Who are your guides today? We want to talk about real quick, I'm Samarit Wadhwa and as Marissa mentioned, I'm one of the senior product managers here at Harness. Prior to Harness, I've held positions at VMware and Savantec. Also joining me today is Anshul, who's the principal engineer here at Harness. And prior to Harness, Anshul was at Amazon and at Cisco. What we're going to talk about today is initially you want to get started with getting the GitOps buy-in. Our agenda will focus on also talking about evaluating your current state and then how to get set up for doing GitOps from an enterprise perspective. With regards to getting GitOps buy-in, we want to focus on how do you set the stage and how do you talk to your different teams? You might talk to your managers, you want to talk to different people in your org to see if GitOps is the right fit for your application and for the different teams that work with you. Next, we'll briefly touch upon what your current state looks like. So we want to focus primarily on the application that you deploy today. What are the kind of deployments you guys are doing? What metrics matter the most to you? And finally, we'll save how you want to get set up for doing GitOps and adopting it across the board. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Anshul so he can get us started on getting the GitOps buy-in. Thanks, Amal. So let's go ahead and get started. So not all enterprises today have a good understanding of the GitOps. They are primarily focused on DevOps and there's a need to start looking at the GitOps because of its benefits and they're getting the key stakeholders buy-in. So there are two ways of doing the software delivery. One is the progressive style and the other one is the declarative style. In case of progressive delivery, you practice the buy-in or following the practices of deploying an application in a gradual manner, allowing for minimal downtime and easy rollbacks. There are several ways of doing progressive delivery styles such as blue, green, canry, AB, and feature flags. Typically, in this style, you'll have a deployment pipeline that gets triggered on a new artifact or if there's any new manifest change. In case of declarative style, there's a set of practices that imparts developers to perform tasks that could be either classified under IT operations. It requires users to describe and observe systems with declaratives and specifications that eventually form the basis of continuous everything. The main difference between the progressive and declarative models can be summed up in one sentence. Progressive focuses on how you deploy and declarative focuses on what you want to deploy. Declared deployments can follow both push-based and pull-based approaches. In case of push-based, whenever there's a code change, the application's code is getting, you know, gets updated. The build pipeline is triggered and which, you know, updates the container images and finally updates the environment configuration in repository with this new deployment description. This update triggers the CI CD pipeline and deploy your application or service. The pull-based deployment strategy uses the same concepts as the push-based variant but differs in how the deployment works. With the pull-based deployment approach, the operator is introduced, as shown in the image on the right hand side. This operator takes the role of the pipeline by continuously comparing the desired state in the environment repository with the actual state defined in your deployed infrastructure. And whenever there are differences, notice this operator updates the infrastructure to match the environment repository. Additionally, this operator can even observe the image registry and deploy new versions based on that. So as we are all aware by now, the GitOps was coined by B-Works back in 2017 where they defined GitOps as the concept that deployment should be easy as an engineer and acting a code change, commit and merge. So GitOps upholds the principle that everything should be defined declaratively. Git is the one and the only source of truth. It requires the desired state of the system to be stored in a version control system and so that anyone can view the entire auditory of changes. All changes to this desired state of your application or service are traceable, commits associated with the committer information, commit ID and the timestamps. This means that the application and the infrastructure are now version artifacts and can be audited using the gold standards of software delivery and deployment. So following GitOps practices brings a lot of value to your enterprises. So few of them are like increased productivity. Since GitOps enables faster and more frequent deployments, teams have an easier time pushing a minimal viable change. Using GitOps best practices, teams can ship several times a day and river changes if there's a problem. High velocity deployments leads to more rapid releases and helping your teams deliver more business and customer value. Next is the improved stability. When you use GitOps to manage your application, you automatically gain a convenient audit log of all the app changes and audit level of who did what and when your application... And all this auditory can help you to ensure your application can be stable and meet the compliance criteria. GitOps also reduces significantly the risk factor because all changes to your applications are tracked through merge request and changes can be rolled back to a previous state if an iteration of the application does not work. Next is the better security. So GitOps, it helps to streamline the management of authentication and authorization requirements for infrastructure modification. Since in our infrastructure declarative defined and it's part of the CI CD pipeline, the individual developers do not need to know the credentials of the target resource. Also, there's a simplified tool chain that can reduce the attacks since everyone will be using a single tool. And if an attack does occur, teams can revert to the desired state by rolling back to the using the version control system. It helps you to reduce the downtime and outages while enabling teams to deliver software in an uncompromising environment. The next is the higher reliability with Git's capability to revert and rollback and for changes, teams gain a stable and reproducible rollbacks. Because the entire system declaratively defined in Git, we have a single source of truth from which to recover from and reducing your main time to recovery from hours to minutes. Last is the consistency and standardization. Since GitOps provides one model for making infrastructure apps and changes, so then you have a consistent end-to-end workflow across your entire organization. Not only are integration and continuous deployments, pipelines are driven by pool requests, but your operation tasks are also now fully reproducible through Git. So, the next is, how do we convince the members in our organization to start adopting the GitOps? So, sometimes it becomes a bit difficult to have the conversation with teams, how can you move to GitOps? So, however, the value provided by GitOps should itself act as a catalyst in getting them started to look at the GitOps. In order to further convince the members of your organization, one needs to research on the GitOps practices, learn more about what is GitOps, how it fits in with your organizations, use cases and application needs. We should all, the GitOps proponent should also explain what are the overheads of setup and what is the domain expertise as they plan to adopt GitOps. So, today, GitOps is mostly chaos is heavy. So, users needs to make sure that they have the right training about the activities. The GitOps advocates should start small by deploying a known business critical application using GitOps and better understand what works well and then adopt it across the entire application suite. So, next is the deployment matrix. So, publishing the stats showing the true representation of how your organization is doing the software delivery is very extremely important. Using these stats, one can show how often is code is getting shipped, how fast the road backs are happening in case of failures. So, this helps users to understand how can, they change their software deployment paradigm. The last is the GitOps case studies. So, there are multiple case studies out in the field that help to build the context of why your team or all should adopt or look at the GitOps. So, start by looking at the other enterprises or the other industries in the same domain and you'll see what is the success or the value they have attained by adopting the GitOps. Doing all of the above will convince the teams that shipping code helps the organization to move faster and builds happy customers. I'll now hand over to someone for the next slides. All right, thank you, Anshu. So, I think we have a good understanding about how do we get the GitOps buy-in? Now, we wanna focus on evaluating your current state. So, what does this basically mean? It means that how do you identify the applications for doing GitOps? So, the challenge that teams usually have is to understand which application is suitable for GitOps and which is not. For your application to be a good candidate, it should follow the GitOps principles. It's important to see if your app can be described declaratively, right? Because you wanna make sure that everything lives in Git. So, it should be stored in Git and that will give you the ability to see what revisions or versions of your app code is living over there. Next is the approved changes you make to your application config in Git. Can and should be directly applied to your cluster without any additional parameters being provided during runtime. What does this mean? This means that if you have to provide specific parameters during runtime as a part of your pipeline setup, then obviously this application is not a good fit for doing GitOps. Next is for the app that has been deployed using GitOps in the event that a cluster goes down or it dies, a pod dies. To get it back up and running, it should be as seamless as reapplying the same application configuration on new cluster. And the reason being because you already have the entire app config available in Git. All you have to do is pick it up and reapply it on a new cluster. Next, let's talk about if GitOps is only for Kubernetes. Well, this question always comes up, right? The answer to this question is no, it's not only for Kubernetes because it does not matter if the cluster runs in Kubernetes or not. All GitOps cares about is having an operator and it cares about having the sources Git and the destination on which can be any infrastructure. In this case, it could be a virtual machine. It could be a cluster of a type of PCF. It could be AWS or Kubernetes. In GitOps, all we want and care about is the whole system to be managed declaratively and it only uses convergence to make sure that whatever is in Git is being applied to the cluster and vice versa. As mentioned in the previous slide, GitOps is not just for Kubernetes. So as we see here, you have your GitOps engine that you can see. And what happens in this case is with the predefined rules and configurations that are responsible for monitoring the Git configuration and observing the current state of your cluster. You always have the ability to take an action to get your cluster to the desired state. Now, in this case, your cluster can also happen to be a virtual machine. It could also be another service, such as an AWS service or a PCF service. Centralized strategy. There's always a confusion and assumption that there is a centralized