Good afternoon, New York City When I took office a year ago, I promise to give stuff done for our city. I Promise that we would build a safer more prosperous and equitable New York and New York that works for everyone and my administration is delivering on that promise For the second month in a row Major crimes are down and we have taken thousands of guns off our streets Our subways are getting safer in December we reach our billionth rider of the year That is the most rides on the system since 2019 Our economy is also getting back on track. We have added nearly a hundred and ninety thousand new jobs We are investing record amounts in affordable housing and tourism is booming This is the city that New York is want and deserve This is the city that are responsible and focus fiscal year 2024 preliminary budget continues to make possible Before I go into details, I want to acknowledge that we have much to be proud of our City has shown is courage compassion and Can do spirit as we recover from the pandemic Over the past year. We funded and will continue to support programs that benefit everyday New Yorkers still Summon our city continue to struggle and although the economy has been strong is slowing At the same time we face significant challenges. I Want to be clear in order to keep moving forward while preserving the programs and services we value We must be careful and make the best use of our resources since day one fiscal discipline has been the hallmark of this administration Administration We are focused on governing efficiently and measuring success not by how much we spend But by our achievements This budget protects funding for the essential services that continue to keep the city safe and clean Drive equity and affordability and keep us on the path to prosperity We understand that the communities we make today affect our children our grandchildren and The kind of city we create for them With proper planning and foresight. We can assure that New York City remains a beacon of opportunity for future generations We crafted this budget in an environment of economic and fiscal uncertainty And while our country has made an amazing recovery since the darkest days of the pandemic The national economy has slowed as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to tamp down inflation Most economists predict that it will cool more in the coming months They slow down will reduce the revenues that we have used to pay for programs and services That benefit all New Yorkers at the same time it will increase demand for city services as you can see Financial markets decline substantially over the last year and following two years of extra ordinary profits and bonuses Market declines have slowed Wall Street activity leading to job losses At home our cities economic indicators are mixed As I mentioned earlier nearly a hundred and ninety thousand jobs have been added since the start of my administration While our cities economic recovery was slower in the early part of the pandemic We have now recovered almost 90% of the jobs lost during the pandemic and an annual growth rate That is higher than the country and the state Let me repeat Under this administration New York City's job growth is moving at a faster rate than the rest of the country And we currently expect to reach pre-pandemic job levels by next fall That's a full quarter earlier than previously expected however real estate sales have slowed because of rising interest rates and Although New Yorkers are returning to work Office vacancy rates the amount of space that is unleashed by companies remain at a record high This weakens the commercial office market and has a negative impact on the property tax the city's single largest source of revenue While we expect office attendance to continue to increase We're also addressing vacancies through the proposals in our new New York action plan That includes making it easier to convert some offices into affordable housing On top of a slowing national and local economy. We face fiscal challenges new and unfunded needs the arrival of nearly 40,000 asylum seekers Created unexpected course of more than one billion dollars this fiscal year We are conducting a new analysis to determine an updated estimate given the influx of asylum seekers We've seen in recent weeks And while I am grateful that our partners in Washington allocated some funding to help us cover a portion of these Expenses this would not come close to covering what we need New Yorkers will be left foot in the bill now and in the future We will continue to push for relief from the state and the federal governments So that we can avoid straining our budget and our capacity to provide city services for everyday New Yorkers Additionally, our city's healthcare costs are growing significantly The federal stimulus that has supported our pandemic recovery will decline and sunset in fiscal year 2025 And we are negotiating new labor deals with nearly all of the city unions These settlements will add billions of dollars to our city's budget As the economy slows so will our revenue growth This creates the perfect storm We will still need to support the core services that New York is dependent upon every day But with fewer resources in addition We face billions of dollars in new and unfunded costs related to asylum seekers labor deals in healthcare So we must be more efficient We must make smart decision Invest wisely and give New Yorkers the most bang for their buck The fiscal year 2024 preliminary budget is balanced at a hundred and two billion point seven hundred and two point seven billion One point seven billion lower than it was in the November plan fiscal year 2023 remains balanced Outyear gaps are three point two billion in fiscal year 25 five billion in 2026 and six point five billion in 2027 by staying focused on savings and efficiency We will bring these gaps down over the course of the financial plan We balanced fiscal year 2024 by reorganizing additional revenue and savings We updated our revenue forecast to add an additional 1.7 billion dollars in fiscal year 23 and more than 700 million in fiscal year 24 these gains along with savings of more than 550 million allowed us to balance fiscal year 2024 as Always we have remained focused on savings in this plan Savings protect our city's economic recovery and have been a vital part of our administration's fiscal strategy from the beginning Our preliminary budget achieves more than half a billion dollars in saving over fiscal years 23 and 24 This brings total savings in the November plan and preliminary budget to three billion dollars over the two years And we accomplished this without laying off a single employee or reducing services We achieved most of our savings in this budget through the vacancy reduction initiative Which took down more than 4,300 vacant positions citywide in each year of the financial plan This generated savings of just over a hundred and eighty million this fiscal year and 350 million in fiscal year 2024 Some will argue that vacancy reduction results in agencies not being able to do their jobs Don't believe them There are 23,000 open positions still on the books Which leaves ample room in agency budgets to hire for critical roles In this budget, we're limiting spending Nearly all new needs are self-funded with existing resources and Over fiscal years 2023 and 2024 we paid for nearly half a billion dollars and new needs with savings With more self-funded by agencies one of the most powerful lessons. We have learned over the past few years Is the importance of setting aside resources for unexpected emergencies? This preliminary budget maintains reserves at a record 8.3 billion dollars So that we can respond effectively to any unforeseen events I'm proud that despite the many many challenges. I've mentioned our budget Protects funding for the transformative programs. We rolled out over the past year Like the earned income tax credit that puts money back into the pockets of working families or the 100,000 paid summer jobs that open the door to opportunity for our young people These centers for employers and property owners to develop more child care spaces so parents can return to work In violence prevention programs for communities most affected by the epidemic of gun violence Since the beginning of this administration, we've also invested substantially in our students This includes more resources for students with disabilities for literacy and dyslexia screenings Summer enrichment healthy food career pathways and gifted and talented programs Even with federal stimulus money running out We've kept per student funding at a higher level than before the pandemic But as we've said from day one, we need to be fiscally responsible We need to return to developing school budgets based on a number of students enrolled in a school And the needs of those students Last year to protect schools that had lost enrollment from the impacts of funding reductions We provided additional support on top of the fair student funding formula 160 million dollars for fiscal year 2023 and 80 million for fiscal year 2024 But we heard from families that some schools need more time to adjust in order to avoid disruptions for students So despite the fiscal challenges we face We have added an additional 80 million to that funding pool for fiscal year 2024 This keeps the total at 160 million for another academic year Our preliminary budget also makes inroads into the key priorities of my administration We are continuing to tackle our housing crisis created cleaner and greener city and promote efficiency in city government New Yorkers have been suffering from our housing crisis for far too long We simply do not have enough homes for those who need them So we are taking steps to address the problem We're cutting red tape to make it easier to build and upgrade affordable homes for new yorkers And we are assisting our low income neighborhoods with down payments Tenor protections and more through our housing our neighbors and get stuff built initiatives New yorkers like to move fast And they deserve a city government that works just as quickly That is why we are making improvements at key touch points We are implementing a citywide building code that would allow necessary improvements to be made for both residential and commercial builders This will save time and money on upgrades and will help new yorkers live and work safely in their homes and offices As a leader in the fight against climate change We want all our agencies to be a part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions That's why we've authorized several agencies to hire chief Decarbonization officers who will lead the way to a greener future And as you know, I hate rats We're expanding our rat reduction initiative to reduce damage to homes and businesses and improve our quality of life Our city uses capital funding to build and maintain the infrastructure we rely on Capital funding enables us to invest in our city's future by building More affordable housing along with parks health care facilities and public spaces It also helps us keep our schools and streets safe keep our water supply clean and protect the environment In this plan we're tackling a broad range of priorities Our investment in the public private partnership and willis point would transform the neighborhood by creating Thousands of new affordable homes a rural class soccer stadium acres of public space and a hotel And as a bonus it will generate nearly 16 000 new jobs NDOE schools across the city will invest in safety measures for students and staff Every student deserves to feel safe at school and this budget is making it happen And on the west side of Manhattan We are renovating the historic riverside park soldiers and sellers monument and plaza New Yorkers who use a park have long been calling for its restoration Traffic safety is public safety And we are deepening our commitment to vision zero and more Walking and cycling should never result in accidents or fatalities So we are making targeted improvements to street safety across all five boroughs This includes safe routes in the Bronx and stan island Select bus service in south brooklyn and is stalling and upgrading traffic signals And since new yorkers also rely on our waterways to get around We will be repairing our marine infrastructure on stan island and in manhattan Climate change affects all of us To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality We are accelerating projects that will meet the target set by local law 97 New york city is aiming high in the fight against climate change And we won't give up until we create a healthier and more resilient city for everyone The initiatives that I have discussed today play a part in creating the city that all new yorkers want A city that is safe equitable and prosperous I know there will be those who say we should do things differently That we should extend ourselves further save less and spend more But as mayor The book stops with me It is my responsibility to keep our city on a stable path Whether it's new labor contracts asylum seeker course Or the next unexpected event The bills will come due And I cannot allow new yorkers to suffer while cities Fortunes to see so up and down in response Our discipline An efficient budget keeps us safe and allows us to remain on an upward track It allows us to continue to protect and build the greatest city in the world The city That we are all proud to call home new york


