Hi, I'm Sarah Morrow, Realtor with Cell State Peak Realty. My guest on today's proper tea time is Natalia Veccarelli of Arvada, Colorado. She's a young lender who's already quickly becoming known across the front range as the down payment assistance expert. She's passionate about helping her clients realize financial independence through real estate and she attributes her team for her ability to have this specialty niche locked in so early on in her career. She works for a financial institution called Spire and she serves on the Williams team who has an accumulated 30 plus years of experience in fulfilling the dream of home ownership. As the newest member of this Fierce team, Natalia brings insight into programs that are rapidly changing at this time and she's proactive about placing herself on the cutting edge of the current evolution and the trends of this sometimes mystifying little pocket of the biz. As a result, she's opened the door to home ownership for many who never thought it possible for themselves. She prides herself in expanding Spire's reach to more and more people each quarter, particularly those just starting out and those renewing their financial stability. She does all this with grace and grit because of her background from a young age as a competitive, nationally acclaimed figure skater and ice dancer. She also has a natural tendency towards seeking out the finer things in life. And one of her favorite ways of using this skill and her curiosity is through her long-term search for the perfect Colorado breakfast burrito. She's actually accumulated a list of over a hundred burrito purveyors. She's a true Colorado at heart herself and she's determined to find the very best burrito in the state. I'm thrilled today to extract some of her down payment assistance program prowess and I was even able to score the top 10 tea time, well, lunchtime recommendations from her in the process. See the comments below for her burrito bravado. And while you're down there, please subscribe. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thanks for that introduction, too. Oh, you're welcome. My pleasure.  So let's dive right in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Spire Financial? Tell us about your role with them, what team you're on, and how you've become such a specialized niche in the down payment assistance space. Yes. So I'm with Spire Financial. We are local lenders in Colorado, but also most of the U.S. as well. I work out of the branch in Denver, but we have branches all around Denver Metro. And I am on the Williams team. So there's about 11 of us. There's three loan originators, which is what I am. And my niche is really down payment assistance and working with first time home buyers. Awesome. So tell us about down payment assistance programs, whether or not those are always just for first time home buyers, how one qualifies, like, what does that even mean down payment assistance? If I know that I want it, okay, I can talk to a lender, but like, what am I even qualifying for and applying for? Right. And I think with down payment assistance programs, that's something where, you know, you can really get into the weeds pretty easily because there's a lot of stuff out there and it can be pretty confusing when researching, you know, first time home buyer programs and all of that. But those really, I think, are a myth because you don't have to be a first time home buyer to utilize a first time home buyer program or down payment assistance programs. Oh, okay. So the goal of the programs is to be able to get people into houses, to make it more accessible, you know, not dipping into all the savings that you have and just being able to get you in the home. Great. So yeah, so if I'm a buyer and I haven't really built up tons of reserves, maybe my credit's really banged up, how do I go about starting this process? Right. So to start it, it really starts with the conversation with the lender to figure out, you know, how much you're actually making, you know, figure out what your gross income looks like, what your credit score is to the best of your knowledge, and then to figure out what program works for you from there. So we work with two. We work with Metro DPA and CHFA. CHFA is the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority. So two programs, they offer a little bit different things, but when it comes down to it, they're both down payment assistance programs that you can layer on top of, you know, FHA or conventional loans.  Like you guys are the ones taking the practical income, the practical credit score and making something possible where maybe people don't think it's actually possible. And I admit, I hear a lot from buyers first. I hear, I want to buy a house. First question, have you talked to a lender? Do you qualify, right? And they're like, well, what do you mean? So how do I, I mean, obviously I just send them to a lender, right? And I might refer them to you. But like, when in this process and what is the timeline, you know, I tell them, I'm just your personal shopper. I need a credit card balance to go shopping with, right? So how can you share with us a little bit about like the timing? Like they ask me, oh, down payment assistance and like, qualification, never mind. I'm sure I don't qualify. And then they kind of, wind comes flying out of their sails and I don't hear back from them. So tell us about how you start the process and get them excited. Right. And I think it can be very confusing because there's so much stuff out there.  So it's not really up to the borrower to figure it out on their own, but really up to us to be able to tell them.  I really make sure that, again, we know what their income looks like and how does that relay into how much you can afford for a home. So the conversation really just starts with an initial phone call to really learn ultimately what your goals are for the home. Because especially with down payment assistance programs, that's going to tell a lender what program's best for you based on longevity and what your goals are. And from there, what it looks like is a pre-approval. It's a credit poll. It's figuring out what exactly your income looks like with documentation and things like that. And then a pre-approval. That can be very quick. My team does it in 24 hours. Oh, wow. And then we relay that information to you. You know, we want to make sure that the client's never in the middle trying to figure out what exactly the language that we're speaking means to them because it can be so up in the air and it can be hard to relay. So it's just to give very clear cut combinations really that we can give to you to make sure that you know what you're looking for in a home. They know what they're looking for. And it can really turn out to be very different things, just depending on how the numbers all break down. Sure. So is it true, I've heard, especially since COVID, that qualifying for down payment assistance is completely separate from qualifying for a loan product. And I've heard that the down payment assistance takes even longer, more red tape. Is that true? And how quickly do they need to be applying for one versus the other? And then the shopping happens. You're saying it's not maybe as long as people think? No, it's actually so much simpler than that. Really, it, again, starts with a conversation with me. And that's my job to make sure that we're figuring out the best loan scenario as far as down payment assistance and conventional and FHA and all of that. So that's my job to put it all together and make sure that you're not applying for down payment assistance and for first time home buyer and for the loan to package it all into one and then present to you here's what your options are based off of the information that I have. And that can take as little as a week or two? Less than that. I mean, depending on how quickly I can get clear cut information on income and credit, we can do it in 24 hours. Wow, cool. So you mentioned FHA. You mentioned DPA Metro. These are two, is this government subsidized money? Is this bond money? Is this private money? How do I really get in on this? Do I have to make a certain, if I make too much? Yeah, so they're both going to be the big determining factors, I guess you would say, on both of them are going to be credit and income. So they each have pretty clear cut guidelines on what's allowable for each of the programs. It is bond money. It's not necessarily private, and that's something that when having a conversation with your lender, you should always make sure that it's possible, because that's something that's going to vary depending on lender to lender. It's not going to be a one size fits all, because you have to get certain certifications and education on these programs