strategy just like DevOps, where we have a template that can be reused across different environments. And trust me, this is not the first time we've heard this or this is not the first time, you know, people have this confusion. The reason being because in DevOps, the whole idea is about reusability and sustainability. So people really want that aspect of reusability to be there for GitOps as well. But in the case of GitOps, what happens is that this statement does not really hold true because one, there is a mapping between your cluster and Git, which is a one-to-one mapping. And it does not really follow the paradigm of centralized strategy. What does that mean? It means that users will have to maintain and should maintain separate repositories for different environments, which is good. How would that comes with the overhead of maintenance, consistency, and also the visibility across all the different environments? Now, let's talk about, you know, what is the tech stack that GitOps currently supports? Well, as I mentioned, it is not only for Kubernetes, but with everything that is available today, it seems the most suitable to do GitOps with Kubernetes. Of course, Kubernetes sits at the heart of GitOps and so does Git because they are married together. But, you know, always there's this discussion that why is it tailored only around Kubernetes when we hear the term GitOps? Well, the recommended Kubernetes configuration mechanism is entirely declarative in nature, right? It's all YAML files. So when they lend themselves to this approach, particularly well, I don't think it's a surprise and it shouldn't be a surprise that, you know, the genesis of this approach is to help tame Kubernetes. So that's the reason why whenever we hear the term GitOps, we think of Git, but we also think only about Kubernetes. It's the whole declarative approach that Kubernetes provides. All right, now there are a lot of different tools out there in the market, right? You have Flux, you have Argo, you have Harness, you have Jenkins X, all of these different tools provide some form of integrations. Or, you know, they assume, they say that they're providing GitOps, but they're solving some part of GitOps. GitOps from an end-to-end perspective does have a lot to it. And there's not a one size fit all or a one tool that's all kind of a solution. There are some important aspects of GitOps that, you know, these tools are unable to resolve for and we should consider this. Like Harness is looking into providing more visibility as well as scaling, as well as propagating releases across environments, right? But the other tools, what happens is that they provide one or the other aspect. But when you think of a tool to adopt a tool for doing GitOps, you want to think about all the other entities as well. You want that visibility aspect, you want that scaling aspect, and you want to understand what else and where you want to be a few months from now. Okay, so that was all about learning more about the GitOps part. Now let's talk about pains. With every single positive does come some negatives. So, you know, it's not always roses. So let's see what are the pains of doing GitOps? Some of the pains that we know of, and you know, a lot of people want to address is GitOps doesn't address promotion of releases between environments. I think this is a very important pain point to call out because if you look at the GitOps charter itself, they literally say that, you know, GitOps doesn't provide a solution to propagate changes from one stage to the next one. And it is recommended to only use a single environment and avoid stage propagation altogether. Well, if you have a problem, you don't run away from it, right? You have to address it. So the most popular way of handling different environments seems to be either by using different Git branches and that solution also has, you know, a lot of disadvantages if you think about it. One, it opens the gate for people to do commit to specific branches. And, you know, that could be environment specific code that you might be writing into. Second, it makes your project coupled to very specific environments instead of it being generic in nature. Third, it requires extra effort to keep all the branches in sync at all times. So think about it when you have to do some hot fixes to specific branches, there might be a branch sprawl and you have to look into what's going on in each one of them. Last but not least is it puts the unnecessary strain on the CI system that has to always keep rebuilding, keep checking and, you know, do the unit test if necessary for each and every individual branch. Next, auditing is problematic despite having all information in Git. Absolutely. Just because you have access to the whole deployment history of the cluster in the form of commits, it doesn't mean, you know, that you can easily audit its functionality. And if you think about it, the current problem of GitOps tools are great for managing Git hashes, but when it comes to searching and understanding business value, I don't think, you know, there is much that we can do because all they provide is simple pre-text search capabilities. So it's pretty difficult to understand who did what when and where. GitOps covers only a subset of the software lifecycle. Absolutely. And, you know, this is probably one of the most important pain points that people are well aware of. Reason being that GitOps model follows a one-to-one mapping between your cluster and your Git repository. So GitOps tools are sometimes marketed as a one-size-fits-all, as I mentioned before. And this will only solve for the release problem, but it is simply not true. GitOps requires that your deployment artifacts are already there. That is true. This means that the tasks are just compiler code, running unit tests, integration tests, any of the security scanning and status analysis is something that's always a missing piece to this big puzzle. And last and least is running GitOps at scale is difficult, which is very true, right? Because if you adopt GitOps in a large company with a big number of environments and a lot of different teams, you know that your Git repositories are gonna quickly skyrocket, right? You're well aware of that problem. Now, this makes it very hard to deep track of what is going on in each and every environment and can quickly lead to configuration duplication or people making commits to specific environments where instead of using the shared configuration. For example, if you might have maybe 30 Git repositories, right? With different Kubernetes manifest and maybe you wanna make a central change to all of them. What does that look like? It entails 30 different Git commits, which is just not scalable. On the other end of the spectrum, if you think about it, you could have a single Git repository, right? And all of your environments, but all the people collaborate along with the CI CD systems. But having a single gigantic Git repository can become a bottleneck as well. Because if you think about it, something does go wrong. It introduces performance issues and think about scanning the repository for different changes should you need to go through an audit. So that, you know, puts it all together that there is some pain associated with GitOps as well. Now, next, let's talk about the setup for doing GitOps. Primarily the components or the architecture of GitOps comprises of four different entities and these are the most basic, crucial and important entities. What does that entail? Point number one, it needs to have your configuration. Now this configuration can be your infrastructure configuration and it could be your application configuration. Second is you need the most primary aspect, which is Git. Third, you have your GitOps operator, the operator that's making sure and keeping your Git in sync with your clusters. And last, not least is your Kubernetes clusters. In this case, as I mentioned, because Kubernetes is one which is the closest to GitOps, that's why all of your clusters will today be representation in Kubernetes. And now let's talk about scaling for enterprises. So obviously when people start adopting GitOps, there is a need to scale at an enterprise level because with GitOps adoption, you wanna move from an operational aspect to an architectural aspect. For an enterprise when they consider an application and from the application standpoint, what should this really matter is that where does a particular enterprise want to be with a business critical application and not about how one plans to get there? Today enterprises primarily care about the house, they are busy solving the how do we make this application better? How do I make this application do this differently? I think answering that how is not that important because all of their current processes are well established for answering that how. When they should actually be thinking about is where do they want to be not just now, but three months from now, five months from now, right? And that's where GitOps should come into the picture. When you architect your application, make sure that you think about the GitOps principles because the last thing you want that GitOps is not just a tool, it's an actual building block on which all your applications are being architected. So they scale for themselves. This also means that the people need to take the time and effort to learn the details that go with making the source code repository, the single source of truth. Today, because of all the different teams and all these different operational models, there is a segregation of duties amongst everyone. But you don't want that. You want that everybody comes to a single focal point from which all actions upon the enterprise can emanate. Next, let's talk about define everything declaratively as code. And when I say everything, everything has to be declarative in nature and in the form of code. Not everybody today has that mindset. It is going to take some time. It is going to take some effort to get this shift in the mindset as people now have to start thinking about doing everything in the form of code. Can you imagine doing infrastructure in the form of code? Well, that sounds good, right? But if you think about it, that for every single application that you have, for every single application you plan to build in the future, you have to think about doing infrastructure as code from the get go. And as I mentioned, that GitOps has to be a foundational aspect. Apart from that, obviously comes your application configuration, comes your user tests, comes your integration tests. So everything has to be thought of and has to be done in the form of code. Only when this form changes, it will be easier for folks to adjust that the applications they're building is following the GitOps principles and can scale better, not just for the teams, but for the enterprise, providing more business value. Last but not least is the teams are very used to providing inputs during runtime. When you start doing everything as code, you need to think about it from the very beginning of what inputs need to be provided, because all of the code that you're writing has to be encoded as a part of your application configuration. There is no runtime inputs that you can provide, which is a difficult shift to have, to be honest. But if it is done from the building blocks, it is pretty easy and widely adopted across the enterprise.  