The next item of business is a statement by Ivan McKee on building industrial clusters around Scotland's ports. The minister will take questions at the end of the statement, so there should be no interruptions or interventions. I call on the minister for around 10 minutes please, Mr McKee. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Presiding Officer, Scotland has significant strengths in the industries of the future, and renewable energy and hydrogen, life sciences, financial services and ffintech, quantum photonics, advanced manufacturing, digital and space. We have genuinely world-leading technology underpinned by the excellence of our academic institutions. While we have had significant success in building manufacturing clusters of excellence around those opportunities, we recognise that they have much more to do. The Government is committed to maximising opportunities across Scotland's regions and in doing so creating high-paying jobs, delivering on our fair work agenda, ensuring that everyone is paid at least the real living wage and meeting our ambitious net zero commitments. We will use all of the tools at our disposal to deliver on those ambitions, maximising exports and investment, building Scotland's indigenous businesses and supply chains to scale, leveraging public sector procurement and supporting businesses with targeted support and investment. Our vision is of a Scotland that has world-leading capabilities in those industries of the future. Our focus is on high innovation, high wage and high technology opportunities. We are not interested in a race to the bottom in low-cost, low-wage, low-tech manufacturing. Our national strategy for economic transformation will clearly articulate that vision, and we recognise the key role that Scotland's ports and airports represent in delivering it. I want to update Parliament to the progress that we have made in the implementation of one initiative that will support the delivery of that vision, our green ports model, on how we have managed to secure significant additional investment into Scotland to upgrade port infrastructure and build clusters of manufacturing excellence fully aligned with our fair work and net zero commitments and on a partnership basis between the Scottish and UK Governments. The UK Government has presented its free port model as a dividend of the economic vandalism that is Brexit. We reject that hypothesis. Free ports already exist in many EU member states and indeed did so in the UK within the EU until 2012. We are also well aware of the reputation of some free ports globally. We will also recognise their value in other cases of driving innovation and high technology economic development. This afternoon, Presiding Officer, I want to set out our ambitions for and expectations of Scotland's green port model. I will explain why, after careful consideration, we engaged an intergovernmental dialogue on an equal footing with the UK Government to improve the free port model by introducing a tailored model for Scotland, one of which delivers the Scottish Government's requirements, addresses concerns and ensures proper safeguards and enforcement measures. Four principal factors resulted in the recent agreement with the UK Government. First, we negotiated a partnership in which the Scottish Government will have an equal say both in decision making and in delivery. That demonstrates the determination to ensure that the influence of the devolved Government is strong in collaborative dialogue with UK ministers. Presiding Officer, that was not on the table previously. Indeed, it is a model that can and should be used in other areas where the UK has recently been all too willing to ride roughshed over the devolution settlement. Secondly, an insistence that bidders must clearly set out how they will embed fair work practices into how they and the companies within the area conduct business. Presiding Officer, that was not on the table previously. All applicants in Scotland will be familiar with the Scottish Government's ambitious policies on fair work. Specifically, they will all know about the feature set out in the fair work first criteria. Naturally, applicants will want to refer to those criteria, considering how as robust a case as possible for designation can be set out. We are crystal clear on that. Any bid that does not aim for the very highest standards in fair work practice, including payment of real living wage, will not be supported by the Scottish Government. Our commitment to fair work is clear, and that programme will be an exemplar of how we will deliver that commitment. Thirdly, Presiding Officer, we insisted that applicants will be required to set out robust plans that will contribute to Scotland's just transition to a net zero economy. We have been clear about the need for greenpots to be an exemplar of the use of technology and innovation to decarbonise Scotland's economy, to incubate and foster clusters of new green technology and industries and to benefit wider supply chains in Scotland. The UK Government has now agreed to that requirement, although we are pressing, of course, in the aftermath of COP26 in Glasgow. Presiding Officer, that was not on the table previously. Scotland announced 17 projects last month. Scotland will provide us with enough power for every home in Scotland and create the opportunities for Scotland to build a world-leading offshore wind manufacturing and the export sector. It is highlighted in the strategic infrastructure assessment for offshore wind, commissioned by the Scottish Offshore Wind Energy Council, which I co-chair. There needs to be greater collaboration between developers, the supply chain and the public sector to help to focus activity and investment in Scottish ports and to help Scottish suppliers to grow and win offshore wind work. Greenpots will support the delivery of this crucial objective of securing more offshore wind contracts for Scottish ports. My use of the word green is more than semantics. It signals clearly to global investors our ambitions and our unique offering, with our intention to cement Scotland's already well-deserved reputation as a global-leading ESG and net zero investment destination. Anyone who engages with investors during COP26 will be well aware of the significant opportunities that this presents to Scotland. Finally, the UK Government has now decided to provide fair funding for Scotland. The agreement to invest up to £52 million to create two new designations means that set-up funding available for England and Scotland will be the same. That was not on the table either before. Indeed, it is almost three times as generous as the funding package in the Secretary of State for Scotland's formal offer to me last autumn. On those four criteria, fair work, net zero funding and the NECO say that the Scottish Government has secured everything that we sought in those negotiations. On that basis, we are content to proceed with the implementation of the greenpots model in Scotland. Operation of the model will include the Scottish Government providing investment support through non-domestic rates and land and buildings transaction tax. In addition, operators can expect a wider package of developmental support from Scotland's enterprise agencies, local government and others. I have heard some criticism that the Scottish Government delayed discussions, disadvantage in Scotland somehow. The reality is, to the contrary, any delays or the consequence of the UK Government being slow to come to the table and slow to recognise its specific requirements. Thankfully, that situation was resolved towards the end of last year to enable those negotiations to conclude. We are not shy away from the fact that the reputation of greenpots around the world is mixed, with concerns that are expressed about deregulation and risks of criminality, tax evasion and reduction in workers' rights. However, that is not a model, nor is it a approach to which the Scottish Government would agree. We are optimistic about the potential of the model, but we remain vigilant and focused on firm monitoring and evaluation of progress on the ground. I have engaged with trade unions and others on the matter to ensure that their concerns are taken into account, and I will continue to do so. Equal say in choosing the two designations in Scotland and how they are governed subsequently, I can assure members that the Government will remain focused on ensuring that the high standards on governance and poverty are maintained. I would also point to my confidence that our ports, local authorities, businesses and others who will submit applications will be similarly focused. In this element of our partnership work with the UK Government, we will ensure that the issues of compliance with the law, governance and management and performance are placed at the top of any hierarchy of priorities. Let me be clear, Presiding Officer, that which is granted can also be recalled. In addition to the issues that I have already covered, we are also conscious of the need to avoid economic displacement both within and from Scotland, but those will be required to make clear what assessments they have made of potential displacement. Scotland's greenport model is designed to support the development of innovative industries committed to developing new green technologies, fair work opportunities and, crucially, embedding themselves into the local communities in which they are based. Further, we want the areas to assist the development of their regional economies and benefit wider national supply chains. A full applicant prospectus is scheduled for publication next month. The selected designations will take part in a fair, rigorous, open and transparent process. We look forward to considering all applications and the expectation that it will serve to demonstrate the ambition, potential and commitment of the partnerships who assemble them, including local authorities who are central to the bids that we expect to come forward. That agreement delivers fair set-up funding for Scotland, demonstrates the negotiating strength of this Government and demonstrates the fundamental importance of fair work, payment of the real living wage and net zero to the Scottish Government and Scotland's future economy. I will, of course, ensure that Parliament is kept fully up-to-date on the matter as it progresses. The minister will now take questions on the issues raised in his statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes for that, after which we will need to move to the next item of business. Those members who have not yet done so, but who wish to ask a question, I would ask them to press the request-to-speak buttons or place an R in the chat function. I call on Liam Kerr. I thank the minister for advance sight of his statement. It is an extraordinary rewriting of history. No one is forgotten that, having described the very concept of free ports as havens for criminality, the minister's desperation to find fault with anything the UK Government proposes and his initial reluctance to deal meant that Scotland came very close to missing out on investment that could bring, for example, 22,000 jobs to the north-east as well as an economic shot in the arm of £8.4 billion. People well recall that the mayor of Tees valley said in December that people are investing in his area who would have invested in Scotland had the minister backed free ports. It was only when the cabinet secretary took personal control of this matter, saying that free ports would deliver a major economic boost that this moved. What we have just heard from the minister is grudging, is negative and, dare I say, petulant, which is hardly surprising, given that it is an open secret that the minister had to be persuaded of the enormous economic value of free ports from within his own Government. Does he really think that he can now, in good conscience, tell the Parliament and industry that he is the minister that can make this free port project a success? Furthermore, what will the minister be doing proactively to ensure that Scotland is at the forefront of bids and ensure that the negative divisive language of his statement