Well, it is great to be opening this session and I got the easy ones to define, which is very, very nice. So I'm Johnny, I'm a postdoc currently based in London in the UK. I'm also a member of IGDOR, which we'll come back to. And I host and produce a podcast which is focused on pre-prints, open signs and early career researchers really. You can find me in various places, you can email me, you can find me on Twitter or I have a website you can go to and follow me through there if you want to. So what is open science? Well, open science is basically just the collective name for an entire movement, which is why it's the easy one to talk about. And it really encompasses many of the things you're about to hear about in the rest of this session.  So open science is really the movement to make scientific research accessible to everyone. And that's not just for the researchers, it really is everyone. It's everyone in society who might want to access any kind of scientific output. But it's also about making science transparent. And that's a really, really important part of it, especially within the research community. And it kind of comes back to what Brian was just talking about in terms of... And this is a little nice diagram to kind of show you just how big an expanse of open science is as a concept. So it really does go everywhere from the tools and the infrastructure we need to do open science, right through the basic things, like just access to a scientific paper. And access is kind of my area in particular, but it's a really big expanse of fields now. And all these things are coming along and developing at different rates. It's kind of exciting to see where this is going to go. When you're looking at open science, one of the things you might see is this little kind of four pillars idea here. And this is really the idea that open science is built on these four core structures. Open knowledge, open infrastructures, open communication, and the open engagement of societal actors. And this is... I want to break this down a little bit, but open engagement of societal actors is very much about citizen science. And it's about getting people who are not necessarily researchers involved in research and the process of doing research. Open communication is quite an expansive topic. And this is everything from how we share results to also just discussing the results. And again, you can link those two very nicely together to bring those two things and getting the patient groups, for example. So I am a biomedical researcher. It would be really nice to have patient groups in their opinions. None of this is possible without a good solid infrastructure. And the open infrastructure is not just about having things in place that allow us to do things. So, for example, having a pre-print server, let's you pause the pre-print. It's also about making those infrastructures themselves open. So UFPMC, for example, is a platform that allows us to put a lot of research out there. But it's built on open code. And so it's accessible to everyone and people can build on that and use it for their own purposes, if you want to. And then open knowledge, as it says, is about making knowledge as open as we can. And that isn't just a final product. It's also at the very beginning, like Brian was saying, with registered reports. It's about sharing ideas when we have them and getting input as soon as we can, which is a really important aspect to doing good science. And it's one of the ones that, I think, culturally within science is quite hard to change because we're all a bit protective and scared of being scooped.  I'm not going to go into this diagram, but you can see it just breaks it down a little bit further. So, for example, on the infrastructure side, you've got a virtual infrastructure, but you also have this physical infrastructure. You've got data centers that you need in place. And so it's a huge collective effort that involves a lot of different stakeholders and different people. And like I said, really, really exciting to see where this is going. So who benefits from this? Why should we promote open science? So there's sort of three key stakeholders you can break down. So there's benefits to the research landscape. So this is in things like people actually being able to find your results and use your results. Or one of the big ones that open science really does here is it allows researchers in developing countries to access your work and be more involved in the scientific endeavor because a lot of science is very western focused and open science breaks down a lot of those barriers. There are also benefits to wider society. So the public can access your findings. The public can start to get involved with how we do research. But it also comes down to grants and funding bodies. So taxpayers get better value for money. I'm sure a lot of people here will be very aware of how broken the current academic publishing system is. Open science really does a lot of effort into breaking that down and making things fairer, and in my opinion, how they should be. And we also, as a researcher, get a lot of benefits. So I work with one of the main people behind a lot of the data for this. And it's really cool the kind of benefits you get just from making your work open. You get more exposure. You get higher citation rates. More people use your work just because they can access it. And you also get to research, you know, your research can influence policy and decision making, which as a scientist is kind of, it's the ultimate goal. You want to have a real feasible impact on things. Thank you so much, Johnny. I think we're about at time. So I'll go ahead and you can find the, the close of Johnny's presentation on the OSF page.


Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Dagny Sharon and I'm in the local liberty movement This program is being taped live at Dagny's Freedom Festival in Englewood, California Today we have an excellent program by a good friend of mine and to introduce her. I give you Tom Cobb Thank you I've had the good fortune to know Wendy for a long time. I first met her and my first reaction Which would be kind of understandable. Oh, there's a pretty little girl Wrong this is a very formidable young lady. She has written freedom feminists and the state She's editor of the volunteerist. She has taken on personally the entire LA County Board of Supervisors I Admire her courage if not necessarily her taste. I mean you're known by the company you keep Wendy and but Wendy is going to speak on feminist history revisited down the Orwellian memory hole and We all know what that is presumably and if we don't I'm sure Wendy will be glad to elucidate Wendy Good afternoon Well this afternoon I intend to commit an act of heresy and Like any act it requires a context So let me first of all set the context before I explain my particular heretical views to you The context is of course libertarianism or that's part of the context and that as known as it will come to no surprise to any of you It's a non initiation of force The second is the definition of feminism and this is a little bit more complicated because there's vast Disagreement and debate about what feminism is. I've heard feminism related to everything from lesbianism to the Green Peace Movement But I think there's at least one definition that most people most women will agree on and that is that women As a class should be equal to men Now there are feminists who believe that women are biologically superior to men and should be treated such but they're very minimum So basically let's take that as a working definition of feminism women as a class should be equal to men as a class Now already with this definition as I'll tell you later. We're in deep trouble Just to find it this way as simply as it may seem Creates as many problems as it obviates But this is at but I'll get into that after I basically give you the history of what I consider to be the proper form of feminism The type of feminism that I advocate which is individualist feminism Now feminism as a movement in and of itself Started around 1830 there were individuals who worked and did very good work before that But as an organized force in America it started in the 1830s And when you're talking about this this organized force you're talking about abolitionism because that's where feminism sprang from Abolitionism was a radical anti-slavery movement in America which demanded the immediate Sensation of slavery on the grounds that every man every woman was a self-owner Which means that simply by being a human being there is something about being born human in that condition Which says that you have a right an unquestioned right and an alienable right to your own body and the fruits of your labor And when you're talking about abolitionism what you are talking about is William Lloyd Garrison and the liberator Because these were the two main William Lloyd Garrison was in fact the one who infused abolitionism into the anti-slavery movement One might think that anti-slavery called for the immediate cessation of slavery as a matter of course But there are various brands of anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that I think in something like 1859 he called for the the gradual abolition of slaves in a hundred years Which means in 1959 or we would have been all seeing the end of slavery in America, which is a rather chilling thought There were anti-slavery people called for colonization It was William Lloyd Garrison who infused abolitionism the immediate cessation on the grounds of self-ownership into anti-slavery Now he also did one other thing with abolitionism, which was to fuse abolitionism with women's rights He had in I believe in the second volume of his periodical the liberator the volume number might be wrong But very early on in its 35 year career He had what was called a ladies department and in the ladies department right underneath that caption He had a slave woman kneeling in bondage and and piteously crying out am I not a woman and a sister That's where that phrase comes from and when you deal with women's rights What you're dealing with is the influence of it of it of William Lloyd Garrison and a vowed Libertarian in the terms of he was totally against government. He was called a no-government man He was totally against the use of force in human relationships And you're also dealing with the Quaker influence because overwhelmingly in abolitionism there was there was It's the roots were Quaker Basically as you go along in history it and it became more popular more and more people were assumed by it, but initially within America its roots were Quaker now Quakerism Even though everything is relative and you can't say that women's rights were respected by Quakers in the same sense that women's rights Are respected today nevertheless Quakerism did allow women to preach women were allowed to be ministers in the church They were treated as equals more or less in the church as opposed to Calvinism or Catholicism or other religions of the time so relatively speaking it was a bastion of women's rights So you have this fusion here abolitionism William Lloyd Garrison the main anti-slavery Paper liberator being an advocate of women's rights and you have the Quaker attitude of basically Comparatively women are women are human beings on equal basis at least religiously with men Now abolitionism freed women in two ways The first way could be expressed by Abby Kelly who said to paraphrase her We have we have learned a great deal and we owe a great deal to the slave for him trying to throw off his bond bondage We have found ourselves that we are securely fettered Women were led to say if in fact we're fighting for rights. Are we just fighting for black male rights? Are we fighting for human rights? Are we not subject to the same oppression that the black slave is? That was one way. They were ideologically