what happened wow no i'm just laughing okay listen but yeah thank you i mean you're right about following your your guidance on how to go after these contracts and you mentioned about relationship relationship is key and but why do people so why do people resist why do people have the temptation to just bid and not focus on developing the relationships what do you think that is scared i don't know that's good that's a very good question i'm not sure you know i don't understand is i don't know if it might be an effort to the next steps i mean that's a very good question okay all right so but go ahead now you were saying you were uh so the sources so i came out yeah the sources saw came out and i know what i'm doing is only a small portion of what they're asking for right but according to that sources thought they're sound like they're going to be tailoring um their solicitation based off of the sources thought okay so my so i'm hoping i was wondering if gov con or if i know there's some other people that are interested in that sources thought so i'm hoping to to meet up with partner up with them to go after to be able to answer that solicitation that sources thought okay we put it out what i'll do is i'll sit on an official email and we'll put out an official email so i'll sit out when i sit out my newsletter we'll put out you know what the government's asking for to see you know and by the way since we have you on the line just tell us real quick what are all the categories they're looking for in san diego do you know it yeah they're looking at landscaping janitorial they they mentioned construction so it's like they want some type of maintenance done on their maintenance done i'm sorry i don't have it up on that's fine don't worry about it okay but it the price performance is san diego right they mentioned those the difference they mentioned the different states but at the very the telling of that solicitation that they're folks on san diego okay so then what i would say what we should do then we've got a couple of gov con students out there in san diego we got a bunch of people in california that's actually our second biggest location of people but we have some some folks out there in fact i think randy is already working up or near san diego area so she's already been in contact with some folks but definitely what i could do is we'll connect with some people out there and then you guys can start you know figure out you know who you need on your team to go after it but now's a great time i found that information huh yeah yeah i found that information they mentioned what industries just yeah the work requirement is mentioning in management administration facility maintenance uh facility investment custodian services uh pest control ground maintenance and landscaping pavement clearance chiller electrical and that's that's pretty much it so it seemed like it's just like a gamut of of things to that they mentioned so but yeah that's what i'm mentioned in helping with the ground maintenance and landscaping right portion of it i know that's not my focus because i'm into right the drone pilot right gis provide mass stuff like that let me tell you something right now that they know you right when stuff like that comes out you'll be able to talk to the contracting people about it okay so now they know you you have that relationship again i always tell me just keep providing value you cannot go wrong by providing value so you're solving problems right and you're doing a job so definitely keep providing value to them and then at the same token right let them know also kind of what you're looking for like hey you know if you ain't give them some examples because a lot of times when i hear drone that's that doesn't tell me anything it doesn't tell me how you can help right doesn't tell me how you can help me what if you did this what if the same thing that the landscaping you saw the need for a drone service there what if you recognize the need for that like not maybe maybe you don't write a date i'm not saying you do to now but put it in your mind the reason why i'm go ahead the reason why i'm i'm i'm with the with the government the type of drones i fly is made in china so they kind of frown on that so i'm trying to that's why i'm not really moving that quickly in the government market with that so so that's why i pivot so that's why i pivoted to it and pivoted towards landscaping until things change in the market or change in the government that will allow me to be able to highlight that skill set but but but i mean again and then there's nothing wrong with that so okay well we'll do let's do one step at a time let's we'll put it out we'll send an email out and see people in the area and then we'll connect to try and you know go after that okay so and then we'll have them reach out to you directly okay and one last thing i mentioned to you about that the line of credit oh tell us about line of credit yeah you didn't you said it and so you didn't tell us the story okay so what happened i didn't know i didn't know at the very beginning about building up a business credit i didn't know i didn't think about that when i started with govcom back in october but as i got more seriously involved with this i established our business credit three uh two or three months ago and then that's when i was able to start purchasing items stuff like that through uh ranger to build up that line of build up our credit history and right and then i reached back out to our it support that's with with del okay and i was able to um get that line of credit as it actually was i received the answer today so um yeah so things are looking pretty good so if there's anyone that's in the market of buying del computer products uh or software we're we're we're also are in that market as well so you're um are you a reseller i'm a reseller under a company called caresoft who is connected with del okay so if there's so but we're strictly selling or provide a solution del del so are you in the it telecom facebook group i am okay all right good all right that would be the place to put it got it all right then hey that's all i got i know you're busy over there so thank you for your time and uh thank you for all that you're doing hey and we did purchase your book we got your we purchased your book i need to get an autograph from uh all right we gotta get all right we gotta get out of here all right man hey you take care man by the way again if you're just joining us you're just coming on put in here your city you're from the industry you're in again i want everyone to use my uh sessions not just to talk to me and listen to me talk but definitely connect with other people right use this as a matchmaking event use this as a way to network kind of plug yourself share what you do you know listen if no one knows knows what you do how do we know how to help you these episodes are also we're taking these episodes and putting them on youtube so again people are going to see this and we will be able to support you right you have no idea how many times folks come to me and say eric i was watching this video that you had and this lady on there said that she needed blah blah blah blah blah and you know i can do that so definitely we have to do much more networking especially in the times of covet there's so many limited opportunities to really just really like i mean there's so many opportunities out here that for us to be able to connect like we used to in the past so again i think that these sessions we should always be about networking should always be about telling us you know you can't hurt to just plug yourself one more time right hey i'm in houston i do logistics hey i'm in atlanta i mean i do training so eric man you're like the statue of liberty bring me your poor bring me your dropouts and you turn so many folks in america dream yeah i like that no i do it's funny because i have a video that says that it says and maria remembers it it says i'll take the down and outers give me the c students i have a video it's funny that you said that i'm gonna grab that snippet and i'm gonna put it on here because you just said that okay i'm gonna grab that snippet and put it on here because it's funny that you said that i actually have a video where i said i want the criminals i want the c students i want the dropouts i want all the people i want all the flunky people give me those people and bring them to me because you know what i realized they have a real reason to work harder because they don't have a college degree they don't have a cushy job and i don't even know what cushy i didn't i was gonna say a number but i don't know what cushy number is anymore 50 thousand 60 thousand whatever it is they don't have that stability so they got to get out and hustle and all i have to do is show them a marketplace and show them an opportunity and you know if they have that hustle type attitude or they have that fierceness like they can do this and it doesn't matter about that felony and all that kind of stuff like i mean it's just none of that matters so again definitely make sure by the way you're plugging yourself so tell me where you're from tell us again your city tell us your industry use this as an opportunity don't be ashamed don't be shy you can't be shy out here in this world you can't be shy in business if you're trying to build a business this is not time to be shy to be cute look again that you are in a safe space can i tell y'all y'all in a safe space here this is a safe space all right this is a safe space look don't be shy tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us tell us your industry tell me what you're doing i can't help you if you don't tell me anything about you if i only read the names you know i can't really help you i don't know t nicole i'm not sure you know marisinda missy i know missy because you know missy is in a group she's again this is your chance it's your opportunity october brings a whole new year so we all get a fresh new start whatever didn't happen this past fiscal year it ain't gonna happen i was sharing earlier i picked up four contract awards today for 1.2 million dollars today and because of my relationships i was able to maneuver some things because i didn't have all of the qualifications needed to get those contracts okay look i'm not without flaws i'm not without fault i you know i make mistakes um as well you know i'm not perfect i don't always have everything that i need i don't always have all of the the resources to do these things hey gubcon family visit gubcon edu.com for course information find out how you can get enrolled right now for one price annual subscription for all of our dozen plus courses and offerings visit the website gubcon edu.com