does not scare off potential investors? Finally, the minister acknowledges that a whopping £52 million investment by the UK Government will make these two Scottish free ports a reality. Will the Scottish Government commit to matching the scale of that ambition for Scotland? The reality is that we have been very clear right throughout this process, with the extensive engagement that I have had with businesses, ports and others, and anyone that he talks to will confirm that right through this whole period of exactly where our red lines were. We have articulated that very clearly and identified the risks, as I have done in my statement and as I did previously, around the free port model globally. We worked very extensively with the team and Government and beyond to understand what the opportunities were in that. I have listened very closely to businesses as a consequence of that. As I said, through the very extensive engagement that has happened through the course of the past year and a half on this process, we have been very clear on our red lines, on fair work, on real living wage, on a commitment to net zero, on an equal say in the designation and on the UK Government putting in equal funding to Scotland, as it has done to the ports in England. It has been the UK Government that has been slow to come back to the table. I wrote to the UK Government on 27 February last year, 2021—no answer. I wrote again on 5 March—no answer. I wrote again on 12 March—no answer. I wrote again on 24 March—no answer—to try and get something away prior to the election period. I wrote again immediately when I came back on 11 May to the UK Government—no answer—and again on 22 June last year to the UK—no answer. Six times I wrote to the UK Government and the silence was deafening. I had a discussion with the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Barclay, back in February, more than a year ago now, where we had a deal laid out, but, for some reason, the UK Government pulled the plug on that. It was supposed to have been announced in the budget by the Chancellor, Richard Shunack, in March of 2021 that the UK Government pulled the plug on that. The UK Government has been disconnected on that internally. It has been unable to come to the table and unable to do it in a negotiation position. In contrast to the Scottish Government, myself, the Cabinet Secretary and the First Minister and others, I have been very clear and very consistent in every stage of the process of what was required in order for us to agree to the Greenport model. As I laid down those red lines, I have not changed. Thankfully, in November of last year, the UK Government came back to the table and approached us and said that it wanted to reopen negotiations. It recognised that us proceeding with our own Greenport model, which is exactly what we were on course to do towards the end of last year, was a suboptimal solution for business in Scotland. It would look very, very stupid indeed had it not committed to that situation. That is the reality of where we are. I will ask you to wind up your response. Finally, I am absolutely committed to FDI coming into Scotland. That is why Scotland, for seven years in a row, has been the best-performing part of the UK in attracting foreign investment and continues to do so. We have a lot of questions to get through. I would appreciate more succinct questions and indeed answers. Question number two comes from Colin Smyth. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thank you to the minister for advance sight of his statement. The ability of our two Governments to argue about almost every issue means that the Scottish ports find themselves months behind England in taking forward free ports or green ports, as the minister refers. There still remains a lack of clarity on the fair work requirements. In his statement, the minister somewhat vaguely said that applicants will want to refer to fair work criteria and should aim for the highest standards and fair work practice. It is not clear what, if anything, will be legally binding. Could the minister confirm whether or not any successful bids must include commitments on workers' rights, including the ability of trade unions to access sites and organise within green ports? Given that the minister has not even met the trade unions that represent workers in Scotland's ports to discuss green ports, will he not only do so, but also confirm that any application criteria and fair work will be legally binding and agreed with the trade unions? We know that green MSPs say that they do not support green ports, but can the minister confirm what the estimated total value of the Scottish Government's financial contribution will be to green ports and whether that funding was included in the recent green SNP budget? Finally, yesterday, Conservative MSPs rolled out support and bids from around seven out of the nine areas that have so far expressed their interest in green port status, including Cairnryan in my south Scotland region. Will the minister ensure that supporting the economies on more peripheral areas with arguably the biggest economic challenges will be part of the application criteria? I am conscious that the audio is not brilliant, but I hope that you have most of that. I thank the member for the question. We have been absolutely clear in my statement today and right through this process that fair work and payment of the real living wage are essential for bids coming forward. As we have secured equal partnership with the UK Government in the decision making process within that, we have signalled very clearly that bids that come forward do not meet those criteria. We will not be supporting them as part of that process. That is absolutely clear. We are very proud of the work that we are taking forward in conditionality with regard to fair work and the real living wage. The green port model is absolutely part of that. I have engaged with trade unions extensively through the process, through four separate meetings with trade union representatives and a separate meeting with a wider stakeholder group that trade unions have been present at. They have been very much part of that process and I am very clear on their asks to protect workers' rights, to protect environmental and other standards and to see no degradation as a consequence of the model operating. It is our ambition that the model is absolutely not a race to the bottle, but, as I said earlier, I climbed to the top. We are very committed to working with trade unions to continue to do that. The member also raises the issue of displacement, as I said in my statement. Displacement is something that we are conscious of. We say that this is an opportunity to attract more investment, more business and additional jobs to Scotland, not to move business around within Scotland. Bidders, as I have said, will be required to indicate the consideration that they have given to the risks of displacement as part of the bid process and how they seek to mitigate that. On financial contribution, my colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Finance will be working through the detail on that. Clearly, it depends on the successful bid, because the shape of the types of businesses that are in the green plots will obviously influence the extent of the reliefs that will be in play, but that will be an issue not for this year's budget but for future year's budgets. Can the minister provide any further information about the economic incentives that will be provided to green pots to encourage business growth and economic development? Will any scoring system to decide the two locations fully consider local economic and social conditions? The two green pots will benefit from a comprehensive package of support, including the additional revenue support to salvage government structures and business plans, substantial seed capital for land assembly and infrastructure, reserve tax reliefs and respect of capital, land and structures, national insurance reliefs, customs easements, devolved tax relief in respect of non-domestic rates in land and buildings, and transaction tax. Depending on the plans and the circumstances of the winning bids, we will also look closely at how mainstream economic development support from within the Scottish Government and enterprise agencies could increase the impact on the ground, and we will consider additional targets to support. For example, in the area of skills, development could also supplement the package on offer, and I am happy to confirm that local economic and social conditions will be taken into account and assessing the strategic context for the bids regeneration and job creation will be the lead objective for this programme. The statement claims operators can expect a wider package of developmental support from Scotland's enterprise agencies, local government and others. Given that the Scottish Government has squeezed the budgets of our enterprise bodies and local councils, is the minister suggesting that additional money will be made available to them to fund the support and, if so, how much? Given that progress has been made elsewhere, can he confirm when next month that application prospectus will be published, what an offer for bids will be opened and closed, and what projection he is working to of when it will be effectively operational? I thank the member for the question and again, not great sound quality. I picked up the gist of it. On funding from enterprise agencies and others, that will depend, as always, on the quality of the requests that come forward and how they comply with strategic objectives and those of the enterprise agencies. Those applications for future funding will be dependent on individual circumstances. On the timing of the bid prospectus, it is clear that we are working with the UK Government, so both partners have an equal say that we move forward together on that. The full timetable will depend on the green all aspects of the detail of that, which is well progressed. We expect that, through the course of March, the bid prospectus will be launched, and we expect that, by the summer, bids will have been submitted and decisions on that will be made shortly thereafter. I thought that it would be interesting to get the member's reflection perhaps at another point on Liam Kerr's comments that the Conservative Party have decided to support the Aberdeen bid—I am assuming that it is in preference to bid from Orkney, Shetland and others in the regions that the member represents. As the minister mentioned in his statement, it is important that the steps are taken to avoid the possibility of green free ports displacing economic activity. Can the minister say any more about the steps that can be taken to ensure that green free ports make an additional contribution as opposed to displacing activity? As I said in my statement, the Scottish Government will not support any bid that does not feature a clear commitment to fair work practices, including the real living wage and other elements in the fair work first agenda. We are also very clear that displacement activity is something that we will look upon to understand within the bid offers that come forward that have been considered in mitigation steps and are in place to ensure that there are safeguards against displacement of economic activity. I echo Colin Smyth's plea with regard to peripheral communities where the benefits of designated ports would have a far greater regional impact. Can I ask when decisions will be made about where our allocated free port green ports status and how decisions will be made and agreement reached between the two Governments? As I said, the process is moving forward at pace with both Governments agreeing on the details of that as we take it forward. I expect that the two designations will be indicated later this year and in autumn of this year once we have gone through the full process. The bid prospectus will lay out in detail how the process will be taken forward and how it will be scored. As I said, that will be launched through the course of March. I am very well aware of the issues that have been raised and what we are seeking to do