What does this mean? Well, better insights into what version has been deployed on which infrastructure? From a developer perspective, it is easy to see the configuration. The division stored in Git, correlated to the environment. However, think about it from an executive perspective. It does not hold true for the execs, because when they wanna see or have a clear understanding of what version is running on what infrastructure, they don't need to worry about the SHA or the version or the commit ID that was presented in Git. All they need to know is that version 1.2 is running on my prod environment and version 1.3 is running in my QA environment. Next, the dashboarding capabilities for application configuration versions with custom metrics and inputs, that is really important. These custom dashboards provided toolbox for building your own visual interface around GitOps data using flexible filtering. Now, Harness has this capability of doing custom dashboarding, right? You wanna use this for GitOps as well. You wanna see how this data can be flexibly filtered. And you also wanna see that, who has done what, when, and where? So you get the aspect of tying your audit trails associated with the deployments. You get the Dora metrics, you get which development and deployment happened at what time, the velocity with which all this happened, any bottlenecks that happened around it and the rollback aspect of the mean time to restore that when a deployment went wrong. So you wanna get that details as well. Next, we're gonna talk about rollbacks. So if you don't mind me saying or asking, right? The one dream that we've heard of from multiple enterprises is democratizing deployments. This is a dream that any enterprise would like to have because they wanna reduce the dependency across different teams. Now these teams could be their development team. It could be their SRE team. It could be their DevOps team, the infrastructure team, right? This is giving more power in the hands of developers to do what they do best, right? Build and deploy. And of course, with the right guardrails. So what developers do is they build the latest and greatest features and deploy it quickly into the hands of the end users, which brings additional value and it generates more business for the enterprises. And should something go wrong, right? What happens then? Then you obviously gotta rollback. But there's a safety net in place already to rollback. In the case of GitOps, rollbacks are pretty well handled as well because it is very simple due to the declarative nature of Git. In order to rollback, all the user needs to do is it is as simple as applying the previous version of your application and you simply use the pass commit for doing this. This combination where the GitOps tool itself will sync both the previous Git hash to the cluster and auto-reverts to the Git repo in order to keep the consistency. Helps you to make sure that you've been rolled back to the right version and you're up and running within no time. Now let's talk about extending GitOps. We've spoken about how we can scale for the enterprises, how we can rollback when something goes wrong, but how do you extend GitOps a little bit further, right? You wanna think about the different aspects to consider other people in your different teams who care about security, who care about maybe having some policies. So let's talk more about that. One of the most important thing is governance when it comes to GitOps and tying them both together or marrying these concepts together. It does take some time to get to this because people are still trying to figure out how to get GitOps correct and how to get GitOps right. But once you have your GitOps set up correctly, the next thing you wanna worry about is how do you scale better for your enterprises and extend all these features of governance to tie in with GitOps and make sure that you are doing the right thing for everyone else as well in the company. So there are many reasons why developers and platform engineers would like to what we call policy as code into their current GitOps process. For one, obviously the strategy helps to accelerate the application development and deployment process because it helps solve any of the change management hurdles that can slow development pipelines. Second is that policy as code saves platform engineers and DevOps teams from having to manually review hundreds of lines of configuration code, a process that you to buy all accounts, machines can and should be doing to be honest. On the development side, policy as code also helps the app developers to learn and understand what are the company's configuration? What are the security and compliance policies? It gives them the right guardrails and how correctly to abide by them. For example, a developer may not remember or may have no reason to remember that when deploying a load balancer onto a Kubernetes and AWS is not sanctioned but policy as code solves this problem automatically for them, right? Or maybe the number of replicas that you can have on a particular part should be only set to two but by mistake did it at four. So instead of the developer worrying about it, you already have policy as code that's helping you solve for it. So the ability to run policies during GitOps deployments and adhering to those policies as a part of the deployment and upon any violations being alerted, audited and notified automatically and rolling back to the previous successful compliance state. So Git remains in sync with the cluster is GitOps with governance. Next, let's talk about GitOps plus AIOps. There is a notion that once GitOps is completed everything is looking good and it's very important to monitor the deployment state because that's where the AIOps comes into the picture. Now, think about it as a part of your GitOps. We can see that the manifest change or infrastructure change or artifact change that happened but post deployment users should have the ability to configure some hooks. And obviously these hooks will be called by the GitOps operator post the sync. Now, this hook will leverage AIOps for what? In order to understand the changes in the service help and determine the course of action by either alerting the user or reverting the last recent commit. Last not least is actions on drift detection. What's really important is that drift could be because of an event on the cluster or an application configuration update in Git. Any pod level updates such as a pod dying or a pod deteriorating should notify the user. And in the case of a PR based where there was an update to the configuration of your application but that update has not been approved by the user customers might want to revert that Git commit then and there. To conclude enterprise customers would like to be alerted whenever there is a drift in their repository. And obviously, based on that, they get to choose if they want to approve this or reject this particular drift that they've just obtained. Putting all this together will help enterprises scale and will also help users to adopt GitOps in a more seamless manner. We'll now open it up for any questions. Marisa, I'll turn it over to you. Okay, it looks like one just came into that Q and A. We got a couple are coming into the Q and A. Can we leverage GitOps on Terraform as an also equal use case? So absolutely, right? So you could leverage GitOps with Terraform. That is something that's actually happening a lot right now as we speak that people are confusing infrastructure as code or GitOps. In the case of GitOps you need a declarative style of doing a certain aspect of your code deployment. In the case of Terraform what you're doing is you're provisioning the infrastructure. So if you do have the ability for Terraform to be for the code of Terraform to be written in a declarative manner, then absolutely there are tools out there that are doing GitOps with Terraform and not only just Terraform, but other tools such as CloudFormation where infrastructure as code comes into the picture. What learning resources would you recommend for this topic? I do recommend. So one thing that's really important is that for you to understand where your application and where your team stands today, right? In order to learn more about GitOps you can obviously look at different tools available in the market but I think it's important for you to understand are you looking for scaling? Are you looking for more visibility? Are you looking for just getting the GitOps principles? So I think that is something for you to consider for sure. And you should also think about where you want to be not just six months from now but a year from now because there might be an aspect where you might have just certain applications set up today but once six months down the lane you might have some business critical applications for which GitOps will be the way to go and you want to learn more about those aspects right now because you want to invite those as you build an architect for your application. How DevOps and GitOps are bearing in their aspects? Well, with regards to DevOps, right? It's a culture that focuses on CI and CD. It doesn't really, whereas GitOps is more of a technique that you can use with Git to provision your infrastructure to do your deployment. In the case of DevOps, obviously, there is the aspect of your pipeline which comes into the picture and you have your artifacts that you build, you have your CI process and you're building for that and then you go ahead and deploy. In the case of GitOps, also you have your build process but Git is your source of truth and what it was running in Git was running in your cluster and vice versa. With the case of DevOps, one thing you want to understand is you could do an end-to-end flow such that you can start with your CI pipeline, you do your CD, you can do your verification. Like Harness has all of this and then you have all the way moving further into doing feature flag and managing your feature flags, right? In the case of GitOps, there is the focus on making sure to get your change propagated to your cluster as soon as possible and that's what you should be most caring about if you may. All right. Is there a class of use cases that GitOps is more suitable for beyond infrastructure as code? Well, absolutely. If you think about it from a use case perspective, think about your security fixes that you want to apply in your clusters as soon as possible, right? Maybe we have a retail application, something goes wrong. You want to make sure that there is a particular service that has been deployed, your login service, sign up service that has been deployed, but you want to make sure that you want to apply a change to this as soon as possible, right? So with this, you have your Yamlify that's ready. You can go ahead and you can use that and apply it to all clusters then and there. In the case of DevOps, what happens is that you really have to wait for your CI process to go through. You can bypass security scanning such as your unit tests, your integration tests and it obviously reduces the time for waiting for maybe an hour or so down to certain minutes. That's one thing. The other thing is obviously in the case of networking, at least what we've heard is when people switch over from 4G to 5G networks, they feel like GitOps is the way to go because you have the capability of edge nodes that they can use and with edge nodes and doing GitOps with the edge nodes has kind of been more helpful. So that would be another use case. Any other questions we can take? All right, Marissa, I think in that case, we'll turn it over to you. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much, Samarth and Anshil, for your time today and thank you everyone for joining us. Just a quick reminder that this recording will be on the YouTube, Linux Foundation's YouTube page later today. Okay, thank you again. We hope you'll join us for future webinars. Have a good day. Thank you. Bye.