prompted to ask this question and the second way was Women for the first time went out and lectured in public as as a strategy now I'd been done before on individual basis But as a strategy women going and giving a series of lectures traveling across the country These women were mobbed these women were assured that they would would never be married because in fact a lecture before a mixed company such as Such as we have here mixed me being male and female meant that no no man of any respect would marry them or touch them They were they were vilified in by the way. I hope that doesn't ruin my plan So I don't don't intend to get married myself being an anarchist but The first the first three women to do this were the Grimke sisters and Abby Kelly Even though I throw the the I could go through stirring passages of what these women put up with and what they and their heroism of breaking social taboos which were At least as significant as legal walls. It's very heroic struggle But I will for the sake of time and continuity not to mention my theme. I will continue now Abolitionists I don't want to give you the the impression that abolitionists were to a man fighting for women's rights Because this wasn't to at all William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Weld another figure that I can't go into but who is who has heroism in of himself We're very strong on women women's rights at least to the extent of saying that women must be allowed to participate They they are a strong moral force in this country and without them. We cannot have an effective anti-slavery crusade But many people in the anti-slavery movement said well first of all many people in the anti-slavery We're not for women's rights, but many who even were sympathetic toward that point of view said We're taking two issues here We're taking anti-slavery toward which many people would would feel a natural empathy and they were taking women's rights toward which Overwhelmingly the country is against and we're cementing them together and one one is acting to the detriment of the other Why don't we treat them as separate issues? Why don't we just totally divorce anti-slavery from women's rights? Fortunately in America or unfortunately depending on your view of strategy William Lloyd Garrison was was very effective in making sure the two came together Not so in England and a crisis was met at the world anti-slavery society meant which meant in London, England in 1840 now Lucretia Mott a fine fine old Quaker lady who was very effective in underground railroads and civil disobedience in terms of Anti-slavery along with William Lloyd Garrison were chosen as representatives of the New England Anti-slavery Society to attend the meeting in London What happened? They show up along with Elizabeth Katie Stanton and many other women who came across the ocean Which was no small feat in those days to attend the meeting. They were turned away from the door The British abolitionists of the British anti-slavery movement did not have a Garrison did not have a Theodore Weld to champion women's rights Women were not allowed to attend the meeting that they were elected as representatives to attend They were shut out eventually. They were allowed to sit in a balcony with a screen around them Now William Lloyd Garrison's response as the response of various other American men was to say we will sit in the gallery with The women we will not sit on the same floor That basically refuses to that that tries to push forth black rights while denying human rights at the same time What happened as a result of this and it's rather an irony of history is this this denial of women's rights led to one Of the most important events in women's history Well in American history when I say women's history by the way I fall into the trap that I've been accused of many times America is not the world when I say history I mean American history So one of the most important events in women's rights in American history, which is the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 Now this was a direct result of the London experience because Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who both attendant attended and both were shattered By this experience of being denied access to the movement to which they've given their lives Formed at the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls and there are another significant thing happened Up until this point when I say that the two main influences on women's rights Were William Lloyd Garrison and Quaker Quaker ism Another thing that I'm implying by that is a strategy the strategy of moral suasion This was a strategy which said that because change must must occur in the hearts and souls and minds of men That's where the war is it's not in the in the legislatures. It's not in Senate It's not in Congress. It is within the hearts of men It's rather like the Gandhi attitude of the only demons that exist in the world are the demons within man's hearts And that's where the war must be fought At Seneca Falls Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pushed through a path when I say she pushed through she she presented a plat being any political I'm likely to to weigh my words She presented a platform Which basically said women should seek the vote women should seek political power There was a great deal of controversy over this Lucretia Mott representing the old guard Opposed it bitterly and I believe it passed by something like one or two votes a very very narrow margin to pass by But what it did was it it offered a split in strategy in women's rights for the first time in feminism for the first time Moral suasion versus political action Now something else happened very shortly after that Something which the United States has never recovered from every every facet of the United States of America is still being affected by it and Feminism perhaps more than many others libertarianism shirt and certainly was almost dealt a death blow because of it and that was a civil war There is no event in American history that has been as catastrophic as the American war American civil war Feminists overwhelmingly supported the North in that war Even though many of them were southern the Grimke sisters for example came from South Carolina One of the rabid if you think think of deep south if you think of the ones that that basically were were the rabid southern Southern states you think of Georgia. You think of South Carolina. They were from South. They're over nevertheless They overwhelmingly supported the North the only exception that I found of a major feminist who did not sub subvert and subordinate all feminist goals to the Civil War has been Susan B. Anthony and When you think of it the outcome of the Civil War should have been a victory for feminism after all Slavery was abolished and they linked their cause very and their and their Consequence very closely to the slave and the Republican Party was was the one that that was the victor the Republican Party being the anti-slavery party So that their friends there's anti-slavery friends like Wendell Phillips Was now in a position of power It should have been something that the feminists benefited from but in fact it was it was a disaster for feminism Because what did people say now their friends in the Republican Party said this is not the hour of women This is the hour of the Negro The 13th the 14th and the 15th amendment were given top priority by all the anti-slavery people and women who came and said but Not only does the 13th 4th and 15th amendment not benefit women It introduces for the first time into the male into the Constitution the word male The word male was introduced for the first time into the Constitution after the Civil War and this outraged feminists totally And what happened here and where I will end for For the moment my history of feminism in general is that there was a schism There was a schism within mainstream feminism as well But in terms of broad broad categories and I must be forgiven for making generalizations in a very short period of time Some of the generalizations are always inaccurate to some degree, but I believe that that that basically this there was three general Paths that feminism took mainstream feminism became overwhelmingly political the drive was one goal the vote Socialist feminists although they would not call themselves that at the time perhaps But ones that tended toward what we call socialism became known as social feminists during the progressive era or even before They were the ones against child child labor there for the pure foods food act They were the ones that basically pushed through a lot of legislation of that sort What we call individualist feminists became involved in two movements Least successfully they became involved in the labor movement most successfully They became involved in the free love movement and that's what I want to discuss for just a moment because this will set the context of what Individuals feminism is and what I what I mean when I call myself an individualist feminist now free love has been Defined mostly by its enemies Which is never a good way to get an understanding of what something means So let me let me give you basically a very simple statement of what free love is Free love is the statement that all sexual matters as long as they do not involve force are up to the individuals involved marriage divorce legitimacy claims Abortion contraception birth control of any sort are between the individuals involved the state has absolutely no business whatsoever And people's sexual lives as again again with the exception of force being brought in now I Can't do anything in this short a period of time except give you a flavor of how rich and deep and and and stirring and helmet How much fun this tradition really is? So let me let me pick out two incidences to let you know You know what you're missing out on if you have not read in the in the background of individuals feminism There was a periodical called Lucifer the lightbearer I'm sure great title great title Lucifer being the one who who bought fire like Prometheus bought fire down to Knowledge down to earth and like Prometheus paid the price of being cast out of heaven and into the fiery pits Now Lucifer the lightbearer was put out from Valley Falls, Kansas by a man named Moses Harman who had a daughter named Lillian Harman Lillian Harman fell in love with and married. I believe the contributing editor though. We might have tights types that as well A man named Edwin Walker Lillian was 16 years old. They decided that they would get married without the benefit of clergy or of the state At the age of 16, she was thrown in jail as was he They were the first couples in America thrown in jail for violation of the marriage laws if you ever want to want to model a marriage after after a Ceremony or just want to read a very stirring account of something you should read the marriage ceremony It ends with Moses Harman declaring I refuse to give away my daughter for I wish her always to be the owner of her Own person great stuff really good stuff Now another part of our tradition of individualist feminism is the word edited by Ezra Haywood and the period of that is about the 1870s Oh, by the way, Lucifer the lightbearer was also in that same same general period to give you a context in time Now Ezra Haywood was imprisoned for Cupid's yolks. Cupid's yolks was his birth control pamphlet and it was to put it in in Blunt terms boring. It was one of the most boring pamphlets. I've read in this period His main way of achieving birth control was abstinence Nevertheless for this pamphlet the man was thrown in jail was arrested and thrown in jail Not only was he thrown in jail, but several people who sold the pamphlets very and and rather prominent figures in society were thrown in jail He was released after a massive petition was was Presented to