to be able to qualify. And so that's where it's not a situation where you have to apply and apply and apply. It's your lender can really do all of that for you. Awesome. And tell us, I know there are classes. I send, to avoid getting question after question for the two of us, I send a lot of people to classes. Tell us about the first time home buyer courses that you are aware of. Yeah, so the first time home buyer courses are going to be required for the first time home buyer programs, as well as down payment assistance. It's very simple, and it's something as easy as my team sends you a link. It's all online, takes, I would say, no more than three hours. There's a quick assessment at the end. And then all you have to do is send us the completion of the course, and we're good to go. And that's really all that they ask for. Cool. Now let's say I hear a lot about down payment assistance with first time home buyers. What if I've already purchased a home, I don't know, long time ago, fairly recently, I'm a step up buyer. Can I still qualify for down payment assistance? Yeah, you can. And so down payment assistance, I would say works similar to how the first time home buyer programs work. You can use it multiple times in your life. The real only stipulation is that you can't use down payment assistance to purchase a second home. You can't own a home at the time of using the program. I understand. So it doesn't matter if you owned a home in the past, especially with first time home buyer programs, which I think is important to know, you can use them multiple times in your life and still be able to utilize the programs as long as you're income and credit score requirements. Do you find that to be like a misconception? I do. And especially here in Colorado, because people move here from other states. So often, they sold their home in another state, and they move here. And it's really great for me to be able to tell them that you can use these programs. So it's not just that they're a first time home buyer in Colorado. It's that they can potentially be considered a first time home buyer again. Yes. Cool. Absolutely. Great. So what does it look like for a buyer to receive lender credits? Yeah, and so I don't really understand this lender credit thing as a non-lander. Right. Again, it's a whole other language. So lender credits are something that really relates to rate and what kind of rate you choose. Now with down payment assistance programs, one of the only downsides really is that you can't shop for rate, meaning that you can't really choose to get a lender credit. A lender credit is what you would want to utilize if you didn't have down payment assistance as a possibility. Oh, OK. So lender credits will usually just depend on rate where down payment assistance programs are clear cut in. You can get a 4% grant or a 5% grant, and that's how you get the money to bring it to the closing table. I see. So they're two different things. And your job is to kind of find which is the best deal for this buyer. Yeah. And how can we get the lowest rate for them? But there's a cost to getting that. There is a cost to it. There's an origination fee that both CHAPA and Metro DPA charge. But it's not a one-size-fits-all. That's really where you want to have the conversation to say, hey, here's what a down payment assistance option looks like. Here's what it looks like if we don't use down payment assistance, but with a lender credit. Are you a teacher or a doctor? What other programs are out there that can help you with those closing costs that's not necessarily down payment assistance? Also government subsidy. Cool. But there are options. Like you're saying, we can go this route. We can go this route. Whatever. If this one fails, there's another option. Yes. There's other options with lending companies, what they can offer, what their program looks like, things like that. Awesome. But you can encapsulate all of it. Yes. And they don't have to run around finding these little programs like scholarships in college. No. Yeah. It's not searching and then applying. It should be finding someone who can give you all the information. And then you make an educated decision from there. Love it. So let's say I'm a tenant. I plan to sign another lease for at least another year here in 2022 at some point. Because I'm convinced it's the only way to keep a roof over my head. What would you tell me if my dream really is eventually to be a homeowner? Right.  And I think it's because there's this stigma of I need to have 20% down. And I need to do X, Y, and Z. I can't have student loans. And kind of all these boxes that you have to check. Like before taking the plunge. Before taking the plunge. And I have to pay a lender to have this conversation. And really none of that's true. And what I find a lot is that even signing a lease, paying for your first month and your last month and security deposit and all of that stuff can sometimes cost what it costs to get into a home. Especially if you've got down payment assistance options. Especially with down payment assistance and 3.5% down, 3% down, things like that. It's so attainable. And so I think that's a conversation where it's, what are your goals? Do you want to own a home? And if you do, what does the next three months look like? What does the next six months look like? What's the next 12 months look like? And it's great to start early because having some goals in mind of here's where we want your credit score to be. And here's where we want your down payment savings to be to have those goals in mind, especially this time of year when everyone's creating fitness goals and diet goals. It's really like a savings goal. Totally. As much as you can really have that idea of your whole financial picture, it's really gonna set you up for some success in the future. I love that. Speaking of success, can you tell us a success story? Can you tell us someone who really considered themselves the least likely to succeed?  It's not for me. I've gotta pay off my car first, which could take years. Where have you been really instrumental in supporting someone, getting themselves into a home that maybe didn't think they could? Yeah, you know, a few come to mind but I think one of the biggest things I see a lot with first time home buyers is a lot of life stages coming at once. And so I had these clients who they came to me and they said, we're getting married. We just got engaged. We're gonna buy a house and we're gonna get married and then everything that comes along with that. The honeymoon, the expenses. Right, there's just so many things and they knew that home buying that was most important to them, I think. And so really what the conversation looked like with us was, hey, here are these programs that are available to you. And that's really where we started talking about Dom Payment Assistance. And once they started realizing, okay, we can purchase the house, we can have the wedding that we want, we don't have to go to the courthouse or do what we were kind of planning on and kind of do it all at once was really cool to see. And throughout the process, multiple times, it's like they thought, I was gonna say, oh wait, never mind. We said, hey, here's your final cash to close. It was so awesome to see that they realized they could actually do it all and do it traditionally and how they wanted to and have a wedding and do all of that at the same time. It's very rewarding. I've had that experience a couple times too and it is. It's not fair that the biggest expenses in life can kind of all happen at the same time and they think they've gotta kind of scrimp and save and to watch it come to fruition must be very rewarding. It definitely is. Well, thank you so much. You've been a wealth of knowledge. You've been very generous with your time. Last thing I wanna just ask you is, how do people get in touch with you? Like where do you serve and what do you, do you mostly work with first time home buyers or you? Yeah, no, I work with everyone. I think I work a lot with first time home buyers and people looking for down payment assistance because of stuff like this and people who I connect with but definitely worked with a lot of different people and my team does as well. So we're really structured to help people who are buying their first home but also buying their second and an investment property. We really wanna be people who are enabling our clients to be able to set up a good financial future and really realize wealth through home ownership because that's so attainable here in Colorado. So I mean, you can get in contact with me through Google, through calling me, through emailing me, really whatever works. Awesome, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. That's the proper tea.