You got Rich Homie Kwan on the show. New music drop in tomorrow. Can't wait to get into it. All things Atlanta, next. Woo! Welcome back to the Up and Atom show. Let's do it. We've got a very special guest. He is an award-winning rapper, an Atlanta native creator of a new label, What? Taken over with Rich Homie Entertainment. He's got a revamped album, Family Moolot Reloaded, dropping tomorrow. The Ad Lib King, Rich Homie Kwan. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. How are you feeling? I'm good, I'm good. Congratulations. How are you feeling? You have new music tomorrow. Kwan, what are we getting? And congrats on the release. What are you getting from the new music and a lot of storytelling? More Ad Libs from the Ad Lib King, of course. Yes. Me still feeling some type of way about a whole lot of new things, new stories. Basically, Kwan E. Barber on Atlanta Down South, 808 Hardhead Instruments. Okay, we love that. I know, you are Atlanta. You are Atlanta.  But why do I keep seeing interviews where you are repping or talking about your love for the Chiefs? Are you a Chiefs fan? What's up? Oh, I love the Chiefs. I love the Chiefs. See, I'm a fan of winners. I'm from Atlanta, so Atlanta's just sending a lot of Falcons to dub. We'll be winning like that. So, you know what I'm saying? We'll be winning like that. And I'm always, you know, I love them. I was just at the falcon game a couple of weeks ago. Kyle Pitch is my man. Corey Patterson. Nice, yeah, of course. Yeah, so I love the Falcons. But the Chiefs are just something different, man. Especially when they get in play-off mode. So the Chiefs in the war is just different in the play-offs. Who's your favorite Chief? Who's my favorite Chief? Uh-huh. My homes? Of course, everybody loves Pat Myhomes. Like, number 17. What's his name? Hardman, yeah. Yeah, that's my doll right there. He's a good Georgia boy. Yeah, you see the relation? Yeah. So that's okay. As long as he's from way of Georgia to the Chiefs, that all makes sense and nobody's gonna ask anybody else. Yeah, so it makes sense why I ripped him the way I did. It's true.  Yes, ma'am. Levy on Bell. We saw Antonio Brown, Melvin Ingram. How do you feel about players doing that? Be honest. To be honest, I think it's dope, you know what I mean? I don't think the people, the fans take it as serious because they're already quote unquote solidified. But I've heard some talented athletes, it's like Dame Lillard, for example, dope bar. Okay. Dame can really spit. Even like the song I think yesterday there was a class on Instagram, KD and LeBron had a song. And I mean, I thought KD bars, I feel like KD could rap if he was to pursue that. You know what I'm saying? LeBron bars felt like a more like old school, run DMC, but I felt like KD was on some, you know what I'm saying? He could hang, you know what I mean? So I don't have nothing against you. I don't have nothing against her. I think it's dope.  It doesn't bother you at all. Like what you think it's so easy LeBron, you can just come in here and just, you know, this takes a lot of work to be the AdLib King. Yes, it does, it does.  But I think it's very rarely for, it's very rare that you just see an athlete just break out for music. Only because like, some of them think it's so easy and it's so much little stuff that we have to do. There's so many tiny things we have to do.  There's no off days in music. Just like it's no off days in sports. So it's kind of hard to try to juggle it to. Yeah, now Atlanta's obviously home to so many talented R&B, hip hop, rapper artists over the years and you yourself one of the greats from Atlanta. Now in sports where I work, we love lists. We love top five quarterbacks, top five teams, top five. You know, I know this is tough but I want to hear your top five artists from Atlanta ever. Top five from Atlanta ever. That's crazy, like nobody's ever asked me that. What? I would give myself number five and this is no particular list but I would definitely include myself in there. Top five ever. Oh, we gotta throw T.I. in there. So there's two Gucci man. I would definitely say future. Wow. Outcast. Okay, outcast. No, no. Outcast is two, like it's one, it's one, it's one. Yeah, so that's my five out. So that's five, no young GZ. Not today. I just knew I knew I was talking in the control room before the show. I go, he's going to put himself first. No, no, I would never put myself first. Not first, but yeah. I usually don't even put myself on a list but like over a hard time, I gotta be on it a little.  You got new music dropping tomorrow. New music probably. Reloaded. Your love for Atlanta while we're talking about it, I know that it runs so deep and the music world continues to mourn the death of takeoff and I'm so, so sorry for your loss. What was it like to have all of Atlanta come together like that? It was amazing to have Atlanta to come like that for takeoff loss. It was, but it was sad that we had to come together in that type of situation. I wish we could come together without it having to be a death.  And the death hit me not kind of hard, but it hit me hard only because like takeoff, the Migos, our career started like at the same time. I remember sitting in Gucci's man studio on the couch before any of us have a dollar sign name before any of us know anything about entertainment, lawyer or just the music business in general.  What was the one moment from the memorial that sort of stayed with you or stood out to you? I would definitely say when Offset spoke, Offset's speech, it was very emotional. And you could tell it was heartfelt. It was heartfelt. It was heartfelt. It was nice to have Justin Bieber sing it. And like it was pandemonium. Like he waited probably like three minutes before he even saw like a Michael Jackson moment. And with him doing it at the state farm arena, I think that was dope to send him up out of here the right way, you know? So I'll rest in peace and take off. Of course. And I bet it gave you a lot of perspective.  And now I'm looking at you and you recently became an independent artist. Hold up. You are now your own boss. You started your own label, Rich Homie Entertainment. That's the dream. Yes, it's the dream, but it comes with a lot of work too. And at the end of the day, like it's something I've always wanted, but with me being in the game for 10 years, I've been through a lot of adversity. I've learned a lot. I've definitely seen every side of the sword, but the independence out of the sword. So it was something new for me. I was excited to take it. And I feel like I'll be able to stretch the surface. And this is my time to, you know, really get my flowers and really get what's rightfully due to me if I do it the right way. It's really true. And I know that, you know, you're not just an inspiration in that way in the musical community. I looked it up because when I saw that, there are 17 players acting independently on there. Just 17 as their own agents. Lamar Jackson, of course, a huge one. He's due, he wants his contract. So what you're doing is inspiring other people to sort of take things into their own hands. But you inspire, you inspire, you know, lots of athletes, of course.  I thought it was very cool. You're featured on a YG song, of course, that Deion Sanders has since made his anthem down at Jackson State. What is that like to you to see what Prime is doing? Oh man, it's crazy to see what Prime is doing. Especially for like Prime, and this before he's coached Prime. So, you know, this is more Deion Prime time. You know what I'm saying, Prime time. Well, I have a picture painted of him in my house. Like this before, like, he was a big inspiration as far as me playing sports. Wow. Growing up, I played baseball and football because of Prime. You know, so he was a big inspiration to me. But what he's doing for the HBCUs, I think it's truly, truly inspirational, motivational. And like it took a leap of faith to do that.  So man, I love Coach Prime, I'll be here to meet him. I'll be here to meet him. Coach Prime, we got to make that happen, man. With that being a song, Coach Prime, this is what you told me, you know, reaching up, man. Let's walk out to the real thing. So, you know, my header, man, it's still the right way, Coach. Yeah, I have the template you've never met him. That's wild, but there's so much mutual respect. I remember back in 2013, that Michigan State team, that you were at the Rose Bowl, you're cheering them on, you're celebrating in the locker room, they adopted your song. That must feel so cool to have a team carry that with you. And there's so much mutual respect there. Now, give me really quickly the one song off of Family Moolot Reloaded, which is Out Tomorrow, new music from Rich Home and Quant. Give me the one song that Chief should adopt from that album, from the new music for their 2022 Super Bowl run. I would say, me too. I would either say Legacy or Spin.  I haven't looked at the Chiefs since they had, like, Dante Hall returning, you know what I'm saying? Throw the X up, Dante Hall, so it's almost like, they're creating a new Legacy down there. And the other song I would definitely say is Spin, because every time they pull up on there, trying to spin the block on whoever team they play, shout out to Andy Reeves, the offensive guru, you know what I'm saying? Definitely shout out to Andy Reeves, man, keep calling them plays. I just pray that everybody stays healthy. That's, you're amazing. Congrats on the new music. Congrats on the label being an independent artist. Live in the dream, and you have so much perspective and we just appreciate you stopping by. Congrats, everybody. Check out the new music. The album, Family Moolot Reloaded, Out Tomorrow. Rich Home and Quant, everybody, thank you. Thank you. So good to see you and to meet you. We got to get that. He's never met Prime. We got to get, we got to make that happen.