the president and he was he was there upon released to show you the spirit of the man. He was thrown in jail again By the way, the law under which he was thrown in jail was a Comstock law Anthony Comstock One of the truly evil figures in American history who passed a law Which had prohibited the mailing of obscenity in America without defining what obscenity was but whatever it was It included birth control material and contraceptives So As we're here with thereafter Immediately advertised in the word a contraceptive device called the Comstock syringe He was he was arrested again And what I want to impress upon you is not that these people had a sense of humor what I want to impress upon you This is this is the 1870s We are told about Margaret Sanger and who's rather socialistic in many of her aspects and what we we hear about the heroism of these people And they were heroic. I don't mean to take anything away from these people They fought very strong battles and they took risks and they paid a price What I'm saying is this is the 1870s the last issue of the word in Israel. He would Israel. Heywood's the word his wife Angela Heywood wrote an article Proclaiming the right of every woman to abortion on the grounds of self ownership that she owned her own body Now I want you to pause for a second. This is the 1890s. We're not talking about Margaret Sanger We're not talking about the progressive era in 1920s or we're talking about very early period and we're talking about pioneers We're talking about really really breaking social taboos. Think about the Grimke sisters lecturing think about Angela Heywood Think about Lillian Harmon going to jail And when we talk about an Orwellian memory hole, that's what I mean These women you'll have books and books written about minor socialist figures As far as I know there is one book that even has a chapter on Lillian Harmon And that's not because there isn't material there. I've researched it and if I had more time I would write the book myself But to get on to my theme and to become heretical at last As I promised at the beginning of my talk I want to say that there is no necessary connection between libertarianism and feminism My definition of feminism is that women as a class should be equal to men as a class Now when I say there is no give me the benefit of the doubt those those of you you who are who are now Dismissing when I say give me a benefit of the doubt for about 10 minutes and I'll explain what I'm talking about Now when I said there was trouble with the definition women as a class should be equal to men as a class I think there are two problems with that at least two problems. One is the idea of class Now different political theories have different class structures different theories of what is a class and the class really is nothing more than a group of people Banded together by some arbitrary standard. I could class people. I could make a class of redheads on the standard If who has red hair I could make a class of people under 18. It's merely just a category category defined by some standard Now in libertarianism the class analysis libertarianism being the non initiation of force and the political Philosophy which is based on self ownership the class analysis since classical liberalism since friends open Humber long Traditional history is that the political means is opposed to the economic means there is a political class And there is an economic class the political class is that which which gathers wealth Through taxation through the use of force the economic class is the one that produces Very clear distinction now There's a problem with this in terms of looking at women as a class Because women fit into either category women can be politicians women can also be productive members of society Marxism has a similar problem. They define class as with reference to the means of production Now by this you can either be a capitalist or you can be a labor you can control the means of production or you can be exploited by it Same problem women can be a capitalist and they can be laborers Now Marxism has come up with its with Marxist feminists have come up with a parallel theme a parallel Political structure to Marxism to explain this which is called patriarchy Now I could incorporate patriarchy into libertarianism, but quite frankly patriarchy unlike the political means does not necessarily use force And I don't see how it can be integrated Moreover since libertarianism says self ownership Means that every human being simply by being a human being has all the rights any human being can have It leaves absolutely no place for women's rights gay rights black rights. You ask are these people human beings? Yes, they have all the rights that you don't need this extra qualifier women's rights black rights gay rights. There are human rights Now having posed this puzzle Let me try to unravel it and tell you why I consider myself a feminist And I want to make a distinction here between women's rights and feminism women's rights is Is the statement that women should have equal rights under just law This is not necessitated by libertarianism libertarianism does not necessitate that we say women should have equal rights under just law anymore than it says necessitates that Australians should have equal rights under just law what necessitates it is government oppression Government has selectively oppressed certain classes of people in its history and just as we we do not have rich men's rights Rich rich white man's rights because they've never been necessary governments never oppressed rich white men On the other hand equally we need black rights because hysterical historically government has oppressed blacks We need women's rights because historically women has have been oppressed And what it is really is a sort of division of labor and defensive rights are so specialization Many people are oppressed. We all we all know that They're oppressed to different levels And in different different cases in different circumstances it changes with history And to the extent that you want to attack the oppression of government You can't simply go out and say i'm going to attack oppression You have to have some focus you have to say some law some event Some class and what this is is a sort of specialization And libertarians I submit to you must be pro-women's rights simply because government is oppressing or has I I'm very aware of the objection that women now are a privileged class And I agree with that that objection but have historically Attacked women's rights so I submit to you that libertarians must be for women's rights simply because it's a specialization of being For rights in general and government has created the need for that specialization But this is different than feminism There are many books That have no necessary implications For law or rights at all It's how to assert yourself with men how to be a single mother how to be successful in business How to coordinate your wardrobe everything from that to to basic to uh, how to change your psychological being How to how to confront Feelings of inferiority in the culture whatever things that are what I call cultural or social change books that have really no legal implication whatsoever What they what they aim at is a changing attitude in society toward women It's like racism versus black rights As libertarians every person in this room must be for black rights to the extent blacks are oppressed by government They must be for black rights and make a special category saying that I am for black rights They don't necessarily have to be anti-racist I would be upset with them if they're not but I wouldn't say it's a violation of libertarian principle For someone to have have in their mind an idea that blacks are somehow Biologically inferior is a wrong idea. I think but I don't think it's a violation of anyone's rights Just as to have in their mind that I am biologically inferior Or that I should not be given a certain job because women after all can't handle stress You know they had that time of the month or whatever Is is a rather lamentable attitude never the right is not a violation of my rights So To recap what I'm saying Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates rights injustice And to that extent one must if one is a libertarian be totally for women's rights Feminist is an is a is a an attitude or a philosophy that champions fairness in human behavior A fair attitude toward other people a sense of what what we what you want to call common decency perhaps And to that extent one need not be a them be need not be a feminist if one is a libertarian I think if one has a has a sense of justice That that's not merely abstract, but tends to go into your heart and soul Then you should consider feminism very very And anti-racism and things like that very deeply Now Many people say that the free market will cure The the unfairness which women experience from society that's usually thrown up as a as a cure for this dichotomy between Women's rights being violated and social change And I'm really I'm rather skeptical about that. I believe that will go a great great Distance toward curing unfairness toward blacks and unfairness toward women But I'm skeptical of it on two points First of all first of all the free market does not say that people's values will be rational The free market does not say that we will all be reasonable human beings All the free market says is whatever our values are they will be maximized by the free market For example, people will be fundamentalist christians if there were a free market today I fully believe that there would be calvinists out there and their Values will be maximized the maximum number of bibles the maximum printing presses without obstruction by government the other reason is that Economic arguments really don't work In all cases I've recently gone down to the south quite a bit on business and there was a country club That's it's very posh that that i've gone to on business Where you you pay two hundred dollars three hundred dollars I don't know what it is a month to belong to at the age of 40 you have the option of paying thirty thirty thousand dollars to join Now I've heard the argument that slavery eventually would have been phased out by economic means And and like saying that unfairness toward the woman toward women would be abolished by the market. I think that's largely true however From the the experience of the south and the country club, and I'm not anti south I like the south very much.  There is a certain prestige and elegance To having the aristocratic Lifestyle which jefferson for example who had slaves and was against slavery maintained Because there's there's simply a prestige and a certain lifestyle which probably would make slavery something that would continue To some degree very limited. So i'm not i'm not totally convinced that the free market will cure things What I think will cure things is a change as will you moi garrison said in the hearts and souls of men And this is something that has to be done through an education process that cannot be done with at the point of the gun Which is which is of course law which is of course legislation You must change the hearts and souls of men. You must go back to pre 1848 feminism when moral suasion was was The strategy now To put it in a different manner There's a sense in which freedom is true There's a sense in which you can logically deduce The nature of man and natural rights There's also a sense in which freedom is beautiful There's a sense in which it touches the heart the emotions the possibility the sparkle the optimism in man And to put it very succinctly i'm a libertarian and for women's rights because it is true I am a feminist because I think the attitude is fair and it and appeals to common decency I am also concluding because the sign is being held up which says i'm out of time. Thank you I think there are a little bit of time for question and answers Ah, yes Oh, uh, I will put it in the next one in one of the upcoming issues of the volunteers which I which I edit So if this is this is a subscription drive you're hearing right here Yes Oh, I meant the same thing I think it's I would have no discomfort in terms of exchanging your word for mine Oh, sure, absolutely, but the thing is what i'm saying is a free market will tend to minimize on fairness So that that great example by soul of you know, if someone who provides a basketball team will not Discriminated against against blacks, you know that great free example But but the fact is that I do not for a second believe that it will eliminate it. It will minimize it Bigotry in some cases bigotry will be rewarded in a small town where most people are racists To be an anti-racist might lose a great deal of business if you hired a black to be a clerk in your store You know it free market really does not say standards of common decency will be in play all it says is rights will not be violated So


