Our next speaker is John Blakely, he comes from Brighton. Another work camp that you should probably visit, it's a really nice one. Very good. Yeah, where it works as a senior technical architect at Pragmatic, which is a leading agency here in the UK based in Brighton. He discovered WordPress back in 2006 and never looked back. And he also worked in the film industry as a sculptor. I want to know more about that. That sounds really interesting. We should talk about this for blockbuster movies that you probably have seen. And today's going to talk about use cases for the REST API. Please give a warm welcome to Sean. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. So I'm going to talk about when to use the REST API. So as Francesca said, my name's Sean Blakely. I'm from Pragmatic, a Brighton based UK WordPress agency. I've recently been involved with large enterprise level scrum projects. And I've been working with WordPress for about 12 years now. So who's this talk aimed at? Well, I'd like to talk about some use cases for the REST APIs and some of the cases in which we've used and found value in the REST API. I'd also like to talk about why I think the REST API is important. I'd then like to talk about an overview of what an API is. So a very brief flyover of what APIs are. And then start digging into when to use the API and use some examples of when we've used the API. And then very briefly we'll look at tomorrow. So some of the impact that I think the REST API will have for WordPress going forward and into the future. So why is the API, the REST API, important? Well, I think it's important for two groups. I think it's important for us as a community and obviously a lot of the community is made up of developers. And then secondly, I think it's important for the WordPress project itself. So WordPress as a platform. So prior to the API, WordPress was a monolithic application. So it was a sort of black box where nothing really came into the system, nothing was really able to get out of the system and it controlled that publishing flow really from sort of an end to end controls and beginning to end. Now, the API changed that. What the API did, the REST API, is that it allowed data to start coming into WordPress. So allowed data to start coming into the system, but it also allowed data to start flowing out of the system. And so what this did was really sort of a two-fold. So it liberated our data. So it meant that we could start moving data in and out of WordPress. But it also liberated WordPress itself that we could start integrating with other systems and start integrating and becoming part of a larger architecture. And secondly, why I feel anyway that the REST API is important for the WordPress project. Well, this is the dominance that WordPress has currently over other CMSs. So it would seem counter-intuitive that WordPress, that the REST API should be important to WordPress for its success and continuing success to thrive or even survive. But in fact, this very dominance potentially makes WordPress vulnerable. And that comes from some ideas introduced by Clayton Christensen. And he was talking about when a software or a company dominates the market to this degree, it actually becomes vulnerable to those smaller, more nimble, more agile participants who can innovate much quicker than this dominant party. And so start challenging that dominant position and challenging that key sort of position. So the answer to this and the way of addressing this at what's called the innovators dilemma is disruptive innovation. And now disruptive innovation is starting to challenge your own position. So that position of dominance that WordPress has within the CMS space at the moment to overcome that potential vulnerability to more nimble and quicker iterating organizations is to start challenging itself and challenging its own position via disruptive innovation. And that's exactly what the API is doing. The REST API is starting to challenge us as a community to start innovating within WordPress. And I would suggest that Gutenberg is exactly the same thing. It's starting to challenge ourselves to innovate and to move forward with our software. So what is an API? Let's have a quick sort of top level look at what an API is. So I often like to think of an API as an electricity supply. So in and of itself it really doesn't do very much. You can turn it on and it just sort of silently sits there. It's really what you can sort of plug into that electricity that is really sort of diverse and awe-inspiring and empowering. But the API itself is the electricity supply. Now, I'm about to visit Guatemala in a couple of weeks. My wife is Guatemalan, which in turn means that my father-in-law is Guatemalan. Now, I was thinking, as I'm sort of preparing for this trip, I was thinking about the API in these terms, that my father-in-law doesn't speak a word of English. So I can't communicate or I struggle to communicate with my father-in-law. And conversely, my Spanish is criminally bad. So I can't communicate at all in Spanish. So my father-in-law has something that I'm very interested in and that's Guatemalan culture or Latin American culture. So I'm interested in the music and the food and the pinatas and all the other things that are enriching about the Latin culture. And conversely, I have things that he's interested in. So he's interested in English culture and that might be warm beer and fish and chips. And he's obsessed with it. He thinks we're all pirates for some reason. So unfortunately, my poor wife is a sort of a conduit between my father-in-law and myself. So she has to translate from one to the other and this is the only way that we can access information and the information that we want to pull from each other. And this is kind of like an API, but I think we can do it a little better here. So let's imagine that my father-in-law and I resolved to learn a shared language and so let's suggest that that's Pigeon Esperanto. So now we have introduced this third language into the mix and we might not speak very much of this language, but as long as we've agreed, we've shared that information between us so we're sharing that Pigeon Esperanto, well now we can communicate in that shared language and so my wife can put her feet up and we can start communicating together. Now this is much closer to what and how an API works. So in this example, I might be a WordPress install and my father-in-law might be a 30-year-old Kobol piece of software. In fact, he might have been around before even PHP was created. However, because we have the shared Pigeon Esperanto and it's actually JSON in the REST API, we can communicate and we can share information. So let's have a look at when to use the REST API and look at some examples of when we've used the REST API. What I'd like to do is sort of home down on two particular areas. So I'd like to look at architecture and we're going to look at some examples of using the REST API as a tool within our architecture and then we'll look at data and we're going to look at some data manipulation using the REST API. So first I'd like to look at using the REST API to enable us to use WordPress as part of an overall solution within an architecture. So this is an example. This is a sports organization which we're just about to embark working with and what they'd like to do is utilize the standard publishing flow of WordPress. So the content team will be creating content within WordPress and then pushing out in a familiar format into a PHP template. However, they also want to ingest news and information. This happens to be an API but it's not via the WordPress REST API ingesting news into the system. They then want to curate that news so they want to decide which news they're going to push forward and publish on their platform and they'll likely summarize it and sort of wrap it in their own summary and information. Now, this is a proposal for an MVP structure but it presents us with a problem and probably a couple of problems. So the first is a performance. So getting WordPress to do this heavy lifting so ingesting the API, ingesting that data whilst also incidentally it's running a subscription area over here and it's also running an e-commerce area over here and so we're really starting to put pressure on WordPress as our key component of our architecture and so there's actually probably a better way of doing this and that's to offload some of that heavy lifting into the resource and that's likely to be a Node.js script running which what it will do is ingest that content so rather than coming directly into WordPress it'll ingest the content into a content API. That will be cached content so we'll be able to call that content into WordPress when the content team decided to ingest that into WordPress they can then enrich it within WordPress so within the WordPress interface there'll be adding taxonomies and metadata and all that other enrichment and then pushing to the front end and it's likely that what we'll do is push into a restricted area of the content API so we'll create a sort of a published area of the content API and then conversely our front end can pull that data down for the content API and it can also be pulled down from other services so it can be a newsletter and apps and so on so as you can see this portion of our architecture is separate from WordPress and whilst we're sort of engaging with WordPress and WordPress is communicating with this dedicated area it's not doing the heavy lifting let's have a look at another approach so this is using WordPress as an API delivery system now this was for an organization who are making available information about every single swimming pool across the globe so they have swimming pools in every major city and hotel swimming pools and you know sort of public baths and there's information around you know is it child friendly or pet friendly I don't even know if that's a thing is it you know the opening hours can you book in advance and all that kind of good stuff so what they wanted to benefit from is the sort of standard WordPress publishing flow so they wanted to interact with the graphical interface of WordPress, the back end they would then push that data into WordPress now the difference with this implementation is that there was no website at the front end of this implementation so what they wanted was a publicly queryable API so this information could be pulled into widgets, could be pulled into other sites and other sort of data sources around the internet and so all that was available was the data the pure data via an API feed now this was a good fit for WordPress using it as a delivery system because we weren't doing anything else there's no subscription, e-commerce and all the other things we were talking about previously the system wasn't doing anything else but delivering an API and delivering the data however there were still some performance issues that we faced and there were still some improvements that we felt we could make so there was a couple of things that we did one was introduced Elastic Search Elastic Search is a flat data storage so it distributes your data into a cluster and shards it into a cluster so you can retrieve sort of lightning quick queries it's very good at multiple query points so all those filters around dog-friendly pools or whatever we were talking about that's what you can do with Elastic Search it's unique sort of queries so we introduced this Elastic Search layer which gave us that data performance returning the API and also introduced an accelerator plug-ins this is a little must use plug-in that we wrote that enabled us to bypass the standard WordPress boot system so the sort of boot sequence in WordPress is even if you're serving up an API it's going to load the whole sort of boot sequence loading your theme and your plug-ins and so on so we built a little bypass must use plug-in that would just ascertain that it was an API call and of course in this model everything is an API request and then we would sort of send it send it into this plug-in this must use plug-in that would then bypass all of the plug-ins that the sort of the plug-in array and push it straight to the API constructor so the endpoint constructor so as you can see we were using WordPress as the solution but we were sort of building and enhancing some of those elements within WordPress let's have another look at another example so this is integrating systems now this example is Fairfax Fairfax are a large Australian publishing company and this is a project that Keeman May recently embarked on where they have an existing content API so they have a million plus existing sort of articles and data pieces and so they have a media API serving up their images, media and so on and then the content API which is actually receiving information so again you're seeing that similar model where we're ingesting information from somewhere else so this is the wires or the press association or Australian equivalent pulling data into the content API and then the existing sort of media API now what Fairfax wanted was that they wanted their journalists, their editors and other employees to benefit from WordPress and benefit from that graphical interface that WordPress offers on the back end and also part of that sort of publishing flow and so they wanted to integrate with those existing architecture and integrate with these existing APIs and that's exactly what they did they allowed the journalists to start pulling data and articles down from the content API so they could create data in the normal flows so that the normal sort of publishing flow they'd all recognise