Good afternoon everybody my name is Robert Douglas from aquia, and I'm here today to talk to you about taking inventory of Drupal products, and It was originally titled app stores, but I'd like to redact the title of my session and make it market places it's part of the Shift in concepts that I'd like to convey today So it's been quite a week if I may say so in terms of Announcements and press releases and blog posts. I don't know if everybody's been following along closely But here are some of the titles we've seen recently So sub hub launches world's first Drupal powered app store certainly Written to raise a couple eyebrows and catch people's attention, which it did aquia unveils apps market for Drupal The open app standard better usability Drupal wide open app standard. I wasn't that an interesting concept so a lot's happened in the in the Past couple weeks, but actually things got started quite a while ago in terms of thinking about market places App stores and whatnot so before we get into What all of those announcements mean and What it means to have an open apps standard and before I invite some guests to share the stage with me from Phase two and sub hub and from aquia to explain some of these press releases and announcements. I want to go through a little bit of history Probably most of you saw some or all of it But just to give the rest of the whole conversation a little bit of context Around what we're talking about when we're talking market places Why some of that might be important and how that might fit into your lives on a day-to-day basis as Drupal developers business owners Drupal users etc So last year at some point I had a conversation a topic that I presented in Brussels at The dev days and I called it announcing the Drupal app store And I used the hashtag Drupal app store and what I what I learned was that? That was a topic that a lot of people were quite interested in in fact have several of them had Somewhat strong reactions to it emotionally It's fair to say that at one point it felt like it was going to unleash a worldwide Viking invasion and they were going to burn down cities Some people even went as far as to say That you know the Drupal wars were starting so I appreciated this graphic unfortunately I didn't trace the credit on this one So it's uncredited, but I think it's quite a great graphic so, you know a Little bit of a rabble razor rabble rouser here it was Slightly intentional that it was inflammatory, but the the whole thing started as a thought challenge for us to think as a community What does it mean to have an app store? Is it something we want and what it would look like and I think it actually after people got over the emotions that we've risen to the challenge quite splendidly? In sense, then I've had the chance to talk about it in many Contexts many Drupal camps a Drupal con In Chicago where Jeff Walpole and I Shared the stage where he announced that phase two was actually launching An applications marketplace an app marketplace in the context of their distributions open public and whatnot So let me share with you some of the concepts that I've developed around this as I've talked about it in many places So that when we get around at the end of the Session to talking about the open apps standard and what three different companies are doing about it and with it That you have some context how how the thinking goes and and why it it's important So backing way up and if somebody we've seen these slides before we're going through them fairly quickly There there's a type of business that you can run where you essentially buy a product And you put it on your shelves and when somebody wants that you sell it to them for more money than you bought it It's a very good business model. I can highly recommend it Doesn't work very well with GPL code where you buy the code for zero, but These are called resellers you basically take a product. You don't alter it in any way you resell it for more than you bought it There's a variation on that called a value added reseller where you take a product like a bunch of cut flowers You put them into a bouquet put a nice little ribbon on it maybe a wedding card or a funeral card or a birthday card on it and You sell that so you've added value to the actual products You've added aesthetic you've packaged them in a certain way and that's called a value added reseller You can apply these terms to the software industry as well People take a product wrap it around in services Maybe combine products together sell that their value added resellers to and in fact in my view Most of what people do with Drupal these days and especially historically because things are starting to change is Act as a value adder reseller you take a software product Drupal you combine it with some things that you download from the internet such as modules maybe themes you customize those Maybe you write some more modules you make a theme you add value to it And then you resell it and the customer that you're selling to is what we typically know as a client it's somebody who wants a website and typically historically and Still probably the master vast majority of people's business these days is being a value added reseller to people who want web sites this is fine and By no means what I encourage people to stop doing that if that's what they're good at and they're making a good business And we definitely need people to do that going on in the future. So and by no means or ways Am I encouraging people that that's a bad thing? It's a good thing However, it does differ from the business model of having a product something that's self-contained something that you can Put on the proverbial shelf somebody walks in and gets the product. They know the product. They know what it is They know what they're getting you can define it. It's a whole thing in it of itself They buy the product and use it now the the good thing about a product like a can of coke Is that when you want a can of coke on a hot day? Nobody has to get out of bag of sugar add water and some brown syrup put it in a tin can and hand it to you It's there. It's ready. It's done You know what it is They've provided it and they can sell that can of coke over and over and over again because they've got factories producing them out in the millions So the same is true with software products I'm you can think of a million examples Microsoft Word made a couple people really rich Along the way because it was a product that you could just Duplicate at zero next to zero cost and sell over and over and over again. So software products have a very Valuable place in any software ecosystem. I Think they have a valuable place in the ecosystem Drupal as well, which is why I started talking about it to begin with But my interests in the matter Actually have to do with these people here now I'm of the opinion that if you possess a development team like that You can write any software you want and it's going to be innovative and great and It's going to be the best software on earth, right? That is the best development team ever assembled Why wouldn't we be the most innovative product on the earth software wise? Why do we have any problem with velocity? Why can't we get modules upgraded? Why can't we get Drupal releases done faster? I mean there are all these complaints about the velocity of Drupal It is what it is. We've got good velocity Obviously, we're doing well in a lot of markets and we're keeping up with the innovation trend more or less But I believe we could get more out of this development team I think that if we managed them a little bit differently Then we'd probably have better products better Drupal better better modules and that we would be more dominant And we'd start to Achieve more of Dries's vision of thinking big and becoming a dominant web building platform for the entire Internet So why are not how are we managing this development team in ways that could be improved upon? So there's several ways First of all we could stop encouraging them to work on a one-hour worked one-hour paid basis So how many companies do we have out there where we sell the client? Essentially hours or we sell them a fixed-priced website building project and then we try and do it in a Smaller number of hours as possible. So we have a margin left, right? Those are basically two variations of the same thing where we either set the hourly price in advance or we figure out what the hourly price was Once we you know get paid for the work we've done in any case That's not scalable. You can't work 30 hours a day. You can't work 3,000 hours a day and You usually can't sell the work product from a website building engagement more than once The second problem with how we're managing that development team is that we're repeating the same efforts over and over and over again Okay, we're building websites that for all purposes resemble each other in a number of ways But in very few cases we actually take that resemblance that commonality abstract it take it make it a product and Just plug it into the next website Or that are yet make it so that everybody can plug it into every website Okay, why is there no one single what you see is what you can get editor? We haven't made it into a product. Why is there no one single does everything that you needed to image gallery? We haven't made it into a product. So we're repeating effort and every time we do that We do it in a slightly different way and it's inefficient now Obviously some things you need to customize for every website and you're never gonna get around that and you're never gonna Find a product that makes everybody's dream website out of the box right granted But there are things that we happily standardize on and we forget they exist like the log-on box You might theme it, but it works the same way every time right Maybe hooks into your LDAP or something and it's got some customizations, but that's all within the product spec 99% of all the sites we build They've got the log-in box and as long as they've applied look and feel they want to it They forget it exists. That's the example of a product if we had to write the log-in box over and over and over again Drupal would have never