with this initiative is to make sure that Scotland is able to compete on an international stage. The quality of the bids that come forward will be judged on that basis, along with the criteria that I have already identified. Of course, we are very conscious of the need to meet against displacement, and the impact that the model could have is something that we are very careful to guard against with regard to displacement activity. Can the minister give any reassurance to ports not in the running to be designated as a free port who are concerned that they might be negatively affected by this move? That is a concern that has been raised to me by businesses, by ports and others. We believe that what we are doing with the Greenport model is absolutely the right thing to do to put Scotland in a competitive position internationally. My priority is to make sure that it is beneficial to the national economy and the wider supply change across Scotland. All ports are welcome to apply alone or in partnership. When we are clearer later in the year where the two Greenports will be, I think that that will be the time to have a look at the impact of that designation and how it plays in the wider context across all of Scotland's ports and in the wider ecosystem to make sure that, as the member identifies, ports that are not successful are also supported to take forward their business expansion plans. He will be aware of the Scottish Greens' very strong opposition to free ports. I will not rehearse all our reasons for that now, but I must make clear that what we have heard today does not do enough to challenge the fundamental functions of free ports, that they facilitate and legitimise tax avoidance, poor labour conditions and environmental degradation. It is not enough that BIDS will, and I quote, aim for the very highest standards in fair work practices, end quote, we must demand and require companies to meet these high standards. Our workers and trade unions deserve nothing less. Aren't these proposals just a UK Government Brexit project that has been greenwashed and will result in tax avoidance and the loss of public resources and common's wealth to the private sector? No. I know that the Greens are in support of fair work and payment of the real living wage and accelerating conditionality to deliver that. The Greenport model delivers that. I know that the Greens are in favour of accelerating our move towards net zero and requiring businesses to come forward with plans to deliver on that. I know that the Greens are in favour of building Scotland's industrial base so that we can benefit from the developments, in particular offshore wind, but other sectors and technologies that are focused on net zero. That Greenport model delivers that. I know that the Greens are in favour of sporting business, where it makes sense to enable Scottish businesses to be able to take advantage of those opportunities. That Greenport model delivers that. That Greenport model is also very clear about no degradation of worker rights or environmental standards. Frankly, I am a bit perplexed about why the Greens do not support the Greenport model, given that it ticks all those boxes in terms of their requirements for such a model. Does the last exchange show the complete irrelevance of the Greens in Government and that they cannot have any influence over Government policy? The Government has got a shocking record in this area. It spent millions of pounds failing to save BiFab, but now the site owners' infrastructure are recruiting from abroad because the Government did not train enough workers to build the tiny number of turbine jackets that have been built in this country. Is the Government going to get anything out of this Greenport deal, or is it just going to be a repeat of the BiFab shambles? We are hugely focused on delivering and maximising the opportunities from Scotland and other opportunities that present themselves as a result of the transition to net zero, working with my colleague Michael Matheson. I am heading up a working group that is looking to make sure that we can maximise the benefits for Scottish businesses and that Scottish businesses are well prepared with the capacity, capability and the skills in place to take advantage of those opportunities as they come forward. Skills development is absolutely key to that transition, and I do not need to rehearse that at the time to list all the initiatives that the Scottish Government has taken to make sure that we have the skills in place going forward to support a fair transition to net zero. The Greenport model is another tool in the box, and I have said that it is another opportunity for Scotland to further build on the very promising sector. We have run about offshore wind but other sectors as well in that transition to net zero. That is where it is focused on. It is taking forward this agenda. It is delivering for businesses, ports, communities and workers across Scotland. It is delivering on the fair work agenda. It is delivering on economic development and delivering on the transition to net zero. We have got three more members who want to ask questions, and I am a minute and a half. I will prepare to go over a little, but I repeat my plea for six ink questions and as succinct answers as possible. First, Ruth Maguire to be followed by Jamie Greene. Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the Minister how Greenports will contribute to the exporting infrastructure an independent Scotland will need. Minister, our objective is to build Scotland's economy to make it as strong as possible so that when we become independent, we have an economy that can compete internationally, and much of that is already in place. That initiative will help to further cement that, enhance Scotland's international competitiveness on those key sectors that I identified in my statement earlier, where Scotland has genuine global advantage and to build our economy to face into that net zero future. As such, that initiative provides an important platform and an opportunity for an independent Scotland. Jamie Greene to be followed by Audrey Nicholl. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Greenark on the Clyde coast is a long and proud industrious history of maritime trade, with deep coastal waters, border checks, transport links and much of the infrastructure that is needed for such a huge investment. We also desperately need jobs and investment. Can I ask the Scottish Government to support, in principle, a Clyde port bid of this nature? Would it work constructively with all parties to ensure that we can bring this much-needed opportunity to my region? I thank the member for his question and the very positive nature that is framed in, unlike some of his other colleagues, and I would be delighted to work with him to look at the opportunities in his region. As I am with ports right across the country, some of whom I have met, some of whom I intend to visit over the coming months, and I am always open to constructive discussions in that regard to support Scotland's economic development. I am just interested to know what Jamie Greene thinks of Liam Kerr yesterday, which committed the Conservative Party to supporting the Aberdeenbyd to the exclusion of all others. It is very important that green ports make a beneficial contribution to the Scottish economy in terms of inclusive growth. How specifically will growth be measured to ensure that the benefit is accrued to Scotland's balance sheet, given the complex supply chains that could be involved? It will be critical to ensure that wider supply chains in Scotland benefit from the two new designations, according to that broad economic benefit as part of avoiding displacement effects. The applicant perspectives will ask for commentary and bidder's plans in that respect and I also agree very strongly with the point made about the benefits that we must deliver for communities around the new sites. I want to see net new jobs being taken up by local people who will enjoy good pay terms and conditions. Thank you very much minister. That concludes the item of business and we will shortly move on to the next item of business.


Hi guys welcome back to this video. In this video I'm going to talk about some health tips for nursing students slash just nurses in general. Honestly like we know so much about health and how to be healthy and we educate our patients on being healthy but yet we're like the worst people are practicing it for ourselves. So I'm going to talk about some health tips that I do in practice and I hope that they're easy and helpful for you. But before we get started you need to know that this video is sponsored by Picmonic. Picmonic is an awesome resource for whether you're going into nursing school or you are a nursing school maybe you're getting close to the NCLEX or even a new nurse that's at the bedside and you're just wanting something to help you really solidify this nursing foundation that you're building as a new grad nurse. Picmonic makes information and learning fun by sharing funny videos and visual representations of information that you're already learning in nursing school. They're great guys. I love their approach and technique to helping you retain and learn information because they share funny stories that will make something like super easy to remember. It's kind of like have you ever like not been able to like remember someone's name that they tell you but you can remember like their social drama that they tell you about their divorce and like their crazy kids and family and you like can remember that because it's really interesting but it's hard to remember like their name kind of the same thing but in nursing school version. Picmonic has an app they have a website and they are a super fun resource. I will overlay a little bit of clips from Picmonic so you guys can kind of see but I use this technique when I was in nursing school making like information that I was learning funny and like creating stories around it to actually help me retain it for taking exams and for when I actually took the NCLEX. So Picmonic does this for you. You can try them out for free in the description box below. They also have tons of NCLEX style questions on there so if you're preparing for the NCLEX great great great resource for helping you prepare for the NCLEX. So check them out and we're going to jump into some health tips that I have now that I want to share with you guys. So I'm going to show you guys something you never think I'm so ridiculous but look at this. This is my first health tip and it's drinking a ton of water. This is the water bottle I legit bring to work. It is a gallon water bottle.  