Heather a big win for you in round one of the Gibraltar Chess Festival. You beat former world champion Alexandra Kostunyuk. Tell us your thoughts and how are you feeling right now? I feel pretty good right now, obviously. I was a little bit lucky. I think she blundered but kept on out it and I managed to convert to a win, which was nice. How did the opening go and was it according to your preparation? No, I didn't exactly get my preparation. I was out of three and moved five and then I was just making it up. Were you excited to play against the former world champion? Yes, I was very excited to play against her. It was a great opportunity. And then when you when you knew at what moment did you know that you were going to take this point back home? When she resigned. Not even after she blundered. I knew a little bit earlier that I thought it was most likely I was going to be taking it back, but yeah. All right, and how do you plan to celebrate? Cocktail? Sounds like a great plan. Well, congratulations and we hope to see you again. Thank you. Thanks


And it happens a lot.  Because there's this statement here, the degree that you reject or your unconscious of your empowerment is the degree to which you're going to be influenced by external forces. And if you look at self-actualized people, as in people that have a sense of empowerment and a sense of completion in certain areas of their lives, one of the defining factors is that they have a really powerful ability to own their own influence and change inside their own life. They're not living as victims of the world, they're living as creators inside the world. It brings me to my next point. We are all creative beings that can change the world. So we are a really weird species. Human beings are a very strange thing. We're the only species on the planet that can conceptualize things and think of things and then manifest them into reality. Like you look at all this stuff around you now, everything that you see started in someone's mind as a concept. From concept, you know, it came into thought, became planned, came through emotions, came through actions, was communicated and through a process was manifested. No other species on the planet can do that, lots of degree that we do it anyway. So that is an amazing skill, something very special to acknowledge inside yourself. And we take it for granted. And that's a shame because, you know, we're basically like God's manifest. So we can use this ability to shape ourselves as well and that's even weirder. We can take our ability to create and change the world around us and start to turn it into ourselves to shape and shift who we are and what we want to be and how we want to live our lives. And this is fundamental to in a game, like the whole process of in a game, because in a game is a really big field, a lot of different aspects to it. But if the fundamental rule that you take is that you are changing, you are creator and you get to change your reality and that you can learn how to do that through owning these different principles, then the world becomes a very open and free place. There's a lot of possibilities that you can explore. And we all collectively come together and create these experiences together. So right now we're collectively coming together to create the experience of the 21 convention. You walk outside and people are collectively creating the experience of Melbourne City. You know, there's people collectively creating experiences of all kinds of things in their lives all the time. So when we understand that, then we can start to see that, you know, we're taking part in a story, a big story that's going on. And a lot of that story is actually based on previous preconceived regurgitated ideas, you know, like memes or just passed down philosophies and ideas that have come from ancestral culture. So lots of things that don't really serve us get carried in our lives all the time.  Or fear of being empowered in ourselves, you know, because we wouldn't want to, like, have our own power. That would be really scary. We might be hurting somebody or doing something wrong.  Like there's a lot of manipulation or not even manipulation. There's a lot of old ideas that no longer serve us that are manipulating us that we've picked up probably from becoming, you know, maybe ancestral lineages of working class that life needs to be hard, that it's not easy to make things happen. Now, or conversely, some people have issues with money because they come from wealthy ancestral backgrounds. And they're worried about people taking their power away or worried about being judged for being too wealthy. So it's like we can't win with these things sometimes because these stories can, you know, really cripple us. And to the degree that we're unconscious of them, they're creating our lives. So these stories of who we think we are just unconsciously keep creating our lives on a daily basis unless we bring awareness and consciousness into them. So I'll talk to you about that in a moment. So really one of our greatest tasks in life is to look at what is no longer relevant and how can we update it with awareness? How can we choose different programs? How can we choose different options, possibilities, directions and freedom in our lives? These are some examples. You know, romantic ideals.  This thing outside yourself that is this golden illusion of this perfect woman that is going to make your heart complete. Doesn't exist. And even if it did exist, if it could create it, because we can create illusions and we can step into them for a short period of time, it's going to get taken away at some stage. And when it does, we have a big crash.  So if you see it as a romantic illusion, then you can see it for what it is. And you can experience golden moments with women. And you can have amazing fantasies together, but you can recognize that this is just a fantasy as well and that you can claim your empowerment and your completeness inside yourself. So you're not dependent on her outside yourself. You're not dependent on the relationship. You're not dependent on needing a relationship and trying to fulfill this idealistic romantic ideal, which has been passed down from our ancestry and projected onto us by media, et cetera. We talked about the fear of wealth creation. And social rules is another one as well. So we're going to see this, you guys will see this a lot. If you guys are out there wanting to evolve your lives and wanting to change and transform, particularly when it comes to developing social skills and approaching women, you come up against all the old rules around, so you can't talk to strangers. That's bad. You can't just go and say hello to somebody. That might feel awkward and then they might feel offended or you might be disrupting their time. Where those ideas come from? It's all these old little robotic programs that we picked up along the way. So you've got to actively see them and choose to not live by them if they no longer serve you. So there's morphias for us. So now we're going to look at the self. What's going on with this self? So we've looked at the hero's journey.  We've looked at your creative beings. You create your lives and you're responsible for that. And if you don't, you're basically going to be under the influence of old redundant thought forms and ways of being that are just around you and in you all the time anyway. And the last thing, the next thing I want to talk about is looking at what is yourself? You are not yourself. This is something I do a lot of contemplation on a regular basis. It's a very slippery thing and I really love to get my mind into the ideas of it and also then experience my mind not being involved with it as well, which we'll give you guys an experience of in a moment. It's a one way of looking at the concept of ourselves is that we are not a self. We have a self. And this is thrown around a lot, the ideas of awareness and presence and things like that. And the truth is you are not only your mind. We'll test that in a moment. There's something more elusive and powerful going on behind the mind. And it's a very, very powerful thing to be connected with. It taps us into intuition, it taps us into our hearts, it taps us into our embodiment, it taps us into the environment around us. And the mind is operating within us to serve us, but it is not the totality of our being as much as we live in it so much in our society. So we'll do a little exercise now. Just close your eyes for a moment and I want you guys to ask yourself a few questions and we'll just explore what is this concept of self? So begin with the question, what is myself? What evidence do I have of myself? Where does my self exist? And have a real look, not just with your mind, like don't just go to the straight, the first mental answer that pops up, like really look and feel. What is my self? Where is my self? And you may notice there's something, there's a bit of an expansion going on. You may notice that there's a search for something. Ideas can pop up to the mind and you can really ask them as well, you know, what is the next step? Like is the self the mind? Is the self the body? Is it some combination of those things? Is it something else? Now ask the next question. The next question is, what is this concept of self that you're experiencing happening within? So what I mean by that is what is outside of your mind? What do you sense is beyond your mind? Another question you can ask.


Hi, I'm Dazza Greenwood a co-organizer of the computational law and blockchain festival of 2018 here in the Boston node and this is a quick video overview of particular design challenge that is one of the one of the Basically topics you could Form a team and do a project to compete on and this one is called slick SLIC sovereign legal identity challenge and In addition to an overview. I'll answer some questions about how you can submit a team project So let's get into that Here we go. So first of all What's this computational on blockchain festival I'm talking about it is happening from March 16th to 18th? 2018 worldwide It's been largely organized and inspired by my favorite group legal hackers But it's happening in it in a coalition with a lot of terrific groups the first annual computational law and blockchain festival Is a three-day global event bringing together coders designers lawyers policymakers researchers? students Candlestick makers your rowboat drivers everybody it's for you It's for everyone to co-create the future of law legal practice and policy so in the spirit of a decentralized organization and a Distributed Approach this festival will be hosted at independent self-organized nodes in cities around the world So each of the cities that has a physical venue for this event. We're calling a note It's decentralized the festival is designed to be as inclusive as possible with activity tracks for participants of all backgrounds You can learn you can hack and you can discuss by hack we mean build of course and Learning is probably the the thing that everyone's going to do irrespective of whatever particular track or tracks They participate in but there's also an organized learning track for those that may be new to computational law or blockchain technology You want to have a blockchain 101? You want to learn how to write a smart