turn taken off. We would have you know failed already The next problem that I see with the way that we're managing that amazing development team Is that we're distracting our great minds? So we have so many people in the Drupal community who think big already who think of great products who think of Abstracted solutions to generic problems that would help a lot of people Okay, but there are very few amongst us actually if we look at absolute numbers Who can do what Jeff Eaton does and not only serve his clients, but then turn around and write amazing toolkit modules or? Product modules that he contributes to the community not many people have that stamina Not many people are able to actually fulfill their own expectations of themselves for contributing back to the community and writing all of the innovative Advancing ideas that they have in their heads So I believe that that development team that we saw has a large untapped potential for innovation That we're not getting to because we're distracting them with client work. That's repetitive and wasteful So there's another reason that we want to focus on products in the Drupal community in my opinion oops wrong direction and That is that if you have a great product in an ecosystem it boosts the whole ecosystem Okay, how many people? Buy Apple products because the hardware is so great. It's a great product So the computer that I'm running that just love the hardware How many people buy Apple products because the software is great, right? And then how many people move on to other products because in the Apple ecosystem because they had this great experience with one product You know iPad users who then move to Mac OS X iPhone users who do the same people who choose iPhone over at Android because they've already gotten a Mac Laptop there are lots of examples of Apple products because of the greatness of one product boosting the sales for other products This could be a great thing for Drupal, but we are still sadly lacking Great Drupal products in a lot of areas Now it's starting to change and there are a number of companies Several of which are going to share the stage with me in a moment who are Actually making great products and I think that we're going to get a lot of the effects that I just mentioned and hope for here So there are other dangers though If you don't make great products in your ecosystem, then you risk losing out okay, so I Have an anecdotal story to tell you there was a company that I've been involved with as an advisor for the past couple of years and that company has always had a split focus on both web services and development for WordPress and web services and development for Drupal and when I started advising them it coincided with a shift in their focus towards Drupal and they then went and released a Community module which provided a great service to Drupal and that was a freemium model that was supposed to draw people to their web services Didn't work out the way they wanted to and they started looking at other business models They thought well, you know one of the problems is we can't really find enough money to invest in the further development of our GPL module and if we could only find a way to like actually pay the developers to work on it more It could become greater and then more people would use it and more of those people would want to use our web services But the web services generation alone wasn't paying for the development of the module So they they post the hypothetical question on their blog. What if we Started charging everybody, you know 20 bucks or so for the download of this and you we use that money for funding the development of it And they basically got their heads cut off by the Drupal community I mean gone right it was it was a pretty sharp reaction That's not the way Drupal does things the community won't stand for it. It's selfish It's not the way we do things and so they said well, okay We'll do it for WordPress and they did they did it for WordPress The developers thanked them because then they could say to their clients this is a supported module by a actual professional development company and came with a support license and support forums and an actual business model and the price wasn't so big that in a $5,000 site build it was going to make any significant difference And all of a sudden this company started had having tens and then later hundreds of thousands of Dollars of sales of this WordPress code, which is basically just like a Drupal module based on GPL To invest in WordPress development Guess what we lost out. Okay. This is an area where Drupal could actually use a lot of investment right now It's one of the hot topics for us In in what Drupal needs to grow into it's one of the initiatives for Drupal 8 and that's hundreds of thousands of investment dollars That could have been ours So that's what the slide is about it's about not losing out in finding sustainable development models so that we can continue to invest in Drupal development So we're talking about selling stuff. Let's talk a little bit about what is a saleable asset for Drupal Okay, so we identified a couple things when when and Karen and I and the team were brainstorming this so You can basically sell usability if you can sell any sort of convenience to the customer that Overcomes a pain point in Drupal. We saw it in Dresa's slide slides in the keynote that people want Drupal to be easier to use If you can sell something to them that simplifies the website building process If you can give them something then you can charge them for essentially is what I'm saying It if you can solve any pain point in Drupal then you can actually turn that into a product that can be for sale You can take that money. You can hire more developers. You can make Drupal better How do you do that? Well distros are a great example of doing that How likely is a government agency going to be to use Drupal if you tell them that they have to go find the right modules? Find out how to configure them theme their site to look appropriate for a government agency This could be expensive build right costs a lot of money Maybe they won't want to do that how likely are they going to be if you could say look there's open public It was built for your use case It already has a look and feel that's appropriate for government and it's got some targeted features that solve some of the actual problems that you're trying to solve around open data and Profiles and directories of people Ways to collect ideation and ideas from constituents You've sold them already if you tell them you can do that, but you have to put them together in modules no way So there's convenience Okay, that's another part of it if I tell you you can build any slideshow You want with Drupal if you get views and you structure your data the right way and you get the right views plugins And you theme them the right way so that they shift at the right wrong time right time Then you know some of the developers in the room be like oh that sounds like a nice challenge for a weekend The rest of the people who are just trying to get a slideshow on their website are gonna be like No way, but if you can give them a downloadable app that they could just install and it does everything you need Configure the right way themed the right way works out of the box. That's convenience And then there's a whole range of stuff that you can sell around full service Okay, this includes hosting this includes consulting So there are lots of things you can sell to people that you can then use that money to pay your bills invest back into Drupal hire more developers around web services the Malam is a great example of that As well as beauty nobody box these days at the idea of selling a theme There are dozens and dozens of stores on the web selling themes for all major CMSs including Drupal and they're making good business So much business that a lot of the jumlah theme shops are now moving into Drupal's space Trying to replicate the successful business that they had for jumlah for Drupal Think back to the slide of the two guys running the race and one of them losing the race if jumlah Has a bunch of great professional themes available and Drupal doesn't that's gonna be one of the Differentiators for a lot of people who are just looking to get a nice looking site up So it's important to us that these shops actually come in and provide Professional looking themes and we've got a number of shops doing that and finally one of the things that you can sell to make People's lives easier about Drupal's knowledge. We've had that for a long time We've had the lullabots going and doing trainings aqua's got a training program But what if you could deliver that knowledge right into their website experience right where they need it when they need it Right once you need a delivery mechanism for that Once you want a billing mechanism to be able to pay people who had paid content Because after all you do want to pay people for your training content so that it's really good Nobody produces five-hour training videos at the best detail at the best resolution at the best quality with a lot of preparation for free Some people do but not on the topic you want when you need it in the place you need it So by paying people to provide the services that we seek and need We actually enable them to give them to us Okay, so that's the context Now we're going to move into the bit of the presentation where I start talking about what's actually going on One of the things that's going on and if you've watched the press releases if you watched aqua's website If you watch Twitter around the matter You'd know that aqua has built an API for their aqua network Which is now going to allow people to plug into it and provide a number of services Some of them would be apps if you will And we've done this we've been building it for about a year and we plan to we've now got some beta Services that are available to our customers now and by Q4. We want to make it generally available public and And looking at Chris Brookings to make sure I'm not saying anything wrong. He'll start shaking his head if I do So what would that provide so if you look at the if you look at the graph I've got here the aqua network consists of our support our cloud services and then third-party cloud services You've heard of some of them before like Malam Mobify new relic we've been advertising that we have those for a long time and those integrations were basically one-off Efforts, you know, we'd work with the partner to figure out how to get their services into our network But what we've been able to do then from that experience is generalize that and we know we want analytics and commerce social Media CRM video and whatever great ideas you're coming up with now in the or in the future to offer We want to be able to plug those in in a scalable way and and let you know people offer these to our customer base so the The services that we provide in an aqua network Marketplace include things like listing your product The ability to charge money for your product and pass it on to you the ability for you to interact with the customer in some way the things that you'd expect in a marketplace so some of the The new service that we have We have a tool called blitz, which is a load load testing tool And this is one of the beta versions or the the the the early adopter versions of the aqua network API That's going to be available later So that's a great tool that lets you set up a load testing service for your website And they've got a really great component that I really like about it They let there's a social component to the load tests and I've been missing this in Drupal for a long time If you if you have a hundred people who load test their Drupal website and they can compare results That would be really interesting like why