I need to drink this much nine a.m. drink this much and whatnot but I bring it to work so I drink the whole thing and I find that if you have water like with you and already filled up it's much easier to drink than if you just bring like a little water bottle or you just like don't have anything but uh drinking enough water while you're in class while you are um working at the bedside doing clinicals is so so important we know we don't drink enough water like no one needs to tell you that that like you're not drinking enough water but this is so helpful I will actually I'll link it if you guys are interested in like buying the same one but it's helped me tremendously and actually once I started like consistently drinking a gallon of water a day it was like so much easier and everyone's like well don't you pee a million times and I'm like well one yes because I'm pregnant but two no actually my body like adjusted it's the weirdest thing once I started drinking a ton of water like the first couple days I like was going to the bathroom like every 30 45 minutes I was drinking so much water and my body wasn't used to it but after it kind of adjusted it like it was like that was my normal amount I didn't like pee anymore than I normally did so little tmi for you but if you're worried about peeing a lot maybe you need to consistently drink water more and it'll do the same thing that it did to me where I just like adjusted but anyways drinking more water um my next tip is to pack some healthy snacks um while you're in school when you go to clinicals if you already have the food available for you it's a lot easier to take a couple quick bites of like maybe a granola bar or like nuts or mixed fruit or whatever then it is to like if you don't have anything then you just starve yourselves and you end up binging like when you get home because you're so so hungry or you go down to the cafeteria and you're like oh this cheeseburger and french fries sounds really good and I'm not saying like we can't have a healthy balance of like having all types of foods but if you can pack some healthy snacks when you're in nursing school that you can just kind of snack on throughout the day um it really helps you want learn better and retain information better because if you're starving you like that's all you can think about it's it's like your basic human needs is is eating and then like next comes like actually learning but if you're starving you're not going to learn um so that's my next tip my next health tip is to take mental health and physical breaks so um mental health breaks this can be as simple as like stepping away from your studying and like walking outside for 10 minutes and just like taking a couple deep breaths and kind of having that reset I know sometimes when you like have so much to do and you're just sitting down trying to cram and get everything done you can get so overwhelmed that like you're not studying as efficiently you're not doing your work as efficiently because you're just so stressed and it's like your head feels cloudy and cluttered and like you can't think anymore so if you find yourself like in this fog take a step away and do something that's not school related whatsoever go outside walk around the neighborhood um maybe just like close your books and sit there and close your eyes uh go watch a little tv show for a bit make yourself a snack like do something that can kind of refill your mental cup a little bit uh for me being a bedside nurse and also a mom and I'm not in school right now but I was in school during my master's not too long ago I know how overwhelming it can be to balance everything and so taking that time for yourself of like at the end of the day I would take a bath light a candle um order takeout because that just made my life easier those like little mental health breaks really add up and are so so good for helping you be a better nursing student a better nurse a better wife a better husband friend daughter sister brother whatever um so taking those little breaks and also physical breaks too I don't want to focus so much on exercise because we all know that exercise is important but if you can just get up and maybe walk for 10 or 15 minutes just something to kind of clear your head get your blood flowing it helps a lot I actually did this when I was in nursing school and I would find like I'm like sitting on my bed on my computer starting to doze off because I'm so tired instead of like just taking a nap because I knew I had like so much to do I would get up and I would walk the loop around my neighborhood and when I'd come back I'd feel like okay like I can do a little more because my head was clear like physically I just felt a little better and um yeah so that's one of my other helpful tips I hope it's helpful um and my last tip is to just get enough sleep I know this is hard but you have to force yourself you have to prioritize it you have to be able to set down your work and set it aside and go to bed at a reasonable time because I'm telling you that if you are up doing all-nighters every single night you are not going to do as well on an exam if you are not getting great sleep so um try to just budget your time appropriately get stuff done ahead of time don't procrastinate so that way you can go to bed at a reasonable time get enough sleep um I again I I know it's difficult for me I'm going to be honest when I was in nursing school it was so hard for me to sleep because I was anxious and I was nervous for my clinicals and my tests that I actually I started taking melatonin and I'm not saying you need to take melatonin like obviously you talk to your doctor do what you need to do but for me I needed that little like something to take the edge off so I could just go to sleep and not be like so hyper focused on everything so get good sleep drink water eat healthy snacks take your mental health breaks and I hope that these are some helpful tips for you guys um if you are interested in checking out Picmonic there'll be a link down below thank you to them for sponsoring this video and I will see you guys in my next one bye


Hi everyone, so thank you all for being here. I'm Razvan, Razvan D'Aconesco, and the Queen Tengen for the Unicraft Project. And my talk is going to be the journey of the Unicraft Project from a small project to what I would call a maturing project, maybe not yet mature, and how we ended up there. The aim is to be, is aim to give you this story to show you a lesson that we learned along the way in the hopes that you would be able to use them for the project that you are part of. So kind of growing them to, let's say as I said, a maturing project. As I'm a fairly technical guy, even I'm doing community management, I have things, let's say engineering structure. So I'm going to have three planes, people, resources, and process I will talk about. And then Indian, I'm going to focus on three takeaways, lesson learned, difficulties, and challenges ahead. For starters about Unicraft, maybe some of you know, some of you may not know, Unicraft is a Unicernel, we actually call it a Unicernel SDK, software development kit, meaning you are able to tie in different pieces to create a unique Unicernel image. The keyword for Unicraft is specialization, meaning that you would be able to select given components that you typically have in an operating system and application, select those components, and carefully tune them towards your use case. This gives you three to four prime benefits. The most important one is efficiency, you're going to waste less memory, so memory footprint is going to be reduced, because you're only going to select the required pieces.  If you're however going to be the database application, you're not going to require an NGINX stack, you're just going to require some standard library and some fall system. So that's the prime benefit, only carefully tailoring the required bits to your application. The other one is security, because this one kind of compared to containers, runs in a virtual machine. The keyword here is you want to use VM-based isolation. And the third one is performance. How do we do that? When we select those libraries, so everything is written from scratch, it's basically a set of micro-libraries that form the DOS features. You select them, and then you are able to finely tune different parameters, let's say memory types of schedule or type of memory allocator for your need.  Also because everything runs in a single privileged domain, you may know of kernel mode, everything is then faster, you don't have the switches, use kernel mode that you have in Article OS. And this is kind of the journey, so this is the years of the project. I've actually been involved in the project since 2019. So it started, mostly it started here in November 2017. As I said, it started as a research project. So this was a paper, I'm also an academic, so I'm also part of the InstaPolitica Bucharest. I wasn't part of this paper. This was a paper that proved you can have fast VMs as you have containers. This was work initially done on the Zen hypervisor and proved this. Hey, you can have VMs with the same, let's say performance benefits and boot benefits as containers. Then the first commit game came about at some point. This was using GitLab for some time. Then there was a move to GitHub. Then we had another paper. This was awarded the best paper award at Eurosis, a top conference in 2021. We finally had the move to Discord, kind of growing the community. And eight months ago, we are part of a startup. So there was a seed funding for the kind of, let's say, the startup base, the commercial version of the project. So this storyline is going to be the skeleton of this journey I'm going to give you, this presentation. This is an evolution of the project. So I did three lanes two years ago, let's say eight months ago and today. So this is the number of stars. We are close to reaching 1.5, 1.5k stars.  I'm going to tell you about how we got to that point. We are now in the process of doing the zero-certain release. It was supposed to be two days ago, but we are now doing some updates to it. And the number of commits, the number of lines of code added are fairly consistent. The project itself is maturing, so it's expected that there are going to be more, let's say, updates and maybe more deletions than actual lines added, but it's still going over there. So this is kind of our experience in growing the project from a small project to this medium-sized project. This is hopefully something that you can use for your own experience in getting to a project like that. This is kind of the evolution of the number of stars. This is today we are at 1,364 stars. How does the community look like? I'm going to give you an overview before we go into the actual items. So there are about 40 active contributors. 10 of them are core contributors. They are also part of the Unicraft Company. We have then about 10 experienced contributors, some that have two to three years experience in the project and are actively contributing and maintaining and doing reviews. And 20 contributors that are kind of maturing also in the project. So we have these three layers.  So I think about 75%, three quarters, that was I was aiming for. Our students at UPB, we have some collaborations with AH and University of Manchester, TU Austin and others. And there are also some partner companies and interesting partners that are part of the community. We're trying to enlarge that. And there's the level of infrequent contributors. If you go into any sort of talk, I was just a part of a talk of Don Foster. You're going to see that there is this level of infrequent contributors that we have. And we are trying to enlarge that number as well. Okay, that being said, kind of given this overview of the Unicraft project and the way the community works. Let me show you things that we've done on these three pillars of we had people, resources and processes. And each of these three pillars is out of three pillars. So it's kind of once again, engineering structure. So I'm going to talk about recruiting, engagement and belonging. I think these are kind of key items for getting people as humans as Don mentioned as part of your community. So for recruiting, what we've been doing is most of the of the new recruits, let's call them are part of the university. So we are very, very engaged in universities. We are doing events. I'm mentoring a lot of students in my academic position to get to the project. Something very relevant here is that we are using their academic career. So they have a bachelor thesis, typically after three or four years, then they have a master thesis for the two years. And well, if they also pursue a PhD, they can continue being part of the university and part of this project. And what I've been doing is I've been mentoring second year students such that we can have them for three years of bachelor studies and then two extra years of master studies, giving you a five years plan. And ideally, then they would be there. So my first, let's say, generation of mentees are now graduating the fourth year and they're going to be involved in the community. One of them is going to join the company. The other one is going to be a master student and be continuously involved. The other thing is Google Summer of Code. This year we are, it's the second year we are part of Google Summer of Code. We have now five projects, five students. Last year we had three students out of the three students last year to are actively involved. One of them is actually very actively involved, Maria. And she's now also gaining a maintainership role. And