Three episodes in we're already dipping into the fruity drinks. Oh, yeah, it's that kind of day That's a hot mug guys Hey guys This is my review for episode three of supernatural season six the third man And I actually kind of like this episode despite the fact that it's still quite Disorganized in terms of what the overall direction of the season is this episode finds Sam and Dean finally working together As one Dean has gone off from Lisa and Ben They're waiting for him to come back and some foolhardy writing there out for a walk Bitch and then in this episode we actually change the perspective almost completely instead of focusing on the monsters are this whole Monster hunt thing that was the first two episodes this one deals with the plagues of Moses Yeah, it's a bit of a leap It actually does set up a side storyline that possibly you're a little bit more interested in Castiel finally returns After seeing a gentleman fall apart into a literal Splitting of blood on the floor while another guy dies by having boils completely Absorb his body and then another dude scratches his head so much that locusts come out of it all of it connected to kind of this really flimsy revenge of these cops Framing this kid who they killed thinking about it now how nonchalantly they throw that in is like whoa But that does equate again to the comment I made about how this episode is very disorganized is you've got like six different plot points going on in this episode before things really start to kind of Forge down to the narrow at the end of the episode with Castiel Meeting up with his old buddy Balthazar who has apparently stolen a lot of these weapons from heaven once the civil war started and then Raphael making an appearance with him almost killing Castiel to have Balthazar turn him into salt and on top of all of that Dean is noticing Sam's lacking humanity when he full-on willingly lets Castiel Sort of torture a kid to eventually find out where this soul pack that was made which by the way the kid's soul His soul to Balthazar as well There's so much bloody happening this episode that I could forgive you to forget that there's Actually probably one of the most dangerous and probably one of the coolest stunts Supernatural ever did Castiel is fighting with this angel and they full-on triple indie out of the what looks like the fifth floor In a building in Vancouver and what's so strange is it's really hard to find any clip about this I found this really bad promo, which is terrible apologies for the quality But this is the best I could find of anything I couldn't find stills about it I couldn't find photos about it on top of all of that There's actually a lot of effort done behind the camera There's a lot more varying camera angles that we're used to we're seeing the cool tricks with Castiel moving about And this is an episode directed by Robert Singer when he still had The want to do anything besides standard blocking and that's something that I'm actually kind of curious is to see when that starts to Transition over if there's anything that's gonna keep me watching the show besides the boys and the humor and everything about that It's also just seeing how the camera work was done in these five seasons Because I actually don't really know what was done with whether they started to go over to that lazy kind of side Maybe that was actually what kept me going aside from just watching Supernatural for the sake of watching Supernatural So yeah, there's a lot of good in this episode. There's a lot of disorganized bad There's a lot of what on earth is actually happening The episode ends with the boys being as just as confused about Castiel's intentions as we are about the intentions of this season The third man has some cool fights. It has some cool moments I really like the introduction to Balthazar He's gonna become a kind of a key character in this season and he's definitely gonna be kind of a side replacement for Gabriel I also kept on thinking this was Gordon Ramsey's Brother or something because he does have a bit of similarities, but overall the third man is fun Disorganized but it does have good intentions and it does set up a storyline with the whole civil war between the angels that you actually are Far more interested in to an extent than other stuff But the direction of season 6 is still in the cosmos. It's still trying to be found And hopefully as we continue on that maybe starts to kind of pick up a little bit But in the end I'm gonna give the third man a four out of seven. I thought it would be fun to give the three But I'm not gonna go there. It's got a fantastic stunt sequence It's got some cool moments here and there but it jumps from event to event so quickly that Whatever happened three moments ago doesn't matter at the point of when it gets to like the fifth thing in the Ten line of things that happen in this episode, but I ask you guys for your comments about this episode So let's read those off this episode has a really good use of cast DL He just blips around and is slightly colder to the boys in the last season I think that works better than him just coming to them at every call Palthasar is an interesting character that I wish stayed longer But he does do a lot of stealing the scene with heavens weapons and one that's cool idea Even though it's barely mentioned Sam and Dean are actually quite dismissive of him of his whole civil war in heaven Which is really actually kind of dumb because you would think that they would be hell hands-on deck because Raphael wants to you know Restart the apocalypse overall solid episode five out of seven. Yeah I do find that they are quite dismissive about the fact that there is a literal Apocalypse restart party trying to happen and they don't do anything about it They're they're very very selfish probably one of the hardest seasons to watch especially from for fans of Dean Because he's just such a selfish prick the start of soul of Sam was a lot of fun But Dean should have caught on very quickly that Sam was not Sam when Sam was totally okay with the whole cast Starting the kid in this in this soul thing Dean should have been like dope That's not my brother to be fair He did come back from the cage and that would change a person cough off Adam cough cough Castiel got his own show to handle with the whole heavenly business Raphael was underused and is he is also an Archangel but this episode to bring us Balthazar the Civil War pretty much happened entirely off camera And even if it had been the focus of the season There was really nothing that Sam and Dean could have done about it and to be honest I'm sure but as we'll see as the show goes on maybe but I do find it quite strange that There is this entire Civil War element that they don't even talk about and it's like I've said before I think they just did not have any idea what they were doing the one thing I absolutely love about this episode is Balthazar absolutely loved him He reminds me a little bit of Gabriel Sebastian did a great job playing him He was so right Castiel still had to stick up his butt. I'm glad he decided to help Castiel deal with Raphael He's one of my favorite angels on the show right next to Castiel sucks at the only had run one season though Yeah, I'm actually always surprised that he is only in one season for some reason thought he was in season seven But as we'll find out that's not the case the third man one of the better episodes this season the end the introduction of Balthazar possibly one of the best angels in the entire series He's like an angel version of Crowley out of all the characters. They brought back in the latter seasons. Why not this guy? I'll be honest. I don't know either I sure everyone dies and then just comes back But maybe they couldn't get the actor back, but I really did like him I was kind of hoping that Balthazar would stick around the third man once again proves that the show Continues onward with unique ideas and also the camera work is really fun upon rewatch Balthazar always felt like a mix between Gabriel and Bella Talbot But still is and a nice to see an angel that isn't robotic as they often are in Supernatural hearing cast say there is no other way Really harkens back to Zachariah Saying that there is no other way to stop Lucifer and you can see Castiel reverts into his soldier mentality the angelic Civil war makes perfect sense after season 5's ending overall It's an entertaining episode with some great special effects and another piece of the puzzle in the narrative mystery element This season is slowly built putting together. Definitely agree with you that they're putting pieces together But I don't think they're matching beginning is something of that of children trying to smash pieces together I've always preferred episodes that address the larger arcs in the bigger picture Supernatural inch towards the apocalypse revealing a deeper darker looming evil That revealed itself by the close of season one the first two episodes of season six focus on the vengeful Jens and the shape-shifting baby seems so Relevantly insignificant and yet clearly something was going on boom along comes the third man with post apocalyptic war in heaven Sam's obvious and disturbing lack of morality. I love the way the season reveals and develops the bigger problem Additionally balthazar and Raphael are brilliant characters. I wouldn't say Raphael is really a good character I like the guy who plays him. I find that Raphael is just so monotonal boner boring as this show goes on as the season goes on it does Start to form better and the third man is one of the better episodes for that I got a point out of correction here the Andrew pointed out of grandpa was a Campbell Mary's father not Winchester who we mean the letter season Samuel Campbell's Sam was named after Dean That after him and Dean was named after Mary's mother who was also a hunter named Deanna I did not actually know that so thank you for pointing that out Andra after two slow episodes the season finally gets it back on track It feels like earlier seasons the boys playing feds turn the angels debate on whether there was something wrong with Sam They ever lingering Questions over one of the brothers experiences in hell while this wasn't in Lin's most memorable episode This was his trademark goriness as well as some awesome one-liners such a great episodes except seven I it actually is quite nice to see him in this episode. I am kind of curious of when he stops kind of Contributing but I think that wasn't until like season 10 to correct me if I'm wrong yet another boring episode Yes, balthazar is in it But so what it wastes the premise of the angelic civil war in favor of some more weird monsters And that is the problem with Sarah Gamble. She just wants weird monsters doing weird things like the magicians I would guess that's the show. I'm sorry But for once I actually agree with Robert singer weird monsters is not enough for the show after it tackled the apocalypse Aside from balthas are the only notable thing about this episode is the Jill Valentine is a no joke Sam Hooker is the original model they used for Jill Valentine the resident evil games The more you know a guest thought that you were meaning about the Jill Valentine in the resident evil movies Not the model from the video games. That's awesome. I did not know that. Thank you All right. Well, thank you guys for your comments and now we've got weekend at Bobby's This is the first episode that Jensen Ackles would ever direct for the show and if the production Style of it was correct to me. This was actually the first episode they shot That was what happened with all of the other episodes that Jensen ever shot and his episodes would usually take priority Because he was new to it and they wanted to give him as much effort as he could which kind of actually does explain Why the first episode is so middling because a lot of effort was put into this episode So give me guys his comments about that episode and I'll read those off in the next review And the other thing I was gonna make a comment about is since 2011 didn't really have the want for a ton of jpegs to be over A thousand a lot of these photos are from IMDB that which are only 500 by whatever so they're not the greatest equality So I am going to try and figure out a means in which to combat this because I fear that just from a visual Perspective. I'm already kind of boring enough as it is I don't want to bore you guys and grown you all with really grainy images So I'm gonna try and figure out how to go about that. Anyways, that's all for me guys I'll see you for the next one