Well good afternoon everyone, welcome to Ten Reasons to Standardize Your Development on Pantheon. Hello. Hello. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Day two of DrupalCon. This is my second presentation of the day, so very excited to be here. I am Steve Perche, I'm joined by Ryan Sears here. A little bit of background on me, I'm an agency and community engineer at Pantheon. You can find me on the internet as Steve Vector on Twitter, Drupal.org, GitHub. You can also find me as Drupal Haikus on Twitter. So agency and community engineer, I come from a background of building Drupal sites for agencies. Working with agencies, building sites for end clients of all sorts, media clients, nonprofits, university use cases as well. My name is Ryan Sears, I am a partner manager at Pantheon and I have two kind of quick questions just to kind of understand the audience a little bit better. How many of you have actually ever like used Pantheon to launch a site? Like actually touched it, used it, okay, got a handful. And how many of you work at agencies? You're doing this like for other people, third party, okay. So for those willing to raise their hand again, about half, something like that. So just a little bit of background on me, I've been at Pantheon for now just about three years and the first two years I was actually working as one of our enterprise sales reps. So spent a lot of time working at people kind of doing large scale implementations of Drupal on Pantheon. And part of my last year has been working specifically with what we view as really central to our kind of like long term strategies. Working with agencies who are often times doing many different size projects. And so one of the things that's been interesting for me is not only seeing kind of like large scale projects happen on Pantheon, but then specifically like what are the unique use cases that apply to agencies? The business owner, the site owner, the agency owner, folks that are digging in. So Steve obviously as an engineer has a much more technical background, but we'd like to think that when we start engaging in this conversation about standardization that there are a lot of different reasons why someone would be interested in doing this. And in my three years at Pantheon I've definitely seen hundreds and hundreds of different use cases of people that kind of go through and look at that. So that's my background. Just for those who may not know a little bit of the background and story of Pantheon, there are four original founders. All of them have now over a decade of experience in the Drupal world and working on kind of like a lot of the lore of the early stage Drupal projects, the department of defense working on the economist, and really kind of figuring out how to do this Drupal thing that was still new at scale. And so building the tools to allow Drupal to reach that kind of level of sophistication and architectural sophistication, they were doing this hundreds and hundreds of times. And so literally every single time they were going through this process, they were building in architecture and infrastructure and codifying the best practices for going through this. And Pantheon's genesis was really as a way of saying there has to be some way of doing this that actually allows for us to implement these best practices to do it at scale for many, many sites. And that really is what Pantheon has come out of. So at this stage of the game we're now at over 130,000 websites running on the platform, over billions of monthly page views. We like to brag about our kind of ever-increasing percentage of the overall internet. Now at 1 in 1,000 on the web, so just made it onto the marker for there. And we were working with over 1,000 allied agencies. And so specifically when we like to think about what is the reason why not only has Pantheon kind of come out of this genesis of the Drupal community, but what is its standard use case? As opposed to being forced to build these things one off, that on Pantheon VR container infrastructure, we've really kind of cracked the nut on two really difficult problems for people building Drupal websites. One being this concept of elasticity, like how do you actually take a site where you don't necessarily know everything about it from the get go and be able to scale it over time? And how do you run huge websites that require massive amounts of infrastructure, how do you actually do that? And then on the other side, we talk about cloud development tools for teams, which is more than just like, hey, isn't it nice to have all these cool things at your disposal? But it's about time to market. It's about efficiency.  And anything that stands in your way, either that's billable hours as an agency, that's like your productivity and being able to go get new business.  So we see Pantheon as really being the way of completing that mission of what people really need in the web space. But this last piece here is really what we're talking about today. It's like, why would you standardize? And what is the benefit of standardization? And if you've talked to Pantheon at all in the last couple of days, it's tip of the tongue for much of what we talk about, because it really is core to our central premise of actually gaining some of these efficiencies for your project. So when we think specifically about what are the impediments that we're trying to solve? So thinking through a standard kind of project life cycle or agency life cycle, what are the things that you're running into? What are the most common problems from getting up and getting started on a project to are you going to launch on time, to the sustainability of continuous integration workflows? We want to dig in into specific examples of common roadblocks for people who are building websites either for their company or for other companies as part of a third-party agency and really how Pantheon is the perfect solution match for a lot of those common problems. Sure. And before we get into these 10 items, we're going to take a look at the Pantheon dashboard. Can I get a show of hands? Who stopped by the Pantheon booth and seen our dashboard demo? So just about everybody, okay, so I will not repeat the demo in its entirety. I want to highlight a couple of key areas that we didn't get to see in that main demo. So first, again, I want to highlight the basic idea of working with Pantheon from a development workflow perspective. So the idea that we have code going up and content coming down, this is a standard idea in the Drupal space, just about really any CMS space, the idea that our content lives canonically in our live environment and we bring it down from the live environment in order to work with it in a testing environment or in a development environment. So I'm going to jump over now to our dashboard and take a look under the hood at some of the kinds of changes we can make. So you've probably seen in our dashboard demo this idea of standardizing what the infrastructure looks like. So on the basic Pantheon plan, that personal plan, you have this essential infrastructure of traffic coming in from the public internet, hitting a varnish cache, bouncing right back out in an extremely performant manner when content is cached. If it's not cached, then Drupal can go ahead and build that page using PHP, using a database container and Drupal performs as you would expect on any infrastructure. Moving up to a bigger plan, say a business plan, yes, you get more resources. What I think is key here is that developers don't have to completely reorient the way they're thinking about it. Even before I worked at Pantheon, just as a developer using Pantheon, for me the part that I loved most was that I didn't have to think about this diagram all the time. We like this diagram, we're proud of the fact that we run on a containerized infrastructure, that these containers allow us to scale to really, really large sites. Moving up to an elite or enterprise site, you get a really large set of containers. What I like about this as a developer is that I don't have to reorient my thinking entirely as I move between large sites and small sites. That I, as a developer, can standardize the way I'm thinking about building a Drupal site. If you're building a Drupal site with best practices, it's going to run just fine on Pantheon. So I do wanna take a look at an alternative way of interacting with that configuration management system that you saw in the dashboard demo. So you saw in our dashboard demo down at the booth that we have this lovely dashboard. It gives you an overview both for yourself as an individual developer. You get to see these are all the sites that I have access to. These are the organizations that I have access to. This might be your agency, this might be your university. I can see my support tickets within any one of these organizations. You get a rollup of those sites. You saw that all at the booth. Going back to the individual site, what I wanna look at is making that same type of configuration change. You saw in our dashboard demo and I'm going to use the Pantheon command line tool if my mouse will respond here to click this button. The joy of live demos, everybody. So what I'm going to do is make that same type of block configuration change that we saw before, moving a block from one region to another and then I'm going to export that change using Terminus, Pantheon's command line tool. Terminus gives you the same ability that you have in the dashboard to interact with Pantheon to make backups, to move content from say your live site to the dev site and a lovely conference wifi is slowing us down here. So over here in our development site, I can see that I've got sidebars on both sides, blocks in both sides. If I want to move a sidebar from one side to the other, I can do so in that same way we saw before. What I'm going to do here is use our Terminus command line tool to give me a one time login link. So I have the ability to run Drush commands directly from this Terminus tool. So I'm going to run Terminus Drush ULI or user login and I want to login link to the development site. So I can just run this command here. It's going to get me a one time login link to the development site provided the wifi is running here. And if we continue to have trouble with wifi we might just skip over this part. I have a wifi if it helps. All right, I think I'm just going to skip over this part. So I can talk through what you're able to do on the command line. So you saw in that dashboard demo being able to export configuration using a button that just says export configuration. A lot of developers are totally comfortable doing that operation with Drush. So if you want you can run Terminus Drush config export export that configuration using Drush. You can commit it right on the command line if you want using Terminus. You also can commit through the dashboard as you saw before deploying forward to that test environment. You can import that configuration. The exact mechanism of import is something we kind of gloss over in that main demo. That's what I want to highlight here and luckily I don't need an internet connection to do that. So pantheon.yaml is the way you specify those platform hooks that you saw downstairs. So if you want to notify Slack, if you want to do things like importing