we now have five new students on different layers. We are also aiming to go for Linux Foundation projects, Outreach and the others. And another way of recruiting is of course through the company, through Unicraft GmbH, kind of getting new people, experienced people that work both on, let's say, the commercial side of things and the open source side. And of course industry partners, we are both in the open source side. We just had the talk with the company that's interested in Zen and Zen support and there was now part of a talk with safety. It's part of that and some other companies, potential clients, we try to get to draw them to the community. Then the other, I think recruiting is one thing, but the most important one is engagement. How do you get people wants to contribute and then to be continuously contributing? So for that, what's very relevant is to kind of to keep them challenged. Challenging means you have to have some sort of personal tracks and we have a lot of items and we allocate people. Hey, you can work on this based also on their technical level and their, their desire. I want to work on it. I think this is interesting. So there is Sergio's working on bootloader. There is Dragosh is working on minimizing and pie support. We're looking at synchronization. Maria is working on security. Tella is working on application compatibility support. So everyone has their own track that they work on and they also get reviewed tasks. So any sort of item that keeps them as part of the community and also keeps them engaged. We also would do, we do a healthy level of mentoring. We start early and we have weekly time of times one to one discussions. We have, we have with them making sure they make progress. He had any sort of question. So kind of keeping a close knit community and making sure that each mentor and mentee are well connected. There are periodic meetings that happen per track. So actually I'm part, I think of 10, 12 meetings per per month for the community with different topics. Ensuring that everything is going well and mentors and mentees are coming in properly. And also there is a level that we try to increase of ownership. So kind of empowering people with new tasks that can be technical tasks that can be community events or any sort of community leadership such as release management, CICD manager, PR manager and all those roles kind of growing people in to keep them engaged. I think this is kind of the most important part here. It's, it's fairly easy to get some people to do something, but to keep them continuously engaged. This requires some extra extra juice and these are items that we've been using so far and for belonging. So being part of the community, we have different items up until some time ago. We organized weekly hackathons. We gathered in university during Saturdays close to each week and work on different items. Then we kind of evolved. We now do one monthly hackathon. It's thematic because it was kind of too often every week. So we do that together in university. We also keep it online so people can join. It's going to be mostly for people in UPB in Bucharest for us, but anyone from online can join. We have then some sync calls. We purchase pizza and everything. Starting from last year, we are doing a community gathering. We actually get everyone from the community in the mountains. There are people from Germany who fly there, France, the UK. We're trying to get it bigger this year. And in October this year, we're going to have this community gathering to get everyone there swag or public appreciation. So everyone that's contributing has kind of their name attached to it. Every release has the contributors name on it. Hey, we did this. Thank you so much for that. This person did this. These are the fixes, reviews and everything. Social events. We kind of have dinner outs or meetings or anything like that. And continuous support and mentors. As I said, there are weekly talks. There are discussions, private discussions one-on-ones just to make sure that everyone knows we are part of the same group of people. The other item is resources. And I think this is something that I didn't see that much discussed. Most people are focused on processing on people. Sorry. But these are very relevant, especially the money part. So I'm talking about services. You want to use something to, well, ensure your work is done. You want to get money for contributors, for mentees, for employees. And you need infrastructure to run your code, infrastructure to deploy, to test, to make sure everything is working properly. So for services, this is kind of the easy part, because for this, we can use GitHub, Discord, any sort of service out there. And it's typically free or has some sort of open source variant that you can use. Using Google Drive, using HackMD for a lot of notes. If you're not using HackMD, I suggest you use it. It's a very good tool to have collaborative editing. It's fun for that. And of course, we have the kind of now with the seed funding and the backing of a company that can provide services such as the CACD system and all the others are there. For money, well, you need money for several things. You want to organize events. You want to get pizza. You want to get some items. You want to get traveling. And maybe we want to have scholarship, right? So how do we do that? Well, we have some university funding. Also, this is part of some collaborations with companies, but also because in university, we are fairly supportive of open source work. And everything that deals with open source can get some funding. So there's quite a bunch of that that we can give for events, for scholarships, for workshops. We have several people that benefit from that or events that we can do. The company itself provides money, one for employees and then for other meetings. If we want to travel for a conference such as this one to connect with others, that's happening. And yeah, Google Summer of Code. So any sort of events, we are now, we are now, we applied for a Linux foundation. This is CNCF mentorship. I don't know what the extents for. We're looking for outreach as well. So any sort of program that provides money for projects, we're going to, we are part of that. And this gets kind of a nice amount for people, for students to work during the summer. The infrastructure is provided by the university. So in UPB, we have once again, very supportive open source, virtual machines, CICD system. We have some Kubernetes integration. This happens over there, test stations. We have stations that are now using ARM, that tests Zen, test Hyper-V. No, no. I know it's all Hyper-V, VMware, all the platforms that we're using. We benefit from university. And also Unicrub because of the company, it provides you the required bits and pieces, gives the infrastructure that we need. The other part is the process. This is something that we're going to see as part of my being here at the open source leadership summit. This is a lot of items that people talk about. What I want to focus on here is the actual realistic practical bits that we did. Because in theory, it sounds good, have better documentation, attract users, make sure you have time for them, make sure they are challenged. But it sounds good in theory. It seems easy to do, but it's a great distance from saying something to actually being able to do it. So let me just go through the item that we did for code management, community management, and raising awareness and see maybe it's something that you can also use for your projects. For code management, we've been using anything that GitHub related all the items out there. So these are kind of obvious items. CACD is very important. And for us, it's very different because we have to build, run different items with different compiler versions. It's kind of very complicated. The CAC system itself is pretty flawed. We've been using concourse and it's shaky. We're looking for tecton or some other solution. So we're going to see how that goes. Labels, teams, there's a governance repo that we're using, but only to the minimum. We don't want to add any sort of layer that makes things difficult for the community to work on. We've now been using a roadmap and each item in the roadmap has two, let's say, owners. A project manager and the tech lead. The project owner is responsible making sure things are happening and the project and the tech lead provides all the kind of the technical muscle to ensure this gets done. I'm feeling project owner role for a bunch of projects and the kind of the actual smart and hardworking people in the community, not myself, are doing the tech leading. A lot of, well, verification validations and something that's very relevant here. And I would advise everyone to do this up until three, four, three years ago, I think releases were once every year. And it kind of happened. Let's do the release and you bump stuff in code quality wasn't that great. And it also kind of step it was a lot of time between releases. And then I kind of come with the idea, let's do it every two months. And we've been doing, I think five or six releases once every two months. And what we are now doing is one once every three months, it was very difficult once every two months was put a lot of pressure on people. Three months is more livable. But if I could just give you the example of the zero dot 13 release two weeks ago, we had, let's say, I'm not sure three PRs out of the plan once. And for two weeks, we now have maybe merged 50 PRs. So releases do work deadlines work. You ready release schedule and things will happen on the committee management side. We have a lot of meetings, maybe too many meetings, but we try to make sure that each track has the support required people are communicating. They are on the same page. And it makes sense once you have live discussion to make progress. So we do that. We do use discord for that. There are a lot of challenges if you're going to enter my if you're going to enter on discord. Maybe I can just show you a quick, a quick run here. You're going to see there's quite a lot of channels. So there's, there's quite a bit of them that we have here. Each particular item has their own channel. Kind of to organize things neatly. There's a community leadership team. So I'm leading a leadership team. Let's call it that takes care of blog posts. We have a CACD system PR management governance documentation. Each kind of has their own role and takes care of different items. And these have been students that have been upgraded promoted to this item. The track owner. They just meant you. And also there's a continuous kind of feedback loop making sure that people are making progress. And also they are challenged. It's too difficult. Let's let's go down. If it's, if you're now if completing it, let's look for something else. So kind of continuously adjusting what you're working on with your current skill level and expectation and time. And for awareness, the, I think the most important items for us are hackathons. So we've been doing hackathons. There's actually hackathon happening right now. No, no, it's not right now because in Europe it's, it's very late. There's a hackathon that is what's happening 10, 10, 10 hours ago, and it's going to happen 10 hours from now in portal. There's actually going to adjust up to look at there's going to be another one here in Vancouver on the 23rd and 24th of September. So we're organizing we contact at universities. Hi, Joel, speaking of the devil and the 23rd and 24th of September, Joel is our host for the hackathon in in Vancouver in September. So we've been counting our host and our most gracious and helpful to for these hackathons and these give us a lot of, let's say visibility and getting people in there. There's a new employee that we kind of advertise unique craft during a hackathon. And there are some other people that are not involved in community because they took part in this hackathon. We just travel abroad. And we do take it's not kind of the I'm not sure marketing it we are actually doing technical stuff. We are doing PRs. We are doing open source work for today's and we get we're getting