Hi, everyone. I'm going to go ahead and get started here. My name's James Russo. I'm going to be talking about how Brex leverages backstage for FinTech engineering growth. A little bit about me. I've been working at Brex for the past three years. I originally started doing product development, but helped start up a team that focuses on internal developer productivity and experience. And that's where I've been spending the last two years as a tech lead, helping to improve our back end developer experience. For anyone not familiar with Brex itself, Brex is a financial technology startup founded back in 2017. We mostly focus on corporate credit cards and expense management for software. But we have been a pretty fast growing company. And there's been a lot of work done in the last couple of years to help with that growth. So that's what I'll be talking about today. In general, the agenda is going to be some background on Brex a little bit more, as well as why we went and decided we need to adopt an internal developer portal. Our adoption path for that internal developer portal, any learnings that we've gotten from it over the past couple of years, and then maybe some time for Q&A, hopefully, at the end. So in general, as I said, Brex is a pretty young company. But we've grown very, very quickly. When I first joined in 2020, we were around 300 or so total employees, and less than 100 of those were in engineering, product, and design. Now three years later, we're about 1,100 people with 500 of those in engineering, product, and design. So we've had about 5x growth in just engineering, product, and design. And with that rapid growth and addition of teams, we've added a number of new workloads internally, as well as a number of new tools. And managing this growth has been a big issue that we've been working on over the past couple of years. So in order to try and solve for this rapid growth, we started a new team at the start of 2021 that I was a founding member of, where our mission was to provide a centralized platform that simplifies and caters to the daily workflows of developers at Brex. This was before we even knew what Backstage was, or that we wanted to build an internal developer portal. This was the mission that we decided on, kind of led us down this path. We had all of this different tooling internally. As you can see here, this is just a sample of them. There's lots more today. And it was becoming increasingly harder and harder for all of our developers to maintain the context necessary to use this tooling. And we wanted to simplify it as much as possible and lead developers down the right path when it came to solving their problems. So our vision here was to build a unified interface where our different platform teams in our infrastructure and platform organization could build tooling into a single file, a single place. This could be anything from managing our preview environments, service management in general, resource management in AWS, and the infrastructure parts, serviceability, secrets management, et cetera. We wanted product developers to have this single place to go to to find access to any of our tooling as well as lead them along their developer journey. So with this in mind, we kind of started looking at different developer portals and building our own internal developer portal. For anyone not familiar, Backstage is an internal developer portal that is an open source software project maintained by Spotify. They used it for years internally and then open sourced it in 2020. We started adopting it in 2021. It's a framework and set of libraries for building your own internal developer portal. There's also a series of SaaS offerings for internal developer portals. But we quickly latched on to Backstage because it was solving for the exact need that we initially wanted, which was a software catalog. That's a core functionality, which we'll talk a little bit more here in a second, as well as it was really, really extensible and easy to build your own internal workflows and functionality into it, which was a big thing, not in a lot of the SaaS offerings where you kind of are stuck with whatever they kind of give you tooling-wise. But Backstage is completely managed internally by yourself and has a lot of opportunities for you to hook your own functionality into to extend it for any personal needs. So after a quick POC with Backstage, we were able to get up and running within a couple of weeks. We quickly saw the value in it and we were super excited about the extensibility part of it as I've already mentioned a few times here. So at the beginning of 2021, we kind of started our Backstage journey. And I'm gonna kind of walk you through how we went about adopting it, what our adoption path looks like, and where we are today. So Backstage offers a series of core plugins. This is functionality developed and maintained by Spotify internally and open sourced. The four main ones that we've kind of adopted are the catalog, which allows you to catalog and group your software as well as add additional metadata around it so that your software engineers and your organization can easily find information like who owns what service internally, how to reach that team, et cetera. They also offer a scaffolder, which is a way to get from zero to one quickly and in the right way, basically a way to generate a new software project with all of the right things built in, any infrastructure pieces and things like that. They have an API docs plugin, which allows you to understand the interfaces between your different workloads and how they interact and how you can interact with them. And they also have a Kubernetes plugin that we've adopted that allows you to troubleshoot your software running in your different environments. This is just the four main ones that we've adopted. They also have a few other ones that they maintain like TechDocs, which is a knowledge base that allows you to use documentation as code alongside your code and service it in Backstage. And there's a few others as well. But these are the four main ones we've used. This graphic that I have here on the right is the system entity model, which will be important for the next slide around the catalog. So I'm gonna quickly touch on it here. Basically Backstage comes with its own model for representing software entities and the relationships between them. At a high level, there's components, which are JRPC or HTTP servers, Cron jobs, websites, libraries, things like that. These can depend on resources, which are things like