contract on a blockchain? You want to learn the basics from local and global experts that are educational sessions and workshops? You are in luck because that is the first track That's that's being supported at this event Hacking is one that's near and dear to our hearts here in Boston We'll have plenty of folks from MIT and from other places We're just bubbling with innovation where we like to build the things like to rapid prototype And if you're a coder or designer, you should consider taking part in this in one of our global challenges which is With this global challenge track is a distributed 24-hour hackathon That will challenge you as a participant in your team to build open source computational law And or blockchain for law use cases with a chance to win some awesome prizes And then there's also a discussion track um You know one thing about lawyers is we love to talk But everybody likes to talk about blockchain and to learn and talk about these new opportunities to transform law with technology This computational law Approach to technology and law Interested in policy implications of blockchain technology and computational law whether you should join the symposium Which is this discussion track is a distributed policy hack to discuss core issues related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies With a goal of contributing to a free and open global survey of those issues. That's a nicely organized track that's going to result in um That in um in some good documentation. They've got I think like 20 particular topics. Um, I should also add that for this um, so that's the context of of the um computational law and blockchain festival The sovereign legal identity challenge is one of the challenges of that festival that I'll mention in a moment but just to um connect to to y'all if you're in any of these cities in spain brazil, india, columbia, massachusetts on and on um Here we go. Then you can Join a local node and take place in any of those three tracks And also um take um part if you choose in um in this particular challenge um Let's find out about the challenge The sovereign legal identity challenge Let's get a little bit of Our space on that um Is um is You could think of it as a as a context and a focus that you could um that you could choose to take on as part of the hackathon track and um and It it involves building out Two things one is a high level design concept and the other is a rapid prototype of some type uh and these would be um a design architecture Or a conceptual architecture and a rapid prototype that demonstrated in some way this concept of sovereign identity or identity that is considered owned and controlled by um by an individual themselves not You know given to us like say uh like a government identity or um an employee identity Or a social media identity So the this concept of sovereign identity Explores a ways that we can utilize new technologies like blockchain technology as a source of um digital identity that um It's self sourced from and uh and and for individuals are on our own behalf So let's talk about each of those two um forks Uh or um, you know components of of the uh of what you would actually do if you want to take on this design challenge one at a time First the conceptual design you could develop a a conceptual design um that demonstrates how individuals can use blockchain technology to Generate use and control their own digital identities The conceptual design should include an outline or a sketch of a realistic approach to deployment and in a stable Identity system including some reference to the business model, you know, like who would pay or how would it be funded? How could it be um economically self-sustaining? Some reference to a legal framework. Um, you know, what would be the uh rights and obligations of the parties? What would be all the roles? What would be the um the basis for enforceability for um for key rules for example? and The technical architecture perhaps the most fun part, um, you know How could you utilize public key cryptography? For example or addresses on a blockchain as a source of usable identity Speaking of usable identity is also a rapid prototype So the rapid prototype should demonstrate How the identity system enables an individual to execute digital signatures Or provide other authorizations that you would need to conduct one or more legally valid and enforceable transactions What do I mean by that? Well, what we're getting at when we brainstormed this would be some examples of legal transactions that Especially you would want to do on your own behalf So not necessarily signing off on a purchase order for your boss at work or um or something like that But perhaps you could um look at focusing on a context in a scenario where the an individual is signing Uh or an enforcing um contracts or other legal instruments Say in their personal capacity And they're utilizing a digital signature that is executed Or adopted based on a public key Pair that's the same one that they use for a blockchain address Um, you could look at registering and holding trademarks or copyrights Um, you know, how could you um complete the paperwork on that? What would the how could you apply the signature and the other attestations? Um, what would be the identity? The source of the identity uh that of the registrant How could it be verified? Um, you could look at sending receiving finding legal notices. That's an interesting one You know, could the blockchain address be the address that you um can be Founded at and that you could receive notice. What would it take for that notice to be? Valid and enforceable. What would it take for it to be binding and legal? Same like on your Reciprocally or like the other side of that coin would be how about sending from that address? um Another thing is you could look at standing as a candidate potentially or voting in in a local election Is it could you think of um zero knowledge proof or um or other? ways to do uh pseudonymous pairwise identifiers or those types of um protocols um You know with blockchain technology for example Um, not too sure about the the candidate in voting. I have to This is a brainstorm. You can come up with your own Um use cases um that in some way demonstrate sovereign identity which again is demonstrating how individuals can use Blockchain technology to generate use and control their own Identities so to self-sourced identity Okay, let's just say you're interested and you want to form a team you want to participate um To register your team project for the sovereign legal identity challenge Submit a github issue with the following information Your name the name of your team The names of the members on your team including their github usernames at least for one member The url of the github repository where your project will be developed and submitted and Reading between the lines here will make this more explicit That means we expect your projects to be in github and under an open source license Um, we're also let us know the url of a youtube channel where you will submit a video We're looking for not to exceed two minute videos. And finally the um Uh, let us know what node and what city Um, your team is using as an anchor and it's absolutely fine for you to have some team members that are remote But at least one person, you know at what at one city would be minimally required one of the uh knit cities Um, we'll be giving uh more information on on the judging criteria And i'll be introducing all the judges in our or at least the first swath of our judges We get some awesome ones in the next video uh, and Let me go to the next thing. Um for those of you that are in the boston area um The boston node is is where it was the locus for this sovereign legal identity challenge and um, you can If you're in the area, you're welcome to um register at clbfest.eventbright.com Um to to do to do there we go and um, that'll be held Right here in cambridge innovation center And Stop the screen share Ta-da. All right. And so that was an overview of uh, a little context of the computational law and blockchain festival and also an overview of the sovereign legal identity challenge and um some information about How you could submit a team project? Um, I hope that you're interested Oh, actually, I should just show one more thing. Um, so I'm getting some feedback here on our telegram channel. Um that I should click the button. So, um, right here where it says Um submit a github issue click this And it will automatically um, um provision an issue for you where uh, What we look for is in the title. Um Like you should put your project name up there. So maybe my project name is um Or what was the one of the topics was um, um, like uh receiving legal notice something like that um slick project for receiving legal notice um, and then you kind of put your project your team name here like notice This or something. I don't know whatever and your your your your that would be your team name your project name your team name They could be the same um put the names of your members, especially the uh, the um github address of a member He had saved as a greenwood Home to to to, you know, whomever chain dough Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Um the project repo Just um copy and paste that in youtube channel and what festival node you would be in the boston node I am not however competing. Uh, and so we will not We're not going to um Submit that one, but that's it's literally that easy with github. Just click the button Fill out the information submit the issue presto change. Oh, there you go. You've changed your state from People thinking about hacking to people that are now hacking. Um, so in the next video a week from now We're also going to show some examples of trust frameworks, which are um those legal frameworks Exam that that's one way to do a legal framework. Um that could cover sovereign legal identity or other digital identity systems We'll show some examples of um of how to do some simple business models Thanks to uh folks in business school that are giving us some templates And uh, we'll show perhaps best of all some examples of some basic technical architectures so ways you can utilize um bitcoin and ethereum and uh, Maybe big chain. Maybe some other interesting um, uh blockchain and related Uh technologies as a as a simple source We'll have some great tools for people. We'll have some great tutorials We'll have some mentors and best of all perhaps Um by way of introductions. We'll also introduce our first swath of star studded Fabulous judges. So um, if you have any questions, um in the meantime come and Pull an issue just if you don't have one by all means uh, get a free github um username and then um pull an issue in um github.com forward slash mit media lab forward slash s l i c Slick or sovereign legal identity challenge is what that stands for and then when you're there see how we've got these uh Oh, i'm not really screen sharing But just uh to make it simple for you to know how to do that if you have questions just Da da go to that address I mentioned and click on issues new And you could if you have some other question kind of blow that stuff away and you could say like um What question would you have like um? I don't know um is uh paper considered blockchain if it is I don't know linked by stables um yes No, and then I would probably After um a very short meeting with our um team say no, it's not really considered blockchain Um for the for purposes of this But you can just ask whatever question you want to ask and then hit um submit and um, that'll let us um deal with those um questions in a in a much more um efficient and in a much faster way because um You know, um, it's distributed you could say Among a team of people that are helping on the slick challenge I guess finally if you're interested in the challenge and you don't want to compete But you would like to support in some way you have a cool technology You've got some nice backgrounders or learning materials Or you think that you could be a mentor or something like that pull an issue We'll get right back to you. So until next time I'm Dazza Greenwood from Cambridge, Massachusetts and looking forward to Collaborating with all of you on the computational law and blockchain festival Happy hacking