as you're constructing and creating an article or they could pull articles down and refine them from this content API they then set them to preview and that would trigger and there was a Slack integration where it triggers to an editor that there's an article that's ready for review and so the editor then pulls that down and they pull it down into WordPress they can then enrich it so they can be adding the meta and the really wanting their employees to have that benefit from the WordPress interface but it might be connecting with other services that weren't originally intended and the media API is a really good example of this because the journalists can upload their images to WordPress so in our sort of media uploader in the normal way however they get sort of hijacked if you like by the media API and it pushes out to a cloud and read service so it doesn't actually reside within the WordPress install so let's have a look at data and data manipulation and I like to think that data manipulation with the API is as easy as pie and so what I mean by that is that presenting and integrating and experimenting with data and this is really what the REST API allows us to do so let's have a look at some examples of these three areas so this is a plugin that I've been working on recently this is a plugin called Site in Numbers and what this plugin allows you to do is start drawing out big data from your website so it's intended to be sort of allow the site owner to pull out big data visualization opportunities around the sort of total word count on the site or the total read time it might be the publishing days of the week that you publish on even down to the sort of times that comments are made and so really starting to enable the site owners to see patterns in their own data as well as their potential audience to see patterns in the data so the way that we've structured this is it's sort of three-fold so it has an admin interface this is the interface for the site owner so here they can sort of select the sections that they want to add to display on the front end or sections that they want to pull out then in turn it has the API construction layers so this is where we pull together start constructing all those statistics start constructing all that information and then creating this JSON data object so this large object of data that is then pulled into the front end so this is a JavaScript layer it's pulling that JSON information in and then it's distributing those statistics those numbers into the relevant places around the site but then also as you can see it's using chart.js to start constructing charts so presenting that information in different and varied ways so this is really where the heavy lifting is being done on the server side so WordPress is doing the heavy lifting constructing that data, that big JSON object and then the processing is being done in the JavaScript and processing that information that comes through let's have a look at another project this is a project called IM Team GB this is a project we did for ITV the British Olympic Association and the National Lottery and among many things that we had to do for this project one of the things was we had to provide an inbox sorry an input box where you could put your location so it might be your postcode or your city of residency and then we'd show events that were relevant to you and we'd show them within distance order from your front door so we had many thousands of events that were being created that were actually being ingested in from another system again via the REST API and so we'd have those events and then we'd be needing to show the relevant events to that individual and where they've searched from so this is how we did it again we relied on WordPress as our interface we were actually ingesting those events into this WordPress site and I pulled out the JavaScript layer here because when we put in and so in that example I'm putting Brighton in which is my hometown that's then firing an API request to Google Maps we're looking for the longer-tuned latitude and so we might get an error back if we're not UK based we get that long-tuned latitude back into the JavaScript layer JavaScript is then via the API, via the REST API making a request back to our system and what we've done is we've split the UK into four sections and the reason that we've done that and we've split it into four endpoints the reason that we've done that is because we're dealing with large quantities of data and so we need to make that data manageable and we need to sort of narrow down our focus as to what data set we're bringing back so we did some calculations and four was about the right number and so the system would ascertain where your long-tuned latitude which sort of pot of this sort of region that we should be pulling that data back from so in this example it's number three we pull that data back via the API and in this instance the JavaScript layer is probably doing quite a lot of heavy lifting because we get this great big unordered JSON data object back and then the JavaScript has to sort those events and calculate the distance from your front door and then present it to the user and obviously all of that needs to be done in lightning quick time so let's have a look at another example this is integrating now the interesting thing about using the REST API to integrate systems and integrate with systems different software and different clients have different definitions of what integration means and so it's really important to define what's meant by integration and what we're trying to achieve by integration now a great example of this is SAGE now we're working with SAGE the global financial company and this is from the SAGE homepage so this is a site core site so site core is a .NET content management system but the content that you're seeing isn't coming from site core it doesn't reside within site core this is coming from a WordPress site and it's actually coming from SAGE Advice which is the blog section of the SAGE ecosystem and that's built in WordPress so how is this information coming across and what is this integration? well through discussions with SAGE we were talking to a number of sort of stakeholders SAGE and that was including the tech teams and other participants within the organisation it became clear that for SAGE integration meant displaying contextualised information in the right place so it's about being able to pull the right information in and then display it anywhere around the SAGE ecosystem so that's exactly what we did what we did is we created a custom endpoint so an endpoint where anywhere within the SAGE ecosystem they could pull contextualised data and pull information in and then display it within that sort of space within the ecosystem and incidentally as you're seeing on the end of this endpoint we have a number of filters and these are also really important because this was an opt-in so you could add and indeed they do add as little information as they want so our relevancy is quite low they might just add the category or they can start turning up that relevancy so really start adding the tags and other taxonomies that are available and so getting really relevant results depending on the information they provide because behind here resides a relevancy engine so when you hit this endpoint that data comes in so that request comes in and then the system starts allocating points if you get a tag match you get a point and then if you match the categories you might get three points etc etc and so it's really sort of constructing a league table of relevancy for the different posts around the system and then we know that we're returning just the most relevant results back to wherever that request has come now what this enables us to do is start making all these connections between the different systems so what you're seeing here this is a site core site and this is a WordPress site but because we're creating this interconnectivity what we're doing is creating a deeply integrated user experience there is no friction as somebody moves from site core into WordPress and back again and indeed they don't know that they're moving between systems and that's by using the REST API and our approach and so allowing all those touchpoints between the two different systems so let's have a look at experimenting one of the things we mentioned before is that one of the real value of the REST API allows us to start innovating and challenging ourselves and experimenting so here's some examples and some experiments that we've been working on now this is a recent thing that I've been playing with this is Ionic and this is an integration with WordPress so Ionic can create a native app can compile into a native app but it's data source where it's pulling that data from WordPress now this is fully crud to what that means is I can create and edit and delete information from the Ionic interface and it will actually persist down into the WordPress site so as you can see I'm adding Charles to Charles Darwin there and if we come back to the WordPress site so the data site sits behind it you'll see that that change has actually persisted into the WordPress site now this is really exciting because it enables us to start thinking of our content as dynamic and it can start being affected and change from around an entire ecosystem and this is just one example where it's being changed via Ionic over here on a mobile but it could be anywhere within an ecosystem and so we can really start thinking of our data as fluid and WordPress is just sort of the storage vessel for that data and we're affecting it across a larger ecosystem let's have another look at a different example this is where we sort of challenged ourselves to start thinking about WordPress in a different way so what could we do creatively with WordPress and particularly around the REST API what would it enable and so what I was thinking about was as a games engine I've never thought about WordPress as a games engine so I was thinking about how would you do that how would you go about that and so what I'd settled on was a football simulation or a soccer simulation for our international friends and so you would be able to think of like a turn-based game so you'd be starting to run that relationship and a progression of times there's a couple of things one was as you can see there's sort of shadow taxonomies here so shadow taxonomies taxonomies that don't really persist onto the front end so we're just using them to create sort of one to many many to many network connections of data so if you think a sort of football match it may have clubs it may have players and players may have agents and so on and so forth so there's lots of interrelationships between that network so that was one element of it but then the other was a time engine so thinking about the progression of time and how we could build that within a WordPress space and in DGS and REST API so that's exactly what we did we created Herbert after HD Wells and Herbert is a time machine that is essentially passing on time so the passage of time is moving on and Herbert is controlling events that are happening in that space so there might be certain events which are clock stopping which stop the passage of time and then other events which just persist in the background and they're updating the user so we're still very early but that idea, that notion of using WordPress and using the REST API to start constructing WordPress and manipulating data in an entirely different way is a very interesting approach and certainly if something that we've enjoyed thinking about WordPress in this different way so let's have a look at a more immediate example so this is the Gutenberg interface well it was the Gutenberg interface a couple of days ago it might have changed by now but in fact, Zach's probably talking about that right now so I've been interested for a while in the impact of Gutenberg of what it's going to mean to us all and one of the things that I have been interested in the while is that in WordPress we have this great big content area and it's this great big sort of imposing area that is impenetrable that we can't really get into the information that's in that content area now of course Gutenberg is changing that it's turning our content into discrete blocks so we're going to be able to start constructing and building out sort of pages from these sections and so what it enables us to start thinking about is potentially drilling down to that information and so rather than just accessing a post and sort of accessing information at that level we can actually start drilling down and looking at individual blocks within the content so what I've been thinking about is where we have post tags and post tags is where we tag at post level we can start thinking about adding content tags and so content tags might be tagging individual blocks you might have a paragraph about some sort of you know a topic over here and then an image in a post over here and you know a bullet point list over here but what if we use our content tags we can start forming those relationships as we've been talking about before that that network of relationships between data and so then we can start constructing these dynamic pages which is pulling related content together and really allowing us to modularise our content so as we developers often modularise our constructions we modularise our sort of SAS files and our JavaScript files well this is one approach where we might start being able to modularise our content and actually pulling it out and showing related and relevant content so