Thank you very much. I also thanks to all of you for being here instead of being over at Matty's, even though he's like DevOps famous. Thank you much for being here. Life after DevOps, I'd like to talk to you about sustaining engineering as a discipline and how it can solve a few problems that you may have in your organizations. You can find me at Tim at Bonsey.net and the slider up on SlideShare. I have three main points that I'd like to cover, and then there's time all set aside for Q&A to answer any questions you might have. And if we get through all that, I've got some bonus content where I'll go into the issues I still have and the problems I still haven't worked out here. So I'd like to talk to you about the software lifecycle, basic stuff. I'm sure you've all seen something like this. For any given product, you play in design, build, test, gather data, repeat. This is probably not surprising to anyone here. I'm sure everyone's seen something like this. I personally don't like to use the arrows here because I know sometimes you go backwards. You're going concurrent many times, but this is very familiar to most of you, I'm sure.  It's live to customers. There's still some feature growth. That happens, but once you get past your alpha-beta releases, you now have a live piece of software that is in what I consider the sustaining part of its lifecycle. That's going to go through a supported phase. It'll eventually be deprecated and retired. Any piece of software that goes live is going to have those steps that need to be covered. I break this up into two parts, the traditional development part, up through your release, and then your sustaining part, once it's live, the customer has to remain live. There are some complications that arise when real-world situations come into play. I've got a few of those. Names may have been changed to protect the innocent. Facts may be just fabricated, but here are three common types of problems you might see. You've got a team of two who build the bulk of a service, leave for different companies, leaving it in the hands of their squadmates. What do you do? Who's responsible for that service? You've got a problem on your hands. You've got another team, two members build a thing, move on to new squads to meet new corporate priorities. There's a restructure, a reorg, the lateral move, however. There's a third teammate who was there but was on leave for part of it. Who's responsible for that service at that point? You're in a bind. You've got a problem. You've got your friends in the Butterbeer Squad. They've built four different products. As with most teams, they've spent some membership changes, some join, some leave. There's only one left with the working knowledge of the two legacy products because cross-training was deprioritized. We always wanted to get to it. It was something that we knew was important, but it just never bumped up. It always got pushed to some point in the future. So now she's got a sweet job offer and what's going to happen to those legacy products. So these are the problems that arise due to real-world circumstances and I'm going to suggest sustaining engineering is something that we can use to solve this. So here's how sustaining engineering could look. I'm going to talk about sustaining engineering as a discipline and also as a team. There's the DevOps mentality that I've heard a lot of times where you build it, you own it, it's yours forever. I think that that's all nice and good, but I'm proposing something slightly different. DevOps is a methodology, a way we do things. It's a culture about collaboration. It's not necessarily about a team and we don't necessarily need to maintain the connection between the team that built it and the team that sustains it. So when you have a service that needs to exist unchanged for the foreseeable future, there's work there that needs to be done. There's a distinct class of work that I call sustaining engineering, but DevOps does not preclude that being done by a different team. The transfer of ownership from one group to another group is certainly advantageous under certain circumstances, such the ones that I laid out on the last slide. So I'm going to talk about sustaining engineering as a discipline and sustaining engineering as a team to keep the two things separately. I'll be referring to the sustaining engineering team, the group of people as the purple cross. So when you see that on a slide or you hear me say it, purple cross is going to refer to the group of people and not the discipline as a whole. So our purple cross team going to start up describing them as a persistent group of engineers. They have a catalog of supported services. A little bit of humility here. These aren't my ideas entirely. I didn't invent this stuff. I happen to do it and have some strong opinions about it, but we all kind of stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. So I'm actively trying to make my team better and draw out thoughts from you folks. So I'm happy to hear feedback from you later during the question part. So I don't have all the answers, but I will tell you what I do know. Sustaining engineering is something I first heard about 10 years ago from Microsoft. It's also something that's been used a long time in the defense industry when they have a piece of hardware that is long lived and needs to be maintained. They call that sustaining engineering. I didn't bother to source either one of those claims, so there's a giant grain of salt for you. Staffing is super important to me. I think anytime you're designing a team, you need to understand what your staffing looks like. So I'm going to talk about the type of people that we want to staff on our Purple Cross team. We don't talk about staffing enough as an industry, and I think it's super important that we understand what the challenges are, what our definitions are, and how we really see these teams coming together as actual people that are more than just a sum whole. So there are two groups of people that I see as the ideal staff for our Purple Cross team. The first are our junior engineers. These are people who don't have a ton of experience and need to still gain some exposure to different things. They're going to want to see something different every day. They're going to need to kind of build some expertise, see what they love, and find what they may want to specialize in. So sustaining engineering is a great place for your junior engineers to get that exposure to different concepts. You'll be working on a networking problem one minute, then you're going to jump to DNS, and after that you're going to have to figure out why this thing in the Linux kernel is doing this. So all in one day, you're going to have a broad exposure to topics, and