Well, hi there, it's Sandy Allnock, and I have a layered slimline card that I'm going to watercolor today. And I did it twice, but the blue one did not capture on video, because I don't know. My old camera is dying. Gotta get a new one. Yikes. Anyway, the dye that I am using is from Trinity Stamps. For those who like to do layers but can't deal with the math of calculating the layers on a card, this is actually a really good dye set for you in that way. And it's got three windows in it, as well as the layers for the outside. And you can, of course, cut those layers, which is what I've always done. You can cut those layers with a trimmer, and then figure out how to do three windows like this. However, I'm going to show you why I actually like this more than using a trimmer when we get to the end. But nonetheless, I'm starting off by taping this so that the windows are centered in the smallest panel. I'm going to be using all the panels. You can, of course, eliminate some and not do as many layers. But I'm going to do several layers with watercolor paper. So I've got my paper cut into strips so I can do that. So I've die cut the top piece. That's going to be my top layer. And then this one that I'm drawing into with the pencil is going to be my layer for stamping and painting. And even if you're not interested in doing a card like this, I am going to do a continuous background across all of the pictures that I'm going to be stamping so that you can get an idea of how to do that, even if you can't figure out how to do the whole thing with the dyes and the windows and all that. I wanted to stamp my purple onion designs stamps into this. And what I did was take a piece of acetate and test out where their locations were, juggle back and forth, that sort of thing, until I was happy with their location in each one of the squares. And then I took a kneaded eraser to lighten the outlines. I just didn't want them very dark because once you start painting over pencil, you can trap it in there and then you'll end up with lines and all that sort of thing. So erasing them and making them much lighter will help. I've turned the board upside down so I can work toward myself. I tend to get a sharper edge at the top with my brush than I do at the bottom. So sometimes it's easier to just turn the paper a different direction. And I'm making a hillside behind all of the critters. And I'm going past the squares that were on the inside of the windows, but not all the way out to the outside line. Remember when I drew the outside lines around that panel that's going to sit on top, that line is going to be the start of the part that hangs out past the edge. And you'll see when I get to the next phase, I'm going to use one of the bigger dies to cut it. So I want to be able to paint on that in a specific way. So I just don't want the paint going all the way out there. The colors that I'm going to use in this one, I decided to do different colors than just the blues because once I do something once, I don't usually like to do the same thing again very much. I like to do something different. So I decided to try some more fun colors using new Gamboge, Quinacridone Rose, and I'll add some Imperial Purple. And with these three colors, it's kind of fun to play around with what happens when they mix. When Quinacridone Rose, which you may know as a pinkish color, starts to mix with the new Gamboge, it becomes more of a warm red rather than a pink. So I'm going to go back in and add more of it. So I've mixed some heavier color of the Quinacridone Rose with a little tiny bit of the Imperial Purple in it so that I get more of a deeper color that goes kind of better with the colorway that I'm aiming for. And once you get enough pigment in there, you can start tipping the board. But it was starting to dry, so I wanted to make sure I had enough in there. So I added more of the new Gamboge as well. Just lots and lots of pigment in here because I wanted it really intense. And some of it you'll get a natural mix and then some you may find you want to tilt the board and let the paint run so you can get some nice blending going on. But I'm going to be painting trees over top of it. So if it doesn't blend perfectly, don't sweat it because you'll be able to fix some of that in the next phase. So I'm just going to tilt my board, kind of let the paint play around and then get it all dried so I can work on the next step. But just roll it around until you're happy with the look that you're getting. And if you need to add more paint on something, then by all means do. And then I'm going to heat dry it with my new heat gun. My other one just blew up on me so I had to get a new one. This one is from WoW and it has two different settings on it. Which is kind of nice. You can have a low setting and high setting. For the trees, I have mixed up a thin mix of the quinacridone rose with the imperial purple. And it's thin because I don't want this to be big solid blocky lines on it. I want them to feel transparent so I need to have enough water in it that it ends up actually being a little bit transparent. You can still see some through it. And that's going to give it that soft trees in the distance kind of a look. I'm using my number eight silver black velvet brush. And for some of you, this will be brush practice in trying to control the background. This is one of the reasons why I don't tend to do a lot of watercolor backgrounds. Because until you start getting control over your brushes, it's really hard to put this kind of detail in. And typically on things like this, if I want to do this kind of background, I've always tried doing Copic markers or pencils or something when it's got a lot of detail in it. But I'm getting braver in putting some of this out here on YouTube. Because a lot of people are wanting to do more watercolor. And if you want to do more watercolor, you're going to have to do things like this. If you want to do scenes because it requires having control over your brushes. And generally, I don't hold the brush down here really close at the bottom like a pencil. But when I'm doing this kind of detail work, I have to. It makes it so that things don't flow as much. Because normally I like to hold the brush back a little bit, let my arm move. But when you're trying to do tiny controlled things, it's just hard to do with a brush. It's just not something that's real easy. So if you're trying to get better at scenes with watercolor, then I would highly recommend just doing a background like this and practicing making trees, making brush strokes like that. So I'm going to zip through in speed fashion. More of this because I do want to get to the assembly of the card. But I'm going to use the same colors for the most part in the little critters that I used in the background. That's going to tie everything together. It's going to feel like it's all part of the same thing. So I'm going to use the pink in various forms. So some will be light pink, some will be darker pink. I'll use the yellow in the same kind of a way, the purple in the same kind of a way, just so I have the same colors. And I can use what's left on my palette too. So nice way to use all that up. I mixed out of some of it a brownish color so I could have the puppy or bunny. I'm not sure what that is in the middle one. I'll have to look that up when I find the links to the purple onion site. She usually says what kind of animal it is. And you could think of it as a puppy or a bunny. But the two critters have a little bit of brown in them. So I've added just a tiny, tiny bit of a color mixed out of the mush that's left in my palette and then added snow onto everything. And then comes the fun. So I have laid this down just to check and make sure everything is the way I wanted it. And then remember I said that outside of this I was going to do some painting. Well, I'm going to make a layer that's custom. So you could use patterned paper, of course, but I'm going to use the outside layer with watercolor on it so that it's going to match my painting on the inside. And I'm just using the same three colors and adding more paint until I get the right mix, the right blend from left to right. And then I stuck all of the center portion, that top layer on there, just temporarily so I could line up the next layer. Remember we have several layers in the die set.  And so that's going to give me the larger piece. The other two pieces I also have cut out of watercolor paper. Why watercolor paper? Because then I can do another layer in the same kind of a way. And it's also going to make it a nice heavy beefy card. And there's just something about a card that has lots of good solid layers on it that makes me happy. So that's what I'm going to do here. So you can see I've got that little bit of color sticking out. I'm going to make the next layer in white. And I'm not going to pop that one. I'm just going to pop the front layer so it looks like I've got little windows. And then the next layer, which is again cut out of the biggest of the dies, I'm going to do the same painting thing again. And just paint the colors on there. And you can see that it doesn't matter what the inside edge looks like, because that's all going to be covered. But I want that same rotation. You could either put it on the same side, or you can turn it around so you get the opposite rotation of colors. And it just sort of looks like this funky psychedelic exchange of colors from one side to the other, which I really liked. And I loved how this one came out even more, I think, maybe than the blue one. The blue one was nice, but I'm glad I had to redo it. Here's where you can see exactly why I like those edges.  So if you like that kind of an edge, this might be a set of dies worthwhile getting. And of course, the stamps are always worth getting, because they're fun from Purple Onion Designs. I'll have links to all the supplies in the doobly-doo. The sentiment, I plan specifically to fill in that one spot on the card. I moved that center image to the right, just so I'd have a place to put the sentiment on this one.  So there you go. There is my video for today. Hope you enjoyed this and learned something from it. Links to the blog post with still pictures and everything else is in the doobly-doo, including the winners from my recent video. I'll see you guys later. Bye.