Hello, my name is Jackie. Welcome back to my channel. And this video was actually prompted by another video I saw recently, which was from Overly Sarcastic Productions, where Red was talking about nemeses. Now I'm writing the first draft of a new manuscript as part of NaNoWriMo, and I'm about 30,000 words in at the time of recording. I've had my set up. I've had my turning point. The plot's gotten started. And at the moment we're probably midway between the turning point that sets the plot into action and the midpoint. And what I've realised is that my villain isn't really around. Now, I know who the villain is. I mean, you'd hope I'd know who my antagonist is as the author. But I know who the villain is. I don't know if a reader at this point in the book would know who the villain is though, because it feels like after the catalyst or the turning point, a lot of things are just happening. Like it's very bam, bam, bam, bam. And the main character is just reacting to everything that's getting thrown at her. Which is fine, because that's actually what's meant to happen in this part of the book. However, the villain isn't really involved in any of this. And part of me is wondering whether this is a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed, or whether if the villain has a couple of appearances now and really starts to play a greater role from the midpoint, whether that could work. But beyond the villain's presence in the book, one of the things I'm struggling with is whether my villain is that compelling. And the reason that the OSP video made me think of this was because Red was talking about how personal things are between a nemesis and the protagonist. And one of the reasons OSP's video made me think of this is because of her description of nemesis, and it made it sound like so much fun and so personal, and you can really see the dynamic between the hero and the villain, and how one pulls the other forward, and they're both fundamental to each other's development and the development of the plot. And I don't know if that's going to happen in my book. And this is actually something that came up in the last book I tried to draft, where I realized there was this person I had in the role of antagonist, and I knew in the final battle the protagonist and the antagonist would face off. But before that point, they didn't really interact with each other that much. And I haven't gone back to reread that yet, but I have a feeling it means that my book is fundamentally flawed. So now that I'm encountering the same thing in this new book, I'm starting to think I have a villain problem. Now, one of the things red did say is that not every antagonist needs to be a nemesis. What's fun about the nemesis is that it's very, very personal. Like think about Batman and the Joker, they are personally up against each other, they purposefully want to defeat the other one. Whereas in other stories, it's possible to have a protagonist and an antagonist. Don't really care that much about each other, but their goals are opposing, and that's why they end up locking horns. Now, when I think about my book and my story, I feel like the antagonist, he doesn't really care that much about the protagonist, like she's just sort of in the way. She's a waste of space and a waste of resources in his eyes. So as far as his concerned, the best option is to just get rid of her. Which is fine, I think it could work. The problem is, I think that things need to feel more personal from the protagonist's point of view. Otherwise, there's no real drama. It's almost like we're just doing a to-do list until the final showdown. One of the issues I'm having is because the antagonist hasn't really been that present, there isn't that time to build up the emotion on the protagonist's part. And I'm realizing as I talk this through that I really should have written out some bullet points before filming this video because I have no idea where I'm going with this discussion. I just saw this video the other day and went, oh my god, this is a problem, I need to share it with YouTube. So plan of attack for me. One, just focus on getting Nana Raimo done. I have 50,000 words to write, so another 21-ish in the next, I don't know, 12 days or however long we've got left of the month. So that is the number one priority. Once the first draft is done, then two, I guess I can go back through and see if there's still hope for this book. And if there are ways to create a more personal, protagonist-antagonist relationship. Or maybe I can question whether that's necessary for this particular story. Anyway, over to you. What I'd like to hear from you is, do you have this struggle in your stories? Do you have really powerful antagonists? And do you have a really powerful antagonist-protagonist dynamic? Do you have something like Batman and the Joker where each one forces the other one to evolve and to almost question everything? Or do you have protagonists and antagonists who simply have different goals and that means they're running into conflict with each other? And if you are in the second group, like me at the moment, do you think that's a problem or do you think it works for your story? And are there other stories where you've seen that dynamic work? So one of the things read says is that the nemesis dynamic, so when it's really personal, it can start to feel a bit one-dimensional, whereas when you've got an antagonist who simply has conflicting goals, that can create a more in-depth, well-rounded character who wants more than simply to defeat the good guy. So let me know what you think. Let me know how you're going with your book and whether your villains are giving you the same amount of trouble that mine is giving me, and what you plan to do about it, if anything. So I hope you enjoyed this ramble. If you did, please give me a big thumbs up and I'd love it if you subscribed. I do publish videos about twice a week and they are usually much more coherent than this, I think. Until next time, bye.


Hey guys and welcome back to my youtube channel, my name is Dapo Willis as you already know now guys today I'm gonna be talking about how to go about trading like a sniper. How do you go about taking those very best trades? You've probably heard me speak about it in my subsequent videos and in my webinars. I'm not the kind of guy who is always trading the market because I consider myself a sniper.  Snipers are people who literally have guns and they hide up in the bushes but they only come out to take the clearest and the most accurate shots possible. The shots with the highest probabilities and most of the time the bad guys cannot see them and in this case the bad guys are our stop losses. In this case the bad guys are the market makers. So guys in this video that's exactly what I want to share. The steps that I follow to ensure that I'm always trading like a sniper and guess what guys if you trade like a sniper you increase the probabilities of you making a lot of money in this market. So guys stick around to the very end but before we get into any of that cool stuff this video is taking me a lot of time a lot of freaking headache to make and a lot of research goes into this video so I just need one little favor from you guys. I need you guys to smash the like button and hit that subscribe bell right there just hit it right there that's all you need to do. So guys all right so let's go into the nitty gritty of the video. All right guys so the very first thing you want to consider when you're trading like a sniper rather the very first thing I consider when I'm trading like a sniper now before I even get into all of that before I just need to trade like any setup I saw I would trade this I would trade that I would trade Euro USD, GBP USD, Euro JPY, GBP NZD, S&P 500, Gold Oil I would trade every possible opportunity that I could get before and then I realized that well I thought more equal as in more trades equal more profit but I was wrong I realized that the reverse was the case less is more. So what I decided to do was I decided to stop being a lot more patient with my entries I decided to guys and this is not just me just waking up one day and just deciding to do all of this this this was as a result of many losing trades I realized that I was now this was way many years ago I've been trading for nine years now so this was maybe first two and a half to three years into my trading career I realized that I was losing so much money in the market because I was just clicking clicking but in any setup I saw I would trade now due to the amount of losses I was making before I had to do something drastic I had to make some drastic changes to my trading and I said to myself I was only going to trade the shortest trades possible all right guys so the very first thing you want to consider when when we're talking about trading like a sniper is you want to trade in the direction of the trend why is this because the trend have less resistance trends have less resistance so rule number one is you want to trade in the area of less resistance less resistance levels let less issues right so the only way to go about this is if you're trading in the direction of the trend and guys there's a saying that goes the trend is your friend a lot of you guys watch my videos and you realize that I love to trade the trend this is exactly why I came up with this concept called the top down and analytical approach why because what I do is I go on higher timeframes and then I identify massive trends okay I identify massive trends on higher timeframes and then I come back to lower timeframes and I trade in that direction because I realized that listen if I see a massive trend on a higher time frame okay I've spotted that there's there's the least amount of resistance in that direction I can then come to a lower time frame and trade in that direction I realized that my ability to make winning trades increase significantly once I started to trade in areas of less resistance now the issue a lot of you guys face when you want to trade in areas of least resistance or you want to trade in that direction is the market only trends for about 60% of the time between 55 to 65% of the time half of the time you're most likely waiting for a trade opportunity a lot of you guys just don't want to be patient about the market and I totally understand you want to make a lot of money but but in this game in this game you have to understand that making money is not easy in life okay nothing comes easy even trading is not exactly easy it is simple because the rules are simple to follow but is it really easy can you really do the waiting so this is the issue a lot of you guys have now not to worry guys there's always a way out as long as you're willing to pay the price and what is the price in this all where all I'm asking you guys to do just be