your configuration, you can specify this pantheon.yaml file. This is what's connecting you to those cloud hooks. This is a way to specify, say that in response to the deploy operation, I want to run this config import script. Over at the config import script you can see we're simply calling drush config import. So these are the kinds of things that you can write as a developer, as a team of developers, deciding how do we want to standardize our workflow? What do we expect to happen every single time we deploy to live? These are the kinds of things that you could do manually. You could manually import your configuration every time you deploy to test or live. What I like about this is it allows you to standardize. It allows you to say every single time we deploy, we expect this to happen. Every single time we deploy, we expect to notify Slack. It takes the guesswork out of that day-to-day development work. So we're going to jump back now to those slides. So again, there are, we think, 10 great reasons to standardize on pantheon. And they coincide with the basic outline or arc of a project. So we're going to talk through what the life of a project may look like on pantheon. So we'll start here with a project set up. Great, thanks. So specifically talking about project set up, I don't know the standard process for everyone varies, but very commonly, you have to start spinning up servers. You have to set up an install profile. You have various things that you're going to do as part of any kind of net new project to get up and running. One of the interesting stories to me was working with Ketchum. Oftentimes, the technical team, the developers, they were at the whim of the business team. So the business team is out saying, we're going to do this great, cool project. We're going to do something new. And then what was the tech team left with? Whatever they decided to go with. So that doesn't, you know, it could be, this time we're on Squarespace. This time we're on WordPress. And every single time, there was scrambling, trying to figure out, how do we actually start in a place that's going to be consistent and easy for us? And rather than trying to adapt every single time to what the business side was doing, the technical team said, actually, there's a way that we can do this all in one efficient place, we can spin up these new environments. And rather than spending a long time configuring servers or getting the vagrant box set up, we can just start from jump and install Drupal. And rather than having a discovery meeting where all this great work is being done about audience profiles and the people you're trying to cater to with the website, and then, OK, just wait one week now while we go and set up your servers, immediately you can have time to mark it. And what Pantheon really provides here is a dashboard that's really a central interface for everything that you're going to be doing. Whether it be that individual site dashboard that Steve was showing, which has DevTest and Live baked in, and all the things you would need to interact with the site, or a team dashboard, if you're an agency or an enterprise that has one of those central repositories, you can see all the sites in the list. And what Pantheon then allows you to do is have consistency of practice for all those things. And oftentimes, when it came to catch them in particular, they were able to say, OK, don't just go run off and promise Squarespace or something random for every individual project. We have a way, a way to start that's actually very quickly, get us to being able to be productive for that individual site project. And in particular, one of the things that is a very common problem, especially, is when you have a specific project or even within your organization, you always want to have a custom start state, the standard 20 modules that you're going to add every single time. Or if you're working for an organization like in Resonance where they're building school profiles and they're able to print them out in mass, it's really difficult to do that. In Drupal in particular, the history has been your only choice is Drupal Multisite. How do you have a single code base that allows you to manage multiple different sites? Well, in Pantheon, rather than making you sacrifice between the flexibility of having sites with their own autonomous code bases or the efficiency of Drupal Multisite, we've allowed you to tap into this superpower of custom upstreams. And so for in Resonance, it means that they're allowed to manage one single code base. And then whenever they make that change, they can push that change to all the sites, 70, 100 sites that are all running on that code base. And for those that are different or have had modifications, they can test those before they deploy out. But for those that are identical and exactly the same, they can make that change once and deploy across the board. So not only is this useful if you have a specific product or a custom distribution that you're using for managing sites, but also just for site setup. A lot of agencies have specific ways that they start every new project or templates that help the sales team go out and be able to sell what they're able to do. Like this idea of custom upstreams really allows you to have that flexibility of managing each individual site autonomously and with Pantheon, by threading them together, it also allows for long-term sustainability and updateability of those sites. And in Resonance in particular, we found that as they were standardizing on Pantheon, they had to talk through exactly how are we going to be making updates to that custom upstream. That conversation of exactly how are we going to use these tools, but into, well, how are our developers going to work together as a team? It's common in agencies to have developers stepping on one another's toes. For myself, the first time I had to deal with this, I was using Dreamweaver Check-In Check-Out. Did anyone have that as your first version control system? Yeah, that was not a good system. I mean, I suppose it was better than nothing at all, but we found ways to work around it. Oh, styles.css is checked out. Well, then I'll make styles too.css. That's what happened. So that problem of developers working on top of one another is something that we're solving industry-wide with Git. So Pantheon, of course, is trying to give you those industry best practices. So building on top of Git, we have this tool called Multidev.  If we want the Steve Multidev environment and the Ryan Multidev environment, we can do that. If we want a Multidev environment just per bug or per feature, we have that ability as well. I'm particularly excited with CMI for how granular CMI exports those configuration files. I think we're not going to have a ton of merge conflicts, especially compared to those feature files that we were working with in Drupal 7. Those conflicts were the worst to try and merge. With Multidev, I think we're going to be seeing a lot of really efficient Drupal 8 workflows as people are able to make a Multidev environment, make configuration changes, export them, and I think merge them a lot cleaner than they were able to merge configuration changes exported with Drupal 7's features module. So another problem that we're looking to solve at Pantheon, the website is slow. The past couple of months I've been doing this presentation called Why Your Site is Slow. I've done it at a couple of Drupal conferences and part of the answer is often, well, we don't have varnish. A website basically is waiting for requests from the internet and sending out responses. The faster that response can be made, the better. And Drupal, anything running in PHP has a limit to how fast it can run. Varnish can be much faster, basically if you have slash about, if you have your homepage, that's something that's probably getting served the same for basically every site. So in my own work I found that if you aren't using a system like Pantheon, there's probably someone on the team who has as a side task, oh, I've got to set up varnish, or I have to set up solar and it's not my main responsibility but I know I have to do it. That's the kind of thing that can bog down a team. If you're always waiting for that other team member to be able to update varnish or to give you another solar instance to use with your test site, you're going to be waiting a long time and your project as a whole is going to slow down. We also give you access to New Relic. That's a great way to find out what are the bottlenecks in our code. Not only for custom code, I've certainly found problems in my own custom code through New Relic. You can also find configuration problems. Like I had a configuration of token module that I didn't realize was inefficient but using New Relic I could find, oh, way too many calls are going to token module. Have I just do these simple reconfigurations? This site will run a whole lot faster. Often you need to bring in a specialist or an expert or your CTO to diagnose those performance problems. Great, thanks. And one of the things that's really interesting with bringing in people midstream, obviously it's nice from the beginning being able to get everybody set up, get their environments going and have that out of the box but we recently have been working with an agency that's been working during the presidential primary process and sometimes in advance of the Iowa caucuses you need the demand for higher scale is immediate. And so being able to have someone be able to come in, 11th hour, immediately being able to be added to a specific project is highly valuable because not only are you not spending two, three hours pulling your developer off, setting up a separate installation of whatever's going on with your site somewhere else or giving access to your CTO, immediately you can bring in people and bring them up to speed. On Pantheon in particular, it's nice and easy where you can add an email address and they're immediately added to the project. So team management on Pantheon is as simple as adding an email address within that site's dashboard and then that team member immediately has access to everything there. In some use cases for large technical companies, the media publishing or really anywhere where there's kind of secure processes about deployments, sometimes you even wanna be able to lock that down. So within Pantheon, there's team management tools where you can say lock a developer to only be able to touch dev but not actually promote code to the test for a live environment. So that's our change management controls available to agencies and organizations. And this is something that in particular when you think, again kind of putting my like business hat on, I think of time to market the ability to step in and address issues on demand and not essentially having my like development team, the people that are actually producing the goods slowed down by like doing all this putzing around stuff. Like that's a huge value in terms of not having to like mess around with these