Looking for soccer agility drills. This is the video for you I'll show you some realistic agility drills drills You can do with a speed ladder as well as a home workout. You don't even need a ladder You can do things like this Working on a line Okay, but actually forcing your feet to go faster than they're used to I'll just do different exercises I'd usually go through it really quick. Maybe it only take me like three minutes But doing this daily makes me a lot sharper. So singles Doubles focus on the arm movement Just as much as the feet sideways To slalom And when you get tired, it's so easy just to give up and go slower. That's when you need to push the most These are gonna be struggling in the beginning. They're gonna make your feet feel really heavy. You're gonna feel out of shape. This is good Fitness good stamina as well Another one I might do Pour it back. Okay, but adding some form of agility training to your soccer training It's gonna make you a better athlete I will send the better in one day soccer blueprint to anyone who comments hashtag soccer on this video Fast footwork drills are great, but you need to be practicing match realistic movements Here are some soccer agility drills that you can use on a pitch with a little bit of space to practice some movements In a real match crew faster and achieve more this season use the soccer success planner It's 100% free players all around the world have already used it to improve. You can download it right now There's a link in the description below No excuses if you can't get to a field There is no reason you cannot improve your agility at home try out this very basic Soccer agility at-home workout and I promise your feet will be faster with all these things the most important thing is Consistency you can't do agility drills once a week and expect it to make a difference in the way that you play But if you are consistent with your training do maybe five minutes every single day for a week I promise you will feel faster more explosive and a better soccer player I used to be a huge underachiever, but through obsessive self-improvement. I found my success Earned a college scholarship played for my national futsal team a YouTube channel with over 100 million views I've helped players worldwide and I'd love to help you improve faster and achieve more From moving up divisions to making national teams players who use the online soccer Academy get results Access elite level coaching and training become a complete player Make a difference on the field and get noticed when you play limited spots available apply today Start improving tomorrow link in the description below


Hey friends and welcome to my channel. Thank you all so much for stopping by I'd like to first say thank you to all my new subscribers Thank you for being interested in the content that I'm creating and just following me as I go along this journey of budgeting and Newly to planning. So let's jump right in no long Entry so we will go over last week this week really quickly So this week You all know if you're new to my channel. I'm a hairstylist. I get paid daily by cash or Cash app or credit card. We're happy. I'm also Sometimes a makeup artist sometimes a nail technician. I was doing pure romance I'm no longer doing that but I got paid from pure romance this past week with some things that I sold it to get Rid of out of my collection and I track my money daily and my tips daily in my everyday carry This is my everyday carry, which is a Michaels recollection at the moment I may be switching over to happy planner, but I do kind of like my a5. So We're gonna get started with some totals. I haven't been using my little note sheet And that's what I think is kind of messing me up as far as budget wise. So this is the second week I did not use a cheat sheet and for those who are new my cheat sheet Let's go back some because I haven't used it in quite some time My cheat sheet is basically every day I write down my totals and then I took that out. So Let me get to it so I can Show you all I hope I didn't lose it. Okay. Here's a cheat sheet Basically every day Monday through Saturday basically are days that I work And I just write down my income and my tips at the end of the week. I take it out Do my totals and then I add them to my budget planner. So I Add that bow back later. So here we are in this week Well last week and now what I have to do is go day by day So for the total so one basically Monday was $90 I did not work Tuesday Wednesday was $80 because I made 20 from pure romance and then 60 from hair. So I'm just put That Thursday, I made two hundred and thirty dollars Friday I made I Didn't write down my total for Friday. I Did not So now I have to do that. See this is what happens So I'm glad that I make mistakes so that you all can see that I'm not perfect I'm human and I'm just trying to get my budget together So I didn't get a total for Saturday. I mean Friday, but we're basically at 715 I'll go back and do that total so that I can tell you Saturday Friday's total and then Saturday Did not do another total. Let's do the total You know what? Let me just start over Let me do Friday's total right quick Just for my own sanity and that I can write it in I can see so Friday the total was 315 and I really I mean if someone out there who's a hair stylist employee and that is watching because I know There are hairstylists who are planners Also waitresses things like that Who get paid cash daily and who are trying to basically You know plan their life out and what have you They understand the struggle that is so I can't keep saying so hard, but it's not easy. I Thought it was 400 for Saturday. I wasn't positive. It's not easy making cash every day So I'm gonna work backwards. So Saturday was $400. See this is why I need my cheat sheet So Saturday was $400. So then Friday was 315. Oh Darn it now. I gotta add a dollar Thursday was 230. Oh Pretty good $80 on Wednesday And $90 on Monday Wow, so the total for the week was week three. Okay 1000 here I didn't include Pyrrho mans So Pyrrho mans, I didn't estimate anything. I made $20 off of that So all I need to do is take $20 from this 1125 105 quick math So I was actually I guesstimated a thousand on the third week and I was I'm hitting at home I'm getting real real close. So I gotta go back. I don't even know if I did actual What I did make $33 and 60 cent on posh last week Actually, it really showed up this week But I'ma leave it on Week four because it started to generate on week two So we were up basically a hundred and five dollars and Then here we were up 20 because I hadn't expected anything from Pyrrho mans. So In last week, I think we were on the money With I have to look at the video. That's a shame I'ma do a quick add of last week since we you know, we're gonna go ahead and do last week as well So we made 455 on Saturday last week Friday, I Don't think I didn't make any money Friday Thursday was $70 120 on Wednesday Had a date they would hubby Tuesday, so I mean 645. Yep, that was correct 645. So I didn't even make the 800. So that might have been my little Speel so let's Subtract the 800 from 645 So we were minus 155 And I think I had cancellations or something last week. So I just wasn't really in a great case base. So anyway Last week the only thing I paid. I think that was it the reason I was a little upset was because the only thing I paid last week was Let's see when we do Did I pick hard note wait a minute, I'm so confused Wait a minute Here it is. I'm so sorry y'all So sorry last week was the first week my goodness Now we got to do everything all over So you know what we really made more I Kept trying to figure out why this was like this See mistakes happening. Oh, I don't know how to fix this So I found some more Tape so posh was on this week. That's why I added it. So now we got a I have another one of those other tapes, but I'm not gonna get frustrated. I don't get frustrated So last week, this is what happened I did write it down because I did the video So I made 645 so I was up $45. So you think I'd have been you know, a little excited about that I'm thinking it was this week. So I did make posh. That's what it was this week posh and then pure romance So I had three incomes this week and like I said, I'm no longer doing pure romance, but um, I'm selling off some of the things that I have so And I actually made $1,105 So I was up now. We gotta rip out the calculator again because we had that all wrong. So $1,105 subtract 800 Was 305. So I was up 305. That's great um actual Well, I put estimated that wasn't supposed to go there. That was supposed to be 33 60 20 White out to the rescue again Zero I I hate white out when it comes stuff like this. It is going to drive me crazy So I was up $33 and 60 cents as far as posh mark and pure romance. I was up 20 So my totals were 105 plus 33 60 plus 20 equals 1000 I'm right in the wrong place. I'm just off today this spirit Where was I so I wasn't expecting to make so we made the total was 1000 $158 and 60 cents So let's see where that money went this week. I know that I paid a car note. Let's go back Hold this up move it out So last week I paid schedule. Let's see. Oh, and then I went in and put What came out my Etsy payment came out on monday Something else I put the sticker here for something else came out, but my Etsy payment came out Uh, matter of fact, what did I pay? I need another bill to sticker I'm gonna use a flag Because I paid the cell phone bill I ended up paying the cell phone bill on saturday, but I'm gonna put it here on friday I paid that yesterday I'm gonna put the date my victoria secrets bill and I paid 27 dollars You are the balance is so low, but I just keep fooling with this thing. I don't know why so I did pay my car note I did not pay a sale bill This week should have I didn't buy any products this week or did I I know I did I think about one thing I think I did. No, I guess I did. I think it was like 10 dollars Um got paid from posh. So here I put in the payday sticker whenever time I get paid That's the only time I use my payday stickers when I am paid through