infrastructure components like S3 buckets, databases, et cetera. And then these components can provide and consume APIs. These can be JRPC, HTTP APIs and the documentation associated with them. All of this is grouped into a system, which is a group of related entities that work towards a common goal or functionality. And then you can group the different systems into domains, which can be products or different lines of functionality that you offer to your customers. That's gonna be important for this next slide here. So the first thing that we did in our adoption journey was utilizing the catalog and populating the catalog. A question I often get when talking to people who are looking to adopt Backstage is like, how do you start with the catalog? How do you populate it? How do you get the data into it? And generally what I say and how we started was to focus on a specific type of entity first. So don't try and get all of the information in the world into the catalog off the bat. It's important to focus on a specific type of entity. In our case, we focused on JRPC services as our first entity that we wanted to catalog, as this was the most abundant resource in our software world and also the one that we utilized the most and wanted to build the most tooling on top of. So that's the first step. I would also then say work iteratively from there. So slowly build in more and more information after we got our services into Backstage. We added stuff like cron jobs, asynchronous event consumers, teams and users, APIs, and things like that. But each of those were different steps along the journey. Our initial approach to this was to utilize Backstage's built-in entity ingestion. So here on the right, I'm going to quickly go through kind of how the basic Backstage entity ingestion works. So they offer this catalog plugin which comes in with a bunch of functionality that knows how to read information from certain locations. You can figure this in a YAML file saying I have resources located in this location I want you to read for me. The basic one that they kind of use internally at Spotify and that we've adopted for most of our software is a YAML-based configuration file. So they have a catalog info.yaml file and it looks very similar to what you described as like a Kubernetes resource. It's very similar to that. You place these files alongside your code in Git repos and then you tell Backstage where to find these different files and it periodically reads from GitHub, stores that information into the database, and then allows you to display it in your software catalog so that people can go to different places and see the metadata related to it. So that was our initial process. We basically went and automated generation of a bunch of these initial catalog info YAML files by looking at the runtime environments where we deploy our software. In our case, Kubernetes wrote a script that generated a bunch of these YAML files, placed them into the repository in the right places, and then opened up PRs for teams to quickly adopt this. There are other approaches where you can try and get the teams to do this themselves, but we found it very difficult to get adoption, especially when teams are focused on building other things. So in order to facilitate and quickly adopt it, we tried to automate this and do it for folks as much as possible. After utilizing the catalog info.yaml approach, we've also gone now and created custom entity providers for internal APIs to source that information into the catalog. So Backstage allows you to extend it by writing these things called entity providers, which basically are ways to ingest data into the catalog. You can ingest it from static configuration files. You can ingest it from internal or external APIs. In our case, a couple of use cases that we've done internally are ingesting data from an internal service that stores information on all of our employees and the teams that they're members of, as well as additional metadata around it. The service is read from periodically and then puts that into our catalog. So we have all of our engineers information on the GitHub profiles, their Slack profiles, and stuff like that displayed in Backstage. We've also used it to read directly from the AWS APIs and ingest resources into the catalog, like RDS instances. So after we adopted the catalog, the next step that we went around is adopting and utilizing the scaffolder. So we wanted to automate software and resource creation. Previously, this was a very, very hands-on and manual process. There was a bunch of different CLIs for different languages that could generate code. These weren't owned by core teams, often out of date.  So once again, we tried to work iteratively and build on top of the open source version of Backstage. So Backstage comes with a bunch of what they call custom actions in their scaffolder, which allow you to get up and running very quickly to take a template or a scaffold template, inject a bunch of values into it, and open up a PR, or merge it directly into a repository. We started there by just making code scaffolding for the best practice of what we thought a initial service looked like. From there, we iteratively added onto it and built more automation around infrastructure pieces, so making sure that we automate creation of the Docker repo for the RDS instance for you, any other configuration via Terraform modules, et cetera, so that when you open up a PR from the scaffolder, you can instantly merge in your code and see it deployed into your environments, and everything works off the bat. I will say that at a certain point, we couldn't automate everything and make it synchronous in the scaffolder. It takes about 30 seconds, maybe less, to scaffold all of this out via the scaffolder, but some more complicated things like the scaffolding out databases, making sure that the users for the database were set up, any additional infrastructure that relied on that were a little bit slower, so we integrated with a workflow engine internally managed by another infrastructure team that allows us to implement more complicated workflows, like creating the database and all of its dependencies, and we kicked these off from the scaffolder so that every time a new piece of software gets created, all of the additional resources will eventually get created. It might just take a little bit more time as it asynchronously spins up the database and its dependencies. A great thing about this is it allowed us to make sure that we have best practices by default or golden