Oh my, it appears one has died. Where? I don't see any dead body. Oh, oh my god Yo, what is going on guys real estate gaming here today? We are playing flicker and roblox loading the game Okay, so it says selected character gender so they're out here assuming genders, okay They just picked my own gender and I am Sabrina. Well, we're Sabrina for today Okay, let's see how this goes. This seems like an interesting game. Your role is an instigator Cast an extra vote that is announced early each night. Okay. Um, what you don't know is that a murder is among you all Oh my god So there is a murder between all of us here. Dude, what's up with this this creepy painting right here the clown All of you must survive and try to uncover the identity of the murder. Oh god, okay, so we have to look out We got to be careful and keep our eyes open Because there's a murder the murder wishes you good luck What what kind of murderer is that? Well a murder is crazy.  Who likes evil stuff? Or scariest things. Okay. You all lost track of time. It's midnight and some of you decide to go to bed Okay, so it's bedtime not me. I think that's the killer I don't know. He might he might be tricking us sad face Okay, so let's go to sleep. I'm sonic, but not anymore. Yeah, we're not ourselves anymore Hey girl It's two a.m. The lights flick around and you all scurry and panic awakening those asleep It's time for the murder to play. Oh gosh. No, so the murder is out and about what? And I think he just murdered someone Guys, it's so dark. It's like someone to accuse Dude, we can't do a thing. How can we accuse someone we can't see? um Um, I don't know. Okay. I can't even move my mouth to click down Veronica. I think that was her name Okay, let's go by the fire So we can be nice and warm You hear the power generator turning back on My god, somebody turned the lights on there you go. Finally Okay, the lights have been turned back on the house guests arise from their slumber Uh-oh This does not sound good. Wait something seems off What is he talking about? Don't make me freak out. Oh my god. This is another horrible painting Oh my it appears one has died Where? I don't see any dead body.  He might be a little too crazy for us Hey, you guys left me in there all alone Okay, I have news from our investigator as to what they believe the murderer is What do you mean as to what they oh who they believe the murderer is I don't know. This can be very tricky guys The investigator believes the murderer is Veronica Wait, I think I'm the investigator, right? I accidentally clicked on her name by accident The house guests must use this information to get themselves as they must soon vote Wait, who's Veronica? Okay, that's Veronica. Hmm. She doesn't look so um Yeah, she don't look so deadly to me after the vote the player. Oh gosh If the survivors have voted correctly, they win Dude, I didn't mean to click on Veronica I like I couldn't move my mouse and it clicked on her Because they haven't the murderer lives another night and the accused is eliminated Oh gosh, all right, um So we got a like v spot on with our choices we pick here Because if not it could all go wrong. It's time to vote survivors Who will now be prompted to select their accusation? Dude, okay. I didn't want to vote for you Veronica. It was an accident.  It was an accident Please listen to me. Oh my god. Why am I so happy like there's people getting murdered out here? Come on Okay, it's time to see who the house believes the murderer who the murderer is I think that's a murder. She just said hi to everybody who does that when we're all scared No, no, all right, um Hey, you got to stay in sight the house believes Veronica Did I just tell you guys not to vote for Veronica? Okay, we're gonna see how this goes All right, what's up with this player? They're just over here by themselves next to the fire um All right, um, what is going on? Incorrect the murder remains on the loose. Oh gosh. I said do not vote for Veronica These people just don't get the message man Your accused person Veronica has been removed from the house. Oh, no for Veronica. She got kicked out All right Yes, I'm right boy All right time ticks by okay, I'm gonna stay here so I can get a clear visual of everybody So I can get a better glimpse so I can assume who at least the killer is Hey, stop moving I'm watching your every move Okay, you all have lost track of time. It's midnight and some of you decide to go to bed No, everybody stay here. Do not go to bed I need to see who the killer is I think I don't know who it could be guys. This is like very hard I just don't want to blame someone and they're not the killer for example Okay, it's dark Wait, did she just have something? Oh gosh, it's time for the murderer to play Dude, it's so dark He's not killing anybody because we're all here Oh my god. Oh my god It's time for the murderer to play. Okay, um Dude, I am thinking way too much. Okay, uh mini mini mini mode and I cannot move my mouth to pick a killer Okay, I'm gonna go with Colleen I don't know if I voted or not Okay, the power is coming back on Okay, then you need to fix that thing I can't move my cursor to pick someone dude the muffin man deliver the muffin to you last night Oh my god. Why is there a body on the stove? And why is there a girl hanging out there? Oh gosh, all right. This is getting crazier by the minute Oh my it appears two have died. Okay. So now two more people died So not one but two this time help me Oh god, we we got to catch this killer asap man pronto The murderer has killed thomas the dead house because has been sliced and cooked on the oven Dude, he cooked them Oh no, the victims twin Colleen has also died and they haven't been hung from the tree outside I want out of this house right now yo Right, let's just stay over here in the corner Okay, so the killer Is between amongst us Who can be the killer? Let's look at let's take a look at all of them The killer did not uh, oh, yeah, I didn't accuse anyone because I can't move my mouth It's not I would have Okay, Lara Mary tray. I think trades the killer guys. It might be tray or dan The house guys use this information amongst himself as soon they vote. I'm sorry guys. I couldn't vote Left of the vote the player with the most votes roles will be revealed If the survivors have voted correctly they win, okay, so Can we just vote somebody out? Oh my god. I'm on the toilet If they haven't the murderer lives another night. Okay, so it keeps on going till we find out who the killer is And I guess the game ends if the killer ends up killing me like what if he kills everybody and it's just me and the killer left Like do we lose? It's time to vote survivors will now be prompted to select their accusation Guys, come on. Just pick the guy. It has to be a murderer guy Okay, um, I don't know who looks evil.  Uh, I'm not the murderer. What what is wrong with you guys They're really about to vote me off aren't they? This conclusion is Okay What it's not even saying anything What okay, so Okay, incorrect the murderer remains on the loose. Okay, so I guess it doesn't kick me out because I'm the instigator I mean the investigator Okay, get back away dad. I do not trust you Okay, so we just got kicked out because they accused us of being the killer when we were Definitely not the killer Yo All right exit to lobby you're watching marley Mary I wonder who the killer could be I think it it has to be dan Okay, where's the other guy laura?  Oh my god. Okay. I know why she's a murderer. She has a broken heart on her head. That explains a lot Broken heart dead people. You know what I'm saying. Congratulations survivors.  Wait, they can leave the house now Dude, this dude's celebrating and that was it.  What's going on over here Hey, oh my god All right. All right you guys while this was flicker and roblox if you guys enjoyed the video Make sure to slap the like button If you're new to the channel, make sure to subscribe and turn that notification bell on and I will see you guys in the next one. Yay


if I need to refer back to something. Okay, so yeah, I started the recording and yeah, it's just G sort of sales. We have four people on the call and right now we are planning to process agenda and lots of us from the previous meeting that by Mark and after that just switch to another organizational part. Okay, so next question was I should come in for long running projects, right? Right, so Google season of docs has two concepts, regular length and a long running project. The question was, are there any negatives for someone proposing a long running project? So long running project is basically, firstly it implies a more relaxed schedule. So it means sort of what's highlighted here like schedules easily, that's true. Harder to predict is it really depends on how planning is organized, how team operates because there is no practical difference in a short and intensive project and long and low intensive project. It really depends on how the teams operate. And for the next question, for the next bullet about could be more valuable. Yes, they could, but yeah, why they could be more valuable? Firstly, yeah, you may choose long running project and work much more on that than expected. So for long running project, yeah, you can deliver more in this case. Whether it's advised or not, basically it's your personal choice and it's definitely not expected that you take long running project and keep working 40 hours per week on that. At the same time, it may be more valuable because there is more opportunities to get feedback because you can submit something for review, you can submit something to the community. Sometimes review cycles are quite long as you may have experienced from your JSOT applications. Sorry about that, but what may happen in open source because the project is driven by volunteers, all our mentors are volunteers in this case. And it means that sometimes the responses might be delayed or for mentors, we don't expect it to be due to the active phase, but if you are outreach to the wider community, again, there might be delays. So long running project basically allows them to get that and it allows to do longer review cycles. If you want to do any kind of surveys, et cetera, it may be more convenient. If you talk about special risks, well, yep. Longer timeline, longer, there are more risks of various events like whatever, like COVID-19 confinement, version two, et cetera. So you need to keep it in mind. At the same time, long running project provides you more flexibility to react to these things. So yeah, I'm not sure how flexible is Google in terms of Google season of dogs deadlines for JSOC deadlines are fixed. I believe it's smallest of the same for JSOC, but if there is really emergency, et cetera, of course, Google is open to discuss options, especially in the case of JSOC when there is a lower number of mentors participating in the project. So there might be more opportunities, but so I provided some hints, but generally a long running project is neither advice to not discourage, it's just another option. And it's basically up to you to decide what would you prefer in terms of availability. In the case of the JINX project, maybe if you can accommodate both short term projects and long term projects. So it really depends on you. Great, all right, thank you. So then could a project proposal specify the alternatives? I want to do a regular or if allowed, I want to do long running as part of the project plan or should they, one of the questions was, how should they frame it if they think they've got a long running project or something that might be both, might be one or the other in their plan? So for JSOC application, we expect a plan and I believe that they have to explicitly specify whether it's a long running project or not in the application. I might be wrong about that, but if you have a preference, please mention it in your project schedule. Because