the back end. Right, so that's a rush link, so we already logged in so that's why it's at access. Doesn't matter. So now we are logged in as the user one here and this must be very familiar, right? It's just the usual setup that you get out of the box. You have a list of content here. We have our three content types and if we go for the front page, for example and then we have translations. So some time of our life has gone into creating that multilingual migration that runs in the beginning but it works. So basically if you select the front page for the site, this is what you get. This is a feature of Next for Drupal. We didn't invent this. Basically the front end site is running in an iframe there and you can see the published version of your front page, right? Then if you click on edit, you can then see the data that makes the page, right? And there's some more stuff you can preview on published things and so on but let's not, yeah, we don't have too much time. Right, so that's my thing. Then we saw that we're on menu, right? So there's nothing too magical about it. It is here. So it's done in the usual way, you know parent and then children terms and so on and it's also then translated and that's how you get it. Then last thing we saw that we submitted one web form and the web from is here and our submission is saved there. So basically this is the base of a possible project, right? You maybe don't need all of these things but using these recipes is quite a nice way and I really hope that this initiative gets to be committed because basically if you think from a development point of view what you have here is a working site that you can do rush configuration export and then commit it and that can be the start of your project, right? So your configuration is yours and then if you don't want the article then you delete it or if you don't need something you delete it but you don't start from scratch, right? And that bar is moving to the in the direction of the developer. So, yeah. Josh, Q. I'll just try to screen this again. Yeah, okay. So now you've seen a little bit of the website about, you know, what the starter kit makes for you when you first run it and now I can talk just briefly about the kind of front-end setup some of the decisions we made in terms of what packages are installed and that kind of thing. Yeah, so one thing that this next-day setup has is something called incremental static regeneration and so what that means basically is that although the entire site is built to HTML when, you know, when the website is built that build only has to happen once where all of the data for all the different pages is fetched and generated. Next time a content editor makes a change to a particular page or a particular piece of content then only that one page or whichever page matches or uses that content is then built so that means that pretty much when the content editor hits save a few sort of 100 milliseconds later or so that content is then live without having to wait for a whole build. Yeah, we also have preview mode for unpublished content so a developer or a content editor can preview that content before hitting save and putting it out there to the world. We also use TypeScript and a related package called Zod on the front end and that ensures obviously type safety for our code in the case of TypeScript and then type safety for the dynamic content that's coming in from JSON API in the case of Zod as well. Yeah and then a few more kind of opinionated decisions that we've made we've got styling with Tailwind and interactivity with Radix UI so we found Tailwind to be a really good solution for styling our components across many projects and yeah, Radix UI allows us to make highly accessible components quite easily. Login for the front end is handled by NextAuth and the search interface uses search UI which is a kind of front end set of components built by Elasticsearch and designed for use with Elasticsearch on the back end and then finally we use React hook form and we only have that very simple form example in the starter kit itself but of course all of this is about taking decisions out of the hands of the developers and kind of making a default decision which we know will work for the developers and like once that project has been spun up if a particular project or particular developer either doesn't need one of these features or they want to use something else that's perfectly fine and the idea is make sensible decisions and kind of have sensible defaults so that there's a little bit more consistency amongst our projects but then between different projects there's no kind of we're not forcing anyone to use any particular packages we just think that it's better to have a default setup than if you know what you're doing you can change that if you wish and then finally we also have Storybook setup so we have a reusable component library with a few basic components that are used for this with the idea being that again that's all set up for you that's all set up for you already so if you need to make another component of course you'll add it to Storybook as well and just to encourage that consistency rather than having some projects having it, some projects not and all of those setups differing in slightly different ways it's just so much easier to set it up once and most projects then will tend to go with that setup at least a lot of the time and then we finally have Cyprus setup for some testing as well on to the back end yeah thanks I realised I have spoiled basically everything in this slide so let's go very fast so as we said the site is using a minimal profile and then stuff is added on top using this mechanism of the group of recipes which as we said is a bit experimental but the good thing is that once you have created that initial configuration then you can decide for example to remove that patch completely and then your site leaves its own life so these will set up the admin UI and permissions for all the things to work and if you think about it there's quite a lot going on there's