people in we had. So there's now in Porto. We had one in Amsterdam. We had one in in Athens in five weeks time 29th of March and it was in in Athens. He left the 10th of May is now in Porto and in between it was Amsterdam. Also, when these are this is with the help of University. So Joel is from University of British Columbia. We have these contacts and we are able to organize this. This also gives us the privilege to advertise when you to kind of create this network at universities. And then we advertise Google Summer of Code. We already pay people. Hey, Unicraft is out there. Have your students apply. And yeah, you get kind of this broad exposure to students and technical young technical people that can can also not not only see what Unicraft is about, but maybe make their first or beginning contributions to open source projects. They were able to get about, I think, close to 50 PRs from the hackathon in Athens because they're out of people. And they made they made it to upstream, which is pretty cool. The other one is, of course, conferences workshops, Google Summer of Code. Every time there's some sort of Google Summer of Code presentation, I'm going to be part of it. There's a plan to have a Google Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in October this year, some somewhere in California if I recall. I'm probably going to be there as well. We'll see about about my time, but that should happen. Classical blog posts. This is also very important. I'm in university and when I teach, I have only one logo on my laptop. It's Unicraft. So basically all the people students know I'm teaching operating systems and everyone knows I'm doing Unicraft and they come. They now come to me. Hey, I want to work on this project. I think it's pretty cool what they have to do, right? So I'm also doing some, let's say, recruiting of mentees, but it's also that people know about this and they want to, hey, I want to work on that. It seems pretty cool. The community is building and it works. So having people that are involved in university and are able to have some technical background to get people on board is very important. This is what we are doing also in collaboration with, with her and some other universities and something that we've been doing for maybe three months ago. It started, we were part of FOSDEM in Brussels. And after that we said, we had the idea, we had a lot of Unicolonial and LiboS related projects. behind me now there's our professor in operating system Octavian Purdilla had done something that's called Linux kernel library and there are some other Unicolonial projects out there. Mirage OS, Hermitax, what else, Unicolonial Linux. So we are now doing a Unicolonial Alliance group. We finally decided tonight we have periodic meetings. We're going to do presentation. We want to advertise and to have this consortium of Unicolonial projects to better advertise and raise the awareness of Unicolonials as a viable solution for different use cases that may be education research or well ideally also commercial. So this is something that we are now doing beyond the lookout for hearing more about Unicolonials and Unicraft with this. So as some takeaways from our experience from our journey, once again, our journey is from a small research focus project to one that's now maturing so medium sized project. It's, I think that it's a very important item to consider because people are, you see all the presentations of open source and you see people talking about kind of larger projects how do you organize them. But I think this kind of this adolescence phase where you go from a very small project to some once again a maturing one. This is also very relevant. This kind of gives you the foundation on top of which you build the your actual project. So these are difficulties that we faced. Maybe we are currently also facing. I added some of them. One of the most important one is that it's very difficult to get people to do reviews in time. That's why that's why releases happen. Everyone between coding and reviewing will always use choose coding. Yeah, I want to code. I want to do some pull request. I want to fix that feature. I don't need to spend time reviewing other other person's work. This is where it is coming. It's a constant issue. I'm pinging people constantly. Hey, please review this. We have a healthy number of reviewers and also with the release schedule that helps. But it's it's it's a difficulty. The other one, at least for new crafters, we have multi-package of multiple compilers. It's ceiling DCC different version. That doesn't work. That works there. It doesn't work for VMware. Maybe it works for for Zen. So having this diversity of environments is a problem. The other one is the CCD, which is should be very important, but also in conjunction with the diverse ecosystem makes it very difficult. And we are working towards improving that. And this is also it's it's something that we are struggling a bit with. We think this is the way we need to have actually out of newcomers, but they tend to overwhelm the experienced people and you need to have some time to properly guide them. I'm kind of doing this balancing act of getting experienced people and getting newcomers. We are, we are okay with it. We're trying to grow new people and experience role and also try to experience people just to be able to properly handle newcomers. But this is something that's always going to be the case. It's not going to be like I'm going. I have 10 experienced people and zero newcomers. It's always going to be unbalanced on the on the maintenance side, but it's something you have to deal with. And also the typical one you make decisions. Yeah, this has to happen, but then decision making to action making huge difference. It's easy to say it needs to be done is very difficult to actually do it. So this requires time effort and resources and kind of constant nagging constant things is happening. Challenge is ahead. I told you about the code review one. So this is the maintainer time. You do want to have maintainers do the code, the coding, but you need to have some review time for them. That needs to be balanced. We have poor issue and period time. So maybe there are some PRs for one year ago that haven't yet been merged. So this is a challenge that we need to address to see how we can actually speed up the rate in which PRs are merged and issue solved. The obvious one growing and recruiting experienced people. You need them to kind of get get the offloader from the maintainers. Building a building. This is in conjunction with governance model building a more well stabilized the well defined community hierarchy. Currently it's pretty informal. I think that this is something we typically say we are not yet there. So this is a learning process. So as part of a project we are now learning when it's going to be the time and how the community hierarchy is going to look like. It's not yet the time because things are pretty informal, but it seems we are headed that way. Yeah, so there's also always a balance between code quality and fast merging. You know, there's they may have heard of the topic of optimistic merging. I tend to favor that most of the maintainers don't tend to favor that so there is a bit of a conflict there but we're kind of coming to to some sort of arrangement but there's always the idea that you we are very slowly merging because of because of focus on code quality. So we want to balance that out as well. And this is kind of I think it's going to be forever you want things to be better documented and more easily usable just want people to click a button and that works. And finally, this is I think is the most important part here. What I think is items that we learn to the process that can be transferred to other projects. Very important is connected to universities and track students. I know this kind of sounds easy. I know students out there, but it's something that personally because I'm also an academic I feel this must happen and you have a lot of potential there. Of course it requires a lot of, let's say caregiving and nurturing, but it provides a healthy number of potential contributors if handled properly. And because you have and university are very open. I mean, I know Joel here is a great guy but we also talk to some other people and they're close to to his level of greatness in being open to to host us in sending messages to students people are very very open to open source to organizing events to helping around so it's a very nice pool of recruiting talent and getting people to work. We actually have people who get assignments and say, hey, I have an assignment my virtualization class. Can I use this project? Yes, pick up this issue solve it. And that's happening. Those people from to Austin actually their professors and yes, there's the Internet and they end up with that with our project. I can't focus on this in us always be trading. I know there are kind of guidelines and rules do this with that. The keep that I see is you want to iterate you want to do something and then constantly one month, two months, three months, something like that. See, okay, how can improve this. We switched from one year release model to a two month one and then three month one. We are now doing a two weeks feature freeze between the three month one so we are kind of constantly revisiting this how the community should be organized how we do our code analysis how we're going to do the system. It's nothing is going to be set in stone and especially for a growing project. You have to have the, let's say the diversity and the openness to update the way you are doing things. Not fundamentally change it but update it along the way. This is something I'm very fond of communities are building during weekends. So you actually have to put that extra mile and Saturdays are and weekends are great times for hackathons and the different events. People are free. And that's when we actually do the bonding. Right. Well, that's when the belonging happens. So people are afraid they are going to do this and we only got maybe 10 participants when hackathon is it worth it. Yeah, it's worth it. You have 10, you have another 10 you have another 20 keep doing it it's going to it's going to pay off. Right. So, for example, in Amsterdam we had maybe 10 12 people at some point but they managed to do PR is one of them is doing reviews one of them is now an employee of Unicrub GMB age. It works, but you have to keep doing it. You have to kind of to believe that, okay, it's it's not that much. But if you're doing it, it's it's going to pay off. Okay, and everyone has their place. So we have people that I don't know about this very much. You're going to learn. You can do this small thing. There are always small items. There's going on. And finally, this is something I also heard from a presentation from from someone earlier. Be human. It's very important to get people to know you are part of the of the team. You are you are supportive and you're going to assist them with everything that's required. Very, very important if you're going to act like some sort of pop it here and I went to do this just with them to do stuff. It's going to be a nasty relationship. But if you show your and you are really caring for what they are doing for their level experience and making sure they they are happy with that they are doing that that weighs a lot in the in the greater scheme of things. Right. So, that would be from my side. These are kind of key item that we've learned them. Once again, it's for smaller projects aiming to to mature themselves. And I'm going to invite you all to contribute to Unicraft. We are fairly welcoming community vibrant. A lot of people do not doing a lot of work. Everything you're going to see it's it's on GitHub. So if you have if you fancy any of those topics. Be sure to to visit us on GitHub on discord and we can do very nice work together. That would be thank you so much. I think I I I feel the proper amount of time if there are any comments suggestions feedback questions, I would be happy to address them. Okay, if not then thank you again and we keep in touch. Thank you.