a little bit patient and trade in the direction of what least resistance alright guys so the second thing you want to consider is you want it's called trading from an area of value what does this mean now guys I came up with a strategy called the Willis zone and the Willis zone is nothing more than a confluence of technical indicators coming together when I mean indicators I'm not talking about moving average I'm talking about technical tools so you want to trade from an area of value an area whereby your trend lines your support and your Fibonacci have come together and have formed a very solid base okay that is an area of value because if there's a strong support or strong resistance or you see a combination of these three tools Fibonacci trend line and Fibonacci trend line and support or resistance whichever the case may be if you see all three of them come together in a very strong area that area is known as an area of value what you tend to realize is once the market comes into those kind of areas we tend to see a sharp bounce off of those areas so I keep telling people trade from areas of strength forget about catching falling knives forget about falling knives are nothing more than when the market is quickly falling just want to quickly get in and get out at the end of the day you end up hurting yourself especially during non-fampero days NFP you want to stay away from days like that because all you're doing is you're catching falling knives and at the end of the day what this imagine if this was a knife and I'm trying to catch it as it's falling it's gonna hurt your hands that's exactly what's gonna happen so guys rule number two to trade like a sniper is you want to trade from an area of what value wait for the market to come into those significant areas and it's so simple coming as the market is about to go up again let me show you that listen I've bounced off of this region and I want to start heading in that direction allow the market to show you evidence by providing stuff like bullish engulfing candles let the market bounce off an area of value with a bullish engulfing candle and then you're free to buy okay or a bearish engulfing candle for a sell position so guys that's the number two thing you need to consider trading as a sniper always trade from an area of what value all right guys so number three thing you want to consider when you want to be a sniper trader like myself okay I'll show you I'll tell you what I do so guys I like to your entry trigger my entry trigger for me I'm very very very conservative when it comes to my entry triggers like I don't just buy or sell any any trade I like for the market like I'm saying earlier to bounce off of a region right bounce off the region and come back on your way out is when I want to fucking trade the market you get me man I'm not like I don't buy at support I don't sell at resistance never ever ever ever would you see me do such a rubbish I would never do such a rubbish in trading if you do that you're supposed to be flogged you don't buy at support and you don't sell at resistance this is exactly what you do you wait for bounces we like to see the market bounce why do we want to see the market bounce first of all it is telling me that yes indeed I've touched this level first of all it the market needs to confirm that your support is actually support haven't you seen sometimes where you've drawn a support level and the market just breaks through it together with your buy trade because you believed in that support level so much yes so the first thing is the market needs to first of all confirm our level that's the first issue now once you've confirmed my level the other reason why I like to trade bounces is because I've seen several situations when the market is heavily manipulated around key levels now what does this mean around areas of support and resistance is exactly where investment banks the people who move the market like to manipulate price they like to go and do what they call run stops think about this guys you have a major support level your market is coming well it's a major support level you and I can both see it every the whole world can see that this level is major support and then the market comes into that level and then what happens you go and click buy what tends to happen in market manipulation situations is the market makers will trigger your buy trade the market will not bounce at that support line on the dot they will push the market even further below to wipe out all the stop losses and then reverse the market in the opposite direction now guys I speak about market manipulation in an entirely different video if you check somewhere around here probably going to link the link somewhere about here okay so watch it is an entire video you're going to learn so much from it so guys for these two reasons okay is exactly why I like to trade the bounce okay first of all confirm to me that is a support level secondly go and do your rubbish manipulation you want to do when you're done doing whatever you want to do when you're done and you're coming out that's exactly where I want to shake your hand I'm like alright cool are you ready to go it's time to start trading so guys I have some other entry techniques that I discussed on the forex mastery course as well if you want to know how to grab it it's just 99 bucks click the link below so guys I use a very I use I use various amounts of entry strategies to get into the market but they're very simple and very basic guys whatever entry I'm doing that market needs to bounce and come back to me I'm not going to chase it I'm not going to run after it and then I don't chase the damn market don't chase this shit because I tell you what's going to happen it's going to you are it's going to mess you up right so that's the that's that's one of the things you want to consider guys guys I've lost my line of thought give me a second I need to check my book where was I so we spoken about trade in the area of less resistance very important the next thing is trade from an area of value very important oh yeah we are entry triggers so guys you want to have your set entry triggers most of the time I like to see bullish engulfing candles I love to see bullish engulfing candles go test the level test the level and bounce off with the boot now what is the bullish engulfing candle bullish engulfing candle is when you see a very strong candle I like to call it an erection a very strong candle off of a major level okay come out once you do that I'm like all right cool it's time to go so guys that's one of the things you want to consider when you want to trade like a sniper you have to have your criterias for entry bounces always do what the trick all right guys so number four thing you want to consider is market behavior so what do I mean by market behavior in this situation so guys you have to understand that guys there's sometimes when the market is just not cooperating man there's sometimes you just just stay away like for me if I look at the market you guys all follow me on YouTube you guys all see all the webinars that I do and stuff like that there's sometimes I have a webinar and I don't have a trade opportunity to present to you guys it's not because they're not trading opportunities it's because I don't like the market behavior at the moment the market behavior at the moment might be looking like stop loss stop loss stop loss to me so what I do in those situations is I just like to stay away I fucking stay away you need to stay away so you need to read the market behavior is the market bouncing in a trend and making higher highs and higher lows if the market is making higher highs and higher lows guys trust me I will get I will look for trading opportunities and I will buy that market but if the market is making higher high lower low equal high and it's just very difficult to read guys you want to trade like a sniper right in this situation you want to back the fuck down right stay and sit on your hands it's very important and you save you a lot of money in fact as a matter of fact out of everything I've said this is one of the most important things understanding market behavior okay understand this is why people send me trades like what do you think about this I'm like I don't think anything about this because it's quite complex to read the market conditions I've been trading nine years and I still see very complex market situations I'm not saying I cannot analyze it I can analyze it easy even in my sleep but my point is it is complex in the sense of how will this market play out okay how will it play out it doesn't really look like something that I've seen play out profitably before okay so guys understanding market behavior is very important and ranging markets you want to be very careful guys if indeed you really want to trade like a sniper you need to start looking into what trending markets and this is exactly what I speak about on the forex mastery course top down analysis learn how to do these things properly so that guys you can trade and go and chill you can trade and what go and relax on the freaking beach with your what your family all right guys so number five on my list the last but not the least I feel like this is I know I said the other one was the most important one but this this right here is the most important aspect of your trading like a sniper philosophy and it's called patience crickets nobody likes to hear patience in this market I understand guys everybody wants to make money me guys everybody wants to make money man shit we all want to make money however guys there's a saying a saying that goes in this market that goes this way right the market rewards the patient how do I know this saying I didn't read it in the book funny enough I haven't really read I didn't really read that many trading books in my time how do I know about this saying I didn't read it somebody didn't teach me about it I learned it from losing money in this market so this is why when I tell you this take it for me for free as somebody who has lost a lot of money in this market in the past the market rewards the what the patience okay you have to have patience I there sometimes I go three whole weeks I don't like the trading opportunities I'm seeing I'm seeing trading opportunities but I don't like the trading opportunities because I don't feel they're going to reward me with the 500 600 people 1200 people move okay guys so you have to consider patience in this game and aside from that patience when it comes to entries now you can be a lower timeframe trader that's absolutely fine however guys your entry criteria needs to be fulfilled before you get into that trade even if the market looks like it's running away let it run away because guess what it's running away only on that candle and then the market comes back and closes right exactly where you want it to close for your entry and guess what the market now starts to reverse in the opposite direction whereas if you had waited for that candle to do this nonsense and come back and close in the opposite direction you would have never got into the trade I don't know if I'm making any sense I'll take it again a lot of you guys feel like the market is about to leave you and run away so what happens is you go and enter the trade somewhere far away like oh my god I don't want this trade to leave me and then what happens you enter the trade and the moment you enter the trade the market retraces back and in most times it doesn't just retrace back it starts going in the opposite freaking direction forex can be a pain in the ass so guys I hope I've been able to make sense to you guys today I hope I've been able to shed some light on trading like a sniper so let me quickly recap everything that I spoke about today so first things first you want to trade for less resistance trading the direction of what a less resistance okay you want to trade