that's great for junior engineers. The next type of staff that we need are your hard and bad asses, people who have seen some shit and know how to handle it. It's the end of the world, but don't worry, we're going to make it through this. I've seen this before, so you also need your experienced engineers on the team. People who are going to be able to operate well in a fast paced environment and for the critical things that they support are not going to be dragged underwater by them. So junior engineers, experienced engineers, I'm kind of saying there's a gap in the middle and that's okay. We don't necessarily need all of the engineers on this team to stay on this team for the entirety of their careers. The junior engineers will grow, they'll get some experience in things that they might enjoy, and they may go off to other teams. Just understanding that that's what your staffing looks like is going to make you more successful at making sure that your team, your sustaining purple cross team is itself sustainable. You're going to have a hiring and staffing plan, and you're going to be able to get the right people in, and you'll be able to grow the right people out.  So the purple cross team, persistent team of engineers, staff with a mix of junior and experienced. So this is who they are, now what is it they do? When people hear sustaining engineering, this is the thing I hear. Oh yeah, you guys fix bugs, right? Yes, absolutely sustaining engineering fixes bugs. So that's what everyone knows, but there's also a lot more that sustaining engineering is about. And particularly the things that are important and most valuable are the long-term architectural changes. Things that for any long-lived piece of software, any service, any product, there's going to be things that you're going to need to tweak. And not necessarily because someone made a bad decision early on in the process, it's not like someone decided that we'll just deal with, okay, this database column is going to grow at some point in seven years. It's going to overflow, and that'll be a problem we'll have to handle down the road. That's not necessarily a bad decision you've made in the moment, saying we're going to handle that in seven years is a perfectly reasonable decision. Also things like your backups, your backup strategy for an active product that you're doing releases to multiple times a day. Your backup strategy is going to be much more aggressive. Your disaster recovery strategy is going to be different than it would be for a product that is going to sit with no intentional changes for a long period of time. Changing up how you handle your backups, how you handle your disaster recovery is absolutely something that needs to adjust once it moves to a sustaining model. You also have things that crop up due to the nature of some systems changing. Patches coming in underline architecture when your software isn't changing. All of a sudden you're getting deployment time creep. That's a problem that comes up. You just have to fix. There are also instance types are going to get cheaper. You're going to need to make sure that your stuff was going to work on a new EC2 stuff. You're going to want to move to the more cost-efficient stuff when it comes out. These are all things that need to be handled besides anything actually breaking. This is all stuff that you need engineers to be able to understand and fix. Also, you're going to want to eventually deprecate and retire some of these services. Not everything you build is going to live forever. Some things you're going to say, okay, this validation service we needed at one point, but the things that relied on it have moved to something else, we now need to retire this. This stuff can die and go away, but you need an engineer to make that change because if you just have someone hit a button and not all of your dependencies were in line, something breaks. You need engineers in charge of this stuff. Our sustaining engineering team, this is who they are, this is what they do. Resolving incidents, fixing bugs, long-term architectural health. I'd like to use a metaphor here of the wet basement. Sometimes when you have a problem with a service, stuff goes bad, all of a sudden there's water in the basement, people are going to grab buckets. You've got to get that water out of there. But we actually have engineers with a true engineering discipline to handle these problems because sometimes just using buckets isn't efficient. You're going to need to install a pump. And once you get all that water out of the basement, you're going to need to figure out where all that water comes from. How do we keep it from happening again? We need to move from a mindset of just bailing water to installing pumps, figuring out where the water came from. Do we have aging plumbing that needs to be addressed? Do we need to install a drain in the hill behind the house so that we keep this water from coming in? These are all kind of engineering decisions that need to be made when incidents happen. So it's not just about, okay, all the water's out, let's move on to the next problem. You need engineers to understand these problems, make the long-term architectural changes in order to keep these things happening. Topic III, once we've decided sustaining engineering is something that we want to do, how do we enable it? And once we've done that, what does this enable us as the business to do? I'd like to start first talking about transitioning as a service. Easiest thing I can say about this is this is not throwing something over the wall. Like everything else in DevOps, this is around a conversation. This is different teams working for the same end goals. This is not something that you're going to take and say, yep, we're all done with this. This is yours now. Have fun. Great. Thank you very much. When we're transitioning a service, there's going to be some concurrency going on and some back-and-forth about, is this healthy enough? Do we have our documentation, et cetera? It's also not a second swing at the backlog. We have moved from the feature growth phase to the supported and sustaining phase. It's not about, okay, we're done with this. This is now going to the Bush leagues to put in some of these last things. That's not what sustaining is about. Making sure these things last and these architectural changes are made to keep these things lasting. What transitioning may be is an alignment on business fundamentals. Let's talk about what it is this thing does. So any decisions that we make are aligned to the end goal. We're not going to sustain a piece of technology for the sake of that technology lasting forever. That's not really useful to the business. If we know that the business needs an address validation service in