something else like posh Uh anything else 1299 to amazon so that came out on sunday which tripped me out And then something came out on saturday that I wasn't expecting the etsy payment and it was something else I can't remember what it was, but I did get a card note and my half of my card note is 181 60 And then I have another one coming out this week Coming so that's what I paid this week. Let's flip over What I got paid and what I paid Uh, let's see I did prepare booth rent. Sorry about that. I paid a booth rent as well I paid half of a car note Um car insurance is due on the 28th Weebly I didn't pay Jim. I didn't pay products So so far I only spent 10 dollars of my 200 dollar balance for products Victoria's Secret I have budgeted 50 dollars. I've spent 27 dollars And I may have to come back in and because I want to go ahead and pay that off because I think I do Have like a 50. I had a 55 dollar balance. So to 27 dollar payments to pay it off But I'm going to hit that off for the rest of the month. So I'll come back in I'm just going to put down the date here with was today's dutch That was yesterday the 13th and so I'm gonna split that up So the next time I make a payment, I'll put it here Uh gas can I get gas this week? I did get gas and I spent I don't know which day I got gas. I think I got gas on Wednesday I'll use another flag sticker And I spent really too much 36 dollars gases went up And I don't like to spend 36 dollars on gas. I'm cheap. So And I have like a little mini truck. I don't have like a big truck So but I there was a time when I had a big truck and I was spending 60 70 dollars So whenever I could spend less, I'm gonna put another mark through here And I spent 36 dollars. Okay Um aflac. I paid aflac this week. I forgot about that So I paid them. I paid that yesterday And I think yeah, I paid aflac yesterday There you go Oh and the total I had right in my total was 1150 You know what you guys if you've been following me, you know that my goal is to make 1200 dollars a week We were very very close. I don't know why I don't have that over here in the goal section We'll put it over here But that's supposed to be from here And there's a video finishing up Okay, what else gym membership didn't come out victoria secrets. I paid that aflac Mr. Lane is eating out. This is my issue. Okay, this is my issue and um one day I'm just gonna do a video basically on me um How I'm gonna rear in my budget and be able to pay myself on Saturday and I kind of got a idea So this week I tried writing some of it down, but you guys I know I spent A good hundred and twenty dollars eating out I'm gonna put a slash to that because the month isn't over Cell phone bill. I didn't pay that yet. I need to hit it up with something and say I could have taken care of it It's just crazy Savings. Oh my god. Let's not talk about it. I haven't saved anything. It doesn't make sense I'm just trying to figure out how can I Pay myself And get through and everything extra I pay bills and pay stuff off So this was this week's budget very Not necessarily challenging Money-wise it was great and especially with my other little sources of income Which as you can see my other sources of income. I'm not getting rich off of I'm not So that's why I have to continue to stand on my feet and do hair And um to show you guys how I'm managing that which I'm not managing it. Well, I can honestly say I'm not managing it well so also I want to talk about sinking funds too because I have a sinking funds. I've added that to my budget now And um, I'm going to start implementing it and I remember I don't know if I told you guys if you remember, excuse me That um, I was doing the um cash envelopes, but I stopped because I was going into the cash envelopes well, I'm thinking I'm going to bring cash envelopes back because Then when I did go into my cash envelopes to Basically take the money out and just spend it on whatever I had pretty decent amount of money in there to just Blow and I use it all pretty much on craft supplies and Planner stuff, but that's not what it was for But I did have a decent amount of money in there if I had kept that up, you know So I'm going back to sinking funds and cash envelopes because I think for someone like myself who is self-employed That that will definitely definitely help me because like now um, if you saw my other video, I've been trying to make a dentist appointment with a dentist with my low dental insurance And they're not answering and I've been the dentist that I like She uh charges like $200 for a cleaning. She's well worth the $200 trust me and I want to go back to her She doesn't take my insurance.  So we're next week We have estimated a thousand and I think we're going to hit the 1200 mark because next week is well This coming week is Easter, which is week three and that's when one of those times I'm busy And then when we get into week four, it kind of slows down and I did not account for there being another week five in april so Back to that. So thank you all so much for watching and budgeting with me Um, we're going to get this budget together. We're going to get it in control. I promise you I'm going to get a handle on these finances. I have to I really have to um, I was watching elaine michelle's video I'm not going to keep you guys But I was watching elaine michelle's video the other day and like you get Basically of how I think um, I can't remember the name of the video But if you follow elaine michelle, you you know the video that i'm speaking of But basically you get tired of being sick and tired You get tired of not having what you need and when I hear and spending frivolously on things that you kind of don't need So like I've been buying, you know planner stuff like I really want to just go buy a bunch of planners I don't know why But I have got to speak some sense to myself because when you get older and especially in my predicament of being self-employed I have IRAs, but I just don't pay into them. That's another thing that I'll be adding to here's my IRA I have stock that I don't Basically buy a sale trade do nothing with it. It's just sitting there. I've invested the money and just sitting there Collecting dust pretty much because I'm sure it's not gaining any money But you have to have a backup plan, you know, especially self-employed Um, if if youtube is your full-time job, you need a backup plan. You need to have some money sitting somewhere Um, just period. So I'm getting on the ball and I'm gonna I'm gonna basically just really Nail myself to the wall on this because I'm tired. I'm I'm tired. It's it's no need and no sense in me making I'm thinking it's not a lot of money But it's no need to be making this type of money and not having anything to show for it But some pretty paper and whatever and I sure it ain't even clothes. Trust me I haven't worked clothes because I can't fit anything but I need to Okay, I'm not gonna hold you guys, but thank you so much for watching and I will see you in my next video. Bye


As an emergency response agency under the Emergency Management Arrangements in the state, we're responsible for immediate animal relief and agricultural relief, and then following that we identify recovery needs and implement recovery programs. We are the peak body that represents local producers, lots of different industries on the island, a lot of advocacy, talking to government, talking to other peak bodies. As an organisation, Life Stalker Sale established in 2013, representing the sheep, cattle and goat industries, we've always had a connection since that time with PERSA representing those producers. In regard to areas of work like this such as responding to disasters, it just brings the relationship closer together. We partner with industry because they have the critical relationships with the growers in the regions. They understand their needs and then we can design programs to address the needs that our industry partners have identified. Working with industries and communities impacted is really critical to our role. Initially we work with industry on identifying short-term relief and recovery needs, things like access to fodder, access to secure water, access to fence posts to get people back to business. The Hills and Flourier Landscape Board, just like other landscape boards across the state, really I think in my view have two key partners across government, and that is the Department of Environment and Water and PERSA. And through the role that PERSA plays in the state emergency response, there was some resources through that fund that found its way into Hills and Flourier Landscape Board and we were able to roll that money out to support landholders in the recovery efforts in that landscape. It's an incredibly close partnership. PERSA is really strong on their work with landholders. We're really strong on our work with landholders. We come to it from slightly different angles. We meet in the middle. We've worked with PERSA for many years, 8KIs over 25 years old now. We've been working with PERSA the whole time, but they had really stepped up after the fires because there's a lot more work to do being half the island being lost to the fire and PERSA really wanted to help so we were able to really use those connections we already had to really make effective change and really help farmers on the ground. The relationship with PERSA began immediately after the fire. We had a conference pulled together within 48 hours I think. It was really very rapid. That relationship with them became one of constant phone calls. We were talking to them probably three or four times a day as we started to talk through what was going to be needed for our members to first of all clean up and then start thinking about how they began the very long process of recovery. As soon as the fire came through PERSA's expertise was really good. They put fab workers out there and went and called on all the farmers. PERSA and all other people investing into Kangaroo Island post bushfire the level of community need on every different angle was absolute and having two government agencies work hand in fist to deliver an outcomes focus to gender that was based on creating positive environmental, social, economic outcomes I think couldn't have been more valuable for the community. We've had the opportunity to be quite creative in how we achieve what we think are the needs of our members within this space. It's not just about recovering from the flames or recovering even from the smoke it's about building resilience ongoing. Working with PERSA has been great. We know everyone and we know what's going on the ground but we don't have the resources where a person can come in and provide those government resources. It's a really good partnership. Our strengths really work well together. From the outset I would say this was a really unique partnership. It was very clear that these were people who were coming to us and it was not a faceless government department. We knew their names straight away. They were on the phone with us. They were up at our offices. They wanted to meet our members. We're going to maintain and build on the relationships we've developed through these programs and aim to build resilience in these communities to future events. They might be bushfires but there might be other events like flooding, hailstorms and those sort of things.