for us, it may also require some adjustments on the terms of mentorship side, et cetera. Just for example, Christmas break and other things which may get into the equation. Just having information about the plan in advance would be preferable. But again, longer term or shorter term project doesn't make difference in terms of evaluation because the amount of time I expect to be spent from the project is approximately the same. Thank you. Now, how to deal with, how do we adapt to changing things we learned during the project, et cetera? Yep. In Google Season of Dogs, the approach is exactly similar to Google's Summer of Code. As long as your mentors are fine with the process, the organization is fine with the process. So it means that deviations may happen. In each case, even significant changes of the subject may happen. It's not something you would really want to do, but yeah, things may happen. For example, you apply to work on, let's say documentation migration, you provide a list of plugins. And we know that basically, there is continuous migration of plugins in the community. So it means that even you submit your proposal now, in August, let's say, we're accepted, but by the beginning of September, there might be contributors who address, let's say, half of your scope. It may happen and we expect the teams to adjust based on such scenarios. And it's not a problem. It happens everywhere. It happens in real work. It happens in open source. Everywhere, a change of plan is a part of the plan. Just make sure that you communicate with mentors and do joint decisions on that. Great. Okay, so what are the limitations of changes? So yeah, it might not change us. We should do not change deliverables. It's not a problem. If major deliverables change, then of course it's a subject for discussion with mentors. Great, excellent. Then the who-do-in form, I had assumed that we only have to do formal notification to Google if someone were actually abandoning their project. If they had been accepted and later said, I have a personal emergency, I simply cannot continue. But other than that, changes don't have to be notified to Google. We just go ahead and accept the flexibility ourselves. Yes and no. So yeah, just to clarify how you approach it in JSOC and how you approach it in JSOC, I believe. But yeah, again, all minor changes, they happen on the project teams. Still, we expect teams to identify your org admins in the case of significant changes. So let's say if you change order of the delivery, et cetera, it's totally on the project. But if you change the scope significantly, it's better to identify org admins so that they know about that. And if you have to change error significantly, so for example, you want to create Kubernetes documentation, then let's say Google calcels Kubernetes and you agree to work on docker documentation. So these changes likely need a discussion and likely need a sub to Google. Obviously I provided a case which is unlikely to happen, but just to provide you an idea. So such drastic scale changes, again, it's basically an organization decision, but we still prefer to notify Google team about that because again, if something goes wrong, we have to fail the project. This communication transparency may help both sides. So one that I may have made a mistake on on Google summer of code, if we're adding a mentor or a mentor changes, that should go to the org admins always, right? Yes, because org admins, I need to do updates on the website, et cetera. Good, okay. Sorry I didn't do that. Yeah. So yeah, it's a separate things, but yeah, so it's org admins, it's changes in the deliverables if needed. And for example, if there are long unavailability periods, so during Google season of dogs, you're also expected to take vacations, to take breaks, but let's say if you are going on a one week vacation is better to send heads up to org admins because we may need to do some communications and it's better that we know in advance that we are not worried about it. Great, excellent. Oh, one last question, I think I got the answer right, but the question was, can a technical writer act as a mentor if they were not accepted as a writer? So let's say we have someone who submits proposal and one of many, and we select only a few of those, and the others say, hey, I still want to be involved, could I switch and become a mentor? And my assumption was, if you know Jenkins and are willing to mentor, you could potentially be a mentor in this case. Right. So there is no limitation on that, as far as I can tell. Yep, also as we discussed at the previous documentation seek meeting, we consider doing additional community bridge projects for documentation in addition to Google seasonal docs. And in this case, they definitely get, they're wanting such limitation for sure. And it might be also an option for you to apply to community bridge instead of recommendation. And we had discussed community bridge actually in the Monday office hours. So that's great. I just, we took a tour of the site, I gave a brief overview. Excellent, thank you. Yeah. That covered all the questions that there were on the meeting from last Monday. Thank you. Okay. So yeah, regarding the rest, July 9th is a deadline for applications, or July 8th. But yeah, so we have a bit less than one week. So I can be asked mentors, et cetera, to focus on reviewing the proposals. Spend some time scrubbing there, and thanks to Mark for doing the review. So almost every proposal by now. And yep, we basically encourage contributors to review proposals and also to do peer reviews, if you're interested in the project, et cetera. And yeah, I hope that you will be able to process all this list. Again, if you don't receive feedback, please don't hesitate to ping participants because sometimes we don't provide the feedback because the proposal looks good. So yeah, there would be some minor things to discuss, but overall we have enough information to run to this proposal. Sometimes we don't provide feedback because basically we adjust the overload with other stuff. So if you don't receive it, yep. Continue, excuse my interrupting. Yeah, if you don't receive feedback, just please ping us. Yeah, so as far as I can tell, I have reviewed all the proposals that I've detected. That means if someone was expecting my review and got no comments, I missed their proposal. And so I would at least personally would be very grateful if someone says, hey, Mark, you said you'd reviewed everyone. You made no comments on mine. I made a comment on some minor thing at least on everyone that I reviewed. So if there's a proposal that I've missed reviewing, please ping me in the Docs channel, send me email, the getter, yeah, on the Docs mailing list. Any one of those is great. Okay, that's perfectly fine with me. And if I don't provide feedback, just ping me. Because there was out for a while, but I'm catching up with all of my inbox. I just have 2,400 emails, that's a matter of life. That's a matter of life. Yeah. Okay, so I guess that's it for today, unless there are any other questions. So I will do this meeting next week as well. But yeah, lessons learned that this slot is not suitable for tech writers. So if we organize meetings after the acceptance of projects, it will be a different time slot. Right. They really need to work, how to organize it. Yeah, I was amazed that we had people in the Monday afternoon, my time call from West Africa. So they were calling in at 10 p.m. their time and it seemed to work better for them. So yeah, that's okay. Yeah, if you're employed professional, somewhere, probably this time is not ideal. Maybe for Asian Pacific region, but for Asian Pacific region at the same time, yeah, there is not so many applicants for JSOD according to last year's statistics. But whatever. All right, thanks Oleg. Yeah, thank you too. And yeah, I'll publish the recording tonight.


Why 254? Imagine. Good evening to you and thank you so much for sticking to why 254 TV My name is Sheryl blessing and this is the power talk show now this evening. It's the 14th of March Muize Imefika Katikati and so many of us are on our socials because when we're at work when we're going through life We get entertainment through our digital platforms now. I want us to understand when we're on this platforms How can we have etiquette? How do we communicate with each other? How do we share our opinions? How do we interact with our followers and people who we follow? So I want us to have a better understanding of this discussion and joining me live on set is Two experts who have been on digital platforms and their communication experts So we have Chebet Sharers. Who is a digital content creator? Thank you so much Sheryl. Yeah, and this is not even the first time I've been I'm not a guest here. This is home. This is home And that's the goal for power talk. We want to make it home. Thank you so much and right next to Chebet We have the beautiful trophy Kiprono who is a communications expert carry boo Yeah To our rainbow too and we want to have a very interesting conversation How we can better communicate on digital platforms because all age groups is equal to digital platform squeezy It's not just Gen Z or the younger kids or millenials It's every single platform every single generation and we have different platforms that we used to communicate So I want us to understand on this different platforms. How do we practice? Social media etiquette. How do we communicate with each other in a way that is sensitive in a way that? At a common opinion you consider who is receiving the comment on the other side So I want to understand from you. How you communicate what platforms do you use? What platforms are you majorly on and while you're on those platforms?   Do you DM your celebs and you just tell them whatever you feel like I want us to get an understanding of where we communicate on the digital platforms So go on our social media platforms, which is at Y to 54 on Instagram on Facebook and on X We have made a post and I want you to comment I am there too. I want you to comment on these platforms and communicate with each other on these platforms And I think to kick start the conversation because Both of you have been in media. You have been practicing communication for a very long time So Chabat, you're a digital content creator So I know you definitely receive a lot of comments. You receive a lot of feedback So first could you tell us how did you get into this space and how are you evolving through this space? Regardless of whatever negative feedback you may get or positive feedback Thank you so much Cheryl and it's a pleasure to be here. You look amazing. Thank you So about social media, I decided to open myself up to the digital space and to just like completely get into Creating content about two years ago like seriously So at that time I think I had about 500 followers or something Then I just decided to first of all move from being a private user into like now my pages open for them all But now that was very scary for me because you see all the things happening on social media You you it's like you're opening yourself up to people you don't know things you don't know So it's it's really crazy. It comes with its own pair of challenges and all the all those things So for me, I've not really received Many negative comments. It's it's always mostly been on the positive side maybe because of my content But I try to also avoid people who are just negative, you know If I find that kind of negative energy either I will block or I will just not engage with such people So because my pages my page is a nice page is a page of nice good vibes and inshallah, you know So I try to really distance myself from people who talk negatively about others You know, they try to bully people. So I really keep away from that, but throughout I'd say The engagement has been nice. It's it's nice to know people to