Oh my gosh It's crazy another cycle of PA school applications is beginning And I know many of you have been waiting slash dreading this moment slash really like actually like waiting for this moment to happen And so I'm gonna make a video on it because I wanted to talk to you guys about how you should be preparing for Casper How you should be tackling Casper? And really I guess kind of what Casper is for those of you that don't know so for those of you that do not know What Casper is Casper is our central application website for like PA school. This is where you will go to Actually apply to PA school. It's kind of like nursing cast I think it's it's the same company that actually like does both systems or you're like your MCAS But it is a central application site. So literally you put all of your information into Casper And then you send off those separate applications to all of those different schools from Casper So Casper is opening up tomorrow Like I said and that means that you all should like already be prepared and if you're not prepared then you should be preparing yourself So with respect to things that you should be doing or thinking about doing or like I mean you're having some time right now to do this as you're watching this video is Ensuring, you know who your letters of recommendation is going to be coming from And also looking at like your transcripts, you know making sure that you have all of that information down So like I said before it's important for you to be prepared. So when you are preparing for a Casper It's important for you to have every single thing that you know You're gonna need like your GPA your science GPA Your personal statement all those things ready So that once Casper opens you can start your application and input all that information because it can be a lengthy process Now this is obviously a video for those of you that are trying to apply to PA school this year But it's also a video for any of you that are trying to apply to PA school in the future because I want to give you guys a tip that I came about That I think would actually be very beneficial to anyone that is trying to apply to PA school But you're gonna have to stay a little bit later on in the video to get that tip because I'll address it So again with respect to Casper, right?  So gonna put in all of your personal information and it's important for you to also have the information of your parents if you're in like your 20s because you can get a FAFSA Sorry, that's such a tough to me. I mean I'm so used to saying FAFSA, but that's not it So it's FAFSA so you can get a loan like that through You know to to actually apply to PA school So it's important that you have your parents information or your own information, honestly So if you're older then, you know, you're early to mid 20s You've kind of been working and doing your own thing You're adulting then you would need your your tax returns from last year And I know like this whole coronavirus situation throws everything kind of out of whack But Casper is still operating as it operated before so you're still gonna need all that information Once you put that information in your personal information Then you can move on to the next sections Casper is broken up into four different sections So you have like your personal information your course work Any like which will have like your letters of recommendation and all of that stuff in it But there are various different sections that you're gonna have to fill out So give yourself some time to actually like go through and be able to tackle each Section efficiently because each section has subsections, right? So once you've gotten all of your personal information taken care of I suggest that you actually kind of reach out to those Individuals that you are going to be getting your letters of recommendation from so it's important for you to just kind of Preface them with the fact that hey, you know Casper is about to open up or Casper recently opened up I know that you agreed to do a letter of recommendation for me And so I just wanted to let you know that they will be sending you a Link and you just have to click on the link and input the letter of recommendation that you wrote for me And just follow the prompts because this is not something like where they're giving you a letter and saying Harry You know here's your letter. No, they actually have to put it into The link so that it can be attached to your actual application So it's important for you to just kind of forewarn them about that because sometimes it can go into their spam And then they're they're sitting like thinking oh, okay well, you know, they'll send me that the letter of recommendation information when they're ready and It's in their spam and now you're like just wasting time as you know You're trying to get this letter of recommendation from somebody that should have already done it if they were well informed. So Number one thing after all of your personal information in it is in is to go ahead and get those letters of recommendation people The information that they need so that they're waiting for this when you actually send them the letter through Casper The next thing is you really should be saving. So you should have been saving money to apply for PA school a while ago, but I mean now You really should be saving as well. And again, like I know that you know money is tight and The things are rough but This is where you're gonna actually like be very strategic in choosing what schools you want to apply to because the first school for Casper is always a hundred and seventy five dollars and then each subsequent program is fifty five dollars So it can rack up and cost if you're applying to multiple schools But if you're very strategic and you use some of those little tips that I said or even like my PA box And you go through and you see what schools that you have matched with you Choose those top five or top three or top four schools And you go from there and then as money comes in in the future Then you can apply to schools later later down on your list. I guess you can say so Save up your money Be strategic in the schools that you're applying to Because again, you're gonna be able to see when those deadlines are but all of that information Will be needed for you to understand exactly like where you're at in the cycle and Kind of what kind of applicant you will be are you gonna be a strong applicant or not? Depending on the program that you're applying to so the next thing that you all should actually be looking at is your Undergraduate program or your grad school that you graduated from Whatever schooling you have is getting the transcripts from them and again, like we've been on this like online Learning platform for the longest but there should be something that's put in place For you all to be able to actually get your transcripts So that you're able to send those to CASPA because you have to send your transcripts to CASPA because CASPA has to calculate your GPA so CASPA participates in National Student Clearinghouse Parchment and There's one oh and credential solutions. So those are like the online Transcript bodies, I guess you can say I don't even really know what to call them But they're where you can like request your transcript online from your school and then they'll send them to various different places CASPA actually Participates with them. So what that means for you is you don't have to go to your school because your school may be closed Like most schools are to actually get your transcript. So That is a plus. Hopefully that that makes the process a lot smoother and easier, but You don't want to rely on that So you want to make sure that you're kind of getting this done very early in your whole application process So that when you are ready to apply You're not still waiting on a transcripts because I told you all if whatever you Verify your CASPA application with whatever information you have. That's it Nothing else that comes in after your application has been verified will count towards your application So it's important for you to make sure that everything that you want in that CASPA application is in there before you verify it and Verifying it means like you're paying the 175. You're applying to your first school CASPA is going through your application calculating your GPA and all of that information Okay And now I told you all in the beginning that if you wanted to If apply to PA school in the future that you should actually stay on this video because there's something that I wanted to tell you a little tip that I learned and Now's the time for that. So with respect to your thinking of applying to PA school in a year or two years I think that you should still open up a CASPA application and start putting in your information so what I've learned is When I called CASPA like a few months back went, you know way before this whole Lockdown happened was that you can come back to CASPA as a Reapplicant and by no means does this affect your application in the future to PA schools because PA schools can't see like oh You were a reapplicant and now you're applying again if you never applied to their program Right. So when you come and you actually like start the application You put in all that information you kind of save it but you do not apply to any schools when CASPA closes in The month of March and then reopens again in April Then you can always come back as a reapplicant. You you would click the choice It gives you an option to say are you a new applicant or reapplicant? You pick reapplicant and then the majority of the information that you put in before Actually transfers over and so what that means for you is you're ahead of the game, right? So You don't have to spend Weeks slash a month or days in putting new