I'd just like to say a few words around performance just some sort of things that we've found when using the REST API so the first is around transients and using the transients API I have to be careful obviously we're talking about the REST API the transients API WordPress has a number of APIs and the transient API is a really useful one transients are database storage there's ways of caching data objects now they're very useful for something like the REST API so if we're making requests and we're requesting data that may be persistent and other users are requesting then we can construct it into a transient and then it will cache it within the database and we're going to get a much quicker response time so as you can see here we were hitting about 5 seconds or so drop that into a transient and we're getting a huge slash I don't know if you could read that but we're down to 0.4 or 0.5 seconds now there is a caveat with transients and it's really a use case that you need to be aware of so if you have a high traffic site they are temporary storage and so your user may go to the transient and it doesn't exist and if the transient doesn't exist it blocks the transient for the user however that's true for all users so if you have 20, 30 concurrent users then they're all going to be constructing that same transient putting huge pressure on the database and on resources there are a few ways around this but one is asynchronous transients which is the plugin which I suggest looking at if you have those sort of racing conditions and big high traffic now the other thing that we did and I'd recommend and we mentioned this before is the accelerator plugin or that similar kind of architectural solution so this was a site that is dedicated to the API so it's just a delivery system but by default it's loading in our theme and our plugins and our other sort of resources so we use this accelerator plugin and it simply just bypasses the plugins and so it just gives us straight to the information that we wanted and we managed to slash that by about two-thirds so a huge saving just in thinking about how the WordPress boot structure works and then thinking about how we can manipulate that but in a secure way and so not sort of making any compromises on security I'm going to make these slides available I don't expect you to read all those but these are some dev resources indeed they're asynchronous transients and some distributor plugin is a very interesting project at the moment so there's some bits and pieces there I've also put together some other resources so there's a white paper and see the Slack channel is a very active channel around the API so what I'd like to sort of leave you with is just thinking about Tomorrow and where the rest of the API is sort of taking us to Murrow so for me I think we've opened up this opportunity and it's an opportunity to be innovative to sort of challenge ourselves as a community in particular as a development community I really start thinking about the sort of integrations and the opportunities that being able to have access to our data anywhere in different sort of services and different solutions what those opportunities present us I mean it's certainly we can start working and collaborating with different teams and different agencies that may have no relationship with the WordPress space but the API is allowing us to do that because our data then becomes platform agnostic the fact that it's originated from the WordPress makes no difference because JSON is platform agnostic so it allows us to start manipulating and moving data around and so for me it doesn't really matter where the API goes the rest API may be superseded by other API solutions but it's really it's not what's important what's important is we've enabled that opportunity for the community to start moving information and treating data and thinking about data in a very different way and so as we were talking about before that innovating into new space that challenging ourselves and challenging our own dominance I think that's exactly what the rest API does it allows us to start innovating into new space and taking WordPress into places that it certainly hasn't been before and so as we were talking about before as the API the rest API as an electricity supply well it's truly inspiring what electricity supply enables and all the myriad of things that you can do when you're given that power and that opportunity thank you we have five minutes for questions there thank you and then here thanks thanks for the talk question about the transient API are you using transients directly or do you go through the cache, get set etc so in our current structure we're using transients directly so we're creating a transient and the plugin that I was talking about the site and numbers plugin is constructing a transient directly some of the things that we were talking about around the compromises or potential things that you need to be aware of and so that's that current racing conditions as you have lots of users starting to construct those transients so looking at the asynchronous transients and so what that essentially does is sort of creates a full back transient so if the transient doesn't exist you go to a full back conversion so you don't have those construction pressures on the system and for me currently that solution sort of overcomes I think one of the key flaws of transients when you have that full back you no longer need to think about other solutions I think that's a good sort of fit for us just a related question how long do you keep the transients or how long do you set the expire on them that's a really good question so just to be clear transients expire so they're sort of temporary data storages and so by default you normally set an expiry date and so the transient sort of doesn't persist for too long I tend not to set the expiry date so you can actually set a non expiring transient and then you can start replacing the same transient and so as long as you use a naming convention which is the same name you don't then have to concern yourself with that expiry date okay follow up on that a non expiring transient is stored in the options table which is autoloaded which will put pressure on the memory of your server so as a pro tip you can set an expiry date on all transients to not kill your server with lots of transients I've run into that it's not good I can well imagine and in fact if someone were to be talking specifically about transients there's all sorts of little tips that you need to be aware of there are little caveats and gotchas and there's a really good one a really important one so yes that's very sage advice you do need to be mindful when using transients so that you have consequences to your actions we have another question here thank you you spoke a lot about the performance problem so my question is from someone that doesn't got inside this matter deeply in the past but looking from the outside do you think it's preventing this API system to be widely spread and used and do you think in the future that the WordPress core will improve this issue it's a really good question I mean so the problem that we're trying to overcome with that accelerator plugin is we're trying to bypass that boot sequence that WordPress does by default and that's an obvious quick win because if we're going to use WordPress in a different way and so as a delivery system then there really is no need to be sort of loading all this information that's not going to be utilized I mean it is it is a a concern to a degree or there's certainly something you need to be aware of but there are all sorts of caching layers that you can introduce so you can start making that more performant that transients we're talking about is one option to start increasing the speed and efficiency of your system but one of the things we haven't talked too much about today but is the opportunity it gives you to start introducing new front end libraries and frameworks into your architecture so things like react and view and so on and so the payoff is that you then have this whole other opportunity to start building and structuring things in a different way and so you can start thinking about the performance some of the performance savings we can make over here but this opportunity it presents us to sort of you know far outweighs the performance concerns we might have currently sort of you know over here this is it for us for this morning please let's give it up thank you lunch is served


There were two vices, much blacker and more serious than the rest, lack of persistence and lack of self-control. Persist and resist. A man venerated for his benevolence, discipline and self-control. Throughout his meditations he constantly warned himself as to what would happen if he gave in to superfluous desires. What is amazing is that throughout his almost 20 year tenure as Emperor of Rome, with unimaginable temptations always surrounding him, he consistently demonstrated kindness, fairness and magnanimity. Never once is it reported that he displayed any arrogance or sign of megalomania. But how did he do it? How did Marcus Aurelius maintain control and possibly the most toxic environment filled with betrayal and hardships? Before we get into what Marcus believed about the human condition, let's take a look at some of the things that he had to endure, all while heading a massive empire and fighting multiple wars. This should give you an idea of the strength of this man's constitution. Ascending to the throne on March 8, 161 CE, he ruled together with his adopted brother Lucius Ferris. During his reign, Marcus and his wife Faustina the Younger had 13 children, of which seven passed before him. I can imagine what toll that alone took on them. On top of this, he also lost Lucius Ferris in 169 and his wife Faustina in the winter of 75. He also lost one third of the population he was tasked with protecting to a pestilence later named the Antonine Plague. This made the fighting of the Marcomannic War against the Germanic Barbarians increasingly difficult. Lastly, the Tiberripper flooded in the spring of 162 CE, killing a significant portion of the wildlife, ruining grain stores and subsequently causing widespread famine. Now ask yourself, under those circumstances, could you maintain your composure, run an empire, all while still placing the needs of others above your own? Honestly, I don't think I could hold a candle to him. He had unbelievable mental fortitude and strength as well as self-discipline. There's no question that his fundamental belief in stoicism helped impress on regardless of the circumstances or the happenings in his life. Marcus Aurelius believed that our very lives are ephemeral and that focusing on something that's outside of your control is irrational. This doesn't mean that he didn't grieve for the loss of his countrymen and his loved ones alike. This quote by Epictetus, someone who Marcus Aurelius respected for his works on the Stoic doctrine, pretty well sums up Marcus' view on death. He said, life is something like going on an ocean voyage. What can I do? Pick the captain, pick the boat, the date, the best time to sail, but then a storm hits. What are my options? I do the only thing I'm in position to do. Drown. But fearlessly, without bawling or crying out to God, because I know that what is born must also die. Because he was always following the logos and striving to be the best human being that he could be, he had a strong understanding of his purpose and place in nature. To him, whenever the circumstances in his life were too chaotic, he always had a place to go. This place was his mind. He said it is in your power, whenever you choose, to retire into yourself. For there is no retreat that is quicker or freer from trouble than a man's own soul. Especially when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them, he is immediately in perfect tranquility. And tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Not only did Marcus Aurelius have to stay on guard through tremendous tragedy, he also had to refrain from self-indulgence. When you're the ruler of the entire known world, there's not much that you can't have. With this immense temptation, one can only imagine the extraordinary self-control and virtue that he would have to have in order not to disgrace himself. You can see this with tons of the emperors before and after him.  Now why does this matter? Because it's an example. He is a precedent of what human beings are capable of. If he can press on through such extreme circumstances, then there's nothing that can break you. And there's nothing that can stop you from doing what you ought to do.  Because any behavior that is available to one person is available to all people. If he did it, then you can also do it. If you want to look into the mind of this exceptional human being, pick up a copy of his self-reflections called the meditations. This is what the book cover looks like if you get the Dover Thrift Edition. You can get it on Amazon for about four dollars. The link is in the description below. Now I'm going to leave you with this quote from Marcus Aurelius. I'm rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I'm going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into this world? Or have I been made for this till I under the blankets and keep myself warm? Do you exist than to take your pleasure and not at all for action or exertion? Make sure you subscribe if you enjoy the content and want to learn more about stoicism and the notable figures who practiced it. Stay stoic and stay satisfied. I hope to see you in the next video.