things every single time. And in particular, when I think of another common problem for those teams working together is the worst common problem is that the site doesn't launch on time. And now there are a lot of things that go into a site potentially not launching on time but we recently worked with an organization called dbrand and they were having problems on the infrastructure that they were working on and realized that we're now two weeks out from Black Friday and we're selling internet or cell phone covers and everything, we're running huge promotions and we're not sure that our site's gonna be able to scale. So this issue of like not launching on time has many problems but moving to Pantheon one of the things that's really cool about the process that you just get out of the box for every single site is you have baked in best practices. So you have DevTest live. You can make sure that when you deploy your site, you're confident that it's going to actually work because you've run it through on an environment that's identical and testable to what you're gonna be running in production. So the team that was able to kind of move the site over to Pantheon then was able to get up to speak quickly and make sure that they were able to launch on time because the QA process and all of that was standardized with like a standard set of best practices and when you kind of even expand the view outside of an individual project to many projects the consistency developed by being able to have a standard approach for deployments is a huge value time saver and making sure that you're actually doing this in a coordinated way and everyone can be on the same page for exactly what those deployments are gonna look like. And it's especially helpful when it comes to core security updates. I don't think anyone particularly enjoys doing core security updates. It's a task that we have to do in some way as Drupal developers. We have to make sure our sites stay up to date, have the latest security releases. And when I was just working as a freelancer I could keep track of all the places I've deployed sites and how I deploy security fixes to all those sites. As I started working with other people well, okay, maybe I just need to ask the guys sitting next to me, how are we supposed to actually deploy these security fixes to that one site? Well, okay, that works. That maybe works with two people talking with one another. As you get to a dozen developers working with one another, working with a large number of sites each deployed in different places. It can be really cumbersome to keep track of how are we supposed to get Drupal 7.46 out on all these different places. And that was especially critical with Drupalgetin.  So the company I was at at the time we had a team of people dedicated to making sure that all of our clients got the patch in time and that was just fine. Pantheon we were able to block some attacks and we were able to provide that one click update to any site on Pantheon. When it's mission critical, when it's absolutely critical that you get security updates deployed immediately the more standardized you can be in how you're making those deployments the better off you'll be because seven hours is not a long window to make those kinds of fixes. So we also have people asking us about what to do with continuous integration. Some people like to think of their Drupal sites as the units where they simply put modules in. They push them to Pantheon and that's it. That's pretty much the way we've been developing Drupal sites for years. People are starting to reconceptualize how do we think of the way a Drupal site is being put together. Some people like to think I would just like a slim repository that has a Drushmake file or a composer.json file. The way Pantheon is answering this question right now is we're giving you a clear picture of what we expect Drupal to look like when it is fully assembled. So if your team decides we want to think in terms of Drushmake we want to think of composer.json and we want to have our own processes for building say SaaS or running gulp or grunt. We say please do go ahead and deploy your site by connecting say GitHub, have CircleCI, Jenkins, Travis whatever continuous integration you want to use to get you from that known start state to a place where Drupal is in that shape that it has been for years. What I like about Pantheon is that we have a clear line between the application and the environment. Much of the conversation around continuous integration has to do with how do we know where our line is between our environment and our application. When I got started working with continuous integration processes I would intermix setting up my environment and setting up my application. I would download modules and I would configure Apache and then I would do something else at the application level. What I like about working with Pantheon is that we handle the environment for you. If you want to organize your Drupal project in a certain way, go ahead and do so. We're giving you a clear picture of what our environment looks like and you can send us exactly what we need to deploy it on Pantheon using Terminus. Terminus as you saw before is that command line interface. So you can use Terminus in your day-to-day workflow if you want to just use the command line rather than the dashboard. It's also that bridge to continuous integration platforms. So in my own time right now what I'm doing is building pull requests on GitHub and then sending them over to Pantheon using Terminus. We're also rolling up more and more ways to integrate with third-party services. So you saw at our booth demo the ability to let Slack know what's happening, the ability to let Jira know what's happening. Again, this is a great way to standardize. When you've got a team of developers working on a number of sites, it can be easy to forget. Oh, I'm supposed to tell Ryan that the deployment has been made. If we just have that happening in Slack, if we're just simply updating our Jira tickets, then I don't have to remember to tell Ryan, hey, take a look at that site because I've made the deployment. The robots remember to do it for us. That's what they're good at. Developers can focus on what they are best at as well. So again, Platform Hooks is the way to do that. You simply define with that YAML file the scripts you expect to run in response to which Pantheon level events. Great, so this has all been kind of conceptual from project start to launch to long-term sustainability and really the core problem we're looking to solve with Pantheon aside from everything a site needs to be highly scalable, secure, on a bulletproof infrastructure, but also everything people building Drupal sites need to be successful. And so one of the things we've seen is especially in the agency space is that people who are building sites over and over again or even for organizations that have many sites, every time they start a new project, they have to orient themselves, like I've spent six months on this and now I have to totally switch gears and do this in another way. And we've seen this kind of across the board with agencies whether it be Calamuna, Minecraft, or like any of these agencies that say, hey, we recognize that actually not every single site we're gonna have the choice of where this is gonna live in production, but we know that every single project we can start on Pantheon and that we can start it there and even if the eventual destination is somewhere else, like we believe there's a lot of value wrapped into kind of keeping it on that same platform, but even if you don't have the ability to make that choice on Pantheon by standardizing in that way, there's a consistent project, like a project process that everybody can buy into and that everybody can see. It's transparent, it's scalable, it's something that is immediately available to you. Like this is the power of modern SaaS. Like the only reason why we're able to offer these things is because we have this giant container-based infrastructure and so giving you these pieces to be able to use as part of your development life cycle or any sort of project life cycle is part of our contribution to saying, let's make this simple. We know that if you're doing that on Pantheon, not only are you gonna alleviate a lot of these specific problems, but the thing is that, again, back into the world of site owner or business owner, time to market, ability to make changes quickly, being able to have a scalable dynamic for all of the projects that you're working on is a truly valuable thing when you're building a team or really running any sort of customer project or your own site owner project. So we see that as being kind of like the linchpin for really taking advantage of what Pantheon has to offer. And is there anything else on the standardization front that you wanted to touch in on? I love it. Like the standardization philosophy is something that has really hit home for me because it's especially valuable when you come back to these projects. We've talked through this lifecycle of projects. What happens six months later, a year later, when you're pulled back into a project? I find that when you're setting up your projects in the same way, when you're doing deployments in the same way, when that client does call you back and say, hey, we can now start phase two or we can now start phase three of that project, you're coming back into an environment that's familiar, you're coming back into an environment that's standardized. So those are common problems in ways that Pantheon can help to solve them. Now over to you all, I'll bring this out if folks have specific questions. I'll stop roving around with the microphone. Any questions at all? I will assume we have answered all questions already. And we're also around, like if there's specific things that you're interested, if you've touched Pantheon or had challenges in kind of getting up to speed, we have, here I'll move to the microphone. We have teams that are really designed to help make the process of moving to standardization easier for you. So whether you're at a company and you're kind of like starting off with Pantheon for the first time, you wanna run your site or you're an agency and you're looking to say, like, is Pantheon available to help me kind of like move this life cycle towards more agency standardization? We have people as part of our team that are really focused on being able to make that process easier for you. So both Steve and I kind of work with hundreds and hundreds of different agencies and organizations that are looking to do that. So if you need specific help on that, our information is there in the slides or please feel free to come up and talk to us about it. Great. Well, if there aren't any questions, thanks everyone for coming. Please do review our session. We'll be at the sprints on Friday. Of course you can come find us at the Pantheon booth. The Pantheon party is tonight. So we hope to see you at the rest of the conference. Thanks everyone.