information into CASPA because a lot of that information would have already Transferred over there are only a few things that do not transfer over From what I gathered when I spoke to CASPA, which was your letters of recommendation And then your personal statements or any of the essays that you would have had to write now I mean to write an essay or your personal statement You're gonna save that on your computer anyway So that's not a big deal that that doesn't transfer over and then with respect to your letters of recommendation I mean if you're using the same person in the future or if you want somebody new Like it's not that big of a deal to actually be able to like reach out to somebody and ask them to get a new letter of Recommendation so of all the important things like all of your personal information Obviously like your trend, you know, like any of your transcript stuff Your actual like GRE scores or your PA cats to the goers, you know That might happen in the future all of that stuff is still is it's gonna transfer over and so that is important because now You are ahead of everybody else leaps and bounds So I would suggest that you all take advantage of this as well Even though you're not planning on applying still open up an application fill out all the information and then close the application Down and just wait until you're ready to apply because that will help you out a lot So lastly, I just want you all to just kind of take a breath You know, you've been waiting on this moment But like just take your time, you know, not too much time but take your time in your application Right. Make sure that you are going through it with a fine tooth comb Make sure that you're looking at each particular section and you're not missing anything Because you want to familiarize yourself with CASPA You want to go through the various different force sections that they have and make sure that you're putting that information in So that you are putting your best application forward because you don't want that you made like a silly mistake on the application And then now you're like your whole PA school application is ruined for it And I mean simple things like that can happen if you aren't paying attention So with all that I've said about preparing for CASPA and actually going through this application And what transfers over and what doesn't and you know, what saving money and whatnot I think like the biggest thing that you can take away from this is to actually just take your time with the application and make sure that you're being very meticulous with how you're going through and filling out this information At the end of the day, you can only do your best and that's all that You know, we're asking or anybody's asking of you is to like do your best and put your best work forward And then if whatever you put forward is your best then you can be happy with that I wish you guys many blessings on this application cycle You know, it's going to be a lot different in terms of actual like virtual interviews and things like that Then anytime before because of the current climate that we're in but I am sure that you guys are going to do great So just keep me posted on that if you have any questions for me, please leave me in the comment section below Thank you guys so much for watching. Please go ahead and subscribe to this channel like my video It helps me out a lot For that YouTube algorithm, so please hit that like button and tell your friends to hit it as well All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. I will talk to you guys next time


Alright, remember from yesterday's vlog, we're pregnant! Smells are not a good thing for true love at this point because it makes her gag, and it's just not good. But today she did go shopping for new food. So I'm excited. Papa's belly is excited.  The boys are screaming right back. That didn't work out. The sun came out. That's nice. Alright, we're in survivor mode. We're in survivor mode to the point that I am forgetting things throughout the day. Including two days ago, if you didn't know, we're pregnant. We're expecting a little peanut in March, late March. So I forgot to insert into the vlog two days ago. You gotta go check it out. We make the big announcement. It's fun. It's fun, baby on board. But I forgot to put a couple clips into that VLOG. Apologize about that, but now I remembered. So, take it away, little peanut. Where the baby is in the womb. Oh, it's like there is life in there.  So hats off. Tip of the cap to true love once again for enduring the smells in the house and this morning's sickness. And it's been a tough one. And thanks for all the tips that you all have left once again on that vlog from two days ago about how to deal with it. A lot of ginger ideas, a lot of saltine cracker ideas.  None of that has worked. Ginger, saltine crackers, snacking, even in the middle of the night. It's not working.  Could you do that for us? We'd appreciate it because Brigid is a hurting unit. But today was a little better day. Did I read the directions on how long to cook the beef? Making the call. I think I was supposed to put them on one of the pizzas. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Do I know what I'm doing? No I do not. Question of the day for you. Was I supposed to put tomatoes on the pizza? Oh my gosh, that's brilliant! What were they for? All right, with tomato and mozzarella and olive oil. Brilliant! That looks so good. I couldn't remember. We're talking, baby. I could not remember. What is it? How do you ask? Please. Tear. The fridge. Amen, brother. It's hard. But it's worth it. But it's hard. It's a sacrificial love. All the time. Pretty much. Sometimes it's just straight love. But a lot of times it's sacrificial love. And that's okay. But man, it's a hard sacrificial love sometimes. I'll try to think of something. See beauty, work hard. At being sacrificially loving. And love each other. Wow, sacrifice it. See you tomorrow.


We've personally had a great time so far at KubeCon Europe. KubeCon Europe's observed today to be precise. And Paris is everything they said to be and more. Like, every piece of bread I've broken so far has been better than the last one. Can't sing the same praise about the subway system. I hope you guys can relate with me. I don't know why, like, why do they give such bad directions? Like, I thought I agree with bad directions, but yeah. All the talks today have been really fresh, really intuitive. And the energy on this day zero has been more useful than any other KubeCon I've been to so far. And what we're going to talk about today is related to the zero interest rate phenomena. How many of you guys have heard about this before? The zero interest rate phenomena, ZIRP, yeah? A lot of chat about this on pretty much everything that's happening today is because of this last two years.  It flew by like an innocent night of drinking. And ever since, there has been an increased focus on cost optimization going hand in hand with performance optimization. As companies consulted their businesses, offerings, and financials, every penny spent needs to be accounted for more and more now. And this talk is about how RazorPay saved upwards of $500,000 on their observability and infra tooling spent by switching open source vendors and implementing best practices which aren't as intuitive as they seem to be. I hope that a lot of fast-growing teams today here can identify similar patterns to find money where this seemingly is none. So yeah, nice to meet you all again once. I'm Shubham and I lead developer relations at Zenduri. This is Sandeep. Hey, hi, everyone. Nice meeting you here. I'm lead DevOps at RazorPay. RazorPay is India's biggest print recognition. You can call it Stripe for India. It kind of take care of close to 80 million of merchants' transaction on day-to-day basis. Yeah, that's all I mean. Yeah. And once again, I lead developer relations at Zenduri and advance incident response and alerting platform. Together, we've helped teams set up their cloud automation and incident response processes across the world. So what is this talk really going to be about? So firstly, we'll start with discussing the scale at which observatory costs really start to pinch hard. It's a place where RazorPay personally has been for a while. And we'll talk a little about how even experienced and proficient teams can find themselves stuck in the spiral and let infrared observatory cause spiral away. And then we'll just take some time and cover each pillar of change that RazorPay undertook, talking about their experiments with tools like Fluent Bit, Hybrid Trace, Victoria Metrics, EVPF, and a lot of some other fun stuff, all in the spirit of getting some more bang out of the money. So a few of you might think that, hey, any proficient team with cloud-cost alerting and good architecture in place would not be in a situation like this. However, reducing costs in areas like observatory and associate tooling is often something you would not get 100% right while you're shaping these pillars up. So I'll walk you through a similar journey that a lot of these fast-growing teams come through. Firstly, the team rapidly expands as the business booms. Infra-orchestration kicks in into high gear. And the team is currently at the stage where they have a lot of problems. But these are good problems to have. They're happy about being there. Next, as the consumption climbs and climbs and eventually peaks, scaling issues can and do arrive even for teams that do plan for it a lot beforehand. And at this fateful juncture, every high-performing team would prioritize meeting the evolving requirements of the customers and the internal developers. And this involves ensuring that everything that a team can do to boost developer productivity, making