is your site so much faster than mine? Why is your site so much slower than mine? Are they really that different and they provide this? that's going to be really great and The the other one that's not listed here is Drupalize me that's a service. That's a website that exists built by the Lullabots That's the home to their training materials It's a subscription based service where you pay money to get access to their great training materials and Starting immediately or in the near future all of that material is going to be available to customers of the aqua network so The important part of that is that when we talk about a marketplace We've already hit two really divergent use cases One is a web service that interacts with your website directly and another one is a web service That provides training materials to the end customers. So there are lots of different ways that a marketplace can be used So aquee's built that we've been building it for about a year and it's now going live. We've announced it It turns out that there are a couple other companies that are working on similar things and I'd like to actually Invite them to the stage now So we we're gonna bring up Karen Bortchart from phase two technology Evan Rudowsky from sub hub and Moshe Weitzman from aquia And I'm inviting them to the stage in the context of an initiative that has grown out of the Realization that a lot of what a marketplace does and a lot of what the marketplace has is Like really similar from one instance to another and it also comes from the realization that if you're gonna build a marketplace You have great incentive to make it the biggest marketplace possible Okay, when you're a vendor of a service or of a good Then you want to be able to sell it to the greatest number of people possible So it's not conceivable in Drupal at least at the moment that there's going to be one dominant marketplace like there is for Apple I'm not even sure we'd want that However, we do see marketplace is emerging So sub hub announced recently that they have an app store and phase two announced in Chicago that they have an app store And I can I've heard other people talking about building similar things and in a way Drupal the org itself is an app store or a marketplace so The realization that there was the danger of duplicating effort in five different Permutations That came the idea prompted this group to come together and We're happy as a group to announce that there is now a draft document about an open app standard That's been worked on and now published on groups dot Drupal org the URLs at the bottom of the page So the kind of the history of that So sub hub was actually the first out of the gate They launched their app store all the way back in November of 2010 and they've got customers who are using that and service providers using that Phase two back in Chicago in March Announced that and demonstrated that open public was going to have an app store component And that that would then become a central part of all of their distributions over time and then This week Acway announced that we to not only have a marketplace for the Acway network but that in the future We'd actually like to have something like this in Drupal Gardens as well and that we're joining the working group for the open Standard to participate in it to you know show what we've learned in building the Acway network Marketplace and if possible to adopt it for Drupal Gardens because we want the marketplace to be as big as possible And as inclusive as possible to give the people who are going to sell things in it the most Incentive to be part of it and that's very important So I'm going to read the first bit from the open Standard draft and then I'm going to turn the floor over to Karen Evan and Moosh So the goal and then we're going to move to questions. We've still got plenty of time for that The goal for the open app standard is to define the purpose and high-level components of an app Infrastructure in Drupal and to define the technical protocols required for the creation use and distribution of apps in the community And the larger marketplace I think that's very carefully worded to encapsulate and capture a lot of the values and Context that I tried to convey in the first part of the presentation So I'm very happy then to turn it over to my colleagues take it away Hi everyone big room So the two of the members of the open app standard working group that that you haven't heard about yet in this session or our face to in subhub We've heard a lot about about what aquee is doing So we'll just go through a little bit about what we're what we're each doing phase 2 we specialize in Drupal distributions and Actually built apps as a module that was a technical solution to a technical problem An open-sourced module we open-sourced a few weeks ago And built documentation for building apps, which we'll talk a little bit about in a minute, but The concept of apps itself we really built as part of a distribution not to launch an enormous war on app stores Or the concept of app stores, but actually to solve the problem a usability problem that people were having with our Distributions in Drupal and so that's really the the history and like where we came from at this Towards this idea and I'm gonna let sub have can tell you where they came from and then we'll we'll take a look at what the app store So like so sub hub is maybe one of the first companies to try to product size Drupal in the way that Robert was describing earlier kind of the Coca-Cola model where we're trying to provision thousands of websites to Consumers to individuals to small companies at a very low price points and we're trying to do that in an automated fashion While also giving them the flexibility and the control over what elements they incorporate into their platform So for us an app model is really critical in giving them that control, but also making it very modular and Turn key and deliverable at high volumes and at low transaction costs So that's really our motivation for for being here and participating and launching this kind of solution and this is actually a slightly blurry picture of our app store as it looks today within our platform and you can see a lot of similarities to app implementations on other platforms and it has many of the same kind of elements Apps are organized in various ways. We don't have a large enough quantity of apps yet to organize them by category but that'll come and also Users of those apps can rate them and rank them and write reviews of them So over the time the marketplace helps to determine which apps are most useful and most successful Thanks, and this is the app store in this is an open public So the apps that you see here again, you know easy to discover and find read about see screenshots of vote on up or down And then you know in this case these are all open sourced Open-sourced apps apps the modules themselves are all Are all open source and the module itself the apps module that goes into the distribution is open source as well So it's you know it again the the concept of apps here that we're looking at And the concept of an app market or console or store is really you know It's a very similar concept with a few different implementations. So together we and aquia These three organizations came together and said okay. Listen, you know, there's a lot of these The word app flying around let's get a conversation going in this community about what this really is and what it isn't and What it is intended to be and help to develop something that the community can agree on Around the concept of apps overall and then around the concept of how those apps become something useful in the marketplace In the same way that themes have become useful in the marketplace and training has become useful in the marketplace as a reasonable answer to a Customer need so we're going to talk a little bit about what apps are and then we're going to talk a little bit about what apps aren't so I get to do the positive one. What are apps? Basically, they're meant to solve a very specific problem They're meant to contain a discrete bit of functionality and be very easy to add to your website without any technical skill required That's part of improving usability as well because if you can do that obviously Drupal and the sites that are and the services that are built on top of Drupal become much more usable and user-friendly At the same time it makes it more Usable for the developer community It's a set of clear rules that enable a developer to come along and and write a discrete Solution to a problem and actually have that be very easily Deliverable across many many websites all at once and similarly it also makes it possible for Companies and organizations that are not part of the Drupal community to Build for Drupal without having to get into the deep detail of understanding Drupal So it opens up Drupal too much wider audience and much greater participation from other enterprises and other organizations that have services and products to offer but need to do it in a way that doesn't require them to Figure out Drupal first and then finally and related to that point it facilitates a Drupal economy So just as Robert was saying earlier the example of the the Drupal Solutions provider that ended up excuse me going to WordPress instead because they found a more receptive Economy that enabled them to make money. We think this is something that helps Drupal as well because it creates a way for people to build services and charge for them and actually as a result of that facilitates innovation and development of new features and capabilities Motivated a bit by a profit motive, which is a good thing in our opinion now. Let's talk about what apps are what they're not So earlier I said to these guys in another room. The best way I can describe apps are convenience nuggets apps are apps are really intended to be a usability concept around functionality in Drupal and what they're not is intended to be Something a way for someone to go and immediately sell their module just straight out. It's not about selling a module. It's about Providing a layer of usability download configure find Around functionality in Drupal. It could be one module or many so it's not just a way to sell to sell modules It is not a single out Drupal app store to rule them all It's not a a push for a single app store concept in Drupal that will that will take over the very important part of Drupal that is the open-source community the most important part Drupal And it's not a plan to commercialize Drupal or contract the open-source community So again, you know where apps are coming from what we care about in apps Is the solution that it creates in creating greater usability in Drupal and and in what we where we can go with that as a community? We'll try to kind of scoot through these so people have time for questions Okay, so why standardized obviously I mean the reasons for standardizing are really reasonable You don't want one person saying, you know, hey mail chimp come and build an app with us It's a Drupal app and we'll put it in our and it will put it in our app store or our app market And then have another company two weeks later going hey mail chimp You want to build a Drupal app not that kind of Drupal app a different kind of Drupal app? That's where things get really frustrating for third-party service providers And if there's one thing we don't need Drupal to be anymore is frustrated for any but frustrating for anyone else We want to make it easy so interoperability between Distributions between SaaS offerings between different organizations is hugely key if somebody builds a mail chimp app That can fit on your distro and then on somebody else's it's going to be more valuable to the community overall And then best practices and there are great ways to