Novak Djokovic again looks like he's going to be denied playing tournaments in 2023 as he was in 2022 for the most part in America. As America continued to stop unvaccinated people from coming into the country, which means Djokovic might not be able to play the US Open later in the year, but more immediately Indian Wells and Miami in March. Let's go look at the document that shows why Djokovic won't be able to get into America again in March. So here is a document from the TSA in America that shows an amendment to their rules. And the two parts to look at this is the power says requirements for proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Also the expiry date April 10, 2023, which means for any foreigners coming into America, they have to show proof of fully vaccinated status. And this rule is going to be in place until April 10, apparently. And we all know that Djokovic is not vaccinated. So he does not fall under this category, which means that until April 10, Djokovic and other unvaccinated foreigners will still not be allowed into the US. So there you have it. So that is the change to the rule. And I guess it's not really a change because it's the same thing that Djokovic had to deal with last year, but it's an extension. And we did think that Djokovic might be able to play Indian Wells in March and also Miami in March. But he won't be able to because they have played in March in April is the date that they're going to change possibly at the earliest. They're going to change that rule. But let me know down in the comments below. What do you reckon? Do you reckon Djokovic should be allowed to play in America? I mean, COVID has been around for three years now. And most countries are letting unvaccinated foreigners into the country. The Australian Open being one of those. Djokovic wasn't allowed into the country this time last year because of being unvaccinated. That's been changed now. You can come in and play. And he isn't playing actually at the moment in Adelaide. But do you think America should also let Djokovic play the events? Now, it doesn't mean that he can't play the US Open. That's a long way away. But at this stage, it looks like Djokovic won't be able to play Indian Wells in Miami that are happening in March.


Welcome to Web Usability on a Budget. How's everyone's afternoon going? Well, decently? Great. All right, good to hear. My name is Tim Thomas. I'm a senior UI consultant with HeadSpring here in Austin. And you can tweet me at Tim G. Thomas and follow or read my blog and TimGThomas.com. And today I'm going to talk to you about Web Usability on a Budget. So I like to start off by trying to ask what usability is. And unless you're actually working in some sort of usability capacity, a UX designer or one of those other similar titles, it can be very difficult to define exactly what usability is. So what I like to do instead is try to ask what's not usable? What makes software not usable? And when you talk to people that use software that they find unusable, that I would say have poor usability, they use words like frustrating. The system's not doing what I expect. I think it's going to do X and it actually does Y. I am now frustrated as a result of this. Sometimes they'll use the term intimidating. It's giving me too many options. I don't know what I'm supposed to do next. There's just too much stuff there. Sometimes they might actually call it confusing. There's too many different things to do in my normal flow for me to be able to keep track mentally of how to get from thing one to thing two and so forth. And so all of these things kind of combine to make software unusable in some capacity. So I have a question for you guys. Anyone who would like to answer what have you used in the real world and this doesn't even have to be software. It could be anything whatsoever. You have found confusing, frustrating, difficult to use, unusable. Doors? What about doors? It makes them unusable. So you get like the push plate but it says pull on it or something? Okay, fair enough. Doors. Oh yeah? Class registration. You could probably have just said class registration. I don't know if ACC's is any better or worse than any others out there. They all seem pretty terrible. Dishwashers. Tell me about dishwashers. We actually have a dishwasher at the head spring office that if you don't completely close the door, it beeps every 10, 15 seconds nonstop but nobody actually stops to push it in. They just let it keep beeping. Dishwashers are very unusable. That's true. So we can take all those and say these are things that are unusable. These have very poor usability. And so usability then would be the antithesis of all of that stuff. So think about software or dishwashers or class registration systems or doors that aren't those things. And that actually is some semblance of usability. And so what we like to hear when people are discussing software or other systems that we like to think are usable are words like pleasing. So this isn't frustrating. This is pleasing. It's fun for me to use. I enjoy using this system. Instead of intimidating, the system is inviting. It's inviting me to do something very interesting and unique and experiment around. Instead of confusing, some of these systems are very clear. It's very obvious what you're supposed to do next. Now at first, it seems like this process would be very, very difficult. And in many cases, it is. But hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll find that it's not so much if you approach it from a certain direction. So if you look at some really large projects, you'll find people that belong to different design disciplines that help with this particular process. And so here you'll hear job titles like Information Architect or User Advocate or Human Factors Engineer. And then you get the designers of every possible variety. There's visual designers. There's UI designers. There's UX designers. There's so many different job titles that there's actually a job title generator that you can go online and just say, give me what my job title should be. And it'll come up with a really nice one like Principal Mobile Front-end Design Rockstar. And so these large projects have all these different disciplines working together so that they can achieve what they call usability. But what about small projects? Well, small projects can still be usable, obviously. We all use very simple software systems throughout the day that are quite usable. But they don't have the budget for these huge disciplines. You can't hire 30 different interaction designers and user advocates to do what you want. And so what we can pull, what we can glean from these disciplines are design principles. And these principles guide these larger disciplines and help produce usable software. And of course, if you are in a small project, instead of all of those myriad of job titles, you end up with job titles like developer, maybe software developer. If you're really, really focused, you might be a web developer. But everybody always has the same sort of title. Everybody can help with this process. And everyone can use these principles to build usable software. So how we do that is similar in the manner that we would put a jigsaw puzzle together. There are procedures in place. There are certain ways that you approach jigsaw puzzles that people have kind of agreed. This is kind of a decent way to build a jigsaw puzzle. Anybody want to take a guess at what one or two might be? Alright, find the corners and edges first. Maybe before that, what might happen before that? Just get a new puzzle from the store, dump it out on the table. Put all the colors together. That's a great one. Make sure they're all face up. So we have these procedures and we can use these to build puzzles more easily until they become less of a frustrating experience. If you tried to build a puzzle upside down, it's a very interesting exercise. And if you've got kids that you want to keep entertained for a long time, tell them to try to put this puzzle together with all the pieces upside down. But we can use similar procedures while we're trying to make software usable. And so we call these usability principles. So most of today is going to be devoted to talking to you guys about usability principles, how you can use them to make your software more usable without having to break the bank hiring all these other people that can help. So one of the first things that we try to talk about when we talk about usability are of course the users. The root word of usability. Users are the only reason why any of this software exists. And so what they want to do is very, very important. It's completely the most important thing that any software could possibly do. And so the first thing that we want to try to do is focus on users' goals. And here's an example of a site that I think does that quite well. This is a tool called ZenPen for writing blog posts or anything really. There's no UI here at all. It's just this. It's just text. I can't think of a better example of really, really focusing in on user goals than this. There's nothing to get in your way. Your goal when you come to this page is to write something. You're going to write a blog post or an email or anything else. There's nothing to get in your way. Now if you read the description, you can highlight some text and then you can choose some from a list of options that appears above it. You can make things bold. You can italicize them. That sort of thing. But if you're just using it, you're literally just using the text box and your keyboard. This is the best example like I said I could find out how to focus on your user's goal. All they're going to do is type here so don't give them any other options. It just makes things confusing. Secondly, learn and use the language that your users use. In software we call this ubiquitous language if anyone reads the domain-driven design book by Eric Evans. But the term is applicable everywhere. Use the language that your users are using. For this example, there's a little bit of a guilty pleasure that I have. It's a site called Neon Mob. You can go to NeonMob.com. It's an online trading card game basically. Game actually might be a little generous. You just collect these card things. Really cool. It's got some great art to it. It's obviously visually very pleasing. One of the first things that struck me when I used this is that they actually use the word display case. It's not like cool stuff that I found here. It's actually a physical object in the real world for many people where they display these cards that they've collected. Being that this site is a virtual representation of the real world activity of collecting trading cards, they use the real world equivalent. People who collect stamps or collect anything really that lends itself to being displayed they use display cases. So NeonMob uses the word display case. It's quite nice. I really like it. Perhaps to a lesser extent, but nonetheless still important, trades. You trade cards with your friends. Same words. You could use swap perhaps. Might be a better choice in their example