sure that you're reducing the time to market. And this involves over-provisioning, then choosing tools and any other processes not requiring a lot of deliberation, but on the focus of what's an easy way to get this reliability seeped into my operations right now. Yeah, so I'll just give you a quick overview of the scale on ReservPay Operates, basically. So we kind of process 100 million of money every year for our merchants. And then we do close to 1,000 TPS in a second. And just to give you a brief, PayPal, maybe till last year they used to do across India somewhere around 190 or 193 TPS. And Visa is capable of doing somewhere around 1,700 TPS, basically. And so we produce somewhere around 100 TVs of logs every day and 32 trillion of data points per hour. And then we have somewhere around close to a million power, half a million power, basically, spreading across different, different environments, basically. So we'll start with the observability highest with the metrics, basically. And then we'll go back, go to logs, and then traces. So Victoria Metrics is the holy solution or her majesty solution for us, which kind of saved a lot of money for us in this. So when ReservPay was very small, we used to have Prometheus, which could take care of our metrics. But when we started scaling, it was becoming the single point of failure for us. It was not high availability. And the only solution which we could have with the Prometheus is actually we need to scale it vertically, which kind of becomes more dependent on DevOps engineers. We cannot have the high availability and the auto scaling with that, basically. And then we tried Thanos. But the problem with Thanos is that actually it saves the metrics in S3. And then fetches. And then it does the calculation in the memory. And it takes a lot of back and forth, and the network costs a test to it. So we rejected or kind of parted ways with Thanos. And then we came up with the Victoria Metrics. And the flexibility which Victoria Metrics gives us is actually this. So Victoria Metrics, we kind of keep our data in the tired format, which is kind of insert, select, and then the storage format, basically. And then we can even further tear it down in the two more format, hot and cold, basically. So whichever is in use, we can just keep it in the hot format. And then whichever is not used, or maybe whatever we want to archive, we can just put it in the cold tier. And Victoria Metrics enables the Grafana for the previous or the old data as well, which we can just fetch from the Prometheus as well. So yeah, that's all about the Victoria Metrics. So just to give you a brief, I mean, how much cost is associated with it, actually, we can have a few VM instances for an environment, typical Kubernetes cluster, which will be somewhere around five machines.  So that will just cost us somewhere around $13. And then two or three more nodes on basically for the storage and the select. And then that will be somewhere around $3. And the total cost for a cluster, which will come somewhere around $18, basically. And the overall cost saving with the Victoria Metrics was somewhere around $40 to $45, basically. And this cost is clubbed with the spot instances plus Victoria Metrics, which used to cost us somewhere around $60 a month. And then it is down to $15 a month now. The other factor in the observability is the logs, basically. So we used to have a different logging platform, which used to ingest the whole data, whichever we were producing. But the main sipper for the logs were the Fluent D at that point of time. And it used to have a lot of memory hogging. And then if we visualize it with the 10,000 to 12,000 nodes at a time, it becomes somewhere around 200 to 300 machines only for the log shippers, basically. So we shifted from Fluent D to Fluent Bit. And then we made it a log shipper and then Fluent D as our aggregator. And then we shifted our logging platform as well, which does not need the whole data to be ingested at the same point of time. So we moved to the different vendor, and then it saves the data into the S3 in parquet format. So whatever we need at that time of troubleshooting or visualization, it fetches from the S3. And then the cost is associated with only the ingested data or the process data. So once upon a time, we kind of played with hypertrace as well. Hypertrace is kind of a cloud native solution for tracing. It saves the data in Pinout and Kafka. But we did 100% sampling. And the cost kind of skyrocketed for us somewhere around $3 million a month a year, basically. So we have to tear it down and then move to some other solution. And that's when the hypertrace became really hyper for us. The newest addition in the observability, the hot topic is kind of EVPF. We started playing with it and we have implemented an EVPF based network observability solution, which kind of tracks the kernel prof for us using K-Props and gives us the exact visualization which some of the tools in the market currently giving. And it gives us the whichever request or service is trying to connect outside well, because result pay being fintech organization, it has to be compliant with the central bank regulation all the time. So whichever service we need to move it to internal network or external network, it can be taken care in a few minutes. And the outside or inside communication is kind of associated with the net cost as well. Because if you're connecting outside, it goes via net. So significant amount of money has been saved with the EVPF tool. We call it the egress eye, basically. So observability is only half the battle when things eventually break. All the shiny, iron tight monitoring and observability systems that you have built would be for not if your teams aren't able to remediate and prevent business impacting disruptions. So if you're asking how unoptimized incident response processes could cost your team's money, you're not the first one. Let me show you how. So raise up a leader's notice that on an average, every engineer is spending more than three hours per month attending incident disruption calls, which is around 10% of their monthly bandwidth. So in almost 75% of these cases, it was realized that the final root cause is something that was beyond the control. And all they needed to do was run a few SQL queries to reach to that point. And this is a very repetitive, repeatable journey that could have been undertaken without getting the engineers involved so frequently. The incident management team at RazorPay diligently monitors approximately 11,000 alerts per month, out of which only around 250 are P0 alerts, out of which only 110 end up being business impacting incidents. So you can kind of get an idea of the noise to signal ratio when it comes to improper alerting practices. And just your on-call engineers being involved in so many of these calls, diving into something and realizing that this has already been fixed or is not something that you should be losing your sleep over, costs you more than developer productivity than you can probably measure. So the solution to this predicament is as simple as your first thought, which is just minimize human intervention wherever possible. So RazorPay identified the top five alerts, which are frequently occurring, and built runbooks outlining the steps to address these alerts. These were meticulously reviewed by senior engineers who have been here for a while and know that automation can't just be thrown into a system really nearly. You need to have some level of manual intervention there. And they did this by using the tool of choice, which was Shoreline. And to minimize the noisy alerts, RazorPay implemented a service-based incident response architecture. And they had set up very complex alert rules around their alert payloads, which they received from their monitoring tools. And this allowed their incident alerting tool of choice, which was Zendudi, to deliver only the right alerts to the right people. So right now, they've already shed their alert load to around 3,000. And we're on the journey to bring it down to 1,000 alerts per month. And the outcome for this, well, a significant 20% reduction in the time to isolate, which is the time that they spent typically on finding out what the root cause per incident is. And the automation of runbooks empowered these teams to swiftly pinpoint the time of isolation and in a remarkable span of less than five minutes. Like, automations need to be relied upon as we move forward. It is the future. A lot of more established teams try to avoid this fact. But the only way that you can maintain the same business velocity that you want to do in this current competitive market is relying on automations. And a few final words before we leave you all. So don't rush into things because it might be easy to drop in. Hypertrace was a good example for you guys. There's a lot of chatter about shifting vendors, exploring open source solutions. I'm saying this at a CNC conference. But yeah, do your due diligence properly. And don't drop something because you feel it's going to solve all your problems. There's nothing called like a silver bullet in today's world. Open source is not free. So make sure that you're not correlating those two facts. And it's an extremely competitive time in the market, as I said previously. And companies just can't afford any downtime. So while you're scaling up fast and fighting goliaths, if you're one of those rapidly built fast break fast teams, it's worth spending on extensive monitoring and alerting regardless of your skill or size.  And that is pretty much all the time. Thanks for listening, all of you guys. We can take a few questions if you have. And yeah, I hope that the next few talks will do you guys justice for your attention. Thank you so much.