A very good morning to all of you and good morning to the online students as well. Last week we had an introduction to the Old Testament and today we will get into the actual books of the Old Testament. So we would obviously be beginning with Genesis. But before we get into Genesis, just a few instructions for everyone, for those of us who are here present and also for those of us who are watching online. As you know, all of our class lectures have been posted in YouTube. So even as our classes go on, the lecture would automatically be posted on our APC Bible College YouTube site. So if you have any doubts, during the lecture you were a little confused about something and you would like to go and listen to it again, it is possible. So it's not like as if you have missed out on anything. So even if you feel that I have kind of maybe rushed a bit on something and you didn't quite catch what I was saying. You can always go to the YouTube link and you can just rewatch that little portion just so that you can gain clarity if you have any doubts. Because sometimes without realizing it, I tend to rush a little. So I will try not to do that. I have been instructed not to do that and I will try to be slower in my speech. But sometimes when the thoughts are running in the head, the voice catches up with that speed and it doesn't really help. So you can always go to the YouTube site and look at the videos which are available there. And that actually clarifies a doubt which I think Evangeline had brought up about the PPT slides.  So I don't need to again give the PPT to each individual. It will already be there in the lecture. So you can go over there and look at those PPT slides which have been displayed. In case you want to capture a screenshot for yourself or something. In case you think that particular slide may be helpful to you and you would just like a screenshot of that, you can always take those slides. And then another thing which I realized last time whenever I was teaching, I don't really get a chance to really look at my screen over here. Once I get into the flow of the teaching, it kind of becomes difficult to see what has been posted in the chat. And another thing which I realized is that immediately after the session is done, I terminate the session. And so I may miss out on what has been posted over there in the chat. So for the online students, if you could post your doubts, questions, anything that you want to say in the stream page of Google Classroom. I will make sure that I go through it. So online students who wish to say something or want to ask something, please put all your questions in the stream page of the Google Classroom. So I will be able to respond to your questions. And also, like I asked last time, around 11.40 if someone here in the class could wave at me so that I would not forget to give you your 10 minutes for any questions that you may have from the book of Genesis. Alright, so one of you can wave at me and remind me that time is almost up. So, having gone through those preliminaries, we'll actually get to Genesis. Now, last time we were looking at the main divisions into which the Old Testament is divided. So we looked at how the first five books are called the Torah, which means instruction. It's also called the Pentateuch because there are five of them and Penta in Greek means five. What is the other name for this category? They're also called the books of the law because that is where Moses has given all the instructions and law which God has conveyed to the Israelites. So these are the different terms that are used for these first five books of the Old Testament. Now, the students here in the class have also received their textbooks. So I would touch upon a few things which are there mentioned in your textbook but then we would go beyond that. We would be discussing many other things which are not mentioned in that brief right up which is there in your book. So the books of the law is the term generally used for these first five books and it spans over a time period of maybe around 600 years and right from the time of creation. So it extends to a period of about 600 years and it's generally believed that Moses is the one who compiles all this information and puts it together regarding what happened during those first 600 years after creation. So we have many important things mentioned in Genesis. The term Genesis basically means beginning. So it's a book of beginnings and it talks about the beginning of so many things. In fact, the beginning of the universe itself talks about the beginning of human beings, talks about the beginning of the Sabbath because God says that he rested from his work on the seventh day. You have the beginning of the institution of marriage where God brings Adam and Eve together. We see the beginning of the fall of man and the entry of sin so we see that as well. We see the beginning of sacrifices because the Lord kills an animal and clothes Adam and Eve with the skin of that animal. So we see a lot of beginnings and in your textbook in fact along with the references you have a nice listing. So you can actually go to your textbook later and look at the listing of all the beginnings which are mentioned in the book of Genesis. Now Genesis also talks about four main characters. We have Abraham and you have Isaac, Jacob and then of course Joseph. So Genesis basically deals with these main issues. Now coming to the kind of writing that we see in Genesis. It's a term which you might have heard of or you might not be familiar with the term. It's something called genre or to put it in simpler terms category. When we talk about literature, when we talk about written works, they tend to use this term. They ask what genre of literature is this is the term they use. For instance, when you're reading a storybook that would be called the genre of prose because it's written in a paragraph form. You have paragraph after paragraph and then you have chapters. It's just prose form of writing. On the other hand, you have poetry and you can very clearly understand the difference between prose and poetry.  One is poetry and the other is prose. So what about this book of Genesis? What kind of writing does Genesis contain? It's mainly what they call as narrative history. It's a narrative in prose form. Narrative I suppose is a more technical term but you can just say prose. So narrative and prose are just basically a narration of something. Something is being explained in long sentences and the sentences add up into paragraphs and then you have the paragraphs adding up into chapters. So it's just prose. It's basically narrative history and also you have something else in our Genesis which is called the genealogies. And especially in ancient times genealogy lists were very important to trace the lineage. Who was the original person and from whom did all the descendants come? So because for them their ancestry was very important. Today it does not seem to be as important. Most of us probably would know our great grandparents but beyond that great great grandparents we may not even know their name. So ancestry is not that important now but then in earlier times it was so important for everyone to know from whom you have descended. And so these genealogy lists are given in the book of Genesis and they are considered quite important as well. So if we are talking about the genre of Genesis it would basically be narrative history and genealogies. These are the two kinds of writings that we see in the book of Genesis. Now it's generally believed that Moses wrote Genesis in the time period of 1450 to 1410 BC. Approximately they say that he probably would have written it around that time. And some scholars suggest that he probably began to write the book of Genesis while he was still living in the royal court. Because he was adopted by that Pharaoh's daughter and he was brought up as one of the princes. So he would have been there in the royal court and of course he had contact with his people. He had an idea of who he is, what his ancestry is, what his background is. So he knew that he is a Hebrew. He knew that he actually belongs to the Hebrew people who are living in the land of Egypt. But he was in the royal court and he had been trained in the royal court. So he in fact he would know how to write out a historical narrative. If I were to ask one of you and say in the next one up please kindly produce the narrative history of your last five years. You may in fact even wonder how on earth do I write a narrative history. On the other hand this man Moses had been highly trained and educated in the royal court of Egypt. So he would definitely know how a royal narrative or in fact any narrative history would be written. He would be aware of those things. And it's actually in Act 722 where we see this particular detail regarding Moses where it says Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. So it talks about how Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. Because they don't exactly deprive their princes of education. They would give him all of the education. He would know everything there is to know. So whatever science and whatever geography and whatever physics and chemistry they were aware of in those times. He would have been educated in all of that including all of the writing skills and recording skills. So these are things that he would have known and I mean even as we read this Act 722 it kind of brings to our minds. I know the words of Moses where he is speaking to the Lord and giving an excuse. And if you remember what does Moses say to the Lord about his skills that would be in Exodus 410 where he is talking to the Lord and he says, pardon your servant Lord. I have never been eloquent neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant.  But then what does history record about him because Stephen even as he is speaking about Moses. He says Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. So here was a highly educated man who lived in the royal court and yet seemed to have a rather inferior opinion about himself. So I mean I don't know maybe the other princes kind of treated him a little badly because he was a Hebrew. His ancestry was a Hebrew ancestry. On the other hand they were descended from the pharaohs. So maybe he had a lot of flak in the court. Maybe people you would know would comment on him and maybe his skills were not as perfect as some of those other royal princes who were getting trained. So maybe it's a result of all these things. So even though this man was a highly educated person he thinks so low about himself and he says Lord I'm slow of speech and tongue. I have never been eloquent. The word eloquent means someone who can speak fluently and who can express his words in a very powerful way. So he says I have never been eloquent. On the other hand history records that he was trained in all of those things. So even if you are sitting here right now and you don't have a very high opinion of yourself.  God has been working on you and there are skills which you have developed which you might not recognize but the Lord sees those things. So he sees you very differently because you may be thinking only in terms of a formal training in an institution. But life itself can be a training and the Lord allows circumstances in his people's lives which will shape them and mold them and make them ready for the tasks which he has for them. So that's something to keep in mind even as we are looking at Moses the author of Genesis. So when we look at Genesis we see that there are some 10 specific sections. All of them beginning with the words these are the generations of. Now we see that happening in chapter 2 verse 4. We see it again in chapter 5 verse 1. We see it in 6, 9 and then in chapter 10 verse 1, 11, 10, 11, 27, Genesis 25, 12, 25, 19, 36, 1 and finally 37, 2. All of these sections they begin with the words these are the generations of that is the way the royal genealogies were recorded in those times. And so whenever anyone is making any historical records as well they would speak in this way. And so this is an art of writing which Moses would have learnt in the royal court. Because when you look at the Egypt in historical records that's the same kind of wording that you see over there. So these are all the influences that we see the Egypt in influence that we see in his writing style. Now we have a chronological record in 1 Kings chapter 6 verse 1 and based on that calculating based on that chronological record which is there in 1 Kings 6 1. They generally say that most probably Moses would have started with the people of Israel taking them out. He would have done that most probably in 1446 BC around that time. So if the Exodus the people leaving Egypt happened in 1446 then Genesis probably would have been written before that would have been written after that. So that would be 1486 BC. So they say that maybe Genesis probably was written around 1486 BC. So