order to get to these outcomes and the sustaining team's job is to make sure that address validation service stays up to make sure those goals get met, then their job is to make sure those goals get met one way or another. Sometimes you can even combine services, deprecate one over another, say, hey, this other team actually built one of these. Let's switch everything over to using that and that's the better decision. So we want to focus on what the actual business outcomes are. Sometimes this is also a tough conversation. You will have some things that need to be transitioned that are not in a great state. If you run into one of these, yeah, we have this system. You need to take it. No one knows a thing about it. We don't have the passwords. Good luck. Here you go. These can be tough conversations. The solution there is sometimes you inherit the code but not necessarily the architecture. You get it up and running elsewhere and make sure that you can swap all the dependence over. The services that we like to transition, there's a couple different patterns here that I'd like to talk about. Lighthouses, this is an analogy I like to use where you've got a product. It's super critical. It needs to run every night. If it doesn't run, it's pretty bad. But luckily it's very well automated. It's a simple system, so there's not a lot that can go wrong. If anyone here is a lighthouse expert, just tell me about it later how I'm doing it wrong. But these things are critical and they're simple. This is a great service to transition. This is the kind of thing that you hand to an engineering team. Here's your documentation. You're off of the races. You're good to go. The other analogy kind of on the other end of the spectrum, dogs. Everyone loves dogs. They're not necessarily business critical, but they make people happy. They deliver joy to the customers and employees that they use them. They're sometimes finicky, but overall they're stuff that people like having around. They need daily care and feeding, not necessarily a problem. Now, something we don't want to get handed off to us are puppies. Puppies are services that don't have that business value baked in yet, and it's more like, hey, we just built this thing. We think it's kind of fun. The house breaking should be in the next patch. Don't worry about it. The spaying fix is scheduled. So let's get those puppies matured into dogs before we go ahead and move them off to sustaining. Thank you very much. The reason that dogs, you might not think that that would be something that would be great to transition daily care and feeding, but the reason we do that is it scales really well. What you need to put in place, like automation-wise, process-wise, to go from supporting zero dogs to one dog, yeah, that can be a bit of an adjustment. Going from one dog to two dogs, almost nothing. You're going to be able to apply those same procedures, that same automation, and you can scale that up very well a dozen or more dogs without really batting an eye. So those services are going to scale really well. So once you have your Purple Cross team in place, what that is going to enable the business to do, you're going to be able to start building a culture of sustaining. What I mean by that is the people that are going to want to start to transition the teams, the people that are building these technologies that are going to want to transition the products to the Purple Cross, you're going to put together documentation in a better way because you know that documentation is going to be read by someone else. That's not just, oh yeah, I need to know about the ham sandwich thing because I know what that means. You're going to write it for someone else to read. Also with the documentation, things need to be written down why those decisions were made, not just how they were made. The whole code as documentation thing doesn't really work when you're going to hand it off to someone else and you don't always bake in all of your underlying assumptions. I can read through the code and know how this thing works. I can trace through and understand it, but I don't understand why you made this decision here. It may look like a bug to me and I fixed that and all of a sudden there's some business goal that's not being achieved because I didn't understand that. That can be fixed through a comprehensive test suite if you've got a good enough test suite that actually handles all of your business outcome cases as well as all of your unit test integration tests. But the documentation really needs to be built around a culture of sustaining where we understand why the decisions were made and what the business outcomes were trying to achieve are. So something that also arises from this, we get to a series of defaults. It's not necessarily governance, but once there's an understanding that we're going to build this thing, we're going to hand it off to other people. If the engineers that are building this thing know, all right, we've got to put in some monitoring platform on this. It doesn't matter to us really which monitoring platform. It's an arbitrary decision. If we know that the sustaining team prefers Sumo Logic and New Relic, if we don't have a good reason to use something different, we're going to plug in Sumo Logic and New Relic and we're good to go. We don't waste time making that decision. We don't put in something else arbitrary that we then have to teach a new team how to use and your Purple Cross team has to end up supporting six different monitoring platforms. We can coalesce around a source of defaults without it really needing to be top-down mandated or some sort of governance board deciding, here's how we're going to do everything. It's just about creating a set of defaults to answer those questions like, if I have to make an arbitrary decision instead of going to Google for 15 minutes, I'll go to one of the guys in the Purple Cross and say, what are you guys going to prefer we use for our monitoring here? And it's easy enough to have that conversation. The holy grail here is to take that conversation and have those discussions around, you know, what do you prefer to use and make sustainers actually a stakeholder and push those discussions left if we can talk to the developers that are building things that they're going to want to transition, then we're going to have time to actually say, all right, you want to use a new monitoring platform because there are these things involved. We're going to have time to train up on it. We're going to know the intricacies of that so when it comes time to transition, we'll be ready for it and we'll also be able to provide our inputs to say, okay, you want to do it this way. In AWS, we prefer to do it this way. But if you don't have a good