engage with people that you've never met and they always send you Dms or you speak to them about matters in the society about just whatever it could be really I really enjoy that platform when it's used positively And I like how you've said the fact that it was very important for us to note You are private user and you opened yourself up to the public So we are going to get into that later because I know so many people who are in the digital spaces like to maintain their privacy Even as much as they're on the platforms So thank you so much for that and I like the fact that you've also said you've not gotten so much negative feedback That's very good to hear because most people who put themselves out there always always Receive some negative feedback Now trophy you're a communications expert now help us understand who is the communication expert? What do you do? How did you get into this field and Maybe what what are some of the things that you do as a communications expert? Thank you for that question. So as a communication expert my background is in communications And I worked in government for some time until I realized that there's a gap There's a niche when it comes to public speaking when it comes to communication skills It is very important in our society So that is when we decided to co-founder company called the brand experts Kenya where we are trying to teach people on Effective communication skills and public speaking communication is very important because you're only as good as you communicate That is why we decided to start this and try and narrow that gap And that's really I like that, you know No one will think you need to learn about communication skills because it's gonna communicate And that's the assumption that most people have they do not understand that there's a Difference, good a professional communication inter-personal communication and different ways of you Communicating to different people now. This is a funny thing that I read on X the other day a Gen Z intern a liquid via what's up? So she she sent a I'm you know, I can't do this anymore. I'm stepping down call you later XO XO that was it. So trophy from your perspective Being especially in in a professional corporate world. How would you view things like that because that happens a lot with the new Generation that's coming up. How would you view such kind of communication? How would it be received by the boss of the intern who was doing that? You know one thing that people don't seem to understand is that what you post online is a direct reflection of you There's very little chance that I'm going to meet you in person So what I see online is what I perceive you to be and when it comes to communication We do have a saying that says speak without being offensive listen without being defensive and always leave your opponent with dignity Now Gen Z is more the more They're very outspoken and everything However communication is very important because you need to use tact and diplomacy So the right way is just to actually quit this right at the formal text a formal email Don't quit on what just don't quit don't ban bridges. That's basically it don't ban bridges And now that you've said that I wonder how do you classify the different platforms? Because clearly you've said write an email or send some formal communication So is what's up considered informal? What platforms are more formal and what will do you classify as informal platforms? Emails we consider emails and direct messages to be more formal and these are things that keep changing over over time But what's up is more informal because sometimes you'd find someone sending you some emojis with a message and then your exo exo That is that can easily be misinterpreted when it comes to acronyms They're very different according to each and every country.  Hey in Kenya. What does lol mean laughing out loud? Elsewhere it means lots of love so you can easily misinterpret it In fact when you mentioned quitting and exo ex exo exo in one sentence. I was like Jesus Christ Don't do that. Just stick to formality. It doesn't hurt Yeah, I like that because you know so many people would not think too much about that especially with the new Generations that are coming up who've grown Knowing this digital platforms. I'd probably assume see what's up is formal because if they have the business aspect Bonam for a secret formal and I like the way you've said some phrases as well that we use because it's common for the Gen Z to abbreviate so many words But when you're communicating with someone who's probably of a different generation, they may miss the point Now Chebet could you just tell us what platforms you majorly on which do you use for your casual posts? And which do you do more professional posts on? Okay, so for me I have Because I'm in the digital space. There's very rarely that one is professional And so all of them will represent like she said who I am you will just get me Throughout so I'd say Facebook a little bit But mostly Instagram and then just venturing into tiktok for the last I think I ever saw but mostly Instagram That's where I share my content. I Do everything that I relate to do as a content creator. Yeah, that's the space that I have found that I love and yes, I love to do my things there nice and trophy brought an aspect of DMing direct messaging being a means of formal communication Now I want to find out from you if someone DMed you a Fan or someone who wants to do partnership with you. Would you take that as formal communication? Yes, I would because here like she said I think the the point here is not to use in formal language as long as you're using formal language that I think if you used any platform it would still make sense because like she said I will not be able to meet you in person But if you're you know your message is straight up. Hey, I would like to work with you blah blah blah Here are my details. You see that's already business in action. So yeah, we are which it's just that we're transacting in a different way We're just not doing it Maybe officially formally or in person, but it's still you see now That's I think that's the best way one of the best ways to use Social media. So it's the way you communicate. Yes, it's not where you communicate Yes, and I think that's a very important point to note because some people will will say no You have to I've seen so many people who have the emails on their bio in on the Instagram platform And whenever you DM them, they tell you know, you have to write me an email. You have to email me You have to communicate this formally when that could be a formal platform of communication as long as you've used the right Language. Yes. Now, let's catch to that up with the right language, especially with focus on the professional aspect How do I communicate to my boss that I want to quit? I am unhappy with the the job conditions It's not it's not giving The youth like to say it's not giving like I do not want this trophy. How do I communicate that formally? Maybe I'm in a work situation. That's toxic or I'm not happy I'm not pleased by the working conditions and I wanted to express that without Offending as you said communicate without offending Your your the recipient how do I do that in a way that is me formal, but to me may explain Kenyan I feel How do I do that? That's an interesting question. Now one thing about working in any kind of organization emotional intelligence is very important Don't send that email that text when you're angry come down. They now learn corporate jargon I understand. I am I apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for understanding, you know Even KPSC kick out a steamer tonight. Thank you for understanding. Who has understood. Did you? That is what is now what you call corporate jargon We send it to Nemeacha and you know one thing people don't realize There's even some time to text or call your colleagues before 8 in the morning and after 8 p.m Unless it's an emergency unless someone has your kidney please text. Yeah, don't call someone at 9 Someone's like what's going on 9 p.m. They can either to etiquette. You know what you mentioned about social etiquette. We call them an etiquette Yeah, just these and it's hate I didn't think just First of all know that the person on the other end penguin in old school a lot of people are old school Actually people in the workforce most of them are old school and a lot of times when we get clients coming to other like But me I'm always direct and straightforward. Yeah But what has it helped you with you need to learn how things work Just learn what we call emotional intelligence and corporate jargon how to say dear so-and-so. I know it's exhausting I know you're using so many words, but that is how we are going to perceive you Okay, and it got high and then the worst is when someone says hi, and then you're like, okay, hi How are you? I'm fine So you're like wait now. Where is this message going? Any a lot of people don't have the seven seas of communication ensure message is complete high Chabet I'm writing to inquire about one two three. Could you please direct me? Oh, this is a hi hi. Hi. Hi It's so funny, but I was having that conversation with a colleague earlier today Cuz nearly when I want me I don't have time for this hi hi. How are you? How are you? Get to the point just say hi How are you if I respond? Give me the complete thing if you can't do that make a call in the appropriate time and Watch you begin by saying the tone and the mood that you in is very important Because right now I may be frustrated I may be angry and when I want something in this in that heat of the moment I may want it in a negative way because I also have to understand the person who's receiving this I may have a cool tone, but they may receive it as ever. This is harsh because you've delivered it Nika money Vita, so it's very important as you've said to understand that you're communicating with someone of a particular age group or Of a particular personality exactly and what your words appropriately after they will go there will relax But now I'm wondering cuz I want to a hi hi, but do I go to see that guy?  They call you five times and they wonder why you're not picking up What what do we do and it's npm?  I'm sorry How do I get that one bit? Well, I'm pretty sure With every Gen Z there is that one situation in here will equal now a couple customer a For my mental health.  