in the direction of the trend the forex mastery course it will help you out with this the forex mastery course would it will fine tune you so that you actually start trading like a sniper I know you have a lot of people are saying oh it's always talking about this course guys the course is so freaking cheap the reason I always talk about it is because I want to save you guys from yourself from blown accounts okay and I believe if you're watching my youtube channel and you're listening to me speak all the time in order for all of this to make sense you really need to get on the program because the program will bring you up to the level that I am at the moment so that you can understand what I'm saying in even more detail okay so guys the first thing you want to consider when trading like a sniper is trade in the direction of less resistance okay the second thing is trade from an area of value okay confluence the will is zone area let your technical tools come together and form a major solid base and then the third thing is entry trigger let the market bounce off of that region don't trade inside of the zone trade on the bounds of the word of the zone okay number four is always try as much as possible to understand market behavior because there's some market behaviors that are absolutely treacherous absolutely treacherous once you understand the market behavior feel free to get into that I'm not saying all this to scare you I'm saying all this to prepare you so that you go into this market as a what as a sniper guys you have to understand that it's not everybody that gets drafted to be a sniper so the same thing not everybody gets to be a successful trader so if indeed you want to become a successful trader you need to be what a creep look at snipers they have the best goggles the best guns the best backpacks they're the best guys in the games and guys last on my list number five like I said earlier on is patience you want to be absolutely patient with those you want to allow the market form in your entry you want your let the entry cook let the spice let the spice let the let the rabbit come out okay come out guys before I go this is exactly how you do it you chill you chill and then when the trade because the market will always get to a point where it's very vulnerable the market will always me I know when the market is vulnerable and like I would I would just be watching the market with the corner of my eye check my chat once a day twice a day and then when the market messes up and sleeps and gives me a very predictable pattern and this one I come at and I take it down once I take it down I hold it hold the trade and I milk as much as I can milk from it and yeah that's pretty much it and that's exactly how I'm able to make a lot of money in the market so guys if you found this video very helpful which I hope you did all I need from you guys to do is first of all comment below tell me which of these steps you found very very helpful tell me if you found this video very helpful don't forget to subscribe and smash that like button and for those of you guys who want to grab the forex mastery course the link is going to be down there below do yourself a favor and do your training a favor and jump on the program and guys I'll see you guys in my subsequent videos I love you guys very much thank you so much for all the support and I'll catch you guys later take it easy and peace out


Okay, welcome to our talk, good luck with that. Tag teaming civic data. I'm Liz Rush. And I'm Sing Wei Su, and we're both recent graduates of the first cohort of Ada Developers Academy. We wanna share the story of our year-long road to becoming real developers, and some of the lessons that we learned along the way. Presented through the lens of a case study of our ongoing project, we'll show you how we learn how to get unstuck from common problems new developers make. And throughout the talk, we'll present seven takeaways that we came up with over the course of this project. So for the senior devs in the room, we think you'll recognize the experiences we had and the lessons we learned. And for the less experienced here today, we hope that you will walk away from this talk with more tools to help you bridge the gap from beginner to professional developer. So a bit about ourselves. I graduated college with a degree in clarinet performance, and also French by accident. This allowed me to work in France, which was really just a way to fund my ultimate Frisbee habit. And this proved to be such a successful strategy that I went on to learn a few other languages. And at that point, talking to computers is probably even more interesting than talking to humans. So I decided to go into programming. And I also have a language background. Before learning to code, I worked in digital marketing and then moved into technical and legal translation. Eventually, I found my way to translating apps and got myself roped into manual regression testing. After beginning to automate some of those tests and seeing the parallels between translation and code, I decided to pursue programming. Luckily for both of us, a new unproven experimental program called Ada Developers Academy was just beginning to take shape, so we decided to jump in. For those of you who haven't heard of Ada before, it's a nonprofit tuition-free code school in Seattle focusing on training women making career shifts into tech. The program is industry-driven with professionals, companies, and community members all contributing to the open source curriculum. It focuses on web development using Ruby on Rails, as well as general software engineering principles such as software architecture, test-driven development, and agile. The program's a year long, separated into two six-month phases. The first six months consists of in-class instruction. And the second six months is spent in an internship with a local tech company in Seattle. Our six-month classroom experience started with one month of learning pure Ruby, followed by Rails projects in short one to two weeks sprints that we completed in pairs or in teams of four. The classroom portion culminated in a final four-week-long self-directed capstone project. Singh Wei and I had previously worked together on a two-week Rails app, and that's when we discovered where our individual interests and strengths lie. Yeah, Liz likes front-end JavaScript frameworks, UX, and mobile, whereas I'm one client towards databases, APIs, and back-end work, and we both really enjoy the challenge of architecting a project together. So we decided to pair on our capstone, which was an app that would make use of the City of Seattle's Open Data Initiative to provide users with a way to discover street parking restrictions in their area. So our project is very much an example of the scratch your own itch principle. About three months before even beginning to think about capstone projects, I had borrowed my brother's car and needed to park it near my apartment. Not only did it take me 20 minutes of prowling just to find a spot, but once I did, I got out of the car and found the nearest pole with parking signs. Then I realized there were multiple different and conflicting rules, and I was left more confused than before. We're both car-free cyclists, but we knew intuitively that this was a problem that would need solving for more than just ourselves. Parking in Seattle is polemic, but everybody agrees that the parking signs themselves are basically gibberish. So here's a particularly egregious example. It appears as if every sign contradicts the one before it, and as a final cruel joke, they tacked on west of here. When the direction this photo was taken, we're all east of all of these signs. So where does that leave us? We had been granted a week of free play in Eda before the capstone started, which I spent doing research. Simply enough, I just Googled to find out if somebody had solved the problem for me. And while there were no mobile apps, it turns out the city of Seattle in fact had a parking restrictions map on their website. I investigated the different data sets available through the city's open data initiative and SOCRADA portal, and I also managed to get a contact at the city of Seattle, not in their parking or transportation department, but an engineer on their web team. So this is the way that the city of Seattle government implements the map showing parking information. They use ping overlays on map tiles to show the different parking categories. As you can see, it's a bit hard to read. The categories aren't really very clear and the data is static. We thought we could do better. Our idea was to use the data to display parking information in a simpler, more human friendly way. So for example, rendering just green lines for available street parking and red lines for no parking. So we were pretty excited. There was open data available. We had a contact in the city and we had a starting point to improve on. As newbies to programming, we had picked up on the trick that sometimes the key to solving a difficult problem was knowing that a solution was possible, or at least deluding yourself into that belief. More out was pretty high, but knowing that this would acquire some help from the city of Seattle government, we called our contact. We explained our idea, what we thought we could do, hoping to get some feedbacks or tips as we embarked on the journey. And he said, well, if you think you can build it, you'll be the first. Good luck with that. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. And then he hung up on us. Yeah, seriously. So yeah, in spite of this ringing endorsement, the guy did provide us with a link to their ArcGIS server, which is what their web application was using to generate the parking maps. Though we had never used an ArcGIS server before, the Esri website told us all about the different tools that ArcGIS provided, including a way to dynamically generate KML files that we needed for our project. So this is perfect, except... It turns out that our perfect resource wasn't so perfect after all. As you can see, there were quite a few implementation problems. Almost every informational link was a four of four, and many of the links produced empty files from which we couldn't extract any data. So at this point, not really knowing what we were doing, we reached out to other developers on Twitter and actually got back a link to a fully implemented demo ArcGIS server from a developer at Esri. We found that there was actually a lot more to an ArcGIS server than what the city had, including projection tools and coordinate conversions. Since we didn't appear to have this on the Seattle Map server, we called up our contact again, who told us that the person who originally implemented the product was no longer working there. They had no idea what was going on with the Map server, and they'd be unable to provide us with any help or guidance. So as we mentioned, the city was using ping overlays, but in order to implement the features that we wanted, we decided to use KML files or keyhole markup language files, which are an XML type formatting for geo data that's used by applications like Google Earth. A KML file contains information that's tied to latitude and longitude and allows you to render shapes, place markers, or lines with different colors and textures to show, for example, the topography of region, points of interest, or in our case, lines with associated parking data that corresponded to block faces on a city street map. Fortunately, ArcGIS servers include an API endpoint that returns these KML files, but when we tried to hit that endpoint on the Seattle's city's Map server, we got back a KML file that rendered like this. So at this point, with no luck getting the KML files from the Map server and two weeks into the four weeks that we had for our project, we were starting to get worried that we wouldn't finish in time. So