Every culture around the world has its own folklore. And within all these cultures around the world, with their specific folklore, comes the legend of shapeshifters. For example, a very common folklore that originated in Europe and then came to the Americas with the Europeans is the legend of the werewolf, a being a human that can shapeshift into a wolf under the full moon. But did you know that according to the Navajo culture, there is a folklore about shapeshifting that is so taboo that the Navajo people will not talk about it to outsiders. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button and give us a like. If you wanna help support the channel, there's a link to our Patreon page down below. Okay, let's get started. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and today we're gonna be talking about the legend of the skinwalker. Taboo subject for the Navajo people. So all the information that I got on the skinwalkers came from outside sources. So with that being said, I do apologize if I get anything wrong. Now the Navajo people actually lived on the opposite side of the country. I live in the Southeast and the Navajo were from the Southwest. Now the Navajo is America's largest Native American tribe. And their tribe was located in present day North Eastern Arizona, Southeastern Utah, Northwestern New Mexico. This is a beautiful piece of land. It is beautiful deserts, breathtaking views. And the Navajo people, not unlike other Native American tribes, really tried to work in harmony with nature. So for the Navajo, the folklore or the legend of the skinwalker is the complete antithesis of what they actually stand for. Within the Navajo culture, certain men and women will learn how to become medicine people. They will learn how to work with the elements of nature in order to heal others. Now along their studies of learning this, they are also taught the dark side of magic, the dark side of working with these elements. The theory behind this is, from what I understand is that that every practitioner, as they hone in on their craft, they will be able to distinguish between good and bad. And as far as the Navajo culture is concerned, they only want to promote the good. All in all, in my opinion, the Navajo culture is one of total beauty. I actually think there's a lot that we can all learn from the Navajo community. So it is said that the skinwalkers are people that went down the path of the Madison man or Madison woman. And when they were taught that evil side of magic, they were corrupted by it. And instead of taking the path of righteousness, they decided to hang back with the path of evil. Now, from what I understand, shape shifting itself, according to the Navajo culture, isn't necessarily evil. In fact, before the white man came along, I read somewhere that the Navajos would teach their people how to shape shift in order to spy on other tribes. But then of course, as I said, there were a few, more than a few of these people that became completely corrupted by the evil. Now, it does take conscious choice to become a shape shifter from what I understand. There is actually a ceremony involved. Now, for the Navajo people, when they do wear animal skins, they typically wear them for ceremonies. And the animal skins that they wear are the sheep, animals that are not predatory animals. However, for the skinwalker, the skins that they wear are that of the coyote or a bear or a wolf, animals that find prey. You see, when one of these medicine men or women wanna become a skinwalker, the ceremony that they go through is quite intense. And it actually kind of reminds me of some of the legends we hear about the cabal. It is said that they have to find a loved one, preferably a sibling.  It is also stated within the skinwalkers themselves, there is a leader, preferably an older man who has been a skinwalker for a very long time. Apparently all these skinwalkers still meet and hold ceremonies within the caves where they continue to participate in things like cannibalism and incest. They also are big into robbing graves. Now, the skinwalkers themselves, those that choose to become skinwalkers, it's not known by the people in the community that that's what they are. This ceremony and their identities are kept a secret from everybody else. But when the skinwalker does appear, they usually appear as a wolf or as a coyote. They say that these skinwalkers have red eyes when they are in the skins of these animals. But as humans, when they shift back, their eyes have an animalistic look to them. Now, the Navajo people do not want the skinwalkers around. The squid skinwalkers are completely evil beings. The skinwalkers can run extremely fast.  They only travel by night, a little bit like the werewolf. That's when their shifting takes place.  They will run past you, terrifying the driver. And because the United States police department at this point has no jurisdiction on the reservations, the Navajo people living on the reservation do take matters into their own hands, sometimes, allegedly. There are stories that when they know that someone is a skinwalker, they will remove that person. Meaning, I have to say, if the person really is a skinwalker, I don't blame them. It seems that their nowadays is nothing positive left on the skinwalkers and they all have pretty much turned against their own people or rather, turned against humanity in general. It is said that usually a tribe today will know if there is a skinwalker present because their sheep will die. You see, according to Navajo, this sheep are so innocent and so good that the energy of a skinwalker in their midst is enough to make them perish on the spot. When a whole flock of sheep goes down, the tribe knows they have a problem on their hands. Now, in 1878, the Navajo community saw the biggest purge of skinwalkers. So what happened in 1878 with the Navajo community can very much be compared to what happened in Salem, Massachusetts for us people of European descent when we experienced our witch trials. By the mid-1800s, as the pioneers from the East Coast started to venture into the Western part of the United States, the Navajos, along with a lot of other native tribes, were all of a sudden challenged for their land. There were many battles between the Navajo and the pioneers and eventually, the Navajos unfortunately lost the battle. And so in 1864, the Navajo were moved by the United States government. This was called the Long Walk, very much similar to the Trail of Tears on the eastern side of the United States that had happened before. You see, of course, steering this Long Walk as the Navajo were being moved off their land, the conditions were horrible. At that point, so many of the Navajo apparently made the conscious choice to become a skin walker to escape their daily lives. However, by 1868, the United States government decided to give the Navajo their land back and they signed a treaty with them moving all the Navajo back to their native land. By 1878, 10 years later, the skin walker epidemic had gotten out of hand. And so the Navajo tribe had their own set of trials. Within these skin walker trials, 40 people were convicted of being skin walkers and murdered. This was the purge of the skin walker. But you see, it hasn't stopped skin walkers from existing. In June of 1987, the body of a Navajo woman named Sarah Saganitso was found in a rocky area behind where she worked.  She had stab wounds all over her body.  There were also piles of grass around the body and around her car in the parking lot that appeared to be from a graveyard. Now, a man named George Abney, who was a professor at the Northern Arizona University, was arrested and charged with her murder. From some accounts I read, apparently the bite marks to her breast matched his teeth. Apparently they found him because George had told some friends that he had had some crazy dreams about Sarah. Then the friends turned him in and he was arrested.  They even tried to blame Sarah's own boyfriend, who was another Navajo man. However, he was about an hour outside of Flagstaff at a sweat lodge. Because the tails of the skin walker are so prevalent in the Flagstaff area, believe it or not, George was acquitted of all charges. It was firmly believed that Sarah was murdered by a skin walker. In fact, according to the accounts that I read, her own family believed that she had been murdered by a skin walker. And what does this mean? This means that someone in her family took her life as a part of the right of passage to become a skin walker. Now we can't talk about skin walkers without talking about one of the most famous skin walker areas in the nation. Of course, I'm talking about the skin walker ranch up in Northern Utah. But here's the thing. Where the skin walker ranch is located is not Navajo territory. So if the skin walker is a Navajo thing and where the skin walker ranch is located is not in Navajo territory, how did it come to be? You see where the skin walker ranch is located is actually Yut territory. And the Yut people have their own theories on why the skin walker ranch is what it is today, which is coming up next time on Esoteric Atlanta. All right guys, thank you so much for sitting through another story. Again, part two will be delivered shortly. Please let me know if you've had any experiences with skin walkers being from the Southeast. This is not something that I grew up with. This is not folklore that is from around this area. So I'd love to hear your stories if you have some stories to share. Again, thank you to Josh McKay for doing our music and Todd Roderick for being our editor and I will talk to you guys soon. Bye.