that's according to another scholar because earlier we looked at a different date which I had picked up from a different book. So there's a little difference in what the scholars say regarding the date of when Genesis was probably written. Now just coming to the structure of Genesis chapters 1 to 11 talk mainly about creation the fall of man. You have the narrative about the judgment through the flood. These are all the things that we find in chapters 1 to 11. Coming to chapters 11 to 28 and let us say 11 to 36 chapters 11 to 36 can be the next major chunk. So in chapters 11 to 36 we mainly see about how God chooses Abraham and God decides that he is going to create a nation out of Abraham through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed. And why did God choose Abraham specifically through whom he's going to begin a nation because God saw something in Abraham, a particular character which he probably had not observed in other people because the Lord clarifies this. He comments on this in Genesis chapter 18 verses 18 and 19. So if you were to look in Genesis 18, 18 and 19 and maybe over here in the class we could have one person read out. Those of you who are online if you could just follow this in your Bibles. If someone could read out Genesis 18, 18 and 19. What does God say about Abraham? Why did God choose Abraham through whom to make a nation? God saw something in Abraham. God saw that here is a man who will take the effort to train up his descendants, his children, his grandchildren. He would take the effort to train them up in the ways of God. And so specifically God decided this would be a good person through whom I can create a nation because he will transfer the instructions which I am giving him to his descendants. And we see how important this was in God's eyes in our current modern culture for some really bad reason. Men don't seem to think that they have any kind of role to play in spiritual instruction in disciplining their children and bringing them up in the things of God. And they think, oh, the wife will do it. But that is not how God ever viewed it. It is as the head of the family, as the leader of the family, it is very much the man's responsibility to bring up his children in the ways of God to train them, teach them what the Lord is conveying. And so it is definitely even the mother's responsibility, but the father should not shirk his responsibility. God specifically chose Abraham for this purpose. He chose him and made a nation out of him because he said, here is a man who will direct his children and he will direct his household to keep the way of the Lord is what God says. And so in God's eyes, this particular role of a man is very important, not something to be neglected. It is good to go and earn money and get rich, but training the children in the ways of God is something that is very valuable in God's eyes. So anyway, that was just something on our side. But then coming back to the third main section, we talked about how the second section can be chapters 11 to 36, where the focus is mainly on God choosing Abraham and preparing the nation. Chapters 37 to 50 is where you see Joe's of story and we see all the trials that the family went through and we see that these early four generations, they did make a lot of mistakes. They did fail in many ways. But what we see over here in these chapters is that God stays faithful. God helps them come out of their failures. God supports those who have fallen into hard times. God never lets go. So in these chapters, we not only see the early history of the patriarchs, as they are known, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are generally called the patriarchs. That patriarch is a very old word, which basically means the fathers, the forefathers. So even though the patriarchs were not always perfect, even though they failed, even though they made mistakes, God was always there to support them, back them up, help them. So we see the faithfulness of God and the power of God in turning situations around in these chapters. Now, one unique feature that we would find in the book of Genesis would be regarding the Abrahamic covenant. Now, there are three unconditional covenants in the Old Testament and the Abrahamic covenant is the first one of them. Where God does not add any conditions and say, if you do this, this, this, only then I will do this. There's no conditions attached. It's just unconditional. The Lord from His side says, I will do this for you. So the first of these is the Abrahamic covenant, which is mentioned in our Genesis. The other two come later on. One would be the Davidic covenant. And then, of course, we have the new covenant in the New Testament, which is mentioned even in Jeremiah. So that could be one important feature to focus on in the book of Genesis, the Abrahamic covenant. And then in your textbook, there's a brief reference to how Genesis compares with the other books of the Bible. And I'm just touching upon the comparison that they have made between Genesis and the book of John and 1st John. It's a nice comment. They say that Genesis begins with the creation. On the other hand, John and 1st John, they begin before the creation itself. In the beginning, even before creation even came into being, the Word was already there. The Word who is Jesus and of course, God the Father. So we see that even before creation, whatever took place, that is touched upon in John and 1st John. And at the end of each chapter in your textbook, you see that subheading which says, Shadow of Christ. Now, this is again a term which some of you would be familiar with. But for some of you, this term, Shadow of Christ, what on earth do you mean by Shadow of Christ? You know, this is not some new ritual that someone is trying to come up with about shadows and stuff. It's just basically saying, is Jesus Christ represented in some way in these Old Testament books? Because in the Old Testament books, it doesn't really talk about Jesus. But is he represented in some way in these Old Testament books? So in that sense, they're talking about a shadow of Christ. So we don't really see Jesus being mentioned, but there may be a slight reference to him. There may be a shadow of Christ seen in these Old Testament books. So one very interesting shadow or representation of Christ that we see in the book of Genesis would be Melchizedek. Now scholars have been debating about Melchizedek for ages. Some say he was not even human. He must have been Jesus himself who came down in earthly form and met with Abraham. That kind of really does terrible things to the doctrine. Because we know that Jesus came down in human flesh when he was born in the New Testament. So that is one theory which they have about Melchizedek. And there are others who say he must have been a very godly ruler. And moreover it says over there in Genesis 14-18 that this man was like a high priest to the Lord. So he was not only a king, he also performed a high priestly role where he was genuinely following and serving Yahweh. So they say that this Melchizedek resembles Jesus in the same way in the New Testament Jesus becomes a high priest. In the Old Testament this man Melchizedek must have been like Jesus. He was a very godly high priest who was serving the Lord and also pointing people towards the true God. So in Hebrews 7 1-3 you have reference of Melchizedek. And if you look specifically at Hebrews 7 was 3 and there is a term used over there resembling the Son of God. So it does not say that Melchizedek was the Son of God. It says that he resembled he was like the Son of God. So Melchizedek was probably just a human being but a very godly human being who was also a king and a high priest. And because of who he is God instructs Abraham to give one tenth as a tithe to this person. And that becomes like a shadow of what Jesus will do for us in the New Testament where he would become a high priest and intercede for us with the Father. So that can be one main shadow or representation of Jesus Christ in the book of Genesis. There are of course many others mentioned in your textbook. Now there's another important and interesting point that I would like to bring. I was kind of debating over this whether to mention it at all or not. But then this is something that I found very fascinating about the Old Testament and I thought I would just share it with you. Now if you don't quite get it, that's okay. But this is something that we find throughout the Old Testament. It's a kind of writing style which they had in those days in the ancient Near East. In the literature of that time we see this particular kind of writing format. What we use today in our writing is actually the Greek form of writing. When you were in your third standard, fourth standard and you had to sit in your English class and the teacher is teaching you how to write an essay. She would say to you, she would say you have to have an introduction where you're going to tell this is what my essay is going to be about. And then you will come to the body of the essay where you will give your main content and you will talk about all that you want to say. And then you must have a conclusion is what the teacher would say where you're going to summarize all your main points and you're going to give one concluding statement about this is what my essay is concluding about. So something of the sort. Now this is a Greek way of thinking and a Greek way of writing. The people in the ancient Near East back then in those days, they had an interesting writing style which was technically referred to as the chiasms, C-H-I-A-S-M-S. So I will just kind of take you to a PowerPoint slide which will help you to better understand what I'm talking about. And these chiasms are very, very interesting because the Old Testament and in fact even the New Testament is filled with them. And they are trying to bring, whenever the author would try to write in this chiasmic form he's trying to bring out something very significant. He's trying to make a very important point. So it helps us if we are aware of this thing because then we can go online and maybe read up about it and find out more about it because wherever you have a chiasm in the Old Testament and in the New Testament the author is using that particular writing style to convey something very significant and so I'll just take you now to the slide and maybe we could look at that. Okay, I'm assuming that the slide is visible to even the online students. Okay, it would be visible to the online students. Perfect, thank you. All right, now one of the first and most interesting chiasms in the Old Testament would be the story of Noah and if you look at the way the story of Noah is written you would get a clear idea of what exactly is a chiasm. They would write using something called a mirror structure. Oh, it's not showing up here, is it? What would I need to do? Okay, I will convey this to the class, the physical class here later. So sorry, I had not even thought about that. Those of you who are online and who are able to see on your screens what is being said, the rest of you would have to use your imagination a little bit. The story of Noah begins with Genesis chapter 6 and this chiasm actually begins with Genesis chapter 6 verses 11 to 13 where it talks about how God decides that the world has become so evil that he must destroy it. And then if you come down to the very ending of this entire Noah passage that would be in your Genesis chapter 8 verses 21 to 22. You would see a parallel similarity between this first layer of the story and the last layer of the story. They are similar. In the first layer of the story, God decides I will destroy this world because of the evil there is. And if you come down to the last layer of the story, you know, when God has made a covenant with Noah and he says, I will never again do it. So in the first layer, you see God deciding to destroy. In the last layer, you see God saying, no, never again will I do this thing. Coming down to the next layer, okay, the next two layers. In this layer, which would be chapter 6 verse 14 to 22, Noah, he builds an ark. Come right down to the bottom and you have the second last layer down below. That would be able to see because of the, you know, I have this window over here which I'm not able to get the reference, but then we see that Noah, he builds an altar. So in the second layer of the story right on top, you have Noah building an ark. If you come down to the second last layer over here, you see Noah building an altar. Then you come down to the third layer, third layer. Okay, so over here you have the Lord ordering them to enter the ark. And if you come down here, you have the Lord ordering them to leave the ark. So it's like a mirror structure. Whatever you have in the first layer here matches with the last layer here. Second last layer of the second layer and the second last layer again match. It's like a mirror structure. Whatever is there reflects whatever is over here. And why were they writing in this style? You see they were leading up to the center point, what you actually call the X. The chiasm actually is a Greek word and the X, the chias, I think was the word. I don't remember my Greek word, but you know the center is the X. And there a very, very significant thing will be said. And we see this happening again and again in the Old Testament passages. Where at the very center of this chiasatic structure, God says something significant. And over here in this particular passage, that would actually turn out to be chapter 8 verse 1. Where it says, God remembered Noah. Now why on earth would it say something like that? Can God ever forget anything? God remembers everything always. But that wording has been put over there specifically for you and me. You know, for the readers to know that in spite of all that has been happening in the story, God never forgets his people. His eyes were always on Noah and his family. In fact, if you were to go to Genesis chapter 8 verse 1, over there it says, But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark. And he sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded. So if you look at this story, there's a lot of violence happening here. There's destruction, there's God's anger and judgment and all of that happening. But if you look at the center of that story right there in the middle, it says God remembered Noah. Not that God ever forgot, but the point over there is being made for you and me to understand. It's emphasizing the fact that the Lord never forgets his people. So irrespective of what floods, what trials, what things are happening in our lives, we can have this one confidence that the Lord always remembers his people.  