quite many required modules that need to be activated they are added to the composer.json that you will find there and then activated by the the recipes right then as we have seen you have these different content types that contain various fields paragraph types you've seen some pictures there videos so the media types and then the language setup is there then also the whole elastic search setup this is another thing that there's a module called Elastic Helper that Wunder has been maintaining for quite a long time and this contains that under the hood behind the scenes so if you want to see how that is set up it's a good occasion and then also all the setup needed for Next.js for Drupal as we have seen right so enabling the module creating Next.js site entity then associating that those content types with the Next.js site setting up the incremental static regeneration doing the whole simple setup creating consumer and also do this, so there's validation there at the end and also doing this thing in Lando where we host both the front and the back end you don't need to mess with those .env files which are always something that you need to pass around with developers and so on the whole environment, back end and front end is set up inside Lando and the back end knows where to find the front end vice versa So obviously this project is still in active development and we've used it for a couple of client projects so far and it seems to be working well but we're still adding things to it. Some of those things are still working well. We'd like to run the tests in CI at the moment with our testing setup it runs locally only which isn't ideal we have some challenges running in CI we'd like to solve those challenges we'd like to improve the documentation and also the hosting options so right now it works with our in-house hosting infrastructure called SILTA you can also use that because that is also open source but yeah this whole starter kit is obviously first and foremost being designed for our own projects but open sourced with a view to let others use it and 99% of the stuff in there you can already use freely but hosting is something that we haven't configured for anything outside of SILTA which is our own hosting setup we'd like to improve the web form support it's really basic at the moment it's quite difficult to do it right so we haven't tackled it yet so at the moment a lot of if any project needs web forms they have to implement it themselves we would like to have some kind of more general purpose solution but it's obviously not an easy task to solve we'd also like a more modular setup there's a lot of assumptions and things made in this starter kit and we've tried to only give you things that you're very likely to need so almost all of our sites are multilingual for example most of them tend to use these menus that have nested structures etc etc so we've kind of tried to make it work for most setups but in the future we imagine some kind of interactive CLI when you spin up the template and then you can choose for example what content types you do or don't need and things like that Drupal recipes is obviously heavily kind of used in this starter kit and we'd like to you know keep up with that as things change and also use any other features that might prove useful when they do and then as this is used in more real world client projects we'd like to identify more things that make sense to bring back to the template so that more projects can take advantage of it and then finally just expand the user base get suggestions, get feedback and contributions so hopefully that's where some of you can come in today as well or in the near future and talking of that we have a buff session tomorrow and so you're very welcome to come along at three o'clock tomorrow and we can discuss next steps for the project and maybe get see what comes out of that in terms of discussions, maybe a little bit of hands on if we want you're very welcome to come in and say hello we'll also have some swag from our company as well so what have we got things, bags hats bags, yeah so come along and hopefully I'll want to talk about this project if not free stuff is always nice as well and contribution opportunities are available all week and that's the end we've got about 10 minutes or so for questions and answers in a second so yeah, thank you yeah Trond do we have any questions coming in on the app first and if not we'll take it to the floor after first question why should we choose this next JS on top of Drupal what are the advantages and because it adds this additional layer on top of Drupal but why should we do it so yeah so I just want to say this is the million dollar question it's if you've seen the Driesnote yesterday I don't know my personal feeling is that this is not a solution for everything of course the project needs to fit and it needs to make sense with what you need to what you are trying to be yeah is that vague enough somehow or Josh what do you want to add I mean I'm biased because I'm a front end developer mostly so I'm very biased on this I don't know like next JS has a lot of things that make the user experience quite fast there's a lot of things that I think do result in better websites a lot of the time controversial to say at Drupal con perhaps I don't know and also a lot of developers want to work with next JS as well and so whether or not you kind of think it's better or not actually sometimes it's easier to have people working on this side of things as well so that's a couple of reasons from my side answer is it's complicated yeah yeah and maybe a bit related the next question is how much faster is this compared to a normal setup and at least the site that we're running currently in production built from our client is really fast so I mean we have seen it live already Trond has answered so let's move on next question do you have an optional or another recipe to install that does not come with the content or yeah so that we don't have to clean it up yeah so basically if you peek under the hood of that