Their philosophy, their unconditional message of love and cohesion has found many takers in the most advanced cultures of the world. The bowel doesn't believe in the divisions that keep people away from each other. Perhaps the strongest aspect of the cult is its secularism and its simple but stubborn faith in love as the centre of the universe. Offers a direct communion with the inner god or moon just looking at the world as one. The bowel cult draws upon a strong tradition of pantheism and secularism. It represents the spirit of protest against it. Here is a philosophy of love and understanding developed step by step over at least 700 years if not. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu from the 13th century is often considered the greatest known bowel singer. He travelled all over India and influenced generations of singers and poets. Legendary poet Joide is called the original bowel. He transformed the divine love of Radha and Krishna into love between human beings. Lalon Fakir from the 18th century is the greatest vanguard of modern secular bowel fakir cult. Rumidhanath Thakur accepts the bowel as a major influence in his cultural world view and actively encouraged his contemporary bowels. Tagore's university Shantinikethan is bang in the middle of Baalhout Heartland in Birpur. Tagore was impressed with the depth and the songs of Nobunidash Baal, the most acknowledged Baal guru of his times. Nobunidash is Purnodash Baal's father. He reverberates in the global resonance of the small cult from Bengal's Birpur. Today the music of the Baal is one of the most representative icons of Indian folk culture abroad. Baals know that their culture is strong enough to wade through outside influences. The trick is to assimilate those influences and emerge stronger. The trick is to keep singing the love song of being a Baal is about erasing boundaries. It's about actively opposing all forms of man-made differences. It's a mindset, perhaps in a different form and backdrop. That's because the Baals of Bengal don't just sing. They live their songs and when they sing the world listens. The world sings to their tune.


Thank you. Wow, what an honour. What an honour it is to be a New Zealander who lives in Australia speaking at a word camp in Europe. What an honour it is that so many of you want to hear about WordPress Meetups and how to grow your Meetup. Like Taco said, I'm a web developer. I work primarily at the moment for XWP as a team lead. I help advise word camps and Meetups in Australia and New Zealand, and I don't organise them that I do organise on my own. I have an amazing team behind me. There are two universal and often unconscious questions people ask themselves when they're deciding on whether to join a community. The first question is, are they like me? And when someone is looking at a Meetup page or a website about a Meetup group, the choice to attend that event will be influenced by whether what they see about your group seems as though it will fit them, seems as though you are offering something that is like them. The second question is, will they like me? And how they're received when they come to your group and how they're integrated into that community will totally influence their choices to return again. So we'll start with having a brief look at how we can better answer those two questions and attract and keep awesome Meetup members. I'm guessing that for the biggest majority of us as Meetup organisers are doing our organisation through Meetup.com. So the first opportunity that we have to answer some of those questions is our Meetup page. Of course, the principles apply if you're organising your Meetup through Facebook, your own website or some other platform. But for generally, the first port of call somebody will have when they're looking you up is your About page. Your About page is the first opportunity to introduce your purpose or goal. And this is where you put your mission statement and where you should be very clear about what you're about. Maybe it isn't enough just to say we're a group about WordPress. There's not much in that to really sell it to someone. If, however, you say, we're WordPress users who teach and learn from each other, who enjoy sharing knowledge and who are passionate about encouraging others into WordPress and open source, we're introducing both the mission to advance WordPress, but we're also introducing the kinds of people that they're going to meet when they come to your event. This is our About page. It gives kind of broad strokes about the group. It gives people the opportunity to look a bit further if they wish. We've made maximum use of the custom pages available on Meetup.com. This is the index of all of the pages that we have available so that people can get as much information as possible before they actually come. Like Tarko said, we run three Meetups a month. We have a user Meetup, which focuses less on code and more on the use and application of WordPress. We have a developer Meetup where people get under the hood and we have a small local Meetup that we adopted that needed some admin support. In our Meetup pages, we outline the details about each of those groups. We have our code of contact so people know what's expected of them. If you follow the link that's up on the slide, you can actually download copies of all of those templates. Actually, I'm just assuming at this point that WordPress has published my blog post. I haven't had a chance to check, but it was scheduled to publish when I started speaking. If it's not there, it will be at the end of this. The second area that you have available to make great impressions on people and to help answer that question, are they like me? Are your member profiles? On Meetup, you have the opportunity to ask people questions about themselves. While we often, as organisers, use those questions to resource what we do in the Meetup, it's also a great opportunity to give other people who are looking in on our group some information about the people they're likely to meet. These are not a requirement, obviously, because we try and keep things as open as possible. When we see that most people do fill that in, and this is, of course, my profile, and these are the questions that we ask. What would you like to learn about WordPress? And how are you currently using WordPress? And we often find that the answers to that definitely informs us as providers of content, but it also gives people who are looking in an opportunity to see if some of the issues that they may be having might be answered if they came along to our group. The other thing to have is a photo gallery that shows people about what your Meetup looks like. Obviously, as we go through the presentation, you'll see that I've used a lot of international Meetups groups with their permission to showcase photos of the various groups that are doing Meetups. What was interesting about that is what I noticed is that we all tend to just shoot off camera photos, and some of them are great, but one of the things that I'm taking away from this for me is to get our team to actually bring along one of the good cameras one day and actually suit some kind of good promo photos just for the top little photo gallery on Meetup, just to give people a really clear idea. And of course, here's a photo of our Meetup. This is the user Meetup, which has a tendency to be the bigger group. Finally, the welcome email is a really great way of introducing your group to new members when they have taken the plunge of actually joining your Meetup group, but they haven't yet been along to an event. It's actually an excellent opportunity to introduce yourselves perhaps a little bit more personally. And I have to thank our team member Amelia, who used some of her great content marketing knowledge to write the content for our pages. This is a picture of our welcome email, and you can see the kind of headings that are in there. How do the Meetups work? What's the format look like? How do I get involved? And what can I do next? And again, that's part of that download file that's available on my website. So once we've given people enough information to help answer that question, are they like me? Our next challenge is how to answer that second social need. Will they like me? When was the last time you went somewhere for the first time? I'm pretty confident that for a lot of us, that will actually be this weekend. We come along, we're into this huge environment, there's a whole lot of unknowns, particularly for those who've never been to a word camp before. As a Meetup organizer, I think it's really, really important to stay in touch with that feeling. It makes us much better at identifying awkward and uncomfortable newcomers and introducing ourselves to them and making them feel included and welcome is really, really important in terms of actually connecting them and making them more likely to come back and to, you know, in the long term become involved and an integral part of your Meetup group. I think that on the night of the event, we actually need at least one social butterfly who's keeping an eye out for those kinds of people. And if you're one of those people for whom this is really uncomfortable, it may be that you need to identify somebody in your team who's less uncomfortable with the idea of putting themselves out there and introducing them. And this is where having a team involved in organizing your Meetup becomes really, really important. So I think it's important that we all kind of have a dedicated welcome wagon type person involved, which is probably easier to do and I guess when you've got a smaller group, but it may just be you. One of the ways that we have to help facilitate that welcome and to bring people together is to provide food and drink for a social time before we get into the Meetup program itself. At our Melbourne main Meetups, we start the evening with half an hour of social catch-up. We have pizza, we have drinks. It creates a great opportunity for people to get to know each other in a relaxed context. And we also, of course, as a lot of groups do, head to the pub after the event for more social time. And interestingly, the social time, more than the presentations, have proven to be a really valuable space for people to forge some great friendships and collaboration opportunities. If we as organizers can create the environment and atmosphere that fosters that feeling in our members, our Meetups will grow. So if it's pizza or drinks or just coffee and cake, there's a huge benefit in providing this kind of social space. And the question often comes up, how are we going to pay for that? Well, you could ask members to donate, but we also can talk to sponsors and we'll talk more about that in the detail a little bit later. So when you've been running a Meetup for a while and we have a group of people who make others welcome and encouraging participation on all levels and you're trying to keep the momentum going, what are some of the keys to making that happen? Well, for me, the first is have a team because you can't do this on your own. Or you can, but it's difficult to sustain. It's difficult to stay inspired when you're doing this on your own. And of course, this is a photo. You can see those circles around there, our Melbourne organizing team. We're incredibly lucky to have an amazing, huge pool of people to draw from who are hugely enthusiastic about WordPress and committed to building amazing things with it. I'd also like to make a note here that if when you've been going for a while and you've got a committed core organizing group, it's actually really easy to get into a groove and to forget that there might be other people who need to be included. So hold on lightly to your responsibilities and always be on the lookout for enthusiastic people who might just need some gentle encouragement to come on board. So how do you identify potential team members? Team players are always around. They help without asking. They may be the first to arrive in the last to leave. They participate and they may be keen to organize their own meetups around their particular area of interest in WordPress. Great team members may not always be the loudest, most obvious person there, but could also be the quiet achievers who are loyal and regular attendees, obviously getting a lot out of the meetup and could be quietly encouraged to take a more organizing role. They may not put their hand up. They may need you to approach them and they may actually be really excited when you ask them. So keep your eye on the group and encourage people to be involved and we've had a bit of a change of makeup in our group of late. And as it happens we had a couple of people who'd volunteered and so we invited them along to organize this meeting and they got really excited about getting involved and so it's really exciting for me to see other people starting to come along. Quite apart from the fact that takes