If so to only only talk edge only one being person only to my what's up Okay, so my exo exo. How did you tell them? I'm sorry, but I no longer wish to work with this company First of all, I am not Gen Z. I'm very proud to be a millennial Very proud. I miss Gen Z by two years, but I'm a very proud millennial First of all, I've never had to quit work like that but Obviously all of us have been in very unpleasant situations maybe at work or where you used to work obviously So like trophy said I'd like to add something on to it. It's not just Gen Z to the old school people. What are what are they called? What are they called? Exactly the boomers and the exas know it's also them to us because they don't understand us, you know If there was if there wasn't that gap, then maybe we would we wouldn't have as many Corporate issues as we do because you go to work and then you want to follow all these things you've learnt all the corporate jaggon But just because you're coming from a different younger generation There's just this thing of you're so bubbly and you're all over the place at work Yeah, and the boomers just can't stand that they just they just wish they could box you and be quiet and just But you know this. Yeah, we cannot we cannot we can't Progress like that. We have to open up space for okay. These are young people. They're so bubbly. They're so all this and that Can we make space for them if they say if you come in and I say maybe I'm handling communications in this company Then I start giving advice on how we should do Instagram or how we should do content That's not the time for me to be told. Ah, you know like you are shut down before you even start Oh people don't want to take advice or we say we're no longer doing cameras If you have an iPhone or good phones, we can go that way So I find that very frustrating especially from the older generation to us. I think that can be It's always a point of clashing when it comes to yeah So I like the fact that you brought that up because that is an issue. It is a big big issue Yes, because I took your to Camino Quay even when the baby boomers were getting into the job market They were considered younger work. I like it. This generation is different from the ones who were there before Yes, and there was a need to just to integrate not to song a parmoja I understand that that perspective very clearly because so many times they tell you we want fresh ideas We want new ideas. Okay, let's do some fresh ideas. They're like And you wonder now what do you expect because if we do how if I go according to your plan It's going to be the same result But if you're unwilling to listen to my ideas, then we cannot move forward and I like the aspect that you Because I when you're better than a millennial, so we need Gen Z's I've at least to a better different perspective. I need you as a Gen Z. Tell me We should quit job now. How did you go about it? Did you go and what's up? Did you write an email? Did you just drop the the work a la phone and disappear to go on a show? Let me know on our socials at five to five four So I think now that we've clarified how you should communicate. There's a need for understanding on both parts recipient Because otherwise But let's say let's assume I have used the corporate jargon. I have been sensitive But when I'm a poker I may some have in a summer trophy. How do we how do we? I personally deal with that.  I go high Bambi. Well, I'm a bow I reckon Asia. How do I do that? Because if the interpretation is not how I communicated and they give me a negative response based on that How can I communicate that because as you've said on as your in-person communication? You can get the tone the facial expression the mood but through the phone. It's very hard to pick up all those They're the cues that we have of communication. I Love what you bet said about the older guys They don't want to adapt to the younger guys and I think because they don't understand that change is constant Very constant change is very constant. Now. I think the problem people have with Gen Z's is lack of courtesy More of courtesy and then there's something we call the unwritten rules of corporate Imagine no one will tell you these things. You'll just go into a workplace and you're like, why am I missing something? So it's just off here. Why? The old way so one thing I always say it isn't pleasant but speak the language of the organization when it comes to Interpersonal not intra interpersonal communication speak the language of the organization and then do it all it's about getting what you want Not get not being right.  All I can say is for the younger guys just observe more say less and for the older guys Just accept change. It's constant Change is constant. That's very true. I like the fact that you've given advice to both parts Cuz when you're young, this is maybe your first job. You're so excited You want everyone to understand what your vision is Like And you really can't do that in a day So it's going to take some time and it's very important for you to understand the company that you've just gotten into Absolutely, how do they do things? What is the branding? How do they communicate?  This is the image. This is the idea that they have As well as how we can give me what accept change because you can't just tell someone bring fresh ideas But every time we bring an idea even when it aligns with the vision What you say it is true the thing is a lot of Gen Z's how do you could read the room? You know when you read the room when you go into an organization It doesn't work like that. They will tell you directly. Yeah Similarly, you have to understand like read the room. I say my Friday is casual Just because you are told to do casual learn how to read the room have that capability of emotional intelligence Shikanisha shikanisha and then always read between the lines the things that you're not being told so that you can blend easily Everywhere because you cannot change the status quo. Unfortunately, imagine you can't after when I reformist ideas We say may we are changing this company two years Imagine you can't and you will always hit dead ends. You'll be like Frustrated what's up? It's because you're trying to go against the status quo and you just need to accept in that moment So, thank you. I think that's a wonderful start to the conversation And I hope you're taking note of this idea. So when we get back I want us to get into the interperson on because you can do social media You can do a major and you can watch back at home That's a county and be a kid you can book a visa social media We're not really coming to collect says in a mini or when you go in X. So you read something You need to gani it frustrates you on social media Go on our social platforms at Y to 5 for on Facebook Instagram and X and when we get back We're going to get into the interpersonal aspect of social communication


Welcome back to another animation beefy review and today I'm gonna take a look at the David Rick which is a companion to the Dana Rick Which is also reviewed on here link in the description of course and everywhere so you can check that out But this is the rig here on gum road $15 and a rig that I posted a long time ago It just like the Dana Rick and I need to catch up with all of these and do some reviews But let's check it out in Maya and with most rigs as you can see Textures are not there and there are many many ways where you can go and check out the textures You can do this through the hyper shade you can select the geometry go to material attributes and Check it out there to see what's missing and there's also a texture Relationship editor all kinds of ways so this is missing the David diffuse and I can go back here Go into the David textures and it's in here this one and because of that oh It will bring back all the textures for everything just like with the Dana Rick There are no layers here, so I'm gonna select all of this and add that to a layer On and off and I'm gonna call this a geom Why not just the controllers and here we are looks like a very very similar if not identical setup So if you've watched the Dana review, you will see that this is very similar You have your leg controls here as you move your foot It does move the knee which I'm a big fan of here and you have that controller here And of course you have all the classics from swivel to toe to roll The roll angle stretchy and type pop and length just in case you need to make changes there But of course you have also the options through here these controllers here. They got your Middle one here for a foot roll You have the toe and you can go all the way back where you have a pivot like this from the back on top of This one that pivots from the ankle only same thing left and right and Then you have all your bimbos to go out and reshape your rig if you want to up here You have your IK FK blend and will change your leg to an FK leg You can see all the classic stuff. Let's go back down No other options on this except for a lock and then going back here as with the other one you have your partial and full versions of your geometry But on top of that you have body mechanics, which I did not see on the Dana rig Turn this on turns this gray You can also just take the textures off and then everything is gray if you don't want to do any facial Animation interesting add-on. I like it going back here. You have your hip control That is through there. I still wonder I would probably prefer the pivot to see it through here and not on the side That probably be my only comment on this same for for Dana, but you have That here and then you have your movers for the spine and And you can rotate but you can also do translates. There's no volume Computation here, but you can do all of this through that like I say here. This is the root And you have more bimbos on the side here Now let's go up here. Just like with her you have shoulder controls There's a rotations But also translates and then you have your Bimbos of course and your FK wrist and your FK elbow And of course you can change it through this control in the back not this one Here and it changes to the red box, which will then turn into your IK arm and you have of course the pole vector here Does it have you have a follow a stretchy anti-pop length options? There is no pivot option None of that does the pivot just in case you're wondering This is for your pop and then your length, but I also like having this In form of a channel here But that's it. You have arm controls here and just like with the Dana Rick You have all of your finger controls there are there for some quick blocking including all the curling Which of course you can do manually as you select those controllers All the way back to this one as well So this is all available there and again bimbos all the way throughout the whole arm setup Then moving up here. You have your head control That's a translate and rotate this goes all the way down to the lower neck, of course and you have your squash and stretch and you have your Middle squash and you have your separate head Transformations for top and bottom again for reshaping you do have your controls here, which is cool you have overall I Movers here and then it gets into the shapes for your eyes You can do all kinds of adjustments there. It's very detailed and then you have your eyebrows Changing all of it like that. It's being all the way back.  This is your chin Mover and you have your jaw and with that you can show all of these controllers to do all kinds of stuff It's very detailed. I love this. Speaking of eyes, let me just bring all the shapes back Just in case here you have your eye control just like with Dana doesn't do anything You have to do aim and once you have aim You have that option and you have separate eye controls, which are important for specific poses Of course, you don't want to just move the eye control and you also have the option that if you move The rig over you can see how the eyes are staying put but you can also do follow off and then Let's bring the aim back. You can see how It looks at that eye con, but if you move the rig it stays put there Always a fan of that and speaking of facial stuff, you can go back in here Let me just go back and change all of this Now you have eyebrows through there. That's of course left and right Then you have eyes And you can see the deformation in the skin, which is cool. I love that you also have here on the side blink If you want to do a quick move blink center upper lids Upper lower lids eye driven you have all kinds of options including iris and pupil Same thing for the Dana rig. You also have eyebrow squeeze in here.  You can see what it does here and then the zips. This is for the corners of the mouth And then down here We have corners here, which also has a quick small option there so you can do some very very quick blocking using that This guy here and you can see all the visibility limits controls all this is on and you can move this around if you want to and maybe constrain that to a Facecam if you want lots of options here. There you have it All the controls are there. There you go Very appealing rig lots of controls and lots of great Examples online of what this rig can do So check it out link in description with all the information for my animation be feeling and of course gumbrode as well It's $15 absolutely reasonable. So go and check it out