package together Functionality in a usable way and there are not so great ways So standardizing around some best practices there is something that we'd really we really think is is a value So we'll just go really quickly through what the what the actual standard is entails right now And do me to do that? Okay? So right now there's a working group. There's there's three organizations in the working group as of now But it's not a you know, certainly not a closed working group Currently the working group is all people who are who are doing or dealing with apps in some way already The open app standard is in draft on the groups that Drupal org site for open apps for the open app standard It is a draft. It is here and ready for comment question discussion And a forum around that and then there will be alongside that the ability to create open documentation for apps built on the open app standard so The API how to plan and build for them and then a manifest specification as well So and then the last thing we really see as an opportunity just going back to that MailChimp example is that? Those who are participating in the open app standard can potentially go to partners together and say, you know Hello MailChimp. We are 15 organizations who have standardized around a simple concept of usability in Drupal And we want to build an app with you and that's that that we think there's a lot of strength in those numbers So just and finally how to get involved is you know Please join the discussion at groups at Drupal.org Love it or hate it. We'd love for you to to make your opinion known Bring your partners to the table and understand what they need if what what they need is a usability Solution and if what they need is something that's more like an app and less like a customization Maybe worth discussing building an app for it and then start building apps as obviously the the last one that we would Really encourage apps the module is out on on d.o. And documentation is coming out around it Thank You Karen. Thank You Evan So now I'm going to open the floor to audience questions You can address them to me speak nice and loudly So I hear we'll repeat them and we'll keep all our keep our guests on stage so they can answer to sir So the question is how do apps differ from features? I'm gonna step right out take this to our technical team member. You thought you wouldn't get a technical question and you did No, we're calling in the backup So My name is Eric Somerfield. I'm one of the developers at Facebook did a lot of the work on the apps module So part of the when you look at specification one of the first things you see in the best practices for making an app is It be kick compliant So there is probably an expectation that most apps will be generated as features The apps part of it is a lot more about these best practices of Combining those things together and sort of finishing the vision that dev seed started with building the features module So technically, you know an apps a module So like just just like people used to ask what's the difference between a feature in a module And it's like oh well it is a module, but it's a module that does this extra stuff And an app is a feature that does their stuff and allows us to distribute it quickly and Allow more tie-ins to third parties and that kind of stuff So if I could then elaborate on that you could imagine an app that would deliver paid video content into the website to give Contextual help that would be a type of an app that is module delivered That's the technical level, but the product that's being delivered is more of a training service So it doesn't preclude those types. So you had a second question So the question in short is how will the commercialization of These apps change the community well, I mean that's really hard to predict and know therefore It's up to the community to be involved and that's why we call to you to be involved in the standard That's why it's an open standard and we'd like to hear your opinions on that of course However, one thing that I do anticipate is that there will be people drawn to the community who weren't drawn to it before People who might have written functional bits that would be useful to Drupal, but aren't integrated now That's one effect that I highly welcome because I think that'll help us grow and help us be in a more attractive offering for people to use Drupal But go ahead and most most hasn't had his voice heard yet Okay, thanks You know from my perspective, it's a foregone conclusion that there's gonna be app stores for Drupal. All right, so you have to start from there and If you agree with that premise then you want app stores to be good for Drupal right and to be done responsibly It's just like sex happens and you want people to have safe sex. So you talk about it It's a lot like that. So What we've done here is pretty remarkable You have cooperation between three different commercial entities in Drupal We definitely compete at different parts of Drupal yet. We decided to work together And we did it and we made an open app standard for Drupal and all of us are making an open app standard That's something that Apple didn't feel a need to do that's something that Google didn't feel a need to do And lots of app stores never have an open app standard And so I think you have evidence of the Drupal community doing it in a Drupal way already And you know if we can keep talking about it and keep doing it in a Drupal way then it's gonna come out strong in the end Thank you gentlemen in the front So the question is how would you sell software as a service products if the basic component of the products are modules? Okay So let's let's take a little Step backwards and and and look at the people on stage and what they're offering Evan has a software as a service Drupal installation as does aquia Drupal gardens in both cases That's the software as a service product which the end customer will never Directly, you know install their modules on because it makes it impossible to offer a software as a service product when you open that up Therefore we need a way to get code from outside to the inside in a controlled way So instead of giving the end customer the control to like use FTP to move Drupal code onto Drupal gardens We need a way to let them to choose a product and a service from the outside that they want that's met a standard That has a standardized delivery mechanism and then put that in there now it could be that Your software is a service. So know that we're not selling Drupal gardens through the app store Standard I don't I don't I don't think we're targeting go ahead Evan That's so that that's basically the purpose of a distribution The purpose of a distribution is to sell a well or the purpose of a distribution is kind of a Pre-created type of website for a specific use a market place for Distributions is not outside of the realm of possibility, but that's not what it's not now What I would say is that at sub hub It's kind of irrelevant to us whether or not it's based on a module and we already have examples of Third-party, you know software as a service or service providers In our apps or like Mailchimp, for example, there are others and basically in that context the app is something that drives people to them and then The customer then purchases that service from that third party and we get a cut So for us, you know the the app is really just a way of placing that third-party presence within our app store and giving The customer a chance to purchase that service and start by using a bit of that functionality Within the app to begin with so I think there are lots of ways that they can be implemented lots of motivations for creating an app a Module extension is one of them, but it could also be just driving people to use additional services that are offered by third parties Thank you evil So is the the question is Do we have to have a Software as a service environment for apps to succeed or are there other ways? If I understand the question right You're asking could we actually like have offered downloadable code Right So I think in the open public app store That there's actually mechanism for fetching code from a repository Downloading it and installing it. So I think that answers the question It could be a software as a service or it can be code that you download So is there a place planned where people can add apps to sell them? So the way that this is constructed is that there could be many places for that one place will be The open public app store another place will be the sub hub app store if Drupal Gardens moves to this model then you would have a Drupal Gardens Marketplace app store that you would be able to plug into and that's everybody on stage has the intention for making that place and What we're saying is we see value in making the mechanism for how to get into those places the same So that we're not, you know Creating those three different forms of video cassette that I showed earlier and like creating competing standards that make it harder to integrate I mean Google face is the same problem look at how hard it was and still is for people to write Android apps for the Android phones just because the platform kept changing so much every time Good next question you sir Okay, that's a really great point that we didn't address and that is the question was how basically how do you curate the offering? so that falls and that's a really important point, but the beauty of the Standard is that it doesn't address it. Okay, right? That's going to be addressed by the individual app store Curators who run it and I'm sure at that point the process for getting an app into Drupal Gardens In having it curated will be different than getting into sub hub Etc. And that's up to the respective maintainers of the app marketplaces themselves to be the curators for those marketplaces and all of the technical mechanism could be the same in all cases the business terms and actual curation process will most likely be diverging Yes, sir The question is doesn't this make it more difficult to find the right app for your business if you have to go to all These marketplaces our hope is that you could find the same apps in all three So that if you download Angry Birds You know, you're gonna be able to play Angry Birds whether it's an iPhone or an Android so the question is doesn't having an open app standard seed differentiation in the various products and to an extent it does but the the Growing the size of the marketplaces far more urgent to us None of us are big Aqua is not big phase two is not big Okay, the Drupal market is not even as big as we need it to be to really have a long future We need to really be concerned much more about how big the Drupal marketplaces and how dominant it is in the web content management sphere we That's far more pressing for us to solve than whether we're beating each other over the heads Yes, yeah, so what apps do you guys have Evan? Oh, sorry, the question was concrete examples of apps. So Evan is running an app store. What's in it? Well, we have apps like MailChimp, which has been cited a lot as an example Discuss is another one. So adding commenting to your web pages There's a Google search app to Analytics apps are to add analytics to your your site. So again in our case, it's really just a Way of giving people more control over what they add and how they configure their site By choosing these different apps. So those are some examples of third parties and in a few of those in a few of those cases We've worked directly with those companies to get the app built and to get it integrated properly and Karen What apps do you have in yours? We have an ideation app that creates a place for constituents of government website to add Ideas for what they want to see in their world and then vote them up and down and then