reason, let's make sure we're standardizing so that all of our automation just plugs right in. So ideally, we would like to have those conversations as early as possible, but every stakeholder says that. So again, this can be a little bit difficult. DevOps really wants to include everyone as early in the discussions as possible, but I understand sometimes that's not possible. But please, if you're going to adopt sustaining, try and have those conversations as early as possible. Now I've come to the point where I've got time for some Q&A. So if you have questions, I'd be happy to field them for you. While someone comes out here maybe with a microphone to see if there's questions, these are the takeaways that I'd like you to focus on for this. If there's engineering involved, there will be sustaining engineering. Any service that goes live to customers is going to have those tasks that just need to happen, those long-term architectural changes. Either the team that built the thing is going to do it, or you're going to pass it off to another team. But that's engineering that has to happen. And involved with sustaining a stakeholder as early is going to allow your business to function more efficiently. So what questions do you guys have? Have you had any luck trying to integrate, say, remote teams as a sustaining engineering platform? It feels like a softball. We actually, at Vistra Print, our sustaining engineering team is split from Barcelona already. So that has worked well, but we also have different development squads that are positioned around the world. So it's just part of our culture already. If it weren't part of the culture, it may be a little bit different. So it may be harder if that's your use case, but for us it's a natural fit and it certainly works. How are you? It obviously makes sense. In my experience as an engineer, while you would need sustaining engineering, obviously a very 100% business need, but how do you make it attractive? That's one of the things that I would argue as, like, it's there, it's a given, everybody knows, but how do you make it attractive? Because if I was told, like, oh, we're going to put you on the sustaining engineering team, I would almost be like, oh, what am I going to learn new here? I guess I was going to try and look at it as a really positive thing. Okay, so you're saying attractive for people to work on the team? Yeah, so if you need to attract that talent, like you're saying, you want to build that team, you want to attract obviously some good people, so how do you make that attractive? Yeah, if I can go back to the staffing plan, your junior engineers are going to have exposure to a lot of different things. They aren't going to go on to a team where they're going to be heads down, working on debugging Java all day every day. They're going to be able to be exposed to a lot of different things and a lot of what's out there. So it's a good place to kind of get your feet wet and get some exposure to a lot of different things that actually happen in production systems. From the experience engineer side of things, we're looking for the type of person that is who are looking for a fast-paced environment, who are looking for something different every day. It's not a fit for every experience engineer, for sure, but there are some tough architectural challenges that need to happen on aging systems that can attract some people. So it's a great place for probably most junior engineers. It's a great place for some experienced engineers who are looking specifically for some different things. There are people who want to be able to jump around, work on this, make this change, jump over this thing, make this change, jump over this thing, make this change. So it's kind of a personality thing that we look for in the experience engineers. So the question was what's the difference between this mechanism and a traditional operations team? In this case, the sustaining engineers, the sustaining engineering team, your purple cross, is actually in charge of the code underlying it. There's no one to... You don't say, okay, we found a defect and hand it back to someone to fix. You say, we found a defect, we're going to break this thing open, we're going to fix it, we're going to make it better, we're going to change the entire platform underneath it. We don't need to ask it in its permission because we own it. Does that make sense? Great. I think we're at time. Thank you very much for coming. If anyone else wants to provide feedback, there's a four o'clock open space that was unclaimed, so I'll be talking about sustaining there. Anyone else who wants to talk about it more? Thank you very much.


Ukraine will receive modern fighter jets of the four-plus generation from the U.S. Alexei Reznikov, the Minister of Defence of Ukraine, is convinced that Ukraine will receive modern fighter jets of the four-plus generation from the U.S. He explains that the partners of Ukraine delay the supply due to their practicality and good judgment. Reznikov said in an interview for the National Joint 24-7 Newscast, I have come through the evolution from saying no, Alexei, it is impossible to the implementation of real projects several times. The first time I heard a no concerning the Stinger manpads was in November 2021 when I had just taken office with no experience but was facing big challenges and tasks from President Zelensky. But now I know for sure what is impossible today will be possible tomorrow. We were supplied with stingers in two months. In January 2022, from our Lithuanian partners, by agreement of the partners, he added, Reznikov added that the situation was the same with 155mm artillery, the Himmars, MLRS, the Iris T infrared homing missile, the Nassarms systems, and moreover the Patriot anti-aircraft systems, especially the latter seemed fantastic. But as of now, two divisions have taken up combat duty in Ukraine. So fighter jets of the modern four plus generation will certainly be supplied. Why is this supply delayed? The delay disappoints us because it causes deaths and injuries to the Ukrainian troops and they are our primary value unlike the Russian soldiers or the Russians and we explain it to our partners. Modern aircraft platforms are an important component of the air defense system. And the Patriot system costs 1 billion US dollars plus the missiles and a single fighter jet costs nearly 120 million US dollars and further maintenance is required. Ten fighter jets equals 1.2 billion US dollars. So when they count their budget capacities, they realize that this decision must be approved by Congress and taxpayers and must not affect the current level of military aid. They consciously and responsibly want to get to the finish line of this marathon to the victory of Ukraine.