we compromised on our original idea and decided to use ping overlays instead to get a minimum viable product. We thought that this would be much easier to implement since that was actually the strategy that the Seattle government, that used by the Seattle government. So here's a ping overlay that we managed to generate from the Map server. We were working on this project from downtown Seattle. So after a little bit of struggle to figure out the query parameters, we were excited to see the successful generation of the ping. We forged ahead for the next week, building out our backend and figuring out what to do with all of these overlays when eventually we discovered that the graceful fail looked suspiciously like the success. So faced with this problem, we decided to snoop around the city government's code to see how they handled this issue. And the answer was they didn't. As you can see, they simply put a comment in the else block that says, we didn't get any parking results. So let's just not do anything at all. And here's my favorite comment. What do here? To do. And we realized this is silly and we're not trying to tear down the city's code. But at this stage of our project, after so much frustration, it was actually sort of comforting and validating to realize that even real developers don't always know what they're doing. And one last gem. This caused great grief. Oh, JavaScript. So we eventually forgot to the point where we were getting to the correct map that corresponded to our bounding box queries and we decided to use the Google Maps API as a base layer. However, we ran into the problem of the overlay not lining up with the map. And this was pretty perplexing. We were working under the assumption that whatever Google was using to display their maps, everyone else on the internet must be using it too, right? Turns out there are many different kinds of map projections and different regions often use different systems. We ended up on a choose your own adventure sort of trail researching different kinds of projections and spheroids and learned that many civic map servers actually use flat map projections which are accurate locally but become increasingly inaccurate the further way you get from a central reference point. The Seattle government, for example, sourced their geo information using a flat map projection specific to the Washington North State Plain, whereas the Google Maps API displays their maps using a spherical Mercator projection more suited for global geo data. So basically this meant that we were trying to lay a flat map on top of a round map and we lost a lot of time trying to figure out how these various projections were actually being used. We did find a website that cataloged all the different projections for every region in the world and index them by a spatial reference ID. But even when we got the correct spatial reference ID for the Washington State Plain, we couldn't figure out how to actually use it and solve the skewing when actually querying the map server. After beating our heads against a wall we figured out the solution. By accident. I had just happened to be messing around with the spatial reference codes and one afternoon I typed the wrong number into the right box and somehow we ended up getting exactly what we wanted. But this is despite it being the opposite of what every other example on the internet of a similar query was. So now that we were getting the correct ping files we had to figure out a way to store them. Since we were anticipating building out both a front end web client and an iOS app we didn't want to overload the city's map server with requests. So we decided to separate our project into two separate Rails apps. A backend API that would actually make the request and cache the data from the city which would then serve a front end web client. This forced us to think about optimizing performance and caching requests with the same parameters as previous ones. So for example, we used the carrier wave gem to cache the ping files we were grabbing from the city map server and putting them in an Amazon S3 bucket. But since carrier wave was taking around 14 to 15 seconds to complete the actual upload we set that as a background job and in the meantime sent the client a temp file. That way the client would be able to see the map overlay immediately but then any other request made with the same bounding box parameters would receive the cache file from the cloud. So at this point it's the end of April we've just wrapped up the classroom portion of ADA six months down and only six months to go and we've reached the chimney rock of our journey to becoming developers. Yay. And here's what we came up with for our minimum viable product to show off on our presentation day. As you can see we're using the same ping overlays that the city was using but we made our client mobile responsive and all of the important information that tells you what each of these lines means can be found in touch responsive JavaScript tooltips on the side of the legend. Even though these are small improvements we found that they made the data more accessible to the average user especially since there are explanations of what the categories actually mean. We've even heard back from users that this version has helped them navigate parking in Seattle already.  Having the hard deadline helped us scope our work to focusing on building a usable product even if it didn't fulfill everything that we wanted in the app. However this brings us to a common struggle that we've seen in ourselves and in our peers which is that we get so caught up in wanting to build all the things and wanting to perfect our work that we fail to follow the strategies of MVP building after our official capstone was said and done. We decided to continue on this project together with the goal of getting the app in the app store and adding more features but as we transitioned into internships and left the structure of ADA we lost sight of this MVP strategy. We started to think about how to completely revamp the project and all of the millions of features we wanted to add before we felt it would be ready. What actually happened is that we floundered under the weight of all of the work and we made very little progress on anything. Yeah in fact after we started presenting our progress on the project someone submitted a copycat of our iOS MVP to the app store because they stuck to the MVP principle they beat us to it and we lost out on being first to market. Lesson learned don't forget to incrementally build out your project. Building the perfect half of a project isn't as valuable as building as an imperfect whole. So as we wrapped up this MVP and started the transition from students to real developers one thing we found extremely beneficial not just to us as individuals but to the project as a whole was mentorship. We were lucky to have a fantastic iOS contract developer who was extremely enthusiastic about our project. Her brother. Yeah my brother John Rush who we paid solely in donuts and coffee in exchange for his computer science knowledge and experience developing and planning iOS apps. Because we knew that this product is really a mobile product we came into it knowing that we would have this large blind spot when it came to iOS development. John was there to guide us while still letting us decide the direction of the product as well as the design and user experience of the iOS app. Additionally I had two mentors from my internship company Mark and Robin who were mentoring me during the time of the capstone and who remained my mentors for a time during the internship. Having the continuity of mentorship over the course of a larger project turned out to be incredibly valuable. We had experienced developers to whom we could ask questions like how do we use MongoDB but they were also there to put our setbacks in perspective and give us real constructive criticism. Instead of a one-off question that you might ask on say Twitter we had these valuable resources who not only knew what our current skill level was but knew the whole history of the project and how to help push us in the right direction while maintaining distance from the actual code. We believe the support from mentors helped keep us motivated to pursue the project after ADA. So John became our long-term mentor who has seen the project grow from a seed of an idea into our first MVP and also helping us build our first iOS app. He was the mentor who knew our code base taught us about iOS development and could help us troubleshoot our backend but other mentors were also a great resource for guidance and support and providing big picture perspectives into software and product development. So if you don't have a friend or sibling that you can trick into working on your project try reaching out in your local meetup groups or on Twitter to find a developer that will guide you. Find the developers who would love to help beginners and juniors. They are out there in the community. We even suspect that there are several in this room right now. So back to the MVP. We presented this app in front of our ADA sponsors, mentors and future bosses at our internships as well as friends and family. Additionally, we were also invited to present along with two other students who did civic data related projects at a local meetup for civic technology enthusiasts. Unfortunately, we actually didn't have a great experience. While most people responded positively we did get a bit of discouragement from spectators who wanted to tell us about every single thing that we were doing wrong. We also presented at a local Ruby meetup where someone actually tried to break our app in the middle of our presentation, which on the one hand, rude, but on the other hand, it was as if we were being viewed as an equal to this professional developer. It felt like we were in this awkward transition between beginner and junior dev and we were trying to figure out the balance. Another example, one of my coworkers who was trying to learn how to be a good mentor came to a presentation we gave at another meetup and his first response was that was better than I expected. And while this wasn't meant to be malicious, it was an example of how even well-intentioned folks in the community don't always know how to interact with and support us. Oftentimes we ended up being ambassadors of alternative learning paradigms and programs like ADA, but as we tried to find our place in the dev community we had to figure out how to help other people learn how to help us. Through these experiences, we discovered what we believe is a hard lesson for developers. Coda's actually a really small part of what makes development difficult. We had to start to figure out what we wanted our product to look like, what we thought success would look like, how to integrate ourselves into the community and how to work together without a hierarchy. Part of this involves scheduling actual work days to meet and work face-to-face, using Pivotal Tracker to ensure that we were making progress, and the most important lesson of all, don't code when you're hangry. We've learned this the hard way, as you can see in this action shot of me in the same way. So now with Liz firmly established as well my boss and also equipped at the mentality that we might actually be becoming real developers, we wanted to continue phase two of our app following our original idea of manipulating the lines on the actual overlay. We finally found a KML file that contained data for the entire city on the OpenData website and managed to parse it, only to discover that the first rule of parsing KML is pretty much the same as the first rule of parsing XML, which is don't. But we tried anyway, only to discover that it didn't contain all the data that we needed. When we then discovered that there was a different file that did contain all the information that we needed, and