Project mapper that utilizes development seats map box technology to map the projects of an organization or of an entity so you can Show a map of all of your offices or all of your or all of your projects around the world for an organization Again a good way to think about an app is solving a very specific problem for a very specific audience And I and I think that's that's the that's that's what makes a good app It's something that solves one thing solves it well solves it completely and these are also Examples concrete examples that our integration points for a marketplace The aquee network doesn't yet use the open app standard Maybe we will maybe our experience running it will instruct the open app standard. That's yet to be seen We've been working on it for a long time. It's already launched, but in any case the fundamental goal is going to be the same You sir Okay So the question is how how does licensing fit into all of this? so it's an interesting question because There's just like Dries head and his keynote yin and yang sign showing the conflict conflict between Easy to use and flexibility. We have a conflict between The benefits of open source, which we're all well versed in you know more eyeballs on the cord more people able to do it You can customize it it's got a Kind of almost an infectious license so that if I distribute code that I've based on GPL code It has to be GPL that holds true So the apps and Karen's app store are all GPL. They're all hosted on Drupal.org. You can download them there it's just a matter of in this case a convenience and Usability that you can actually find them and Install them from within your website experience and Since they're curated you know what you're getting you have guarantees about the provenance source of That code and there are a lot of value ads. So there's no change in When you distribute code there's no change in the licensing that's impossible for us legally We've got our hands tied. We can't escape the gravity of the GPL and nor would we want to So in the cases where your model is to distribute GPL code You have to find a way to monetize around that and that could include support contracts that can include customization that can include web services that Call out to external services that run code that you don't distribute like Malum Malum has a component That's a GPL module and a bunch of servers that run a secret sauce algorithm that protect your website Did that answer your question? It's a very important question and it was one of the fundamental ones Ben last question Sure, I can answer that question. So Ben's first question was do we have a? preconceived notion of the price ranges of different apps and the second question was and how will that revenue be split so This is a really easy question to answer because it once again depends on which app store you're trying to get it into Okay, are you trying to get it into phase twos app store? Then we'll talk to them Okay, trying to get in the acquies marketplace talk to them different business arrangements I Don't think you know I don't think I can answer that question I don't think we have time to go through that but I know that for example a lot of the web services that Aquia would like to offer will range from you know free you get them as part of the network when you subscribe to it like most of the ones we have now or Possibly in the future the value add is so great that we don't have a freemium model for or there's an upsell from a freemium model Where you then would pay something usually predicated on the external provider's pricing more to get that premium service an example for that is mobify The mobifies that you get when you subscribe to the aquia network You don't pay any extra for that You just pay the subscription price and you get something that is a tick above their freemium offering So you actually get better analytics Statistics from your mobify experience than if you went to them directly But if you want the full deal for mobify with all of their tools that they offer then you pay them 250 a month so That's already a different price point than your five dollar example. So and I've seen other services You know think sales force what do you pay for sales force, right? What if sales force were in one of these marketplaces? Hypothetical we don't have plans for that I'm just saying that their price points out there that are interesting for the running of a Drupal site that are way beyond five dollars and The eventual splitting of that revenue will definitely depend on which partner you're talking to Okay, thank you everybody for coming. We'll be around for more questions afterwards and thank you to my guests for sharing the stage


See for some people it takes very little to get proud as long as they have nothing they're humble Until they get pregnant Until they get a job until small little breakthrough until small little answer to prayer and something happens It's not their faith that explodes. It's their head that explodes and when your head gets exploded Something happens in the proper good place You don't ever fit in because good places always puke out proud people heaven did with Lucifer and Sarah did with Hagar and The interesting part is when Hagar left Sarah's house. She didn't leave Saying I am proud she left saying Hagar doesn't love me Proud people always have really beautiful excuses Easy to offend it Their ego is as big as God's heart and it's always Someone doesn't love me somebody didn't greet me somebody didn't give me this Every single time but if you dig deeper if you get honest with God get honest before God You will see that yes, it's true that maybe Sarah was not all right, but when angel meets Hagar He did not accuse Sarah.   It has to shrink Amen It's like that lady who comes to pastor if he preached a sermon on pride and he says pastor I have a big sin to confess pastor says what is your sin? She says that my sin is pride. He says how do you think or why do you know you have pride?   She says pastor I feel so bad about that sin pastor says dear. It's not a sin. You have you just have a mistake and Imagination but it's not a sin the angel meets Hagar and Hagar is running She's running from where she got pregnant. She's running pregnant and she's actually in a good place She is around water And guess where a Hagar is running because the angels asking her two questions. Where are you coming from and? He's asking a second question. Where are you going? Have you noticed that Hagar only answered one question? She says I'm coming from Sarah But she never answered where she was going because the city she located herself in was one city Closer to being back in Egypt where Hagar came from See every time we get pregnant and proud and we find excuses that people are hypocrites people don't love me Somebody didn't do this and do that and we don't deal with those things But we allow that that thing to drive us away from the place that God planted us in Whether you like it or not you always will gravitate toward your past not your future and many times we are pregnant with the destiny, but because Satan stumbles us. He trips us with pride trips us with our ego You know centric, you know those feelings we trip over that and then we go back to our past and we lose our future in the process


Hi. Welcome to this tutorial. We will introduce how to set lighting for a daytime interior space with D5 Render 2.4. Let's start by checking the final rendering. You can see the day lighting is realistic and natural, yet we only set three artificial lights for this scene. The rest is up to HDRI. Thanks to the global illumination of D5 Render 2.4, which saves quite a lot of time for interior designers. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to our channel. First things first, import models and materials from your modeling tool into D5 with a live sync plug in D5 Converter. Here we use 3ds Max as an example. Other DCC software work the same way. As we mainly talk about lighting here, materials and perspectives have been set beforehand. Clear all the environment, effect and light settings. Turn off auto exposure because we need to manually set the exposure according to the overall environment. Switch to HDRI in the environment panel. We'll share several high quality HDRIs in the video description. You can download them and give them a try. Here we choose an almost pure white HDRI. At this time, the scene will become dazzling because the HDRI itself is very bright, plus the significant improvement of D5 GI. Thus we need to reduce the HDRI brightness to 0.2 to fit with the daylight interior atmosphere. We switch on the sun option, give it a proper angle and adjust the sun disc radius, then adjust the color temperature of HDRI sky cooler while that of the sun is warmer. Here's a tip to quickly create an atmospheric light and shadow. Place some trees outside the window so the sun will leave a nice projection. After finishing this setting, don't forget to save these changes by clicking update in the scene list. As you can see, powered by D5 GI, the effect of natural light alone is already very good. For this kind of wobby, sobby style, dim and high contrast effects can better deliver the vibe. Now the ambient lighting has been set. We need more details of specular reflection and a better balanced brightness of environment. So we're going to add some artificial light. Note that the D5 GI performs well in interior lighting. You only need one or two lights for such a living room. First, set a main light source for the space. We add a rectangular light far away outside the window and make it a bit tilted. Increase its attenuation radius to cover the whole model. Save these settings and continue to edit this light. Give the light a color temperature of around 6,200 which makes it similar to the skylight. As the light has a large size, it shouldn't be too bright. Why do we need this rect light? First, to better light up the scene. When the wall and floor materials look dark, HDRI alone is not sufficient to balance the whole picture. If we increase HDRI lighting intensity, it may result in overexposure. Therefore, a rectangular light is a better choice. Second, to refine the detail, the light source enables more specular details on reflective objects. Take this metal texture, for example. You can see the difference before and after the light is turned on. Move on to add the next rect light which has a smaller size than the window. Set a barn door angle to create focused light beams, a neutral color temperature, and a proper brightness. In this way, the room will be more atmospheric when the light passes through. It will also enhance the contrast of the scene and give objects clearer outlines, thus making them look more solid. If the room has a glazed ceiling or ground, the light will add more reflections. Repeat this process for the restaurant and kitchen. Now you can see the difference. To better reproduce the lighting in the real world, we put some spotlights on the ceiling and some strip lights in the dark corners. Note that all the lights should have the same color temperature. Decrease their brightness intensity. Otherwise, they will be too bright to look realistic. The lighting is all set. In the effect panel, we can make some post-processing, such as highlight, which darkens the shiny part a bit. Thanks to the lighting we set before, there's no need to adjust exposure and contrast anymore. Pull the white balance to the right, and the scene will have a warm yellow tone which suits the Wabi Sabi style. Finally, add a bloom effect. We're all set to render. That completes our tutorial for daytime interior lighting with D5 Render 2.4. You can download the scene and give it a try on your own. We look forward to seeing your works created with these skills. Thanks for watching. See you in the next episode.