pathways is a big thing that Spotify really talks about in a lot of their literature, basically making sure that all of our security best practices or coding best practices are displayed by default, and we have good documentation around the scaffolder so that developers know exactly how they should write software or how we can best support them in the way that they write software. Scaffolder itself allows us to also get contributions from other teams, so the core backstage maintaining team at our company aren't the only ones contributing new scaffolding templates. We have a bunch of other teams internally that create these scaffolding templates and are able to easily allow developers to automate generation and creation of additional resources like additional AWS services like ElastiCache and S3 buckets can be created through backstage now so that we're not the only ones contributing and it's really a platform that we have a lot of different folks building on top of, which is great. After we adopted these first two initial core plugins, a lot of the functionality that we've built since is more so internal plugins custom to our infrastructure and our platform teams, so we wanted to make it really, really easy to build internal plugins and custom plugins. Something to know is that backstage is a TypeScript React front end and Node.js back end and in general, at Brex, we utilize gRPC and Protobuf as our messaging format between services, so this isn't something you can easily call from a web front end per se and instead of making all of our teams develop a Node.js HTTP router that would translate JSON into Protobuf and call the back end gRPC services, we decided to automate this for them and create a reverse proxy utilizing another open source project called the gRPC gateway library. This is developed by Google. Basically, this library allows you to translate Protobuf into a RESTful JSON API and then does the communication to the gRPC service for you and vice versa. So we set up this internal reverse proxy gRPC gateway that allows backstage front end plugins to call it via JSON and HTTP and then it translates it and calls the underlying back end service. This way, we reduce the amount of code that our developers need to write internally to build these custom plugins. They can just build their back end service as they would for any other project at Brex, hook it up to this reverse proxy and then focus on building the front end components via React to call that service.  Here's just a few examples. The main one and probably the one that we see used the most is one around deploying release information and managing your deploys and releases. So internally, we use a GitOps workflow for deploying our software and we allow people to easily with one click roll back to previous releases via backstage for a given service or workload as well as roll forward and just manage the deploys and see previous deploys in general. As I mentioned earlier, we've integrated with the workflow engine internally so that you can create more complicated workflows and kick them off from backstage. We have a notification timeline in backstage which allows you to see different events associated with your software. So this is things like when your software was deployed, when an alert went off and dated dog or paid your duty all in the context of one timeline. And then lastly, another well-used plugin is around our asynchronous event consumers utilizing Kafka. So when an event enters a dead letter queue because it can't be processed by the consumer, that information is displayed in backstage alongside the consumer and you can republish or delete these events and manage them through backstage. These are just a few different plugins that we've developed internally but like I said, this is where we see most of our development nowadays are the internal plugins.  Here's just an example of kind of our internal backstage. Even this has kind of evolved since I took this picture but basically here you can see for a given piece of software in our catalog, this backstage demo app, you can see its deploy and release information here on the left and this is how we manage it. You have a list of all the different release candidates that have been created. You can click back to previous one and roll back to it. You can see when it was committed, what different PRs were associated with it that made up that release, et cetera. And then on the right, here's this event timeline where you can kind of see the different Kubernetes events related to your service in one place alongside the release information. So one very important thing around in adopting an internal developer portal is around evangelization and education. In general, organic adoption does happen from early adopters and champions but you won't be able to get full adoption just by building stuff. You need to evangelize and educate users. So a bunch of different ways that we've kind of tried to evangelize and educate is around engineering-wide presentations or any large format presentations. I've given a talk like this multiple times internally to two different groups. New hire training, so we have when a new engineer joins, we have onboarding and 101 training that talks about how to utilize backstage in your developer journey. Team specific training sessions, we've reached out to very specific teams especially when we see them have issues that we think backstage can solve. So something around incident management and stuff like that. We've set up specific training with teams to make sure that they're aware of backstage, all the new functionality that we built into it and are able to use it. We try and find partner teams to try out new features. So whenever we're building something, make sure that we're listening to customers working directly with them and solving their problems. Lastly, we use a lot of customer research. So we are constantly trying to talk to customers, synthesize that information and figure out what pain points are the most important for us to solve via backstage. So now that we've kind of gone through our adoption path and talk a little bit about the learnings we've had on this adoption path. So in general, the Scaffolder was a massive improvement for us, but it didn't drive weekly or daily usage in backstage, which we were hoping for. Our main goal is to have developers going to backstage every single day, starting their day with it and using it throughout the day to solve their daily issues. But the Scaffolder is more of something you do once for a