from my experience of collecting and trading cards. But nonetheless, it's a word that the users are likely to use. The reason that this is so important is multiple fold. First of all, when you're communicating with your users, if you say the word display case they're going to know exactly what you're talking about. If you said, well, it's actually this collection of featured items that introduces a little bit of a mismatch there. There may be assuming one thing or thinking of it a certain way because you're not quite using the same terminology that they would throughout the day. Next is minimize the cost of failure for your users. And I love GitHub for this particular reason. What I mean by minimize the cost of failure is don't punish users for accidentally doing something wrong. They're going to do something wrong. This is bound to happen. It happens every day. Don't make it a negative experience. I'm not necessarily saying make it a positive experience that they fail or do something wrong, but at least don't make it negative because that will immediately turn them off to your system. So one of the things that GitHub does, this is actually done before the user does anything negative. It's just they've got red everywhere. If you look at the rest of the GitHub site, it's gray and blue. Very nice visual design again. But the only thing that's red on this entire page that you can see here is the danger zone. Things that need to be very careful with whatever you're doing in this particular area of the site because it could go very, very wrong for you if you do something wrong. And so they've got this large banner at the top indicated by danger zone. The most visually interesting thing on the page, as soon as you go to this page, your eye goes right to the danger zone and says, oh wait, something's important here. This is also emphasized by the fact that it's red. Societal conventions say that red things are bad or we need to show caution around them, that sort of thing. Beyond that, and a little more subtle, the buttons are actually red as well while the text is. And so not only do you have nice big banner that says danger zone, very red, very important that something bad could potentially happen here, you're reinforcing that by having red buttons as well. And so everyone's here who goes to this page says, this might actually be something I should think about before I go on and make a terrible mistake like deleting this entire repository that my team and I have spent six months working on. Next are conventions. And I think conventions are very, very important and often overlooked in usability design because everyone tries to defy stereotypes. I'm going to reinvent the whole experience for web users. For most people, that's just frustrating and infuriating. You expect to see things in one location. They're not there. You have to go looking around for them. It takes extra time for people to find UI elements on your page if they're not where users kind of expect them to be. Does anybody use Stripe in here? You guys like it? Pretty cool. I love Stripe. If you're doing any sort of e-commerce, obviously this guy is kind of sucking right now. He hasn't actually sold anything. But really, really great if you're looking for any sort of e-commerce. But what I really like about it is again, good visual design, but what backs up the visual design are some conventions. The logo is in the top left. Where many logos are. If you go to Microsoft's site, Apple's site, Logo's in the top left. People expect to see the brand identity for your company in the top left. Next, navigation in the top right. There's actually two parts to this. There's sort of the site navigation and then there's your little account information there. This is where you would be seeing the log in, log out type of button. All of that's right up there. Same place as it is in many sites. You've got a search button box in the top right where search is in a lot of cases. Again, Microsoft, Apple, many of these companies have this search box in the upper right hand part of the screen. These are conventions. People expect things to be in certain locations and if they don't find them there, they can cause frustration and confusion. To continue, there's navigation down the left side. This is sort of sub-navigation. It's more contextually relevant to the part of the page that you're, the part of the site that you're looking at, I should say. But it's sub-navigation there. And of course, most obviously, you have your main content area in the center.  Maybe this search box is kind of in the same place that most search boxes are. And more importantly than that, notice if they're not there. See if you can find them very quickly. If the search box isn't in the top right, look around. Sort of mentally calculate how long did it take me to actually look around for this search box. Now put yourself in your user's shoes who are just trying to get their job done, trying to get through this whole process so they can go home at the end of the day or back to their kids or family or dinner or what have you, what might be waiting for them. And just think about how much time they might take trying to look around for these elements. Now some of them may be more important than others, logo debatable, but you know, I'm trying to log in. I'm trying to log out of this system to protect my security on a banking website. That sort of thing. Next is emphasize important parts of your site and de-emphasize things that are less frequently used. The technical term for this is actually called a nudge. So you're trying to nudge users into going a particular direction and away from something else. So I love the website Mint. I use it to do some of my financial management myself. This is actually just their home page, I believe. And it's very interesting to me the way that they have designed this. There's a lot going on, but what's one of the first things that you guys sort of focus on visually? All the devices. Okay. Very big image indicating obviously that Mint is available in a large number of form factors. Anything else that kind of catches your eye? I have a trick for you as well if you're... Nobody's going to respond. Ah, good. Free gets started. What jumps out at you about that? Funny though that maybe it's absolutely right. People are trained to say oh, free. Interesting. Or this is a different color. It must be more important. And so this is a way to emphasize certain things obviously Mint wants to emphasize the fact that you need to get started right away by clicking this nice yellow button. Now one of the neat ways, sort of tricks if you will, that I've found to sort of test this out and make sure that when I'm designing something and I want to emphasize certain parts and de-emphasize other parts, if you're just staring at the same screen all day it's impossible to tell what's emphasized and de-emphasized because you've just been looking at it for so long. And so what it can help to do, stare at the screen for a brief moment and then close your eyes. Keep them closed for 5 to 10 seconds or so and then open them and then just see what jumps out. See what the first thing is that you look at. And many times it's hopefully what I want the users to be looking at but not always. Sometimes I see oh, okay, I need to kind of adjust this a little bit. So in this particular case, absolutely right, free gets started. One of the first things that you notice and the reason is, as Jeffrey pointed out, it's colors it's got the word free in it. Free is always nice. People like seeing free. There are more subtle places in this design that have this particular approach as well. If you look at the main navigation up at the top there are two options that are just a little bit larger than the other two. What is meant and how it works. So obviously the developers of Mint.com feel that most people, more people I should say, are going to look for what is meant and how it works. A logical conclusion, that's kind of what I would want to know if I was coming to the site to begin with. Then things like find savings or community whatever that is, kind of an ambiguous term. And then finding out about the company. Maybe if you're an investor you might be interested in that. But clearly they feel that the vast majority of the people that are coming to their site are actually there to sign up first and foremost free get started. And then maybe find out what's this whole Mint thing about. I heard it from a friend or a relative. And then how does this work? How is this actually going to help me? So next I'd like to talk a little bit about symbology and icons. This is actually one of my favorite ways of adding some neat usability. I'm a very visual person.  It's really, really bad with words and names and things like that. I can however remember most symbols. And so I have found that for my part symbols are a great way to help users identify with the system and just make it a little more usable. In this case, this is the Windows Azure management portal. If anyone signed up for a Windows Azure preview account, this may actually be the default now. Or playing around with it, this is actually what you'll see. There's some neat things here. There's a lot of visual stuff going on. But obviously what I focus on first is this group of icons down the left side. Now you could probably go around the room and try to identify what all of these are. You might get some of them. I think the gear is fairly ubiquitous that this means settings. But the important thing is not quite as much that they're instantly recognizable. The point is that after you've been using the system for a little bit, you don't need to read. You can just look at the icon and say, that's the section that I need. I don't need to spend those extra mental CPU cycles reading this word, trying to figure out what it means. And nothing necessarily against Microsoft, they tends to be a little verbose with their names. Just like Visual Studio, ServicePack and Release Candidate 3, Preview 5, something or other. And so their names for these things tend to be kind of long. And icons really, really help with that, because you don't have to remember the whole word for everything. Even larger than most of those icons are that icon, which I'm fairly sure that most of us can actually guess what that does. It goes back to the previous screen. But it's another excellent use of iconography in this particular example. Everyone sort of knows, hey, that's a back button.  