The very horse for the speed of light a cloud of dust and a hearty high old silver the lone ranger. With his faithful Indian companion Tonto the daring and resourceful masked rider of the planes led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear from out of the past come the thundering who beat the great horse silver the lone ranger rides again. A spur line of railroad track ran from the mining town on Rainbow Creek down through the hills to Jackson Junction. As the Friday night freight was due to leave the lone rangers stood beside his great horse silver in the shadows at the side of the station. He watched as the agent and the conductor lifted a heavy box to the platform of a boost then carried it inside. Then the masked man turned toward Tonto who approached softly. The gold on board. There are plenty gold. Yes. The biggest shipment that was ever sent out from Rainbow Creek. Are we right now? Not yet. I want to see if any passengers board the train. You look for Skarmac. Yes. He was here in town two days ago. He surely knows about the gold. We'll try to get it. Maybe he'll hold up train. That's what I expect. But he's not likely to try it until the trains in the hills beyond Springville. We go ahead and get to Springville before train. Oh, there's no hurry. The train won't reach Springville until tomorrow morning. It won't leave Springville until those empty cattle cars are loaded. Oh, we get there before then. Easily. Oh, Tonto, someone coming for us. Ah, we see that for the many time in cafe. It's Bill Galloway, the gambler. Hello there, stranger. Hello, Galloway. Are you masked? Yes. I'm masked. Don't worry. I'm not going to ask any questions. Would you mind answering a few? Well, that depends. I don't mind listening to them. Are you leaving here? Yep. Why? Well, I like to play cards. But the boys won't play with me anymore. My luck's too good for them. Say, yeah, I'd pay $1,000 for that horse. Sorry, he isn't for sale. Would it make any difference if I boosted the ending? Not at all. Yeah, that's what I thought you'd say. You and you know about your pain. Care to sell? No. Scout not for sale. Well, I didn't expect to get a good horse, but there's no harm trying. I'd pay plenty to ride a horse instead of that train. What are you two doing here?  Come on, Tonto.  Hey, hold on. Silver. Silver. Girl is horse silver. Hey, Bill! Coming, Hanson. You ready to start? Well, it'll be a while. The engineer's having some trouble. Why do you want to ride the caboose? I don't. It's going to take us about 28 hours to make the run. There's cattle to loot at Springville. I don't want to ride with you, but I can't buy a horse. There's the mason ranch between here and Springville. We could drop you off there. Mason could fix you up on the horse. You don't care much from my company, do you? Oh, it isn't that, Bill. You'll be more comfortable. Well, you're right. Drop me off at Mason's ranch. Oh, you're talking. I wouldn't have my worst enemy ride that caboose. Well, here comes Linda from the dance hall. Hey, Hanson. I want to get to Jackson Junction. How much? $2. Here you are. Well, Hanson is Linda your worst enemy? Well, I don't have to tell her what this trip is. Besides, she can't buy a horse. Well, perhaps she'd like me to stake her.  Are you taking this train? Only as far as Mason's ranch. Glad it's no farther. The less conversation we have, the better pleased I'll be. That's what comes of trying to give a lady some good advice. I don't need your advice. Or it was my mistake. I presumed on a friendship which evidently doesn't exist. I'm getting on board. How long before we start? Right away, I guess. Let's see. We'll get this started just about on time. Come on, Galloway. Help you up the steps, Miss Linda. Thank you, no. All set! All set! Let it go! Mr. and Tonto were well ahead of the train in the country between the mining camp and Jackson Junction. They reigned up the top of a hill not far from the Mason Ranch and paused to rest the horses.  Put her. It was a low upgrade, Tonto. Oh, that's right. Oh, wait. What matter? Look ahead. Isn't that a fire on the tracks? That's right. It's small fire, maybe signal fire. Perhaps someone from the Mason Ranch wants a train to stop. There's a woman by the fire. Ah, her look this way. Tonto, she's holding a baby. She's running away. She's afraid. Why should she be afraid? She can't see my mask in the darkness like her fall down. Seeing the young woman fall headlong with the baby in her arms, the lone ranger sent silver down the hill at a fast gate. Oh, sir, the woman is here. Please go away. Haven't you already done enough? Please don't be afraid. We want to help you. Help us. Are you hurt from that fall? No. We're on this car max game. Well, that's not the case. Aren't you Mrs. Mason? What if I am? Did you signal for the train to stop? Are you poking fun at me? Tonto, go back and build up that signal fire, will you? No. Me fix it.  Now, let me help you.  Haven't you and your gang done enough? You burned the range. Is that what happened? Oh, please. Listen, mister, all I want is a chance to get away, to take care of the baby. If you'll just leave me alone so I can get to the junction, I swear I won't make any trouble for you. We're going to see that you reach the junction safely, Mrs. Mason. And then we're going to see what can be done to make Scar Mac pay for what he's done to you. Believe me, I'm not a member of his gang. You talk different. Yeah, let me hold that little fella. He's looking at you. Hello there. What? I declare he likes you. The train's coming, Mrs. Mason. Before it stops, please tell me what happened at your ranch. Well, Scar Mac's gang came just after dark. They wanted horses. Jim wouldn't sell them. Then they got angry and they... they shot Jim. Then they drove off the horses. I see. They set fire to the house. I ran out the back door with the baby. Here's the train. It's alive. It's hello, Mrs. Mason. Good. Who's that with you, ma'am? Well, it's the masked man again. Are you sure covering ground? Yes, Mrs. Mason. See that she reaches a junction with her son. Yes, sure, but Springfield is closer than the junction. I must get to the junction. Do you catch an eastbound? Scar Mac's gang is attacked. What's this about Scar attacking? You better get back on the train, Linda.  Well, Sally Mason, you look real tired. Here, let me help you with the little guy. Come on, I'll help you a little. That's real nice. Well, stranger, where do you and the Indian figure to go from here? We're going to try to find Scar Mac's gang and square things for Mason. I figured on getting a horse from Mason. He's dead. He's dead? His house is burned and his horse is stolen. Come on, how long are we going to do this? Very, very long.  Come on. The lone ranger and tonto left the railroad tracks and went to the Mason ranch, where the fine house had been reduced to smoldering embers. Meanwhile, the train with Sally and her child on board got underway and continued through the night. Anson held the iron horse right on schedule and brought the train to a stop in Springville on the following morning. Then the loading of cattle began. The lone ranger and tonto had picked up the trail of Scar Mac's gang and followed it deep into the hills. At noon, the two rained up beside the remains of a campfire. Oh, sir. Oh, sir. Oh, sir. Very big fellow. How old were those ashes, tonto? Maybe four, five hour. That's what I've judged. The tracks continue over that way. Ah, let me see them. Scar must have at least 20 men on his outfit. Ah, we've got plenty big job ahead. Yeah, bigger than I expected. You notice the direction of those tracks? Ah, and starting different direction. Yes, there was a change in direction a half mile back. Tonto, those men are circling back toward the railroad tracks. They're going after the goal on that train. Well, some high overhead. It's about noon. Train's still in town of Springville. Let's hope the cattle loading isn't finished ahead of time. Come on, tonto. We're going to Springville.  The morning had been a long one for Sally Mason and her son, as well as for Linda, who was in the same car, waiting for the cattle to be taken aboard the train. Linda finally broke a long period of silence. Look, Mrs. Mason, I've got to speak my piece. I've got to. That's all, whether you like it or not. What? What is it? You ought to get off this train right here in Springville. What? Well, you're tired, so is the baby.  But I've no place to go. I bet that man ahead can fix that. Galloway, come here. At your service, ma'am. Look, Galloway, you know a lot of people. Can't you fix it for Mrs. Mason to stay with someone here in Springville? Well, I... Please don't bother. I'll have a friend on board the train to the junction. Charlie Bates will be on the train. Bates? He owns the cattle that's been put aboard. Oh, it looks like he's coming aboard right now. Is that him? Oh, yes. Well, hello, Sally. I heard you were aboard. Hello, Charlie. I heard about last night. I'm down right sorry. Why don't you persuade her to get off this train? Huh? And get off with her. Get off?  