project and don't come back to backstage to do that. Again, you're not creating new software all the time. But we did get a lot of success and a lot of people were very excited about the Scaffolder, so we wanted to try and continue that. The next thing here is the two-sided marketplace. So there's not just the users of backstage that you need to think about. There's also the other platform developers that you need to think about. And you are constantly at odds trying to build new functionality for your users as well as making sure that other platform teams think about backstage and build their tooling into backstage. So you actually have that unified interface that everyone knows to go to, and there's not more tooling sprawl that they have to deal with. Metrics are incredibly important. I'm going to touch on this in the next slide as well. But in general, we've taken a very metrics-driven approach to this as you would for any product and any application that you have on the web. Usage-driven, usage is generally driven by actions more than information. So this kind of relates to the Scaffolder, but we initially thought that the catalog was going to be this change for everyone, and then everyone's going to come daily to the catalog, find information, know how to reach out to folks. But in general, that's not what happens. In general, the plugins and the functionality that we built that actually allow you to manage and take actions are the ones we see the highest usage in, such as the Play plugin that allows you to roll back and manage your software releases. Initially, we use a mono repo internally. Backstage uses multiple repos. So initially, backstage, when we were adopting it, did not have very good support for mono repo functionality. We had to build a bunch of custom stuff, and in order to do that early on, we had to fork the entire project or the plugins that we wanted to use, build our functionality into them, and then make it possible for mono repos to be ULAS. But over the following couple of years, there's been a lot of work by the open-source community to make sure mono repos are very well supported. So as part of that, we moved away from our fork. In general, our fork at Backstage made our lives very difficult. Backstage is updated almost constantly. They have a monthly release cadence where a bunch of new functionality that is often very useful. So we were falling behind on these updates and wanted to get away from that and moved to the golden pathway development way of utilizing Backstage, which essentially is to write basic Node.js and React apps that pull in NPM packages. And it's been a much, much easier process and allowed us to take advantage of all of the ongoing updates. And in general, Backstage has a very, very good community. They have a Discord where the Spotify maintainers are very active, very helpful, have learned a lot from myself, as well as monthly community sessions and adopter sessions where you can attend and ask your questions, presents to other folks on Backstage. So it's been a very, very good community for learning and adopting Backstage. So one thing I wanted to touch on are metrics in general. The Brex product is a web application as well as a mobile app. We use segment in those applications to capture client-side metrics. So similarly for Backstage, we use segment for capturing client-side metrics, such as page views, users, things like that, as well as triggering custom actions. Some of the metrics that we've kind of looked at over the past couple of years are weekly active users. So are we getting more active users as we build new functionality? Most active users and teams, who's coming to Backstage the most? What teams are utilizing it the most? Which plugins are being used the most? So we make sure to break information down by plug-in usage so we know which ones are the most valuable versus which are the ones that maybe we should sunset or revisit. We also have scaffolding metrics, so what templates are being used, which, how long does it take to scaffold out templates, things like that. And something more recently that we've kind of looked at is power usage. So which users are coming to Backstage multiple times a week, as well as utilizing multiple different plugins so we can talk to these users and see the value that they're getting out of it and make sure that we're replicating that for other users. In general, we've been very metric-driven, making sure we set up dashboards for all of our new functionality and plug-in launches so that we can quantify how successful they are or not. Lastly, conclusion. I just want to echo the maintenance to solve for a very specific problem when you're adopting Backstage. A lot of folks get really excited by all the different functionality and problems that it can solve, and they try to solve too many things at once. But the maintainers always try and push everyone towards solving for a specific problem, and I want to echo that as well. Starting with one problem, make sure you're successful in solving it and then moving on to the next via Backstage. Evangelization education needs to be a priority. Without it, you're not going to see the adoption that you hoped for. Upstream contributions are super helpful as well as super important for you to contribute back to the community. As I said, Backstage has a very vibrant, open-source community and makes the releases an important part of the process. It's also important that you try to contribute back to it as much as possible. Balance platform work and future development, as I've already mentioned, that two-sided marketplace of users and platform developers. And then lastly, make sure you monitor and track adoption and impact via metrics. That is everything in my presentation, but if there's any questions on Backstage or adoption, I'm happy to take the time to try and answer those right now. Yep? How do you design new plugins? Yeah, so I think it's the same as you would for any kind of product experience. You make sure that you're doing your customer research, getting actual data that backs up the findings that you want to do, go through the development lifecycle process, working directly with your customers and getting feedback iteratively throughout the process as well as working on it iteratively. So start simple and then build to a more complex experience, making sure you're solving that problem. If there's no more questions, any other questions? If there's no more questions, thank you all for coming to my talk. Appreciate it. See you around. Thank you.