mysticalsetup.sh you will see that it's a list of comments and the last one enables migrations and imports the content so if you leave that out nothing will be important in terms of entities so menu items content users so that's easy ok are roles and permissions followed on to the front end so for example search results can they be different for logged in or logged out users so not in this starter kit this particular question so if it's about the search this can be can be added sorry not to be too long but basically so elastic search is proxied by Drupal the front end doesn't talk directly to elastic search if you know how it works this would be a big issue so basically Drupal is there and when you do a query you can see is this somebody was registered and should I show these results or not and we have done it in other projects and it's not such a I don't know at least so far we thought this is not a very common requirement we might rethink it then thank you next use land though in this one do we have plans to add DDEV as local environment so for me this is very interesting I know that DDEV is also very widely used and it's also I think in these contribution days and my plan is to contribution and try DDEV as well so we have specialized on land so of course for our company it doesn't make to say oh there's a new starter key you just need to change what you use but I'm pretty sure it's possible to achieve or I really hope it's possible to achieve the same thing with DDEV and I don't see why not and that would be an excellent contribution if somebody is passionate about DDEV and they want to try to make it work great thank you so this project is done with path-based translations is there support for domain-based translations and do we have client projects where this is a requirement no thankfully I think it has happened in some projects but at least this seems to be the most straightforward way and it's one of those things probably will be a good feature but it's not in this starter thing any specific reasons why opting for next.js instead of react or view okay so next.js users react so it is user react and also next.js for us has been the kind of default solution for decoupled projects until now obviously those projects have not had this kind of starter kit and that led to the sort of fragmentation of different projects that I was talking about at the beginning and so yeah we kind of use next.js by default at our company for decoupled and that's why this was the sort of obvious choice for that thank you have you considered adding next.js app director support yes we have yeah we would like to support this app directory for those who don't know it's the kind of it uses react server components which is a new thing it's only available in the latest version of next.js next.js 13 it's on our radar we haven't done anything to support it right now we don't we're sort of happy with the performance of the sites that we make with this right now but it is something that we definitely want to consider in the future and possibly work a little bit with chapter 3 as well because that's obviously something that you want to add to next Drupal which this project uses and we'd be happy to add support for that in the future yeah okay yeah that's really good to hear yeah we'll definitely check it out soon please repeat it chapter 3 chapter 3 did release just before I walked in the door here we released our first version of the app router upgrade to next Drupal and it's ready for user testing so if you go into the Drupal Slack under next you will see where it lives it also lives in our github repository and if all goes well we should have full app router support soon after it's been tested so just wanted to let that know because it happened right before I came in the door there's still one have you ever tried and what is your opinion about partially the couple of solutions in Drupal project yeah so we happen to have been in different projects where this approach has been is in use and I think again it's a very vague answer but I do completely personally I think that's also a valid approach it all depends on the features that you need and it's one more web or no not web one more tool that you can use to achieve your goals right so in our case we have different websites where for example the search is done using that elastic UI as well and that whole thing is a react app that gets loaded when you go to the search page for example and in that case we needed much more of that bar that Drupal gave us but we still wanted to build a good search interface so that was done in that hybrid or progressive decoupled approach and personally I think it's totally fine use that it's great use whatever works for the project right this is one of the ways that we do projects we have a lot of just Drupal projects we have quite many but there's this hybrid approach and also quite many decoupled ones and now some that use this specific way of doing the couple sites so these were all the questions in the app for the extroverts there's also a microphone if you feel like it but so if you have a question please would you mind walking there to that microphone round of applause thank you okay hi first of all great presentation and thank you for sharing your code I've learned a lot so chapter three for sharing next Drupal and hiring AirShot but why did you let him go so that's the next question yeah yeah I know that's another middle download question so I have like five questions sorry so I know that next Drupal maybe it's for chapter three more or less but you guys might also 30 seconds later okay I know the caching works revaluation by routes but in most cases you kind of need by tag so for instance you have let's say a news on front page and someone changes some add a new content you want to revalidate that and this is somewhat of a blocker you know just to I know you can still revalidate by path but you know it's not performative at all so any plans to support that chapter three guys so well what I can say is that we have some partial support