What's eating you, Linda? Forget I spoke. Everyone else said you're ready to get underway. You folks all go into the junction. If not, this is the time to get off the train. Oh, sir. Oh, sir. Linda, what in the world? I'm supposed to get them up, boys. What was that? Let's go, Mac. Let's go. And I'm the cookie that'll deal with you. Well, let Bates breathe. Linda, you will show up at Galloway. What? Oh! Sally, tell me. But you shouldn't pull a sneak gun. Good work, Anson. That's nice shooting. Anson, you working with Scar? That's right, Sally. And the show is Linda. She's holding a gun on me. And I can use it, too, so don't move fast, Bates. Linda, Anson, both of you working with Scar, Mac. Surprise, dear Mrs. Macie. You murderer. Aren't you ever satisfied? If this don't beat all. Scar, you'd better see if Bates has any extra guns or knives. Good idea, Linda. Sorry about this, Sally. Well, I did all I could to get you off this train. Don't speak to me. How about ropes? Think we better rope these customers, Scar? Tie Bates and Galloway to tough customers. I don't think we'll have to tie the lady. She's got her hands full with that crying young one. The curtain falls on the first act of our Lone Ranger story. Before the next exciting scenes, please permit us to pause for just a few moments. To our story, Bill Galloway and Charlie Bates were tightly tied on the train that chudged slowly through the hills during the long hours of the afternoon. They, as well as Sally Mason, were closely watched by Scar, Mac and his helpers, Linda from the dance hall, and Anson, the conductor. Meanwhile, the Lone Ranger and Tonto took a shortcut to bring them to the tracks ahead of the train. They permitted their horses to pick their own gate on a long uphill grade. Not far from the junction, Tonto. Not right. We've plenty close to railroad tracks. Must be just beyond these woods. Sure, we're ahead of the train. Right up, who's in there for you? We'll look around before we start downhill. There, railroad tracks. You see them? Yes, and I see something else. Look where I'm pointing. Ah, smoke. Campfire, Tonto. I think that's where Scar, Mac's gang is waiting. We go get Sheriff? Posse? We'll have to make sure that's the gang, and the Scar is with the men. Yeah, plenty dangerous. Go close to camp. That may not be necessary. What do you mean? They're waiting for the train. They'll have a guard posted near the railroad. We capture guard? We can. We might be able to make him call. Ah, come on, we'll circle south. Come, Scout, come on. Come on, it's so easy. Close to the railroad. There he is, Tonto. Leave the horses here. Silver. Silver and Scout, not Mac's no way. They keep the cover of the trees. He'll not see us. So almost dark, we'll be careful. Camps less than a hundred yards away.  I'm going to care for you. Hurry up. Quick, Tonto. Go back to that gaggy man. We'll get him away. Fix him. Hurry up with you. You're riding with me. No, no. You ready, Tonto? Is it easy, Silver? You ready. Come on, Silver. Come on, Scout. Now talk. No, no. Oh, no. Now talk. Please, please, Mr. This won't work. I'll take you to the Sheriff to hang Formation's murder. No, no. I didn't shoot him. Now you've started talk some more. Where's Mac? Is he with the others in that camp? No, he's supposed to be on that train. He was getting on board a Springville. Maybe him stealing gold alone? He couldn't. He was too heavy to handle. Well, let me go back to the boys. I've talked like he wanted. Oh, no, you haven't. I've told you all I know. I doubt that. Where's the holdup to take place? Where?  I'm not making any promises. Where's the holdup to be? You're a hard man to deal with. I can get harder. You can see the place from here. Yes. Right over there, at the top of the hill. The train will be slow to walk in speed by the time she gets there. And the boys figured it would be easy to climb aboard. Thanks. Now, Toto, we can move. You go to Junction. Right away. I'll bring the Sheriff and the Posse back. Now surround the gang and catch them in the act. What about me? You're coming with me. You stay here, Toto. I'm some cover about halfway up the grade. There's a chance that I won't be able to make it before the train reaches here. You'll make it all right. It's getting late. Watch for the train. And if we haven't returned, warn the engineer before he gets to the top. Uh-huh. I'm going to wait for you. Into the saddle. You... Listen, I didn't have anything to do with you. All right. Halfway up the grade, Toto. Set it up. Be savvy. Come on. Move it. How much longer before we get to the big grade, ain't it? 15 minutes. You know, a guy I had been wondering about those two men and a woman. What do we do with them?  I got it all worked out. Why not just let them go? Not on your life. You're going to take them with us? You'll have to take the engineer and the fireman, Linda. What if you use a gun on them? I'd like to do without gunfire on this deal. The top of the hill is pretty close to the junction. They might hear the shots. All right. We take the engineer and the fireman with us. But there's the baby. What about him? I told you I had it figured out. You're not going to hurt him. Look, right now we get the gold out of this car and onto the roof of the next one. What for? Because halfway up the grade, the coupling on this caboose is going to be uncoupled. It'll roll down the hill and smash up. We'll get rid of the woman and the two men without firing a shot. No. Shut up. There's no need for them to know what's going to happen till it does. Sounds good to me. But we better start for that box right now. But listen, what about the baby? Linda, you've been a lot of help on this job, and I don't spoil it. It's murder. And you said there wouldn't be any killer. There wasn't supposed to be anybody riding the train. I won't let you. Hey, Linda. Hold it. Don't draw. Linda, put that gun down. What's the idea? I thought I'd wait until the whole gang could be caught, but I'm not going to be a party to murder. You're going to local.  You were local to trust me. Do you know who I am, Scar? Look at me. Don't I remind you of somebody? Scar. Quiet. Harvey Ashland, Scar. I'm Harvey Ashland's sister. I was in the East when you killed him. You never saw me, but when I got back here, I swore that you'd pay for his death. That was over a year ago. I've been looking for you ever since, but it wasn't until I hit the cafe that I got my chance. You like to talk, don't you? I want you to know why I'm shooting you. My gosh, Harvey, shot him in the back, but this is going to be face-to-face. Linda, look out for Anson. What? Drop that gun. Oh, my wrist. Don't let go. Steady, Mrs. Mason. You haven't got me yet. Hang on to Linda. Fix it. Oh. That'll hold it.  Don't worry, Mrs. Mason. You won't get knocked out like that. You just need a few ropes to make you behave. Go ahead. Kill us.  Come along before the grade, Anson. It'll make the curve in five minutes. It will start to climb. So Linda turned out to be a double cross. Well, for that she can ride downhill with the others. When Linda regained consciousness, she found herself tightly bound in the seat beside Sally Mason and the baby, which mercifully was asleep. Bates and Bill Galloway both tied hand and foot on facing chairs. Linda, are you all right? Head tied. Yeah, they're all in the same boat, Linda. They saw how you tried to save us, Linda. Where are those cooks? Anson and Skye moved the gold to the car head. Yeah, they want the gold to crash down the hill with the rest of us. If I could only get my hands free. No use trying, Linda. They've done a complete job of these ropes. We're starting up hill. It won't be long now. They're now, Billy. Poor kid. He won't get it for a long time. And I can't even hold him. Oh, Billy. Billy, why didn't you stay asleep? Whoa, pose over, boy. Did you get the shellet, Kimusami? Yes. He's wearing with his mouth at the top of the hill. He'll close in when the outlaws make a tack? Yes. Train down there. It'll come up hill. Plenty slow. Yes, I see it. It'll soon get here. Then outlaw make moves. Tutto, look at that train. You see, the caboose is detached. That's where people ride. It's slow. Tutto, it will coast downhill. It'll go plenty fast at bottom. Follow me, Tutto. Let's move it up. Come. The masked man grasped the situation in an instant and healed the muddy silver to top speed. Scar and Ensign saw him pass. The lone ranger ignored the shots they fired in his direction. He bent low over the saddle, riding parallel to the tracks to overtake the disconnected caboose. The caboose had slowed to a stop on the uphill grade and rolling backwards, carrying the helpless occupants to certain death. Roll silver! Silver seemed to know that split seconds were important. The muddy stallion overtook the rolling car. The masked man guided silver close enough to reach out and grasp an iron railing. Roll the silver. Plenty more. Here I go. He pulled himself in the saddle. Then he was aboard the caboose, prepared to share the fate of the others and he failed to stop the coasting car. In an instant he was at the break complying it with all his strength. If I could only hold my baby and my arm was only free to hold him. Sally, Sally, someone's applying the break. No, no, I can't believe it. But it's true, look out the window. We're slowing down. It's that masked man that got aboard. We are slowing down.  The break is holding. Whoever that masked man is, he's going to save us. Look, Sally, look. I can't believe it. We're stopping. We sure are. Sally, Sally, we're saved. There you are. Your hands are free. I'll untie the ropes on Galloway. Turn around here, Bill. A few minutes ago I didn't expect to live to see these ropes taken off. There, Sally, now you're free.  Oh, dear, darling, it's all right. There you are, Bates. I don't know how you did it, mister, but we're sure obliged to you. I'd have been willing to die if it had meant the end of Scarmac. I think Scarmac has reached the end of his trail without your death. There, the sheriff. Yes, Sheriff.  He was going to steal the gold. Hold everything, Bates. We know all about Scarmac and his plans. We met the whole gang at the top of the hill. Met them. More than that, we took them. Hey, I want to see that masked man that's going out the other end. He's the one that you can thank for being alive right now. Well, there he is out there. His Indian friend has met him. Well, that settles it. The man's got to work awful fast if he hopes to thank the Lone Ranger. What you have just heard is a copyrighted feature of the Lone Ranger Incorporated.