So we've not only on this site seen an example of a convenient factor for frequent users, people that use the system often enough to learn the icons. But some simpler actions can be performed with relatively no experience with the tool at all. Almost everybody knows, oh, okay. That's obviously going to get me back to the previous screen that I came from. So next, and this is kind of related to the nudge factor. You need to do what's called providing affordance for certain parts of your application. Affordance is kind of a technical term, but it basically boils down to the fact that affordance means how much you can actually act on something. So it's your example of a door. A doorknob has a lot of affordance. It looks like you can grab it. It's about the right size to fit in your hand. Once you grab it, it's got a nice feel to it, hopefully most doorknobs do, really help you turn it once you've been, I don't know, washing your hands or something. So in this example, Firefox's button up here in the top right has a lot of affordance. It looks like you can click on it. Looks like something's going to happen when you click on it. And this sort of thing is very, very important when you're trying to, as I said, nudge users to do a particular action within your system. Affordance can be found in a number of different ways. Firefox uses color. In many cases, you can use texture. And this is especially important if you're doing one of those Apple-style scuomorphic displays or UIs where everything actually looks like it's a real thing. So the Find Your Friends app looks like it's got some tooled leather on it. Excuse me, the Notes app in OS 10 and iOS has an actual yellow notepad as many of us probably used many years ago. And so texture and color can all work together to create this affordance and make things obvious. Hey, I can click on this. Now what you don't see is affordance in a lot of other areas of the page. Perhaps too little affordance. The center group of links says browsing made easy, high performance, advanced security. That's a little too subtle. There's not quite enough affordance there. But it is very obvious that they want you to click on this button. Maybe they think that Firefox will speak for itself and you don't necessarily have to learn very more. Depending on your browser preferences, this may be true. But affordance again, very, very important part of trying to make some software useful. Any questions about the principles that we've covered so far? It's the perception, I feel. UX professionals feel free to argue with me on that. But I certainly feel it's the perception of an item being able to be manipulative. What did you say, Nolan? Manipulativity? Yeah. Yes, exactly. You see something and it looks like it can be manipulated. It is definitely perception in that regard. Great question. Yes. Sure. There have been some very interesting ways that I've seen that particular problem solve. Probably my favorite. I have no idea why this works. But it seems to. You see little circles next to each other. It looks like, oh, I can actually touch that with my finger and drag it up and down. I can't actually remember any real-world objects that seem that way. And most affordance for software comes from affordance in the real world. You see a button so you can push it and so buttons now look like buttons. But that is one of my favorite ways of indicating that. It's obviously. You know, I'm on two minds about help text. Obviously, I think in an ideal world we wouldn't need any help text. And certainly a lot of this can help with that. And specifically, I believe I actually know the example you're talking about with Google Plus where you're dragging and dropping people. I actually don't like their help text in that regard. I think it could have been, as you say, more easily represented with something with a little affordance and make it look like I can actually drag this person from one group to another. Any other questions? So now I'd like to move on to showing a few tools, specific examples of tools that you can use to provide these principles for your own applications. One is a tool that I use fairly frequently for wireframing called wireframe.cc. It's all online. I believe that it is free to do many things with, but it's sort of a freemium model. You can pay a little bit extra and get some more features. Crazy simple to use. It's really drag and drop. Just very, very nice. I use it a lot. What I do use it for mostly is put together a little wireframe, put some dummy text on it. I don't want to spend too much time on it especially for content writing and things like that. Add some colors to things and then try the little trick of close your eyes, look at it when you open your eyes briefly and make sure that I'm emphasizing the right things and de-emphasizing other things. I might show it around to some friends and say, hey, does it look like if I were to give this to you as a UI on a web page and I wanted you to go search for something, do your perceptions of convention tell me that this search box is in the correct place or do I need to move some things around? So it's really, really good for that. I'm a huge proponent of wireframing in general. This just happens to be one of my favorite tools of the moment. I'm sure a new one will come across next week. I'll be like, wireframe.cc, that thing sucked. But right now it's awesome. Is it a way to build a template for a page? This, only in visual terms, you wouldn't actually use the artifacts that you produced from wireframe.cc to build anything. It's more like just you can use it as a reference when you're laying some things out. So specifically involving symbology and iconography, I said I really like this particular part. There's a tool that I've come to love called fontella.com. How many of you have heard of font awesome? Quite a few? Okay, cool.  In fact it includes font awesome. The benefit here is there's a lot more of them and they're all in one place. The awesome thing that fontella does for you is it allows you to select individual icons and create your own custom little font file download that and then use that in your application. I really, really like font awesome. I really, really like this collection fontella.co but they've got too many icons. I don't need that many. From a more boots on the ground perspective, I don't want to download all of that information to a browser, especially a mobile one, that I'm not actually going to turn around and then use the icon. So with fontella you get this amazing collection of icons. There must be several hundred on this site but you can pick and choose the ones that you specifically want to use for your purposes and download them as one file. A little bit in the abstract arena. If anyone has seen or heard anything about Dribble, it's a really cool website where people, designers, can put up ideas, get some feedback, share what they're working on with the community. You can actually tag your shots as they call them. It's a big basketball theme and a lot of people have tagged their shots with UX, I mean user experience. So if you want to go to dribble.com slash tags slash UX, there are a number of many examples of really decent UX. Keep the principles that we discussed in mind when you're going through some of these. It'd be a good exercise in itself just to look at them and say oh wait a second, this guy's search box is in the bottom center of the page instead of the top right. That might break some conventions there. Still an amazing site. If you just want to feel inadequate as a designer, just go to the homepage and look at what other people have been putting up on Dribble. But specifically if you're looking for some good usability examples dribble.com slash tags slash UX. Next is a site that came out a couple of months ago I think called Creative Market. There have been a number of attempts many of whom are which are successful to sell WordPress themes and custom graphics and things like that. This is another one of those. I happen to think it's got some really good UX and good high usability so I tend to gravitate toward it. If you notice it's got a logo up the top left and search up in the top right and use your account management in the far top right so it meets my convention so I'm happy. But they've got a great collection of graphics and icons and typefaces and styles and themes for your WordPress sites that will automatically lay things out in a conventional manner. Very, very affordable. In the summer as low as $3 to $5 all the way up to $15 or $20. So if you're looking for anything, excellent, excellent resource for those. Smashing Magazine is an amazing place just in general but they've got a phenomenal UX design sort of subgroup of pages. So definitely check it out. They post fairly regularly on a number of different topics. They've got quite a few for UX design so go there see if you can find anything that strikes your fancy but it's certainly a place to watch. If you're looking for doing some sort of affordance for particular buttons, I'm in love with this site. It has a large variety of fantastic photographs but beyond that they actually pull out certain colors from the photographs and share them with you as hex values. I think you can also download them if you've got a Adobe Illustrator or something like that. Great way to find, see real world examples of places where you'll have contrasting colors and things like that that these guys have kind of curated for you. So it's really, really great site. I highly suggest it. Probably more than anything else though is a simple cup of coffee. Let me explain what I mean by this. What you can do, and I haven't actually tried this, heard of people that have done it and it's an incredible concept. I love it. Go to a coffee shop with your laptop that has a demo version of your software on it. Offer to buy people coffee. Say, hey I will pay for your latte. You'll sit down with me five, ten minutes and just tell me what you think of my software. Have them go through it, have them use it, ask them questions, maybe have a couple of scripts that they can follow and say, pretend like you need to go search for a particular topic. Tell me what you're doing while you're doing this. And for the price of a cup of coffee, so like $5 somewhere around here in Austin or like $50 if you go to Starbucks, you get 15 to 20 minutes of free usability consulting from an actual user. Obviously it helps if you can find people that mimic the type of user that's likely to be using your system, but any feedback is good feedback in many of these cases. So to kind of wrap up, we started off by not really knowing exactly what usability is and so I think we've discussed how to define that a little bit. We talked about some things that words people use to describe software that's not really usable and then how that translates into words people use to describe software that is relatively useful. We talked about how design disciplines which are used in large companies can be boiled down to design principles that almost everyone can use anytime throughout the day, whatever you're working on. And then we discussed some tools that will help in that process by giving you some icons to use and some resources to read blog posts and things like that. And hopefully you find usability maybe a little less confusing now, a little less frustrating and if you've definitely learned something, then you can even go to the UX job title generator and make a new job title for yourself so you don't have to worry about software developer or whatever. So thanks very much for your time. If you would be so kind as to go to speakerrate.com and let me know how I did. I think we've got a few minutes for questions but thanks for coming.