for the feature not for the cache tags right so for example you've seen that the articles are I don't know if you remember but there's this one page with all the articles right and also on the front page there's these listings with that so basically in the article configuration for on demand revalidation we also have added these paths so you know but then the you know how will visit if you have to tell the back end where things are going to be used there you know it's the usual thing but anyway that approach works if you if you change an article you have told the back end in which pages in the front end is going to be displayed and so all those pages would be revalidated but yeah it could be of course more sophisticated as a solution but yeah thanks hopefully you guys managed something you know but the next issue that I had is the views and listing page for instance you know like on slash news all page that you want to list everything many it's like a heavy editorial website it constantly gets updated you kind of have to constantly keep rebuilding that's a next js issue that at the end of the day it's a static site you know any solution for that you know I always thought for the first page I just fetch the data you know that's what I do but it doesn't seem like yeah so do you mind if I say come to the both because this is a really yeah it's a bit of a long question but okay I can switch to the next one yeah so the answer is at least in the starter it is that page that looks like a view it's not really a view and it uses this revalidation as well and so it is very fast when it's there and then it's revalidated in the background and so on and also on the front page there's a listing of the latest articles but it's a paragraph so it's somehow inside the page so it's done on the client side so yeah again it's not super safe already but so next one is for web form I was thinking do we really need to support it I mean it can be like your own input you know you just render a react input and just hook it up you just use it as a store of data that's also one question I'll ask the next one so we can wrap it up one of the hardest part for me as a I'm a front-end developer so I just like to do this stuff but it's hard to convince first the client to pay more and the second your boss is why are we doing it like that you know so we never came up with a solution just saying it's faster and they say optimize your Drupal and it's still fast it doesn't work for us you know as a selling pitch yeah I'll answer it just quickly because I know we've only got one or two minutes and I'll just go back to this slide in case you want to continue tomorrow as well yeah like we found that decouple projects do tend to improve the websites that we make but the issue with them is that they do take a lot longer to set up and that's kind of like why we made the project is to make that setup a lot faster to kind of do you know a lot of that plumbing work for the user straight away just to kind of solve the problem that you alluded to in a way yeah I will leave it there because I know that we're about three or four minutes over time already thank you so much come to the boff tomorrow if you want to thank you


I just want to thank everybody for attending the pre-construction community meeting for the safe routes to school improvement projects part 2 and 3. Covering the CC Moss and D McRae elementary schools. City project number is 1, 0, 2, 4, 0, 3. As well as 1, 0, 2, 4, 1, 1 in council district 5. My name is Brendan McKinnis. I'm the project manager. My email address, you need to reach me is Brendan MacKinnis at Fort Worth, Texas dot gov. The project engineer is Kim Lee Horn and associates. And the contractors are North Star contractors and urban infrastructure. It's going to introduce some of the project staff that's on the call today. Um, yes, we can go ahead and start with Jeff. So Jeff is helping out with the presentation. He helps with public information. We also have Chad Allen evening of 1, my name is Chad Allen. I may I'm a project manager in the capital delivery department and I'm working with Brendan on the safe routes projects.  This is Lisa, and thank you so much for joining our meeting this evening. Um, project engineer, um, we have Scott Arnold and, um. Amber Christensen on as well as the contract contractors, you for urban infrastructure construction. And, uh, Lucas for North Star. And then, uh, Matt Cain is on as well. He will be the project inspector on the project. Good evening, the purpose of the meeting tonight is to provide information on the construction of the safe routes to school project. That is incorrect for D McCrae and CC Moss elementary school areas. The meeting will include information, um, for the project limits, the project scope. The typical construction process, the project phasing and traffic control. As well as the project schedule and notifications, and then we'll answer questions at the end. Or if you can, if you think of something as you go, you can always write it into the chat box. So, I can make sure we get it covered the project limits, um, or both schools are shown on the screen with the red box area that area represents the anticipated area that you'll be seeing construction activity in the field. We're going to look at CC Moss elementary school. The project areas include the following streets. Dowdle Street, Freddie Street, Grayson Street, Rufus Street, Comanche Street, Sydney Street, Donnelly Street, Castleman Street, Reed Street, Santa Rose Drive, Miller Avenue, and Baylor Street. These streets are listed in the order of anticipated construction, um, once, once it begins. I'm going to go ahead and look at some, um, blow ups of these areas to discuss, um, the limits of the, um, work in the Northwest, um, area of CC Moss, we'll be placing sidewalk along Reed Street from Rufus to Castleman. Along Comanche Street from Sydney to Castleman. Including a little bit of work on the East side of Donnelly at the intersection of Comanche as well as a little bit of sidewalk on the West side, the