some of the load off us but it's also really cool to see other people starting to step into areas that really excite them. At a practical level managing our meetup happens with a few really useful tools. We have a Melbourne organizers Slack channel on the WP Australia Slack account and a lot of our planning and conversation happens in there. It's where we keep everybody in the loop. It's where we drop in items for the news for that night and you know how we organize everything really. We also use Trello to manage our tasks, to take notes of inspiration. We have all of our whole year basically planned out with ideas of what we're going to do month by month. We use WordPress for our website of course and that's just where we drop things like our we often video our events where all the slides are in an easy consolidated place. We use Twitter for marketing and I'm kind of wondering and happy to chat to anybody about that afterwards who's using something else because I don't feel it's as popular now and it feels like it's being less effective. I'm a little afraid we might end up having to do Snapchat or something and I don't even know how to start with that so we'll see where we go with that. We also use Hangouts. We have online meetings from time to time when we can't all be in the same place and actually there's a group within our Meetup who have a monthly business Hangout and so there'll be 10 or 15 people they get together to talk about their WordPress business so that's been an invaluable tool and it's awesome that it's free. So from the earliest days of our Meetups our venues have been provided under sponsorship agreements. Initially these were co-working spaces who provided their space free of charge in exchange for us saying nice things about them in social media. As a business for them change we found ourselves ending up having to pay for that same venue and having to find sponsors who would cover that cost and recently after even that got too expensive we've had to go looking for new venues and new sponsorship arrangements and it's been a challenge. We've looked at a bunch of options. We looked at university campuses. We looked at bars and pubs. We looked at community centres. They all have their different challenges. Universities often need to have a contact and they often you know they can be a challenge to use outside of office hours. Bars and pubs have a minimum spend so it ends up being costly or ends up costing our users. Community centres could have been great. There's some great venues but they're always in out-of-the-way places and they may not ever be a feature of the local area where you live. They're certainly around where we are but it just didn't work and we found did finally find a fabulous local library but it was really difficult to get to. So finally when we hadn't found anywhere so we had to cancel a meet-up one month or all three meet-ups for the month and sent out an email to the gang and said hey guys really sorry we can't meet up this month we're really really struggling to find a venue and we kicked ourselves that we hadn't actually asked the group first because somebody came back to us and said hey check this out and now we have a fantastic new central Melbourne city venue really close to public transport and it's back to one of those co-working spaces that totally gives us their space for free and they are amazing so we really should have asked the group first. So the sponsorship arrangements may differ either in-kind sponsorship like venue provision or monetary sponsorship for payment of meet-up fees or pizza the sponsorship relationship can be a little bit tricky to navigate so here are some tips for finding good fit sponsorships that have a mutual benefit that's fair rather than more in favour of one party than the other. It's actually we found this may not always be true but we've actually found that it's better to ask or approach sponsors directly. Sponsors will often come to you but in often cases we've observed that a lot of those that have come towards us haven't really known us and haven't really been able to feel I guess feel like that really good fit. So we always do you know I'm fairly careful about checking about what the expectations are on us and making sure that the sponsors that we're talking to really really understand WordPress and open source and the expectations that we have on them. So an approaching sponsors approach sponsors of someone with whom you have something in common who had a natural connection with your audience. Have a strong professional sounding sponsorship email request or sales document outlining what your group is about outlining the open source and the WordPress ethos and why you'd be a strong fit for working with them.  If a sponsor decides to come on board respect their branding in your website and your comms about them that's really important. And keep in touch with your sponsor send them pictures of you meet up show them where their money is going and what it's actually doing how it's building and growing the community don't just see them as a cash dispenser build a relationship with them and as that relationship develops and continues your mutual benefit to each other grows with the group. And again if you're interested in the template for that email that we use it's in that download. If I may offer two words of caution about sponsorship the first is don't let sponsorship change the nature of your group. So if the thing that the sponsor wants from you makes you feel less like an open source and WordPress meet up then you might need to rethink that relationship. Number two sponsorship is not about making a profit for your group. It's not about storing up resources it's not about providing high-end fancy spaces or food it's simply about having your needs met. So try and keep your needs modest so that your sponsorship needs aren't extortionate. Okay as with any regularly occurring event once we've got all of that momentum going it's really easy to find what works and stick with it. To get into such a groove that your meet up becomes predictable. So it's important for everyone both organized and attendees to keep your meet up fresh. And there are a couple of ways to do that. If your meet up thrives with a presentation or format and you don't want to move away too much from presentations target speakers who you want to hear from even if they're from outside of WordPress. You don't always have to have a WordPress meet up that has somebody from WordPress. We've got some great connections in the word in the Joomla and the Drupal communities where we are and we've had them come along and speak. We've had combined events with all of them that actually helps to build open source as a whole and make some great new connections with other people which I'm really really proud of. Set specific topic related events. Specifically ask people to speak to those topics. Have a lightning talk event to allow for shorter formats to give people an opportunity to talk for the first time. If people aren't confident to speak run workshops on creating presentations and presenting successfully to give people the chance to practice in a safe environment. And encourage diversity in the speakers you have. Honestly in a lot of cases minority representatives may not actively volunteer but may respond really well if you actually ask them. So offer people opportunities ask people directly build up relationships get people inspired and confident and it will help sort of get away from that meet up where you have the same person getting up every week and doing a different or every month about doing another presentation. One of the meetups for our user group last month was a clinic question and answer session where people could bring their own issues and find a more advanced user to help them out. This is a great opportunity for people to get help. But also for for people who helped to feel a bit more confident in their ability to offer assistance in a safe environment. And we found that everybody learned something from this opportunity. We encourage developers from the developer meetup to come along and help the users. And it's a great way of kind of building bridges within those two fairly distinct and separate groups workshops. They differ from clinics and that they offer teaching on a specific subject and are particularly great for groups where there's lots of new users who want to get to groups with WordPress. And there's some great information over on make.wordpress.org and the way of curriculum for doing WordPress training if you're struggling to set that up yourself. We've also run workshop for developers who want to learn how to contribute to core in terms of setting up their development environment and learning how to actually create patches and manage SVN which has been really, really valuable.  Meetup doesn't have to happen in a co-working space or an office. Some of the most entertaining fun events have been at pubs or cafes over a glass of wine. It may just be that the dominant conversation of WordPress and that's still helping build community. This is the WP bosses some of our Aussie guys. They get together once a week and co-work together. They're all freelancers, they're all solo operators and there's about eight of them actually. We can only see three of them there but that's their thing. That's how they started to build their community is actually for them to have a tribe of people who are WordPress users. In Melbourne we had a similar event that we called Pants on Friday. We all left our home offices and we put on our pants and went and did co-working. So it's always really, really nice to get out of the office and we'd do that once a fortnight or so just to hang out. And funnily enough we got amazing amounts of work done. It was just really nice to do it with someone instead of on our own. This is a contributor day. This is Melbourne's first contributor day last year. We've got the front table there where all the code heads are coding and the back table where the girls are doing the documentation. I'm not quite sure why there's there is definitely at least one girl on the developer table which is fantastic. Everyone can do something and a few hours on a weekend afternoon at this case a local library is a low key easy to organise the way to give back. You can run specialist meet-ups. There are about as many different kinds of meet-ups that you can see as there are people using WordPress. And then there's group weekends. This is Beachpress and this is pretty much my favourite event where we go to the beach but we do it in winter so we don't actually have to leave the house. So really the only limit somewhat any of us can offer our imagination and the will to make it happen. That's it.


Hey everyone, I'm just making this video to share some really exciting news I just received. Last month the official Dragon Quest Twitter account hosted a special contest based on Dragon Quest VIII to commemorate August 8th 2018 and the huge impact Dragon Quest VIII had on the Western DQ fanbase. The contest required you to show your love for Dragon Quest VIII as well as the entire Dragon Quest franchise through fanart, pictures of your collection and other types of photos. The contest ended on August 8th and they spent the time judging it to decide who the 8 finalists would be. To be honest, I was very impressed with a few of the entries I saw. This great scene in the DQ fanbase show off these really amazing looking collections in fanart. Some of the collections even made me a bit jealous if you'd believe it. But last week I actually got the most exciting message my Twitter DMs. I'm one of the winners. Yeah, I actually did it. The official Dragon Quest Twitter sent me this message, I couldn't believe it myself. So you may be wondering what my submission was and what the prize will be. First off, my submission was only really a part of my collection. I have a lot of posters, magazine clippings and figurines based on DQ, but I only submitted my game collection, my fanart I made over the years, and my Yuji Hori autograph from Anime Expo. Quite a few people were impressed that I had multiple copies of some of the games. I actually own four copies of the original NES Dragon Warrior, three copies of Dragon Warrior I and II for the Game Boy, four copies of Dragon Warrior III for the Game Boy Color, and four copies of Dragon Quest VIII for the PS2. I also own a special demo disc for DQ VIII that I got in a Shonen Jump magazine way back in 2005. So anyway, the prize is supposedly a Slime Plushie which I shockingly do not own yet, and an A2 Dragon Quest VIII poster signed by Yuji Hori. So I'm getting a poster signed by Yuji Hori. This couldn't get any better, wow. So yeah, I'll definitely keep you guys updated and we're without a doubt going to be doing an unboxing of the prize when it arrives later on. So look forward to that. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.