Hello everyone, my name is Akama Sentian and I'm pursuing my degree in semester at Denso College, Nigeria. And hi, I am Izzy Dedengia from VGOTAR semester, also from Denso College, India. Today I'm just very pleased to be very helpful out for you, with an amazing case to know more about the knowledge of movement interpreter, empowerment and sustainability. So let's get going. We're here now at the Glam House with Dik to find out who that really mesmerizing woman entrepreneur is. Hello ma'am, despite being so busy, thank you so much for being here with us today. Before we begin, we will appreciate you introducing yourself to our viewers. Okay, hi, my name is Wede Volukasol and it's a pleasure to have you and your team over. And this is my wonderful assistant, Tommi. She has been working with me for the past five years now. In inclusion to that, she also has great experience in Central Colombo, America. University of Technology, Bollywood, Ghana, Hina. Honor of Sakura Sushi Restaurant in Gunsan, Indiana, Ecuador. Volatile School, Dimabur. And also Denso College, Dimabur. And now let us go ahead and get into it. So ma'am, when and how did you became your entrepreneur journey? Can you give us a brief history about it? My first entrepreneurial state was quite unexpected. It was by chance actually. It's a long story but I'll make it short. I was traveling in South America and then I got an opportunity to open a small sushi restaurant in Ecuador. And at that moment, I felt that if I didn't take the opportunity, I would be ready for the rest of my life. So I took the risk and I'm so glad I did that. From that experience, I was able to see what entrepreneurship can bring. You know, the feel of ownership, flexibility and the taste of success. So that gave me an idea also that this is something that I could pursue in the future. If I wanted to shape my career. Was living in the business world and easier or you got the season further? In my point of view, it wasn't difficult. I already had a little bit of experience before. So it wasn't difficult stepping into a different type of environment. So did your family and friends support you? Yes, absolutely. My family is my support system. I get a lot of support from my family and friends and they are the people who have helped me with the transition. And it made it easy for me. That's really nice. I'm like other family who doesn't support, especially you know. Yes, I feel so. I feel quite fortunate to have a wonderful life support family. We came to know that before you started your venture, you were working as an assistant professor which had a very secure and a stable job. So what made you shoot the business? So why did you take the risk? Yes, I totally agree with you. Teaching is a very stable and a secure profession. I think that the most valued expires of teaching is that you have the ability to make a difference in students' lives. And I think that is very rewarding as a teacher. And I love teaching. But I wanted to experience something of my own to create something that I can feel with ownership again and make something that I'm passionate about. And that is why I shifted to business. According to the writer provided, you are the owner of this family house community. Also the owner of the branch and a photographer. So how do you manage to get all this work done in time? Isn't it stressful to handle all these strange jobs at once? It's very stressful and daunting at times. And to manage time can also become such a challenge. In times when I'm living all my three businesses. But I feel very fortunate as a woman here in Dublin where I am able to do the things that I love and am passionate about. I feel that in a conventional family, most family prefer their children to do something which is related to government jobs and all that. And in times when I get too stressed out I think about how fortunate I am that I get to do things that I love. And I think this is something that helps me push through it. The women's struggles and stress. Talking about stress, can you please share with us any obstacles that you have faced in your career journey? And what have you learned from those? In my journey as an entrepreneur, I have faced many struggles and failures also. There are problems that we can anticipate in advance but there are a few things that you don't know when and how it's coming like the pandemic that hit a year ago. And in times like that, we are not trained to... We are not ready since we're not ready. We're not trained to tackle such situations. But then having a strong will and having a positive attitude allowed me to move past that. In the context of the state we are shooting right now, Nagaland, what do you think is or has been the most challenging part being a woman entrepreneur? Okay, in my business with this clothing store and food, I think it's not gender-specific. So I couldn't say I faced issues with this one as an entrepreneur. But being a female photographer here in Nagaland, it's a male-dominated profession. So at first, during the initial stage of my career as a photographer, I felt quite inferior and I felt that I had to work harder than the guys and go the extra mile to prove myself that I can be also taken seriously as a photographer. So those kind of things had something that I experienced during my journey as a female photographer. And it saddens me that there are still some people who have this preconceived notion that photography is a man's job. And I feel that we should not discriminate in any profession being a male or female because as a photographer, everyone is just trying to make a living from the craft we love. So yeah, that is something that I should mention feeling inferior as a female photographer in Nagaland. How do you all model setting up your business or running your business? It's not all about getting the profit, but also about providing job opportunities. So can you tell me how many number of employees do you have? I have done me, my sales assistant at the boutique and then I also have another lady working for me in my home kitchen business.  