An innovator named Vishrut has come up with a unique technique for desalination of water using membrane filtration technology wherein they use customized membrane to produce naturally mineralized potable water. Water, the essence of life, covers more than two-thirds of our planet's surface. Yet the need for fresh water continues to grow. Much of the earth's water is saline, making it unsuitable for human consumption and agriculture. But what if there were a practical method to upgrade the current desalination process? In today's episode of ChangeMaker, we have with us Vishrut, who is working on developing a solution for water desalination using cutting-edge membrane filtration technology. With their innovative approach, they are addressing pressing challenges of fresh water scarcity and sustainability. Welcome Vishrut. Hello sir. Could you please provide some insight about yourself and your innovation? Sure sir. The thought of name is Vishrut, and I belong from Sangam city, Pyaa Grads. I have been located with the banks of Ganga river, but then for my undergrads, I moved to Kerala, where we have women's, let's say, coastline sharing with the saline water. I started my education over there in bachelor's in architecture, and I recently completed my graduation. Over there, I could see a lot of innovative things and innovative approaches which people were taking, and that's how I began my journey of innovation. So which problem does your innovation aim to solve? So majorly what we are trying to tackle is fresh water scarcity. We have recently seen a very major pandemic which was created by COVID-19, but the upcoming pandemic which we all are unaware or I must say partially aware about is that the water scarcity issue. Then in 2018, when I joined the college, that was the year when our initial, let's say, a baseline flood came in Kerala, and in 2019, it got struck very badly. I was there in NSS camp over there, and due to that, I got a chance to get connected with the people who were living near the coastal areas. What happened over there was the backwater hordes which were flooded with the fresh rain water, they came towards the surface and the surface water which was available for the people, it became saline. Seeing that me and my friends at that time who were there in the camp, we tried to make a small miniature setup which was working on the principle of condensation and evaporation, a very many smaller one which sailor boats use for getting the fresh water. That's what we developed and provided to the people who were living over there. And that's where I could understand that if this much amount of saline water is available, why not try to use this as a resource and get fresh water out of it? And this was not a very first move. We have seen a lot of industries which are already existing in the market who are already working in the same domain. There were a lot of issues which were coming over there, which I look forward to discuss with you. Yes, Vishu, what inspired and motivated you to create this innovation? Sir, people I met over there during the floods and when I went to help them clean the houses and when I help them migrate from over there, I could see the problem which they were facing and that's what made me get concerned about them. And then I thought like I should do something and I should look forward for this. That's how I formulated a small team of people who were having, let's say, keen interest and I would sell a little bit expertise into the aspects which I was looking forward to develop for. Could you please explain how your product works? So, right now, sir, if you see the market, it is flooded with aro membrane, which is known as ribosmosis membrane, which covers almost three-fourth of the market. And other than that, the UF and other smaller membranes, which are trying to tackle the, what's it, the scarcity issues which are existing in different parts of the world. But the problem which comes with these membranes is that the recurring cost of changing these membranes is a lot. Every six months or three months, you have to replace them and it goes to waste because there is no usage of it. Due to this thing, there is a lot of environmental impact which is getting created with this. Seeing all of that, when we started the setup, we were working on a very basic principle. But when we went into the depth of it, when we read through papers, we could understand what is existing in the market. We could analyze the market and that's when we went into the membrane development aspect. So, what is new in this membrane is we're using graphene oxides. Graphene oxide is the master of all the materials and components which will be there in the future. It is there from the clothing to the eating every segment in the market. And that's when it has a lot of strength, it has a lot of qualities which makes it stand ahead of all the other current existing materials. Now, what exactly we are doing with that material is we're combining it with some different kinds of chemicals and combinations where we're getting a composition and we have fabricated this in-house in an anti-calibre where we're trying to develop a membrane through which once we follow the process of regular osmosis, it can be cleaning the water and once the water is clean and it is portable, you can do a reverse flux and clean the membrane. So, what it does is that it makes the membrane stand out, it makes the membrane get a longer life. How? Because it reduces the issue of foliage. So, once the foliage of the membrane, the organic components, they are not settling on it. The life's expectancy of any membrane increases to immense. Now, once the life of the membrane increases, the recurring cost of replacement is also reduced. So, seeing all of these things, we can say once the membrane gets ready and it is introduced in the market, the demand and supply of this will be an immense burden. That's where we are making an innovation and a change. Great. Vishu, what sets your productties different from other existing products in the market? Sir, if I may give a little brief about the existing technologies. Right now, as I mentioned, most of the industry experts are using membranes which are related to the RO or the reverse osmosis process. These membranes have been prevalent in the market from a longer time, or I must say two to three decades already. And there is no new innovation which is coming into it. Seeing that once our product comes into the market, what it brings a change is it will have a longer life. As I mentioned, the life expectancy of the membranes which are already existing is not longer. That is what makes it