and I wanted to introduce you guys to some special customers of ours, Sherry Lee, Brandon and Hunter. This is our second purchase from us at Mountain View Dodge in the last couple months, the 2016 Renegade. And I just wanted to ask you guys what your experience here was with Mountain View Dodge and what you thought for the second time. It was fantastic. I mean, everything that we were looking for, and you guys kind of went above and beyond to help us out and gave you everything we asked for. And you're so surprised and pleased that we came back 10 years ago. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for your business and we hope to continue this in the future. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you.


So, build processes are important because when you want to be fast you have to sort of give up the things that are slowing you down. T-shirt. T-shirt. It's a t-shirt slogan. Love it. He says wearing a yeoman t-shirt. Product placement. But you are completely right.  So getting in your build process makes total sense because just whenever you do a build of your site it's just done, taken care of. Yeah. This sort of fits into my three tiers of optimization tooling. I should make a pamphlet. I feel like an advert is about to start playing. That's what it feels like right now. It's life advice. Yeah. It's a difference. Okay, so there's sort of a baseline of tools that everybody should be doing these days. Yeah. Like hashtag I hate, you know, data roaming charges. I don't want anyone shipping a thousand images down the line. So the baseline is you should be at least minifying your styles and your JavaScript, optimizing your images, using compression on the server side, using like async scripts, leverage caching. Yep. We redirect. So that's the baseline. Yeah. Then we've got stuff that you and I have been exploring a lot lately, which is sort of get fast and stay fast. Tools like things that will help you inline your critical paths, CSS, so that you can improve first render, things that will help you remove a new CSS. Like a ton of those things, what I'm finding myself doing is I'm using the bill process, like building out custom little things where basically I can still control what the critical path is and the bill process is just helping me manage it. Like I know there are bill pro steps where it's like it'll do everything for you and it's like magic and that scares me because I don't feel like I understand it enough to know whether those tools are doing the right thing or not. So I'm still in like a learning phase, but I'm using the bill process just to make it easier for me to explore. So there's Web Starter Kit, there's also Polymer Starter Kit, which is very similar to Web Starter Kit except it's got extra plugins specific to Polymer like Fulcanize and things like that. But then Yo-Man is basically like you can just go in and it'll ask you what like generator you want to use is what they're called, where you can then just generate any style of project. So if you wanted to use something like Angular or React or whatever new hotness is out there, there's chances are there's a generator that will give you a bill process already for those things. Yeah, exactly. And like one thing I find, so we've got all of the baseline performance optimization is pretty much covered by Web Starter Kit. And if you're like one thing I find a lot of agencies doing is that they'll use Yo-Man to scaffold out their projects and they'll go into Web Starter Kit and they'll take a look and say okay well we're interested in the image optimization parts or the script minification parts, we're just going to steal like 70% of this file and just like drop it into our project and that's perfectly fine. You know, pick and choose what makes sense to you. So the way that I've started doing this now and I know you kind of don't agree with this approach but I- I'm just going to walk out. Yeah, you should. So I have one Gulp file that basically you can do a thing like require directory and then any JavaScript file within that directory it will basically take the Gulp tasks from those each individual files and then you can basically use them as you would like and just one big long Gulp file. And the reason I'm doing that is you can split it out into like styles and scripts and images like each section will deal with its own thing and then I can copy those files into a new project to leave any old ones that I don't want and just change the directories. And it's like a really nice way of getting re-use out of my Gulp files because before when I had big ones everything would just become messy, it'd be hard to maintain or understand like where problems were whereas when I've got them in multiple files everything just sort of becomes much easier to manage and maintain and share. You've been demoted from colleague to desk occupant. Hush. This approach is actually pretty legit. If you're finding that you've got a really, really long Gulp file splitting them out totally makes sense. The reason we haven't done it in some of our boilerplate projects is that for beginners you don't want them to have to think about one other thing and it also gets a little bit trickier to debug if you've got multiple tasks and different files that depend on each other. It's not a whole lot more but it's just another thing you've got to think about. Yeah, like this is where I always get to a weird point of like best practice versus like ease of use. Yeah. And I always tend to go for best practice because like you ever look at any of the native platforms they always just say this is the right way of doing something for this platform or this IDE or library or whatever. There's no like middle ground where you could do something because it's easier. So. Nope. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's totally fair. I remember when we were like a little while ago you gave me a rundown of one of your presentations and it was one of the bits was on build processes and you were like everyone should just use grunt. Actually Gulp is going out, it's the kid on the block, it's kind of cool. Everyone should just use Gulp. Actually there's this new thing that's kind of coming out called broccoli that's also a build process. Then again NPM scripts is also coming so maybe use that. Yep. And in my head I realised this was at the time where I just lent grunt and I was switching over to Gulp because it seemed like that that was getting used a lot and I realised that basically all of the web tooling ecosystem is basically a game of thrones where the minute I fall in love with one it's going to die and be replaced. So there's a bit of me that feels like I should just never get attached to any of my tools because sooner or later by getting attached I'm almost dooming it.


Okay, July 22nd 2014. We're on our summit push. We just came out from advanced base camp We're up here taking off a few layers Hey guys, where are we going? All right climb on So I'm going K2 Yeah Life is full of small steps and now we're about to go on the airplane to head up the Stardew Wow Stardew Ladies mountains just looming here above the airport. Just an awesome awesome scene They're kind of walking through what's called the bazaar. This is the general market and You know pretty much you can buy just about anything that you want here So this is this is Kami so coming I summited Everest together in 2011 strong strongest Sherpa ever Okay, so the the highlight of the day so far is that everybody's gotten popsicles Everybody's enjoying their popsicle Skardew Skardew We're in Skardew. Do we? Skardew Concordia Hotel Skardew Well, okay, I guess there we have it Let's look at the map here really make sure where we are and it looks like that we are in Skardew so we're here just in a beautiful area next to the river and some awesome awesome mountains and We're here next to the hotel on the garden area and these are the jeeps that we're going to use to go up and Go ahead and head on up to Skoli and you tell these things are really tricked out these drivers are incredibly proud of them They keep them perfectly clean. They buff them up. And so here's some of the folks around here Hello, sir And all our gear goes in these less glamorous Vehicles, you know pile it all up here, but you can see these things.  Let me show you the inside of one of these babies So we'll actually sit back here in the back and hopefully these curtains will be up So we get some fresh air in here, but some of these things don't have curtains on them So here's the inside of one of them The road itself that we'll be on is unbelievably bumpy and dirty and dusty And we'll be in these things for like the next eight hours today Where are you taking these guys? Where are you going? Skoli Okay, so here's the problem. You see the rock is actually coming down This slope and what's happened is is come down and made The whole rock the area wow these are big rocks now coming down And it's made the entire road way too narrow for the teeth to get through So here we are in a skoli and these are the porters starting to gather very early We still have over an hour to go but they're gathering to Get work So everything is weighed by hand here a little hand scale Including all these little wooden boxes that have Mostly food in it. It looks like but the porter won't carry more than about 25 kilograms To attempt K2 I'm back here to uh to honor mom and my aunts and everybody else with Alzheimer's have a mission. I have a cause and That cause will push me further and harder than I've ever pushed in my life And if there's any doubt that we were on a glacier This is actually ice here underneath the the dirt Well, it's July 7th, 2014. We're at the Goro to camp and Just a beautiful beautiful morning. We got a light dusting of snow overnight And today we're going to head up to concordia and then over to a broad peak base camp or spend the night Okay, beautiful beautiful morning here. This is looking towards concordia The big mountain that you see looming right there. That is called g4 gas or brahm 4 These guys are helping each other on the loads. That goes climbing jumping down Look at this Well, it's july 8th, 2014 and we're here at broad peak base camp got in last night And it was totally cloudy, but look what we see this morning There it is there's k2 Oh my gosh, look at how big that mountain is It uh, it's 13,000 feet from where I'm standing to the summit And it might as well be 13 miles or 13,000 miles It's a huge mountain. We'll be taking probably the abruzzi spur That's the uh, the route the ridge on the far right hand side of the mountain I'll zoom in there. You can kind of get a little bit of a feel for it as much as I can with this camera Go up and we'll hit the shoulder up there and then uh going up to the summit There's the summit. I'll zoom in on that a little bit You really can't see that big old sarac has clearly I'd like to but It's up there and it's waiting for us Okay, we're approaching a k2 base camp that's down here at the bottom On the moraine of the Goodwin Austin