The most important thing about women? Yes, all of our men are women. Do you look on with your experience with her or do you even offer jobs to the friendships? I don't necessarily look for an experienced person. As long as the person has a good attitude, someone who is willing to work hard and can handle stress, I hire most people based on that instead of having experience and stuff. So do you provide any kind of training for the employees? Yes, I am currently training one freshly graduate student to become a photographer. I take her to weddings and she's housing me set up and setting up blocks and things like that and she's also training to become a professional photographer. So you are the team of the training? Yes, team of myself. I'm really curious about this question. Do you have any role models? Who and how has that person affected your prior decision? I don't have any specific role model but I get inspired a lot by my friends who are working really hard and especially on social media like Instagram. I made a lot of friends this year who are bloggers and selling drift clothes online and they are doing extremely well. I'm so happy for them and also farming different types of professions that these women are doing and working hard for it and they are my inspiration. They inspire me a lot in my work. So men, are you aware of any common societies or schemes for women, business, owners? Have you ever any of these? I have not availed any loans or funds from the government because I'm not aware of it. Maybe it has to do with our education, how we were brought up because we were not thought to be aware of these kinds of things. And one organization that I know of is entrepreneurs associated in Kuhima. They are providing trainings to youth and potential entrepreneurs. They are also involved in giving loans to farmers, street vendors and people who can't avail loans from the bank. To start your business? Yes. As a woman entrepreneur who owns and handles multiple ventures what advice would you like to give to a woman who wants to start her own business? Those who want to start their own business I would advise them to start right away because there is no such thing as the right moment when it comes to business and I started small and doing research and studying the profile of my customers I'm able to grow according to that. So if you have the idea to go forward I would advise them to do it as soon as possible because it's a competitive environment we're living in now and those who have the idea will find a better means to start their business and if they have the idea then you don't have to wait for a big moment or a big investment and all that but you can start small and start right away. So can you give some key activities that you would like to recommend to entrepreneurs to invest your time? I would say time is the most essential communities we have and with business we trade with time so like I said earlier if you have a plan, an idea to start a business you must start right away and once you have the business running it is important to make sure that you provide a professional and quality service to your customers that way you're able to see you're able to stay relevant and have your credibility that is a business person so that is something that I would advise them to do. Being an entrepreneur, what do you enjoy the most? I love being an entrepreneur I love the freedom of having the ability to do whatever I want and being my own boss is something that I enjoy the most and I take great pride in knowing that I started something from nothing so that is something that I'm very proud of and I enjoy doing that. So Ma'am I personally really like this question if you were given a chance to start your career all over again right from the beginning what would you do differently? I think that's a paradox if that's like going back in time with the ideas I have right now that might not apply in that moment and situation but if I were given a chance to go back to it differently I would use my time wisely because I felt that I could have achieved much more with the time that I had and I didn't make use of the time so that is something that I would do it differently to make use of my time and do it wisely. We are coming to an end so what do you want to achieve next? There are many things that I still want to achieve and I'm doing that step by step. So it's like a surprise for us. Yes, there are so many things that I want to achieve. Last week, Kainisha shared a successful career here. In the last few decades, Naglan was the type of society and women were confined to a domestic space but then now in this world of things we are suggesting a lot of women rising up in terms of entrepreneurship and leadership and we are able to break barriers and achieve great heights of success and they inspire us to let, they inspire us in a way that gender should not be an obstacle to us and in achieving our dreams, this doesn't apply to me as an entrepreneur but it applies to people as well that if we want to achieve our dreams and goals we must be patient and work hard and be focused. You know, in our eyes you are already a very successful very successful actor. Yeah, I agree with that because I feel like you have the kind of inspiration for women and young individuals especially for women and children. Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. Dear viewers out there, if you want to start a venture and be successful like men, men and women like you always remember, work hard, have a lot of patience and stay focused. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, thank you so much.