different. Apart from that, other components like the sedimentation filter, the carbon, nano and all these filters are pretty similar. We haven't invented any part in that. We are majorly focused into the membrane, which is being a critical part in removing the salt ions from the water. That's where the membrane becomes effective. As water is a fundamental human need and desalination plays a vital role in addressing saline water sources, I imagine you must have received positive feedback for your innovative ideas. How has the response been from the people around you? Yes, if I would like to share a personal experience, like once we were developing these setups, we got connected with the professors from our college itself. Luckily, unfortunately, I would say our college is in Kerala. And over there, we have lots of resources of backwater work. So once we were developing this, we used to go to these places to collect the water samples and try to filter them. Once we were doing this thing, our college, in a way, if I may say, they became our first customer because they mentioned that the moment our system gets ready, they would like to install it into the, I would say, system, into the canal which we are having next to our college so that they can get the supply of fresh water through it. So this was the first-hand experience which we got as a, I must say, the customer interaction. That was a positive feedback. Apart from this, we have been into multiple competitions and conferences. Whenever we go to these places, the kind of response which we get from the people and the jury members over there is very positive because they are very curious about the new kind of membrane we are developing, the new change, the new shift we are trying to get into. We are very proud to say that we are among the top 100 startups under the, again, we know it as, this program organized by Kela Startup Mission and they have been mentoring us as well. So their response as well towards this product has been very supportive. And our incubation center, TBI and IIT Calicut, they are also one of our customers because they also mentioned the moment we get it ready, they would take it through the first part. Vashrut, you are the proud winner of National Innovation Contest. Can you please share your experience participating in NIC? And how has your involvement in NIC influenced your entrepreneurial journey? Sir, if I may address this thing. In 2019, June, when we applied for this competition, we were very much unaware about what is coming to us as a team. When I started the proposal part of it, we understood that this would be something, a short one to two months thing or a very smaller kind of competition, generalized hackathons or something. But the moment we got shortlisted amongst the top 24 teams, which were called for the boot camp and the mentoring round in Delhi, AIC headquarters in September, we were amazed with the people and the kind of support we got over there. The kind of lectures into the finance, the startup settlement, the IP filing and different kind of supports, which we could get at that point of time when we were starting our journey was very different for me. And that was the point if I may say the pivot for me, when I understood that this is something which I want to do. This is something which calls me for and that's where MIC has been a very bigger support from me. Apart from this, IIC at NIT Gallicard, the moment we started our journey with IIC, I became the innovation ambassador over here and I was handling the innovative projects in our campus where all the supports and guidance which I have received from ministry, I could transfer it to my juniors and colleagues and peers. If I may even address like the kind of trainings which we got in between the pivot time as well, like if I mentioned the angel investment ones, like where the leap angels gave us a workshop on what all kind of, let's say, developments we have to do in a startup, what all things we required in the initial stage and once the product is ready and all other aspects was not easily available to us, which we couldn't understand on our own. The rounds of trainings which we got from ministry and different, let's say, rounds in the webinars which we had in multiple stages from the starting towards the end has been of immense help. I would wholeheartedly thank Ministry of Education and Ministry of Innovation for providing all of these supports, Agushek said deep in self, all the people who are associated with this for providing us this support and all the mentoring which we have got as of now and we look forward to have a very long collaboration with them and share the learning experiences together. Thank you. Thanks, Vishrut. Vishrut, could you share the challenges you faced during your journey and how you overcome them? Yes, sir. As we all know, we all got stuck by COVID-19 in 2020 and that was the time I would say our startup was on the peak because we were into the development of the membrane because we had read all the papers, we were all set to start off the trials and the fabrication part of it. But the moment this got stuck, we were stuck with the things which we had in our hand and we couldn't develop the things because the lab was not available. That was one of the biggest challenge because when you try out something new, you need a curated system to work on it. But we didn't stop at that time. What we did, because as I belong from the northern side of India and my college is in the southern side, I still carried out things which were possible over here. I got support from Abhishek Sir and the team who helped me and guided me that whatever possible colleges are there in my hometown new over here, you go over there and try to develop things which were possible. So instead of the time-basting for just believing in what to do, what to do, we were actually working parallelly with the COVID-19 struggles. So that was the biggest challenge but even during that time, the supports with the team and from the ministry we had was very helpful for us for keeping us moving. I'm sure you have received some recognition for your interesting innovation. Could you share a few of them with us? Yes, sir. So in 2019, first of all, the moment we got shortlisted for the national boot camp, we were recognized by our quality itself that you are among the top innovative ideas in the campus. That was the first recognition we got parallelly to NIC 2019. Apart from that, we went for multiple competition and if I may address a few of them, one of the most proud achievement for us was amongst the top 100 innovative ideas in Kerala which was organized by