Hi my name is Elizabeth Hale and I work for Bow Design and this is the From Earth to Us Gallery. Today we are installing a replica Blair-Morley. The main use of these rings is to keep the water out while mining. We hope you'll come and see this and lots of other exciting things with the new Canada Science and Technology Museum.


Thank you Todd for that wonderful introduction and thanks everyone for making it here.  So the idea is you want to, what I would really like to do is really talk to you about why capacity planning is important in the first place, because this is something that is often overlooked in our drive to actually roll out a whole bunch of product and feature enhancements to have happy satisfied customers. But we do neglect on this aspect of it so that's why I want to spend some time talking to you about why it's important to do this upfront and not in a reactive mode. The next thing I'll probably cover after that is what is it actually involved. So is it really something very complicated or is fairly straightforward and I'm sure I hope that by the end of this talk you'll know that it's really simple to do and anybody can do this. And the last thing I want to touch upon is basically how you can apply the learnings from your capacity planning exercise to set up auto-scaling policies for any application that you deploy in AWS. So moving on to why is capacity planning important. So I'm sure none of us want to be in that position, you know as you see a picture says a thousand words so I definitely don't want to be where this guy is at right now. So the idea is you want to have no side down times. You really want to make sure that your system is up and running and you're not scrambling to debug issues in real time with real customers waiting online for a site to come back up. So to cover more on the capacity planning benefits essentially the reason you want to do this is that it'll ensure high availability of your systems no side down times and no late nights. It also improves cost efficiencies so that you can end up with provisioning only as much as you need and maybe build in a buffer so that you're prepared for any spikes in traffic. The next thing you also want to do is it's actually really helpful for you to define upfront your SLAs and also figure out how you're going to meet them and have a proper process and plan in place. And some of the other benefits of doing a capacity planning exercise of that it really really provides very valuable inputs into your insights into your top application workflows. I'm sure all of you agree are familiar with the 90 to 10 rule wherein 90% of your customers are using 10% of your workflows. So this exercise would be one of those things which will help you drill down on those top 10 workflows and you make sure those are really fine tuned and ticking along well. And also it also helps you look at other workflows which may not be as critical but which may actually impact your top workflows. And so it helps you get a proper bird's eye view insight into your system so that you can plan well in advance. The other thing it also helps you with is understanding what is your average and what is your peak utilization. And are there any spikes in your usage patterns? How are you going to have your system scale for such spikes? And you obviously don't want to over provision your system so you know you only over provision it as much as you need to. So it'll actually help you to think about how much over provisioning do you need and how are you going to build that into your deployment systems. So that basically covers for overall the benefits that you can have from doing a capacity planning exercise. So the next step that I want to go over is what is capacity planning actually entails. So really what you want to do is I'm trying to break it down into just four high level simple steps and then we'll go over each of those steps in the subsequent slide. So at the very first you want to have a perfect environment set up which mimics your production environment to the largest extent possible. And so you're going to have to go back and understand your complement and component and deployment architectures which is always a useful thing to understand. And then you'll also start looking at once you have that environment set up you're going to actually determine what is your single host load pattern so that you can figure out what are your call distributions, what are the loads for each of those APIs or top APIs that are coming in through your site. And so that you can actually build scripts that mimic that pattern as well.  And the last thing and the last step which is actually probably the most difficult and the most important is actually analyzing your results and then extra relating those results to your production systems because whatever you run will be on a scale down performance instance or a performance environment and then you have to figure out how that actually maps to your drill world system. So that's probably the most critical part of your entire exercise and it'll also help you figure out where your SLAs are degrading and then understand what are the bottlenecks or root causes and what kind of mitigation steps you can have in place. So to move on to the first step which is the setup of the perf environment. So there are some considerations I want you to drill down on. So the point I'm trying to make here. So here I have a picture of our application and the point is I'm not going to walk you through every single component that's actually present in this system. The point I'm trying to make here is that most applications are complex. They're composed of multiple components. Some of them they're interdependencies between these components some of which your team or you will own and some of which will be downstream dependency. So it's very very important that you take a good look at your system to understand what are the downstream dependencies so that you understand what are the SLAs defined for those downstream dependencies because anything you build on top is going to be a delta over and above those downstream SLAs which have been predefined. So it's very important for you to understand that before you communicate any SLAs from your side as well. And the other thing that you also this will help you with is in understanding your component architecture is also it'll help you drill down an environment specific configurations because a common mistake that most people make when doing their capacity planning exercises is they do not understand or they have overlooked that there is a downstream environment that they have a dependency on. So you may not be editing your application configurations to point to the downstream perf environments and you may accidentally or inadvertently end up pointing to a downstream production system or a beta cluster and you're going to actually have a huge blast radius every time you run your tests and so you want to be really careful that you've actually combed through your application configuration files to make sure you're not pointing to any downstream production or beta environment so that you don't impact anybody else in the process of your testing and hopefully you'll be doing this exercise on a regular basis. So you don't want to have any recurring problems that you're introducing into the system. The other thing you want to also understand is your deployment architecture. For example, what kind of load balances do you have? What kind of policies do you have set up? Are there any service gateways? How many AWS instances do you have provision in your production system? What is the size of those? What are your caching policies? What are your database management policies? What kind of replications do you have in place? What kind of failure work do you have in place? So all these things are something you want to really understand at least to some extent up front and at least call out the gaps in your knowledge or your understanding so that you can actually pull in the requisite experts on an as needed basis.  So I actually work it into it and we until now have been using New Relic and Splunk to a large extent for monitoring the pattern and call distributions on individuals from team levels. So the idea that you want to do here is you go into New Relic and figure out what are your highest throughput top 4, 5, 10 API calls and then figure out what is the hourly, the highest throughput calls and what is the relative distribution across these APIs. And then you can move into Splunk where you look at your last 30-day peak and say that for every single API you figure out which was the peak call day and then from that day you can drill down to the peak hour, you can break down by hour and then eventually by minute so that you end up with the maximum number of requests per minute that each API is actually sending to your production systems.  