Glacier. You see it's really Just carved out on top of the rocks Lots of tents here So I'm at the gilky memorial on k2 This is really hallowed ground A lot of plaques are up here to honor climbers who have died climbing k2 They have a beautiful view There's k2 There's k2 base camp down there Let's go up You can see some of the plaques Sadly there's too many up here A lot of them have nails that are carved into metal plates. Some of them have pictures Some are Very sophisticated Some are very simple and very old Some have worn away and then there's some I carefully make my way around To one that's very special to me Okay, it's july 11th 2014 and this is a very important day. It's an auspicious day on the buddhist calendar And hence we're going to have our puja this morning before we start heading up Oh Okay, we're getting everything prepared to go up for our first rotation looking at a lot of different food here You got the sherpa coffee Got the sherpa coffee Okay on the way to abc for our first rotation up to camp one and hopefully camp two And some money We're about 17,500 feet between abc and camp one that's mad up there You can see this is uh, this is pretty steep and it gets even steeper Yeah, I would say right now it's around uh 40 degrees and it'll increase to around 50 to 60 here shortly Looking back down. There's uh Garrett and rick coming up If you look out you can see camp park abc tent down there It appears that we have a nice less narrow blade here and here we have uh Watching the club my mind's going some type of Anyway, very secure at betons Uh Then we have a variety of knots fishermen have a figure of eight And that looks like there's a figure of eight with some type of backup here and They've equalized anchors very nicely. It's confidence inspiring If you're worried about this whole thing flaking away if you probably shouldn't be here Geology in action, so you trust your life to this this setup. I do this particular one. I guess I have no choice I didn't get to inspect it before I got up here And we're going to keep on heading up and you can see This is the way to camp one is up there just below those three black John darms that you see sticking up. It's probably another two hours for us It's july 13th 2014. This is camp one and about 20,000 feet on k2 As you can see it's really really tight up here And it's really steep coming up from an advanced base camp It took us about five hours to get up here on the first rotation to which You know, it's not great, but it's not bad at all But swinging around you can see the good one austin glacier and as I swing up towards camp two You know, this is reason that all these tents are all crowded together Is unbelievably steep and just goes straight up houses chimneys up there the black pyramids up there And that'll be our next destination Well, hey everybody this is alan from k2 base camp as july 21st leave it tomorrow morning head up to k2 You know, this is what we've been working for So you guys know what this is all about and I appreciate all your support Appreciate you coming along with me to the top. Hopefully. All right climb on. This is alan. Remember It's thursday june 24th and we're packing up getting ready to head up to camp two on our summit push Hear the boys in here doing a little Here are the other boys over here crawling out. Hey, man And that's where we're headed. Okay, here we are between camp one and camp two About 20,500 feet Taking a little break Now we're gonna get up higher From here on out against in the rock We got to worry about the rock. Is that right commie? Yes, this part is better than just because it wrote $1 You heard it here first If you pull the rope too tight There's a lot of bare glass on the route Hey, man, we're having fun now. The house is chimney And you can see somebody heading up it right now Chimney is right kind of in the middle of it And camp two Is right above really right right above that cornice right there And that's the black pyramid up there I'll zoom into that a little bit And come back around You can see the guy Getting up house of chimney right now And that's where we're going to go in a few minutes Okay, I'm about halfway up Okay, I'm about halfway up house of chimney. There's matt You may have waved matt There he is He's already climbed up it You can see the ladder Got some decent front point footholds here And this is house of chimney from the top So what is a Sherpa's pulse Oxyminor reading show at 22,000 feet? 60 Oh, good Good grade 108, Oxy 65 Easy easy on it Yeah Okay, we're at camp two on K2. Can you believe that? And this is another one of these spaces that Real estate is very very barren. You can see the winds just destroy the tents up here Just the pakistani team Little under five about five hours So here we are camp two We just got the weather forecast from michael fagan. What what do you say, Garrett? He said it's looking good for us on the 27th trace Possibility of snow but winds about 15 miles per hour on the summit cool. All right Now we're all dressed up in our down suits We're going to make the little trip up to Camp three and across the black pyramid. Here we are in the black pyramid Here's Matt, there's Garrett I can climb the ladders On top of one pyramid This is where we just came up. That's where everybody's jugging up Coming up from camp two Right down there you can see the tents off on the right Look at the picture Beautiful beautiful day July 26 2004 getting packed up to camp four There's the monster Looking at the china Over the kera quorum range These glaciers you don't want to see This is july 26 2014 you can see The climbers setting up Making good progress A lot of lines taking along They already passed the The bottleneck now all they have left is the summit They've got a beautiful beautiful day We're almost to summit of k2 We're ahead of work for this one And they're right here That's right. It doesn't come easy Not on k2 We're all working hard today July 27 2014 at the summit of k2 Unbelievable Okay You just summited k2 How's that coke taste? I believe we summited k2 Thanks to all you guys You're welcome Well done team K2 is down there And there's base camp Halfway between camp 3 Sorry Halfway between camp 2 and camp 3 Just trying to hold it together Look at all these ropes This is the ladder coming back around There's Matt coming down From the surface My urine There's more of water overnight So I don't know what to think I'm trying to get down To ABC Talk to da We'll see if there's a doctor in camp Or maybe we can call one I know it's dehydration But I'm afraid my kidneys are shutting down And my whole Lower back now Is really hurting It's not from the pack I've got less than 10 pounds So I'm gonna do my best To get down I still have trouble catching my breath Even With the oxygen I know there's oxygen down ABC It's not that far away So that's what I'm gonna try to do So Kami, we climbed k2 didn't we? Yeah, yeah We are successful and k2 But in the way It's a bit difficult Because Baldur Gilesh was a very long way That's where Alen was Very tired But it's okay, no problem Now we are in Iskarto Today we go Iskarto, yeah We are waiting for the jeep We're waiting for the jeep Well, thank you Kami so much for all your help I appreciate it man You're a great guy No problem, yeah Well, we just climbed k2 And now we're in Iskoli And we're getting ready to go Here's our steam driver How you guys doing? Everybody okay? Everybody ready to roll? Back door Back door Okay, we're there It was a good trip Hey Matt You just summoned to k2, what are you gonna do now? Sleep for 24 hours I can't go to Disneyland Climb on


Bounces are really nice, they'll like that you have tiny tiny detail notes on this Feels really good though Nice that bounces great too. So what's a bit weird? I buy this all this is cool I feel like you're starting you stretch early because this and this feels almost the same size So it's almost like I wonder what you could do here. I actually Not stretching here and stretch this one a bit more And this one feels like it's looking up already. I don't know. There's something slightly weird Same thing here from here to here. I see barely a difference I would potentially almost yeah, I stretch this guy take this out Just be bolder in your stretch right before the end But then less in the middle here like here already starts stretching, but it stretches Down versus where it's going which also makes it look weird Because then in real time it starts to wobble this and something here here searching too much for the amount of How high it gets here? Same thing here. You're starting the stretch, but it's not pointed really enough at where it's landing It's a bit much just subtle stuff, but then This feels like it stops too abruptly you have all this momentum all this momentum all the volume boom like what? Here so when you're here as he does this I would do a little bit clockwise rotation forward Like you there's still some momentum and Then which will help you because right now your up and downs are super straight You want your pronounce to go? Basically what will happen is you stop and you rotate forward because of the momentum and you jump and it goes a bit forward Jumps a bit forward can jump a bit back and then back here that way you're jumping from a to b to c to d to e And so on and right now all you're doing is a b a b a b a b it's super repetitive All this here. Here's also a weird thing here It feels like you're I'm exaggerating when it's angled this way, even though you're coming down exact same way So always stretch towards the angle that it's going that feels really really fast right there Duck right there. That's your all linear key here. So definitely ease out of that It's his first go backs a bit softer before that you have it on that second one. It feels like you are That was your anticipate and that was better. That's all cool. That's all cool Careful You're here. It's if you're landing in the same spot same thing. You won't land in a different spot That's all cool. Whoa, that's a harsh stop there Right there. I would roll up a bit and then come back with a softer He's in and out same thing here. It seems like you're landing always in the same spot and Then this seems too soft Yeah, that seems too slow. There's something about And he lands right good down where The couple things this flat surface Feels weird. This is not angle like that. It seems like you're going too far I will go this way and stretch this double because you're having the same amount of stretch as here But the velocity is much higher than here. So that feels strange. And again, I just feels like you're not going enough It feels weird that we see him here. I don't think we need to see him I think you can tell the story by the guy is zipping up this way But now it feels forced like you're trying to keep that kind of frame All right. Thanks. All right. There's an email you can sign up You can start whenever you want you can submit whatever beyond you get 16 submissions either way a like and subscribe would be awesome Alright, thank you