New public management, NPM, is a special management philosophy used by governments to increase efficiency, effectiveness and cost savings in the public sector. It employs private sector characteristics and market mechanisms to achieve these objectives. However, its implementation has been limited due to various barriers and challenges. These include a lack of authority, executive bureaucracy, traditional budgeting system, poor payment systems, inadequate resources, and a shortage of trained managers, among others. To address these issues, it is important to design and implement an NPM reform based on the operational reality and conditions of each country. This will help ensure successful execution of the NPM in the desired sector. This article was authored by Jaffer Saadeck-Tabrizzi, Elohi Hadgaseyi, Leila Daschmanger, and others.


I'm Jamie Anderson, we're standing at I.F. Anderson Farms in Lone Oak, Arkansas and actually standing in the world's largest hatchery of any kind. This is our hatchery that operates in April and May and we produce, for golden shiners, produce around 1.3 billion head, our capability for a four to six week period. We also produce our goldfish and black salties in this facility here and what you see behind me are our hatching tanks. In these hatching tanks we have 180 of those and we try to average around two million to two and a half million head per tank, you know, per day so you know the facility you see behind me can house up to 350 million fish at any point in time depending on how we're using these tanks and how many eggs we try to put per tank and in that type of thing but you know we're kind of in a slow period right now simply because last week was a really cool week very unseasonably cool so our our eggs and our mats that we're trying to get off of our brood stock slowed down drastically so so we were bringing in about maybe five to ten percent of what we wanted to every day and and it's just the cool weather it's nothing you can do it's mother nature we're still getting our eggs off our brood stock and our brood ponds outdoors so we're not trying to manipulate the temperature or anything at that point but so it did slow down but now here it is Monday the 26th we've got a full moon we got 80 degrees so things should speed up pretty quick and and hopefully where we've got about 40% of our eggs and fry hatched as of right now hopefully by Friday if we've got 300 plus million fish in here we're maybe at 75% of our normal needs for for fry and then hopefully another week to ten days and that'll be it but but you know all the fish I get asked off quite often all the fish that we sell in a 12 month period are all hatched in April and May in a six week period we've got to have fish that are you know from the small size of a market to the large size of our market 12 months out of the year and even though they're all hatched at one time pretty much throughout the year so so it's a it's just it's a struggle but that's just part of our management strategy here and so that's what this hatchery is all about


that, a little glitch in the matrix. So what I was talking about was that for most of the wallpaper work, we're not really dealing with external lighting and all of the images are providing its own light. So they're shadeless, they're shining. And also the way they're structured, it's much easier to just automate that. And the way I'm doing it is with Python, Blender has got amazing integration of Python scripting. So that's another sort of non-visual way, but we'll see once you look at those graph setups that sometimes is actually more legible than graphs. But one of the things that is very different between the two is that, you run these scripts one time as a batch while the power of the geometry node setup is that it's being evaluated all the time. So it's just permanently there being executed. So I'm just loading a bunch of PNGs and they end up in this, that's one of the things that is specific to the EV engine. Things stacking in depth sometimes causes weird issues. And if you run into that, it's very likely in your material settings, it's the alpha blending that's being really difficult. So if you have problems with that, usually the way to solve it is, well, I mean, I would have to do it for all the materials, but whatever is to either do the hashed method of dealing with transparency or just wiggle the camera a little and things are gonna be fine. So that's the old way. So now with GNOME 44, I've redone this setup using geometry nodes. There's a number of reasons why that's beneficial. One of them is that I can easily regenerate a different set. So for the next release, if I want it to have a different layout, I can just modify the, so geometry nodes is like this modifier, if you're familiar with the modifier stack in Blender, that allows you to really create these systems that either change or even create geometry and geometry can be meshes, it can be volumetrics, it can be curves, it could be anything and it can even like change between the methods. So it's really easy to like create, let me dissolve this one, let's dissolve edges. So very easily you can, and if I want, I can change the set of icons. So the way I'm loading the icons is the same, I just have a folder full of PNGs, then I have a script that loads them and then this setup will distribute them. The great thing about nodes is that they're real-time, like everything you're doing, it immediately comes up on your screen and that's just like, it's a godsend for iteration. Even though you might not grok exactly, like there's gonna be some like vector math and like changing a vector to a rotation and it's like really tricky to wrap my head around it. And I remember from school, I really hated matrices and I thought this is something that I'll never run into in my entire life. Well, I was wrong actually, this is a lots of vector math creating these systems. And while I don't feel like I understand, it's like you're tweaking something and you see a result, so it's really excellent. So what is it? So Geometry Nodes is a modifier, just like if you would add a cube and had like wanted to smooth it, you would use the subdivision surface. So it's a modifier that changes the source data, which in this case is a mesh and outputs usually the same kind of data. With Geometry Nodes, you're way more flexible and you don't even have to input data and produce some other mesh or a curve or something else. So that's really powerful. So in this case, I wanted to keep the source mesh because that is what gives me the control. So I'm creating a simple grid, mesh grid and the system, the Geometry Nodes setup fills up all the faces with an icon. So we're gonna look at how I'm computing like the surface. Maybe, I don't know, we'll see. The sort of heart of the operation, well, yeah, the heart of the operation is the instance on points node. So what this does is that it creates something that's also a data type, like mesh or curve. It's an instance of something else and it's different. Problematic is that it looks the same. So you can have instances of meshes and suddenly you're really struggling to figure out why things don't work because you're expecting operations on meshes, but these are instances. Instances are sort of these copies that are very memory efficient.  I mean, it's probably not just as dramatic, but it's very like memory optimized to be using instances. So you can like get a lot of things going on on your screen with instances. But if stuff later you wanna do on the actual mesh and you've got instances, you can convert between the data types. You can convert like meshes to curves, back to meshes. You can convert meshes to volume and so on. Like that's very powerful within the geometry node system. So we're creating instances of points. So where do we get the points? Well, in this case, even if you don't do anything, so this is the input, this is what before this geometry nodes modifier gets executed, that's what you had. Now you can use it, you don't have to use it. Like if I would create, let's say a grid, I hope it's a mesh grid. And instead of those vertices, I can feed it something else and it completely ignores the source geometry. But we wanna have control over the layout. So I'm using that. And if you would feed a mesh directly into the points input on the instances on points, then there's this maps. So vertices are essentially points. So that's good. But what Blender does, it does silently a conversion. It has mesh to points where essentially it's the equivalent of doing this. I'm doing faces instead of vertices because I wanna do the scaling of the bitmap to fit the size of the face. So that's also something you can compute. There's one sort of amazing thing very use it all the time. And that's that you don't have to like instance is what you're feeding, what you're creating on every point. So it can be a mesh, for example, you can do a cube. This is instancing rather than a mesh primitive. This is taking things from a collection like here. So I have the icons here, all imported. One thing I didn't mention if you're gonna be dealing with pixel graphics is that to get this sort of nice pixel rendering, you don't want any filtering on these PIX maps. And that's done in the shader editor when you have the PIX maps so when you have the icon, one of the options is the filtering methods. So you want the closest rather than, I think linear is the default. Those are always methods that would make a fuzzy if you're dealing with tiny little PIX maps that they would get fuzzy like that. So that's why you need no filtering. And in here, we're instancing, rather than instancing the whole collection on every of these points, you can instance pick instance, which would pick one by default. That would mean that would sequentially like it has an