And not just that it says over here, he not only does he remember Noah, it says he remembered all the wild animals and the livestock. So in the midst of this passage, this narrative which talking about anger and judgment and violence at the center of it, you have this phrase which talks about the mercy of God, the compassion of God, because God never wreaked out this entire havoc just to bring destruction. He did it to bring about new hope, a new beginning, because the world had gotten to such a rotten state that the Lord wanted to restore and redeem and restart something new, give people a second chance, give mankind a second chance. And we see that because of that, this particular phrase is placed right in the middle of the chaiastic structure. So even if you're going to go into the internet and you look for chiasms, if you just simply type in Google chiasms in the Old Testament and you start looking at them, look at what is there in the center, even as the story starts coming right to the middle, you start noticing that it becomes significant. And in fact, you will have some commentaries which will explain in what way that particular middle portion is significant. So that's just something that I wanted to bring our attention to even as we are doing this Old Testament survey. Alright, we will now maybe get into a very brief overview of some main concepts which are there in Genesis. The first is just a question which some people raise. And they say, you have a description of creation in Genesis chapter 1, you have a description of creation. But then in chapter 2, you have another second description of creation. And so they say, what is this? Is it like two different writers writing two different versions? Are they really contradicting each other? And they come up with all of these questions. But then if we look, we will see that chapter 1 just gives a brief introduction of giving a brief list of all the things which were created. That would be in chapter 1. Chapter 2 is attempting to provide you more details regarding some of the things mentioned in that list. So there's no contradiction between chapter 1 and chapter 2. Chapter 1 is just giving an outline. These are the list of things which were created. Chapter 2 tries to give you extra details about some of those created things. For instance, in chapter 1, it just simply says that God created humans in his image. But then when we go to the second chapter, we discover something about how they were created. God physically gets involved in it because he chooses to take up the dust of the ground and make humans out of it. So he doesn't just speak it out, he actually acts upon it, gets involved in it. So we see details in the second chapter which are not mentioned in the first chapter. So there are not two contradictory versions of creation. It's just that the second chapter is trying to provide greater detail regarding the first chapter. Now what do we mean when we say that humans were made in the image of God? Did I say something wrong? Okay, yeah. Okay, it's the hand-waving time. Okay, so we have just 10 minutes left. Let me just fit in this thing about the made in the image of God. As we all know, God is a spirit being. So it's not that he has two hands and two legs and is restricted to one body. He is everywhere. So when it says that humans were created in God's image, we are not trying to say that God has a human body like us. Rather, we are similar to the Lord in three ways. Humans were given the same moral feature that God has. Whatever God regards as right and wrong, humans also were created to feel the same way. They too would feel the same way God does about what is right and what is wrong. Now because of the fall and because of sin, now people's perspective has become very warped. We have different people saying, no, no, this is good. And then others say, no, no, no, this is evil and there seems to be no consensus on what is good and what is bad. But when God first created humans, they had the same moral character that God does. Whatever God regards as good and evil, humans also regarded the very same things as good and evil. And the second thing is that like God, humans also have this spiritual aspect to them. They are able to communicate with God. They are able to understand God. They are able to understand these divine things which plants and animals are unable to understand. So in that sense, we are created in the image of God. And third, we have an intellectual nature which no other part of creation has. We are able to think, we are able to analyze, we are able to remember what has happened in the past and relate it to someone. All these things, no animal, no plant is able to do. So when it comes to the moral aspect, the spiritual aspect and the intellectual nature, in these three areas we have been created in the image of God. So that was just something that I wanted to mention. And yes, if anyone has any questions here in the class, you could maybe raise it up. Anything from the book of Genesis, hopefully nothing too technical. If it is too technical for me to handle, I will look it up. I will find out their needed information and I can share that with you next class. But whatever I do know, I can answer those questions right now. So those of you who are online, I'm very sorry. But if you could put your questions immediately after the class, maybe in the stream page, I will go through the questions and all of those questions shall be addressed in the next class. We will not get into very controversial issues or lengthy debates because Genesis can generate a lot of debate. But anything that can be answered in a simple manner, we will do that because we have to go through all the books of the Old Testament and we may not have time to deal with it. But anything that you want to raise right now, any question that you want to raise regarding the book of Genesis. Any questions? Yes, your time. The question which was asked by one of the students here was that what do we say about the days of creation because of the debate which is there? Some people say God literally created in, you know, seven days, in six days, sorry, in six days, you know, 24 hour time span. And then there are some who say, no, no, no, when it says day, it doesn't talk about an actual physical 24 hour day. It's talking about many, many thousands of years. And so there's a lot of debate regarding this. And even today, the top scholars are still debating it and I am no top scholar.  Just so that you have an idea of what people are saying regarding this. The word that is used over there in your Hebrew Bible is the word Yom. Okay, Yom is the word for day. Now, Yom can be used for day. Yom can also be for duration. So the Hebrew vocabulary was rather limited in the sense they would use one word with many, many different meanings, layers of meaning. So Yom would be used for a physical actual 24 hour day. Yom would also be used for a duration of time. So in what sense was it mentioned in Genesis chapter one? Now that we don't have much clarity regarding. So there are two main parties generally. So there are those who will say, Yom actually is talking about a long duration of time. And so it kind of matches with what evolutionists talk about today about how we know each, you know, there were different ages, you know, and then different species came into being during each of those phases. And so people who support this idea of Yom being a long duration of time, they say, see, the Bible is also saying what these people, evolutionists are saying each day was actually a long duration of many thousands of years. And gradually things began to come into existence during that time as God created them. The one main argument which the other party has, those who hold on to the idea that it's just literally physical 24 hour duration, they say that, you know, if you are going to match your thinking with the evolutionists, it's going to have a problem because of the order in which the creation happened. On day one, certain things were created, day two, certain things were created. And if you look at evolution, they will give you a different ordering of creation. For instance, the sun and the moon and all were not created on day one.  So which means if stars began to come, even sun also would have had to come at that particular time. So, but then again, the other party, the other side, they argue and say, okay, fine, maybe the other stars were coming into being. But on the fourth day is when, fourth duration of time is when God allowed the sun to form, to take form. So it goes back and forth and you have probably an entire 10% of the internet is just devoted to that. There's a lot of debate on it. Okay, but this is the main thing. So you have people who say that the word Yom is just 24 hours literal day and the others who say it's a long duration of time. And we do not really know, you will have to form your own opinion regarding that, yeah. Anything else, any other question? You want just those three things, those three aspects, yeah. The question which one of the students is asking is, in what way were we created in the image of God? In the moral aspect, as in what we regard as right and wrong, the spiritual aspect, where we are able to understand God and communicate with God. And the third aspect is intellectual, where we are able to reflect upon things, we're able to analyze them, we're able to talk about it in a logical manner, all of these things. So those would be the three aspects in which we are similar to the image of God. Yeah, anything else at all? Yes. Yeah, that again, that's a very debatable thing and we really have time for it even. It's called the gap theory. So the theory says that verse one is talking about how God created and then there's a long gap of maybe millions of years and then verse two happened. God began this whole process of creation. So they tried to adjust and say, you know, science is today suggesting that it would have taken this many millions of years for everything to form. So yes, even the Bible is also saying that because there's a long gap between verse one and verse two. Or verse one is when God created the heavens and the earth. But then after that, the actual creation of all the other things would have started much later. And there was a long gap which took place between one and two. And then of course, they would also get into all kinds of doctrinal issues about the fall of Satan and all that. Let's not even go there at the moment. Yeah, okay. We'll conclude with your question because it's time. Go ahead. God did not feel the... Okay, what the student is saying over here in the class is that, you know, God being God doesn't need to explain to us how exactly he went about creating. And yeah, God being on a different level than us. For him, nothing is impossible. So he could have adopted any means of bringing about the creation. He was not restricted by time the way we are. It's what the student is saying. And what was the question? You just wanted to say that. Yes. Perfect. Yeah. So the bell has rung over here and we need to conclude. So thank you very much. And next tomorrow, yeah, we will be meeting for Exodus. Thank you. And thank you all.