Kela Startup Mission KSUM. The competition was known as Young Innovatives Program. So we got a support for three years continuous, mentoring and funding support from them, parallelly to MIC and IC part. We, apart from this, we even went for multiple idea pitching and proposal where interface 2019, we were the winners of the best idea pitching round over there. Then some organizations in Bangalore and I would say IITs as well organize, we were the participants over there as well. So we would say like, without the supports which we had at the back or the confidence which MIC has boosted in us, we wouldn't have gone to these platforms and would have got these recognitions. So whatever we have achieved as of now is just because of MIC. Pishrut, how you will ensure that your products meets quality standards? It's a very big responsibility towards our team. Because if I have to say that we are providing something which is a basic necessity of every individual in day-to-day life. What is something which we need to have in our every aspect from cooking, drinking, bathing to all domains. So when we are developing something which is a basic necessity, we have to be very careful. We have some set standards as per the government regulations. We are trying to take them as a benchmark and trying to produce the best portable parts which are achievable and trying to get the lab testing from our college in the first hand with the teams which we are having over there, apart from that the water regulation authorities were taking support from them as well to check and test the water quality which we are producing. Is it as per the standard or not? This is something which we are taking as our main objective that until and unless the water gets to the best we are not reducing the system which is good for the market until that time. Once the things get to the benchmarks which are set up by the, I will say with our team and the ministry, we would go ahead with that. Cost efficiency is also a very important aspect. How will you ensure cost efficiency of your product for the end users once it is out in the market? Yes, sir. But as I was mentioning, like the membrane we are developing, the recurring cost of membrane replacement is very less. So if I may explain this with an example of a household system. So we have RO, let's say purifiers in our home and every six months we have to change the RO membrane which is installed over there. The cost which is dealt into the replacement of it, service for a person's fee and the new membrane cost that will be going towards the half or even one fourth of it because the membrane which we are developing that would be one time cost. That once you buy a membrane that would go for minimum one to a year and it can very effectively gain itself and it will be even producing less waste as much as we are having towards the current system. So that's where the cost part of it getting reduced because the replacement cost and the recurring cost of it will be reduced by very much. Yes, MIC, AICT is providing you support. Have you received any support from other sources whether financial or otherwise? We have got support from IEDC around some 5 to 10,000 in the initial stages when we were developing. Apart from this as I mentioned that interface 2019 as we were the winners, we got some around a sum of amount of 25,000 from them. Apart from this, we have got a smaller amount of supports from different personal systems as well wherever we have gone, some Indian investors or some other people. Apart from this, TBI in IEDC has given us what's all sorts of supports, membranes which we were looking forward and the victim education support which we have got from them has been enough, I must say, for the trials and the testing which we have been doing up till now. Now we look forward to going for some investment rounds and we are trying to get some more funds into the market so that we can go further in this industry. Many young innovators are watching this session. What advice would you give to newcomers considering starting their own venture? Here's this question I remember myself. I was the first and I was like, oh, I will just try this thing. Let's see what happens. So that was something which I had an attitude towards the competitions and different, let's say, platforms which were during my undergrad time. One very important thing which I would like to give as a message to all the innovators, upcoming innovators, I must say, that always believe in yourself that you are the one who is going to bring the change. Never be insistent to share your ideas, share your thoughts, be very vocal about it because until and unless you share the idea which you're having in your mind, you will never know if that idea is even viable for the person whom you're developing it for or not. You need to understand the market and the end user whosoever is getting using your service or product form. If you understand them, you will be getting a very directive or very corrective system of service or product form. Apart from this, one very important thing is that during this entire journey of three years, I have been very patient and consistent. Never lose hope in your product. Never lose hope in your team. Always be a very good strength and a very good team leader. Try to understand the personal aspects as well apart from the professional things because your personal and professional always go parallel. Once you understand the person, you understand the problems which they are trying to go with. And once you understand all of that, they give their all the system, all the things wholeheartedly. So have some patience, have the consistency and you can do anything in the world. Very important thing, never lose hope. Vishrut, what are your future plans for the business? I'm very much excited if I may say about the product because we are almost towards the end of it because the membrane is I would say 80% ready because some testings and trials are going on. Once that gets ready, we're very much ready to go into the market and disrupt it with the best possible things which we are having in our company. Thank you so much, Vishrut. Thank you so much for joining this session. All the best for your venture. Thank you so much. Addressing world's water crisis is a collective responsibility and innovative technology will play a crucial role. To ensure a brighter future for generations to come, Vishrut and his team is leading the way towards a world where fresh water is no longer a scarcity. In the upcoming episode of ChangeMaker, we will have the opportunity to interact with another inspiring innovator. Until then, namaskar, jahind.