these were shapefiles, which are another S3 tool that stores geodata in a digital vector storage format. I don't actually know what that means either, but it isn't human readable and requires some third-party library to decipher. We tried asking around for which gems would be best suited for the job, but the open-source gems, in particular, RGO and Geovruby weren't really sufficient. And while there was a gem being developed by S3, it apparently wasn't ready for release. We found this to be a very frustrating point in the project. We were trying everything we could think of, and it was like throwing spaghetti at the wall and nothing sticking. No one really tells you this as a beginner, but the feeling of spending a million years just trying to get something to work or figure it out, that's always there. Only experienced developers call it spiking. So we exhausted all these ideas, spiking on each one of them until we reached dead ends until we finally found a solution. And it was... Python. Ooh. Woo-hoo. Turns out that Python libraries are really good at math and handled both reading the shapefile and converting the data to the correct projection. Although we wanted to keep our back-end API a Rails app, we thought we could make this work and integrate a Python script as a separate cron job on the server and feed the shapefile data to Rails. SingWay was in an internship working in Python every day, so having this other language to compare to ended up being very valuable. We couldn't find good gems or libraries for what we wanted to do in Ruby, so we started to question if Ruby was even the right tool. This is a lesson that's especially hard for beginners. I mean, you can't know what you don't know, so how do you know if what you know is the right thing to know, you know? This is especially true when you've only begun learning and you only have one tool. You know that idiom, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail? Well, it can be worth your time to question if you are even using the right tool to get the job done. So in our case, realizing that Python was the better tool for handling shapefile parsing and coordinate conversions, we figured we'd swap out part of our back-end to use that Python script, but turns out the data was bad anyway. We were told that the data from the city was being maintained and updated every day from our contact, but on the open data website, it turns out the last time it was actually updated was in 2011. So, so much for that idea. We decided to go back to the ArcGIS map server. That's right. This guy. So in order to connect the public data to the city's map server, we used some of the information about the geometry objects provided in a CSV on the open data website, such as the unit ID number to actually query the ArcGIS server directly. As Singhway mentioned, we're implementing the solution that uses both the open data and the map server on the government site. This means that even though we started our project trying to architect a way to play nice with the city's server, now we're going to have to get the most up-to-date data by querying until we hit the result limit. This means that we're potentially going to have to hit their server 2,300 times to ensure that we have the newest data for every part of the city. But it should totally work, you know, in theory. So here's a demo of our MVP iOS app in its current state. Oh, is that going? Yeah, okay, it's not going over here. So as you can see, it's just a very simple iOS app using MapKit. The lines have been simplified to be red, yellow, and green. Red obviously means no parking. Green means you can park there. And yellow means that you might have to pay or there are other restrictions that you have to keep in mind. We've also built in filters so that you can adjust your query as you're searching. If you need to park for a longer period of time, you can adjust that, or you can adjust the amount that you're willing to pay. And as you can see, the lines are dynamically updated to reflect your query. We've also added in a feature like a profile system so you can put in default preferences for your filters as well as residential parking permits. So if you live in an area where parking is restricted by having a permit, those lines might appear red to some people, but if you add in your permit, those will turn green for you. We've also added in some other features like a favoriting system so that you can store some of the data locally for quick reference.  So the next step in this app is to kind of wrap up the code in its current state, clean it up and submit it to the app store. We're going to try to do this as soon as possible so we can start getting user feedback. And then over the course of the next few months, we're planning to move over to Swift and move our web client over to Ember to mimic the same type of dynamically updated line rendering for the parking data. So that was the state of our project before presenting at Cascadia Ruby this past August. We decided to take some time off after that because, well, we're pretty burnt out.  And our internships are proving to be pretty challenging. We needed to focus on making it through ADA and preparing for job interviews. This lesson was hard, but we learned that sometimes you have to de-prioritize your side project.  So when you hit milestones like your first conference talk or deploying a new feature, be sure to celebrate your victories, no matter how small. Time off to remember what your goals are and to step back to reevaluate your plan of action are more valuable than 100 hours of half-hearted coding. Plus, it gives you time to revitalize and remember that the person you're working with is hopefully your friend. So even with only a few months of training and having never programmed before starting ADA, writing code was never actually the hardest part. It was working with data that we couldn't control and which had little or no documentation that were the biggest challenges. Not only that, but it became increasingly clear that there's never one straight path to a solution in spite of how simple an idea might seem like from the get-go. Which is how I fooled her into working on this, but I got her back into tricking into giving this talk. So basically we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into and no one else did either. Because of this ambiguity, we had to redefine what success meant to us. Part of this learning process involved the discovery that if you wanna build something new, sometimes it's not as simple as just clicking on the first stack overflow result that comes up. So while this is frustrating, it was also an empowering experience to see that other so-called real developers with real jobs don't always know what they're doing. And now technically, where are those real developers with real jobs who don't always know what we're doing? So originally we wanted to make an app that transformed the way the open data was currently being used. This meant something interactive, human friendly, and mobile. However, we ended up having to settle for an MVP that wasn't exactly what we envisioned due to the deadline of the four week capstone. Which isn't to say that our MVP wasn't something to be proud of, but on the contrary, it was a little bit terrifying that after just five months of learning to code, we could not only build something like this, but we could see a vision and a path to an even better product. Also it was pretty awesome that even though we were so new to coding in the tech scene, we had a great community in Seattle that was willing to support us and help us try to build this. That being said, despite the sometimes awkward or inconsiderate feedback that we got, we did learn quite a bit from presenting our app. It helped us learn how to carve our place out as a newcomer to the tech scene, as well as field some difficult questions that ultimately helped us mature as developers. We learned what features excited the audience the most and heard other citizen stories of parking nightmares. Getting confirmation that we were on the right track, at least in terms of product development, was a big boost to our morale. It's pretty easy as a new developer to get lost when working on a self-directed project. And when we shared our progress, we got to hear from other developers who had worked on similar problems or tried using similar tools. Other people came up to us to share their frustrations and this helped us to know that when a tool didn't work, sometimes it was just that the tool was broken. So for all developers out there, remember, giving presentations and sharing your progress and work with other developers is one of the best ways to get feedback and prevent the feeling that you're never gonna see the end of your project. You'll be able to course correct sooner and check your assumptions faster than if you wait until your project is done. It's never going to be done, so you might as well start sharing it now. And when we spent hours and hours on code that we didn't end up using, we also realized that investigating potential solutions and figuring out why they may not work was just as productive as, could also be counted as a win and could be just as productive as checking in production code. This was actually a really hard lesson to learn. The fact that all of us in ADA were making a sharp turn in a career to go into tech made us feel like we had to play catch up to where other junior developers with maybe more traditional computer science backgrounds were. So anytime we ended up writing code that wasn't used or ended up being the wrong approach, it seemed like we were wasting our time or taking steps backwards somehow. But persisting through even when all roads seemed to lead to a dead end really deep in our mental and emotional stamina and gave us a better idea of how real life code actually evolves. So when first learning how to program, sometimes knowing that a solution existed or that it was possible to solve a problem was enough to get unblocked. When we started on this project, we knew that there was a working version of a parking website that used open data. So we started off pretty optimistic but then quickly ran into obstacles. So for the time when the project was still just a capstone, as we kept getting stuck on different problems, we felt like we were under this slight stress that perhaps we had coded ourselves into a corner or that there really wasn't a way to make this data more accessible. We had this nagging feeling that perhaps if it could be done, somebody would have already done it, right? But actually we found that that wasn't true. Throughout the project, we encountered more and more hurdles with each one seemingly bigger than the last. And we started to think that maybe our goals weren't actually achievable. But as we talked to more and more people, we found that this was actually a pretty common, even normal feeling, and that most developers experienced the same frustrations day to day. So rather than thinking that the best indication for success was knowing that a solution was possible, we came to believe that we still had a chance because no one had yet proved our project to be impossible. Our original fear of impossibility morphed into a belief that it could be done and that even beginners and junior developers are the people to tackle these difficult problems. So before we open this up to questions, we wanted to give some shout-outs to the people who helped get us here today. When we submitted this talk, we were still interns, so we needed, we had a crowdfunding campaign to help get us here. So special thanks to all of our fabulous friends, peers, and community members who contributed. And an extra big thanks to the corporate sponsors who significantly contributed to our travel cost today. So once again, I'm Shing Weisoo. And I'm Liz Rush, and we hope you enjoyed our talk. Thank you for coming.