Northwest side of Castleman at the intersection of Comanche. We'll be placing sidewalk along Grayson Street on the North side from Sydney Street to Castleman Street. As well as Rufus Street on the East side of the roadway from Grayson Street to Reed Street. In the Northeast section of the project, we'll be placing sidewalk along Reed Street from Castleman Street to San Rose Drive. And additional sidewalk West of San Rose Drive towards Miller Avenue. Comanche Street will be, um, constructing sidewalk in the intersection or an ADA ramps at the intersection of Castleman Street. As well as sidewalk on the South side. West of San Rose Drive. Along San Rose Drive, we will be constructing sidewalk on the East side just south of Reed Street. As well as closer to the intersection of the school. Um, near the parking lot, we'll be building some ADA ramps as well as ADA crossings at East London Street in the Southwest area of the project. We'll be building sidewalk and ADA ramps along Grayson Street on the North side. From Sydney Street to Freddie Street. As well as Donnelly Street intersection, Castleman Street intersection and Dowdle Street intersections. Along Dowdle Street, we'll be placing sidewalk from Baylor. To the US 287 or towards the US 287 Frontage Road in the Southeast area of the project. We'll be working along Freddie Street on the East side of the roadway from Grayson. To Hardman as well as the intersection of Baylor Street on San Rose Drive. We discussed the crossing that goes over into the parking lot of the school. On Miller Avenue, there'll be a section of sidewalk from Eastland to Baylor on the West side of the road. As well as sidewalk on Baylor Street, East of Miller on both sides of the road moving into deep McRae Elementary School. The project area is going to include sidewalk and ADA ramps on Avenue N. Avenue K Bishop Street, Collard Street, Millet Avenue, ADA Avenue, Vaughn Boulevard, Avenue L and Avenue M. These are also listed in the anticipated order of construction. The yellow lines are proposed curb ramps and sidewalk locations as part of the project. And the blue lines are the existing curb ramps and sidewalk locations in the Northwest project area. There'll be work along Vaughn Boulevard from Avenue K to Avenue M, N. On Collard Street, on Vaughn Boulevard, that will be on the East side of the road. Collard Street will be from Avenue J to Avenue N on the East side of their street. As well as some sidewalk from Avenue K to Avenue J on both sides of the street. Along Avenue M will be placing sidewalk from Vaughn Boulevard to Bishop Street on the south side of the street. And on Westland Street will be Avenue K and Avenue L will be placing ADA ramps across Westland Street. In the Northeast section of the project, there'll be work along Bishop Street at Avenue J and K intersections. As well as Avenue L and M will be reconstructed from Bishop Street to Little Street. On the south side of those streets. In the Southwest area, we placing sidewalk on Vaughn Boulevard on the East side of the roadway from Millet Avenue to Ada Avenue. Along Millet Avenue on the south side of the street from Collard Street to Bishop Street. Along Ada Avenue at the intersections of Collard Street and Bishop Street. And along the Southeast project area, sidewalk and ramps will be placed along Avenue N on the north side of the roadway from Bishop Street to Campbell Street. As well as on the south side at the intersection of Little Street. Along Ada Avenue, there'll be ramps and some sidewalk placed on the north side at the Little Street intersection. Project SCOPE, the area is approximately a quarter mile radius around each school. We'll be placing new sidewalks, doing driveway approach reconstruction. This typically goes to the limits of the right-of-way. We're building new curb ramps and replacement of non-compliant sidewalks. We'll also be placing signs and pavement markings, including crosswalks. Typical construction process. It'll start off with notifications in the field. The contractor will mobilize in, set up their traffic control in the areas of their work. Set up any erosion control to protect anything from getting into the inlets or environmental sensitive areas. Conducting site clearing, doing any underground utility work or adjustments. They'll start off with driveway removals and replacements. During this time, when they're replacing the driveway approaches, there will be restricted access to areas for your driveway. It'll likely be closed if your driveway is not wide enough to maintain access. This typically takes around seven days from whenever it's closed to whenever access can be re-granted. They'll work on completing the ADA ramps and the sidewalk constructions after the driveways are placed. Then they'll start up with landscaping and sodding of the disturbed areas. Once they're done, they'll remove their traffic control and then move in and start transitioning into the next streets. And then they'll do their final cleanup on the streets as they go. The picture on the left here is a picture of a typical driveway reconstruction. You can see they're doing the approach of the driveway and where the sidewalk would cross. The picture on the right is that same driveway once they tied into it with the sidewalk and prior to any landscaping being completed. And then the picture on the left here is a picture of a sidewalk after landscaping has been done along the back of the curb with one of the type of driveway approaches that you could expect. And the picture on the right is the driveway that I showed previously after the vegetation has been re-established. This also shows a sidewalk that is offset from the back of curb. And you can see it's like farther down a little bit where the sidewalk jogs where we went around some trees to make sure we preserve trees as we went. Estimated scheduling notifications. Currently the projects are estimated to start in April or May of 22. For the CCMOS elementary construction will be starting in mid April for DMICRAE. It'll be at the end of April into May before