Vice President Yemi Oshiba-Jo has spoken out against the weaponisation of ethnic and religious prejudice and stereotypes for political gain. Oshiba-Jo shared his insight on Monday at the maiden edition of the policy-making and good governance lecture series of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, sharing an excerpt of his speech on Twitter on Wednesday. The vice president spoke about a personal experience from decades ago to illustrate the nature of biases.


What's your funniest or most memorable moment from filming? I don't know if it's funny, but I suppose the most memorable. I think in reflection it's funny. The first day we set out to shoot on the open, we were all violently seasick. So I think the smell is still with me. It was pretty repulsive. Wow! That's a hilarious story! It's both of you. You both got violently seasick. There is about 20 of us maybe on that day. All of us, except for our director and our cinematographer, were very sick. Yeah, it was... Honestly, it started off, we all sailed out. Everyone was very, very happy, cheery, taking selfies. I can't believe we're getting paid to sail in Fiji. I mean, amazing. And then eventually one of the crew members, Marcel, he... Came out of the boat the whole. And his face was just white as a sheet, and he was kind of going... And behind him I just saw everyone going below deck. So it was a pretty memorable moment. So I was going to ask about your chemistry. It's amazing on screen. And I was wondering how did you guys bond, but maybe from projectile vomit? Honestly! Strangely, yeah. I think the first day we ever even got on a boat in Fiji, I threw up and she was basically patting my back.  So, yeah, I think it was a great icebreaker, you know. Go on a boat. First date, go on a boat. I had to ask Sam when we were filming that same day that everyone got seasick. I had to use the bathroom so badly, and the toilets were overflowing with puke. And so I had to enlist Sam and Balt to hold up towels for me so that I could pee on the deck and just wash it away with water. Nothing quite gets you close, like... So wee and puke and pee. This gets better, so you're wee-ing and you're holding up a towel. Yes, he's nauseous himself wanting to puke. He's spent so much time together, what's your favourite thing about each other? Oh, good question. Wow, so many. Everything.  My humour. My English humour. And I think her impression of an English person is probably my favourite thing that she does. What are you talking about? You know, I can't even do it. She used to always do this, like the old chim-chimmy. By the way, we just talked in Australia and I was like, I love Brits and he's like, she was definitely Australian. So I think... I can't hear accents. Honestly, I think everything, similarly, everything about her is... With a film like this, there might be some stuff that doesn't make the final cut. Is there something we can look out for in the DVD? There was actually quite a bit cut out. I feel like we had a lot more, a lot of moments pre-stormed that are in the movie. There was a moment that was sweet with some Tahitian kids. Yeah, eating the pie. That was probably my favourite day. Because basically we had to starve ourselves for the majority of the film and we had a couple of scenes in the movie where we're eating. One when we have to devour a jar of peanut butter. Another where she forces sardines in my mouth. And then another where we had to basically demolish papaya fresh.  They were smashing them too.  It's not very sexy.


Hi, I'm Maggie, a librarian at the University of Alabama. Today, we are going to be using IbisWorld to find industry-level information. Some of this information includes descriptions of the industry, the main competitors, the supply chain, key metrics, and much more. We will start our search at the University Libraries homepage, lib.ua.edu. From there, we will navigate to the Databases tab in the middle upper right corner of the page. You can find IbisWorld by either selecting the Business and Economics option from the Subject dropdown box at the left side of the screen, or by selecting the letter I. Click on IbisWorld. Once you have reached the IbisWorld search page, enter the name of your industry in the box saying Start your search here in the middle of the page. Today, we will be searching for Engineering Services in the US. You can navigate within the report by using the menu on the left side of the screen. For this module, we will look specifically at the Industry at a glance page. Here, we can see the key statistics, key external drivers, industry structure, SWOT analysis, major players, products and services breakdown, key trends, and the executive summary of Engineering Services in the US. The executive summary at the bottom of the page gives a quick summary of the industry, which will be useful for you to know when going into interviews for a company within the industry. Today, we navigated to IbisWorld from the Library homepage and used the Start your search here box to find information on Engineering Services in the US. We then used the Industry at a glance tab to get an executive summary of the industry. If you have any questions or need further assistance with IbisWorld, please contact the Bruno Business Librarians, or use the Ask a Librarian chat found at ask.lib.ua.edu. Thanks!


Okay, congratulations now when I told you that winning this league is hard I didn't need you to take me that seriously it doesn't have to be that hard, okay? We got to just clean up a few little things and keep playing complimentary and no matter what happens figure out a way Okay, congratulations. Top three touchdowns man. Hello the guy Like sacks man. They come in bunches. Okay fellas defense. We got after the quarterback.  I don't know how many times but help you ain't about time Great job fellas Okay, congratulations, but we won before we know how to win. We just got to clean a few things up Okay, we're gonna keep winning. I promise you that there's moments where I'm like, that's what it is And I think you guys all see it too.  Let's keep stacking it up man. Y'all see what we can do when we play together man