So Jamie does like a commonly used tool for mimicking these distribution patterns and also building these API scripts. So a few things I want to call out here, you want to ensure that you have the right call assertions in place for error rate monitoring because as we all know a response of 200 is not necessarily indicator of success. So you want to actually have the right assertions in place to make sure that the API response actually contains the data that you are expecting and you want to have assertions in place for that as well. The other thing you also want to understand is where do you actually cap your load test, right? Where do you start and where do you stop? So a common rule of thumb is start with one X of your peak production load and then increment it linearly to 5X and maybe see how your system behaves until then and then go back and see if you still need to go up further than that. And as you're running your test you want to monitor throughput but you also want to look at metrics. For example, you can probably look at client side metrics such as your TP99 or your TP90 numbers, what are your error rates from an end-term client user perspective and also additionally you also want to look at server side metrics for example you can look at what your server side response times, what is your CPU usage, what is your memory usage, what are your thread counts at, how are they doing. These are some of the things that you can look at and one thing you can also keep an eye out as you're running your test is your AWS instance going down and a new one auto scaling so that means you've definitely reached your break point in your system. So that's something you can definitely keep an eye on. These are all the things that you might want to monitor as you're running your test. So which then brings us to what is an ideal system profile from an end user perspective. Basically you're looking at something that's a highly available system so that you don't have any side down times, you're looking at low latency so that SLAs are met, you have happy customers which are going to give you a higher NPS rating. You also look for graceful degradation under load so that you can have the proper alerting mechanisms in place to kind of see how your system is starting to keel over even before it actually does that so that you can mitigate for that. And the next thing you want to do is also make sure that there's no data corruption issues because you want to have atomic transactions so that if anything fails in an intermediate point everything rolls back. So those are the kind of considerations you want to keep from for a profile from an end user perspective. From a monitoring perspective what kind of usage profile are you looking at. So some of the key things that I mentioned were CPU usage. So are you actually seeing that your CPU usage is exceeding 50% for extended time intervals. You might want to drill down further if you're seeing something like that.  So basically you want to have a GC cycle run every three to five seconds and you don't want it to take more than 50 to 100 milliseconds. So you want to keep an eye on that as well and you're also going to have to keep an eye out for your memory consumption. Are there any spikes in usage? You want to definitely drill down on any spikes that you see coming up. And the thread allocations. Is there too much frequent context switching between your threads? Are there any deadlocks or blocks in place? So these are kind of the things that you want to be monitoring on an ongoing basis for your application. So what happens when you actually see any of these markers or these alerts. For example if you have a CPU usage which is exceeding 50% for extended time period. So basically what you're seeing here is you may need to upgrade your CPU or add more processors or you might even have to go back and fine-tune your application. If you see lots of spikes in duration of GC or the frequency you know that that's going to have an SLA impact. So you need to drill down and further look at memory utilization. Is it increasing despite GC? That means you probably have a memory leak somewhere and you're going to eventually run out of run into out of memory error. So that's something you want to keep an eye out on. And lastly you want to keep an eye out on thread allocation as well. Watch out for two frequent thread context switches. Are you seeing anything in blocked state or then you may be actually running into race conditions. So these are the some of the things the KPI that you can monitor at peak load.  You place something in place and now you have something that you're pretty satisfied with. You can actually say okay how do I actually go and extrapolate those results or those numbers from a scale down performance set up performance environment to an actual production environment. For example in my case my performance environment was a 1 AWS instance which was say maybe taking x our request processing x request per minute within SLA. So our production system had 8 AWS instances. Do we directly scale that multiply that number by 8x? Probably not. I think to be on the safer side you would probably multiply by that 666x and say that here's some assumptions that we made in our setup and in terms of caching or any other stuff. And so you want to account for those when you actually make your predictions. So in my system actually what in our application what we saw was we had a typical load of about 1.5 million requests per day which is about 300 requests per minute which is obviously not really very great. But overall we were able to process 2,500 requests per minute across the entire production application system. So the test basically indicated that the peak load is exceeded when you went above 550 or 600 requests per minute which was with a composite API mix of about the top APIs that I told you about earlier. And so that equated to a 4,400 requests per minute overall which means that our production systems are running at 56 percent capacity which is not necessarily very bad. But we also knew that we had a predictable spike. We always saw an additional spike to about this 4,500 requests per minute at very specific times and for very specific time interval. And that's where we decided that this exercise would help us in setting up some sort of autoscaling policies in AWS. So that's where this comes in. So essentially what we had is we had set up alarms to monitor for CPU usage and once that alarm is triggered we have an autoscaling policy that kicks in and basically serves up additional or scales up additional instances of AWS to meet the incoming traffic and put them into the into service so that the rest of the request the additional incoming requests are now being shared across all the systems. And one thing you want to be aware of when you set up your autoscaling policy is that you want to make sure that it actually there is some time there is a time lag between when your alarm goes off and when your scaling policy autoscaling policy kicks in and your box is actually provisioned. So you want to actually account for that delta in time so that you don't want to so if you're anticipating a peak or a spike in traffic at a particular time interval you want to have these policies and these AWS instances scaling up well before or it's not well before but at least in advance of that spike so that your system is already up and running before the spike comes to in through your website and once you do that and then you can you can do the same thing for scaling down your policies your your instances so that you're only using them on an as needed basis it's an on-demand provisioning of systems so that's where your cost efficiencies come in as well. So that's basically about all I wanted to cover. Thank you very much for your time and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thanks. Hi Lakshmi. Can you hear me? Yeah so I just wanted to ask you know how have you defined the ideal parameters for any system like you said right CPU percentage has to be less than that and all those factors. Right so I guess it depends on your application it depends on what your SLAs are so there are some standard KPIs that we always monitor like the ones that we mentioned and then if you have something specific for your application you can always start add add monitors for those as well. Hi here so so you're talking about auto scaling right so so whenever you get a yeah so whenever you have a you know a peak spike in your you know you're detected and you flex up yeah so similarly can you do have any flexed-down mechanism in place where you identify that you know a few of the boxes are not taking just lying there doing yeah yeah yeah that's that's a good point yeah actually you these auto scaling policies can be set up so that you scale up or scale down for a specific time interval as well so for our case we saw that the spike in traffic was maybe for one or two hours at some particular time in the day so after that that interval was passed we would actually scale down our systems so it's not that once you scale up you're always in that scale up mode and I think typically you know you want to balance how much of that you know micromanaging you're going to do about from the provisioning perspective you at least want to have a certain x number of boxes always up and running even if they are not being used because if you have a good distribution your SLAs your response times are going to be much faster and you will be sending a response back to your customers well within your SLAs that you've defined so so you want to kind of balance that but yes you can do both you can provision up or provision down I think that there is there is a mechanism for both as well thank you yeah right in terms of defining the KPIs and keeping them documented in a specific location so everybody can get access to it is there a specific tool or something that we use or we just maintain on excel sheets and things like that yeah that's a good question no actually we don't we don't have any tools I'm sure there are tools out there that that are probably very useful for kind of having a but what we do have is we actually have some sort of CI CD based performance suites that run which will benchmark one of your all your key APIs and publish those parameters on an ongoing basis so report gets sent out to all the key stakeholders on on every release that goes out so that way people can keep an eye and see that is the baseline being maintained and is it going degrading or getting better and they're also organizational or team goals that say that okay we're at this percent but we want to improve by maybe 10 percent in the next release so that's kind of monitoring happens on an ongoing basis but I think we don't actually use any specific tool we just have these scripts that run in a CI CD fashion so that that information is the tests are run the information is collated and it is actually published to you know to some set of stakeholders thanks okay thanks everyone okay thank you all please