construction will start. And the project duration is 240 to 270 calendar days. Estimated completion of the project will be March of 2023. Working hours will be from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. With restrictions and closures prohibited immediately adjacent to the school from 7 30 to 8 30 a.m. and 3 30 to 4 30 p.m. Where there's going to be a peak of people trying to pick up their kids from school. So we're going to make sure we coordinate with that to make sure everybody can pick up people. And the contractor will also be allowed to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Provided they requested in writing and it is approved. Project notifications. The contractor will be placing project signs out in the field prior to starting construction. And we'll also be putting door hangers on residents and businesses 7 days before construction. These door hangers will try to closely follow the progress of the work. So we make sure that notification is provided before we get to your street. But not too far in advance where you'll you know not be notified it's coming within that week. And then as a reminder project schedule could be affected by any unforeseen events such as utility conflicts or weather. Contact information. My name is Brandon McKinnis. I'm the project manager. If you have any questions you can reach me at<PHONE_NUMBER> or Brendan McKinnis at Fort Worth Texas dot gov. We also have Matt Cain the construction inspector. Yajou the contractor for D McCrae and Luke the contractor for CC Moss at the bottom of the screen. We do have the project links for the project website. That has a lot of information on the site including the plans and maps of the project areas showing the work for location. I'd like to open it up to any questions that anybody might have. And around now I don't see any questions in the chat box. And if anybody on the phone has a question y'all can unmute yourself and ask the question if you would like. I have a question. I'm sorry. Yes ma'am. Okay I'm on the webinar as well but I guess the actual microphone isn't working. But my question for you is I suppose I'm going to be affected by the Christine Moss and I think you said a duration of 240 270 calendar days. I take it that's for the entire project is that right. Yes ma'am. Okay. And April to May of 2022 is basically the duration for the Christine Moss. Is that right? That'll be the that's the start of construction. Let me go I'll go back to the that slide here. So April April or May would be the start of construction. The if you're in CC Moss the contractor is planning to work closely to this order of the streets. So I'll start in April and then be working in the order of those streets with an estimated completion date of March of 2023. Quite lengthy. Okay my next question for you. The lawn that's disturbed when they're doing the project is will you guys be responsible to replace the lawn or the vegetation upon completion? Yes they will be replacing any disturbed areas with sod. Okay and my last question is if there is a mailbox at the curb which based on the webinar I just saw it appears that you guys are going to go down the center and not at the end of the curb. So any mailboxes will not be disturbed is what it looked like to me. Is that right? That is the plan. Scott do you know of any mailboxes that were removed as part of the project or reset? I don't think we're touching any of the mailboxes. So the plan is to work around those to leave all the mailboxes in place. Okay that was my concern and I did actually speak with the project manager and he came out and he kind of pretty much explained it but based on the way your picture look it looked that it's going to go down the middle. So it's not going to affect it but I just wanted to be clear while I have you guys on the line so perfect. Yes I believe I talked to you in the field one day and I kind of playing what the what it was going to look like on your yard. If I remember you correctly. Oh yeah I'm real frustrated kind of different. I mean you explained it to me so I was in agreement but until I actually visualizes and that's why I kind of joined the webinar and then once I saw the actual picture a second ago then it made sense. So what you explained made sense and it all came together so perfect. All right. Thank you ma'am. Thank you guys all for your answers as well. And a clarity. Since nobody else has any questions I did have another one. There's seven days where we have no access to the driveway. What do we do? Park on the street? It would either be street parking or if you have a neighbor that you can discuss with maybe like flip flop with them until the concrete reaches strength you can't drive on it without damaging it so to make sure we get the best longevity for that driveway that will be the plan. Okay understood. Okay thanks and that's my final question. We do have another user that's another calling user and they're muted. If you do have a question if we have you as calling user three you can hit star six and unmute. Otherwise if you're on the line you can you can unmute as well. Just lost her. Well I'd also just like take this opportunity just to thank the designers and the contractor for being available today for the call as well as any residents were able to call in. Another reminder Brendan I did place the links to the two project pages in the chat so if anybody wants future information this recording will be placed there link to it as well as project monthly project updates as we move along so the progress will be checked on my website. So you can visit back any time for a relatively recent update. Are there any additional questions this evening. And then there are no more questions in the chat box at this time. Thank you Jen. Well I just want to again thank everybody for attending today. If you have any questions that you can think of that you could not ask today just give me a call or shoot me an email and I'll try to answer them quickly. Thank you everybody. Awesome thank you likewise disconnecting. Thank you.