order of the points. Every mesh has, all those vertices are ordered. And so to have it randomly, you can have a random value node, which would be all sorts of random data types that you can generate and one of them is integer. I'm computing the number of elements from the collection. So there's a domain size node that can count the number of instances. So rather than setting it as a fixed number, I'm getting that from the collection. And then it like randomly generates a PIX map on each of these points. This is very legible or reasonably legible graph, but it's mixing like a couple of, this is like actual data coming in while these purple things are something called fields. So that's like a recipe of how to deal with the data. So like you have a very simple graph, but it's actually like doing on each of the vertices coming in, perform something. So until I get the data, like this can be the same sort of graph can be used in a completely different context and still work because it is like a recipe how to deal with those things. So in here, this is, and I don't think I need this. Like this is just like picking up some faces that we don't need and like randomly. So I don't know why I have that there. So what was I talking about? Oh yeah, so this kind of expects all these icons to come in on a flat surface, but the great thing about geometry nodes is that you can apply the same sort of modifier on a different object. So let's say we would add a cube and I would, let me just only show the cube and I would use the same, I think there's a bug, a minute warning. All right, all right, all right, I'm gonna, so I've used the same setup on a cube, but now, because we're not dealing with how the fixed map is angled, let's try to fix that by using the normal. And as you can see, like what we're doing here is we're taking the source mesh and we're taking, we're putting points at the center of each face. And when we do that, like even if I was being smart and wanted to do a rotation, so let's do a rotation. Well, to see anything, I'm gonna first use something that I was using beforehand and that was dual mesh which would be like very similar to this, but it would like generate a mesh from the source mesh where it would put a vertex at a face of the original mesh and then just like glue it together. So create like this new mesh with faces and everything. And that's where this thing will kind of sort of work, but not really. So we want to rotate each of the instances based on the normal. And this is another sort of thing that is hard to grasp for me because of what fields are. So I'm getting like this data and I don't like, where's what's normal? And you can like put this, this same node at a different places of the graph and it's gonna do a different thing because this doesn't mean anything on its own. It means something based on the data that it is connected to. So in here, it means a normal of the mesh that's coming in, of the faces of the mesh that's coming in. Also like it's very random because, you know, normals are vectors which if you try to remember mass, it's like a direction and speed and change of position in space. So in most cases in here, it's three values that define the change between the previous position and this position and we want rotation. So it's like an angle. So how do we change that? Well, there's nothing called vector to angle. There's vector to Euler. Gotta remember. And I think it's a line Euler to vector. All right, so it's doing something. And I think, hmm, all right. Well, it's doing something else than we wanted but it doesn't matter because it's still wonky because of the source mesh we're doing. Like I have no idea what kind of things it's doing. So let's go back to, like let's keep this and I think it's this one that we want. Oh, this is gonna go terribly wrong. And let's feed it back these points which doesn't do anything because these have no normals. So what we need to do is somehow capture the normals from the previous mesh. And there's a node called capture attribute. So I'm gonna capture attribute. I'm gonna feed it with this geometry and I wanna capture the normal of a, so this is gonna be a vector and it's gonna be a phase. All right, somehow we lost it. Yeah, it's fiddly. I don't particularly like dealing with the graph to be honest. Anyway, so this is the geometry and this is the attribute. So we're gonna replace this guy with this guy. I'm not like feeding it the normal as a rotation but it needs to be a vector. So I'm gonna add the vector to the rotation, not a rotation to a rotation. All right, I'm glad we figured it out. So now like every mesh that we're gonna feed it is going to like use, it's not super accurate I guess, but yeah, it's enough accurate for me. So it's doing the rotation. So that's good. I'm gonna, like I have only a couple of minutes but I wanna show you at least the symbolic nodes set up which is something that was in the previous release. And so this sort of setup shows another great thing about nodes is that you're creating these systems. And as I mentioned, they are modifiers but you can have multiple modifiers which is very useful in structuring your work.  They're really great for discovering and forming the graph but it's really terrible going back and understanding what you did and why things work the way they do. You have this framing ability. So every time you have a couple of nodes, so if I just like copy a bunch of these, I'll have to like get them out which is a shortcut I don't remember. Can I just do a different one? Yeah, so you can like group them, frame them. They're not groups, groups or something else. If you group things, it's good for instancing the same set of nodes. It works in both the shader which I use very often and probably here as well. So you can group but it's a different thing. So you can like color and group things together so you understand. So in here, I have two geo nodes setup. One is for like creating this setup that deals with the proximity to this mesh and plugging holes. But the thing I wanted to show you is that these, so you create these, it's elaborate but you create these note setups but then you can expose using these group input things. You can plug, there's an empty slot here. So any parameter they have here, you can expose to the outside world on the modifier stack right here. So I can like have not show holes or have holes create like a different size for the hole and that sort of thing. So like it's, you're structuring your project and you can expose them publicly. I see Marie dragging me out of, this usually happens but I'll provide links to these projects and I'll point you to the documentation so that you can actually learn about how things work rather than me just showing what can be done. Anyway, I thank you for your attention and I guess we're gonna have a few questions that I won't be able to answer. Yeah, let's take the question that we have here. There's only one. So the nodes available in geometry nodes seem to change between Blender versions. Any hints for how to keep up with the changes? Yeah, it's actually quite tricky and the thing is that Blender actually completely redesigned the system of geometry nodes, I don't know if it was three, well, there was just initial release of geometry nodes and I completely let it go by because I knew it's coming and it's gonna be amazing but I don't have the time to deal with that and that was one of the great decisions of my life because it was completely redesigned and works completely different with that fields approach and it's completely different. It's true that there's lots of new nodes but usually the thing is nodes that are coming sort of become more and more specific. So things that you need to do with vector math these days and you have to like multiply the two vectors and remember that like adding two vectors means that you get the resulting, you know, that's something I wanna avoid and usually the new nodes simplify things. So for example, I wanted to demo you how to create grids of things where you would have a mesh line and you would instance another line in the opposite direction on each of these points and then the resulting mesh you would instance your objects on but then a grid node happened and then you have a grid. Now you can instance like here I wanted to show you how to instance on volume. So you convert your mesh into volume so you can either have the whole object space as a volume or even just the skin of it and then instance objects in there. So that was also pretty difficult to do back then and now it's great and easy but I understand the need to have your project openable, you know, sometimes in the future. Blender has these long-term support releases where if you're a studio and you wanna, you know, rely on something that will be here and supportable for a long time you probably wanna stick there but like geometry nodes is very fresh so I don't think that, well, I haven't actually checked but like you might be lucky and, you know, the release that's marked as long-term support has geometry nodes so I would suggest going with that and then you're sure that an update will not break your project files. I have to say that that happens very rarely for me. I have projects that I did, you know, in 99 and I can still open them in Blender. I mean, they don't have all this fancy new stuff but it's pretty impressive that the backward compatibility is kind of nice and like you could probably be able to like go back to an old version and, you know, still open to do some tweaks but yeah, it's inevitable. Like if you wanna keep up, you gotta watch for the changes. Awesome. Well, we look forward to the links that you provide in the channel. Right. And thank you so much for your presentation and joining us today. This is awesome. It was a pleasure. Glad to have you.