Thank you for staying with us. You're still on to the breakfast on Plus TV Africa and right now we sign for our next hot topic We're talking about the fact that Nigeria slips lower on African ICT Development Index and we're joined by guest Dominic Rume O'Reary. He's a certified blockchain architect and metaverse experts Good morning Dominic. Thank you for joining us. I was tempted to say Rume Good morning. I'm glad to be here Thank you. Thank you so much. So we're seeing that Nigeria slipped lower on the African ICT Development Index Please can you just help me make sense of this because it's I was trying to like do my research There's a lot of numbers. There's a lot. So just explain this to me in layman's terms Okay It's very sad as we have seen Nigeria truly sleeping the global rankings for ICT Context right compared it to a country like Mauritius in Africa Which it is the first and then we just won Bafana Bafana yesterday South Africa the rank second in Africa followed by Kenya Nigeria is far down on that particular list So you can imagine some of the what number are we on now? I think we're about 60 something we're about 15 on that particular list But I've seen on that particular Yes in Africa now one of the major things that have cost this is is that we've had Poor internet infrastructure. We've had low Infrastructure gap That's the fact that they are low They are no more charm the smart devices that is available to the layman that can really do all of these things is Not as cheap as what the man can truly afford So these things have been a major factor. In fact another thing too has been The policy and regulation that have also been there. You see it was in 2022 that 22 that License was even released to some other private Companies to be able to see that they carry out the program So that has been one of the things that has made us to rank really low in that particular ICT Right great things. So what does this even what does this mean for us now? Is there any chance that we might still go up or this is where we are at and how can we What are the things that we need to do to make sure that we rank higher? Maybe when the next survey is being done Okay, it's really right now. This means this is Not a good place for us to be playing as a giant of Africa But it's a good one because we as a young population The population is doing its best to be able to see that some of the major challenges like the lack of internet connectivity We saw it as of life since the Stalin came I know a lot of young Nigerians that have gone ahead of government to be able to buy themself a very good device Right now because they've been able to go and buy themself a very good device You can see that they can be able to bridge that particular technological gap of data problem now So there's one was a look at what the Honorable Minister of Mr. Tijani He's doing very well in terms of his include trying to include much more trajectory and plans and strategy to see that We will be able to get out of this in under two years You know it all starts with a plan and because there's a plan who will be able to achieve it The future is looking bright on Nigeria because money and investments is going in already and we look at 224 as a time The better 5G connection all over Nigeria so from here, we're moving to where number 15 is quite low and What are the immediate things that need to be done to make sure that we return to this place? Because if you're talking about infrastructure or poor internet poor this poor that it may not It may not be a problem that we can solve just now. Does it mean we are going to linger in number 15 or there is hope for us? We will linger there. There is hope for us Like I said Infrastructure a gap is already being Tackled in terms of ICT when you say the information communication technology of the country What do you really mean the ability for? Information to be able to be disseminated very very fast. There are also a lot of Educational programs are also going to be able to see that the skill sets the manpower That's actually needs to be built like in terms of routing switching and showing that networking goes well in big companies There are a lot of Cisco certification programs that are already being done So we have more personas that are equipped entering into this new industry Now, let's not call it new but relatively young industry especially here in Nigeria because we're not yet at the forefront of it So the youth population They are also very interested in saying that they go the way of technology. You see everybody now saying tech bro Texas and because of that particular part that they were so taking they need to find the ways to be able to fix These problems themselves and I tell you the truth and I know it is just a function of a better policy More exposure to funding that we were able to see that okay We can cover up these basic gaps and then we definitely be doing well Okay, so what role do you think? education and skills can start to improve these gaps that we're talking about so Education is very important because I tell you we're going to be a tech bro. Texas. You need to know a lot about that Right. So what book and education? Play with this in making sure that we're covering the gaps and you know We're coming back up because like young booth and number 15 is not a good spot to be on so education and skill is I think in the world of the wise man He says your skill is the only thing you have when a product has been taken away from you so for a country like Kenya you can see how well they've developed their ICT sector They've also taken out time to be able to upskill the young population. They don't They build hubs like the Nigerian government have invested in more hubs in digital hubs Programs that are for empowerment to be able to see that young people also get involved However, this is just something that has possibly be done on the surface level We need to go more grassroots. We need to be able to do it the way we carry out election campaign it's as serious as sensitizing our citizens against To be able to be aware of polio because in your digital world It is an anathema to see the genet of Africa pick such a position in the world We cannot be taking such a position in the world So it is something that needs urgent fixing in terms of Building more hubs that can actually engage people Digitally and with this skill set, you know, it is wanting to talk the talk It's also another thing to work the talk now for us. I just it just cost us about about Stay seven thousand dollars to be able to fix steady power with the current Situation here and the current situation will happen in this country and that because we are the tech hub We're able to afford seven thousand dollars to fix our solar How many other people will be able to afford seven thousand dollars to fix your solar? Which means that if there's no power if there's no this I think in MTN also We just increase the prices of data as well. So you can see that the bundle you normally do is no longer available So that means I will say they should subsidize some of these things but truly there needs to be like a high level of competition to even with the skill and Training to be able to see that some of the major infrastructure gaps like the lack of internet is one of the worst thing the internet the internet in Reduces the assets the assets you have to the global world So skill would definitely be a good thing because of course you can't do that And you need education to establish an economy like our match I always say we need education to establish an economy I would have education you can't even skill All right, I think that's a very good way to leave it. We wish you had more time But yes, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Thank you very much for me. All right, I think very much my very good friend You wouldn't remember my name. I'm not room. So It's all right, thank you so much for being a part of our show this morning All right, we're speaking to Dominique Rume Rui Rui is a certified blockchain architect and a metaverse expert I'm talking about the fact that Nigeria has slipped well to number 15 now on the African ICT Development Index, but this is where we wrap it up on our show. We hope that you've had a good time with us really Yeah, I'm calling the final words Congratulations Nigeria Congratulations to Nigeria. Yes, we defeated the buffoon of the banner and right now we're in the finals and hopefully on Sunday We're going to be emerging as well as the super egos are going to be sorry But as far as I'm concerned They have already won the trophy in my heart whether they emerge victorious or not because all the odds were against us Even from our own people nobody believed in them or believed in the coach But now we kept progressing one goal at a time until we are in the finals So whatever happens, congratulations still a super egos. Well, hopefully when we come on Monday We'll be given like a congratulatory But yes, this is where we wrap it up. We'll see you again tomorrow. Thank you for joining us. My name is Brumette Let's do it again tomorrow