And for the weight of the AlphaFly, 6.8 ounces in my size or 194 grams, I am incredibly. First run, first run in the Nike AlphaFly next per sense. Oh my my. All right, so when I was in college at the University of Colorado, we used to say at the end of hard races, hard workouts, we'd yell at each other like, tighten the screws, tighten the screws. You know when you're doing a wood shop project and you just kind of tighten those screws down and just to bring everything together, that's what I was thinking to myself today on the long run. You know what? There's no races on the horizon. Let's go for it a little bit. Let's open up the carburetor a little bit. So that's what I did today in the Nike AlphaFly next per sense. The weather was perfect. The conditions were perfect. And oh yeah, my mindset was after yesterday, you heard in yesterday's vlog, my legs were tired. And so I reduced my volume yesterday because I did that. My legs felt not perfect, but great waking up this morning. So that was also a sign like, okay, let's open it up a little bit. And that's what I did 23 miles. There it is on your screening kilometers, about 500 feet of vertical, sorry, 450 feet of vertical gain. And I managed to hold a 540 per mile average pace. So solid, solid effort out there. And I was thinking to myself, and if you look at the data, here it is on Strava. If you want to go analyze the run you can. At about mile 11, yes, there was a dog chase. And so my heart, I had to sprint. Like I had to sprint. Like my heart rate went from 165 to about 180-ish. So if you see a heart rate spike around mile 11, approximately, that's what it was, a good old dog chase. And I managed to outrun it, but man, it was not good. So, and oh yeah, at about mile 10 or so, I was thinking to myself, this has the potential to get really, really ugly because the pace was really solid and I'm at elevation. But sure enough, I managed to hold a pretty good pace. I was fading toward the end. I think my last three or four miles were around like 550 to six flat pace. But overall, a solid effort. I feel real good about it in the Nike Alpha Fly, next percent. And one last thought on the run today as we dive into the first impressions, not my full review, that'll happen after 50 miles, is that this is a racing shoe. A, you know, an aggressive marathon and half marathon racing shoe from Nike. And so I knew on today's run and before the run, I got to take this thing up to some higher speeds in order to give you an accurate assessment of my first run in them, how they performed. If I was running seven minute pace or 630 pace for me, I knew that wasn't gonna be fast enough. So that's why I opened up the carburet, tightened those screws down, tightened those screws down. Okay everyone, I am a men's US size seven and a half. So all the weight and all the measurements that you're gonna hear over the next five, 10 minutes is a seven and a half for men's size, seven and a half men's US, okay? And there's not many pairs of these out there on the marketplace. Like they did a limited release Nike about, oh, what was it, two or three weeks ago now? And it was very difficult to get a pair of these shoes. Therefore, there's not a lot of data out there yet from other people testing the shoe and Nike hasn't released all of their information on the drop. So everything is a little bit in flux as far as the data on the shoe, but I'll do my best here. Okay, so from my measurements, and I don't have a laser, so just so you know, world athletics is now requiring under 40 millimeters. That was big news about a month ago, maybe a month and a half ago, 40 millimeters is the max stack height that a shoe can have in order to, for the elites to use the shoe in an Olympic or world championship race or any race that is, let's say like attempting to set a world record like the Berlin Marathon, London Marathon, et cetera, et cetera. So for me in my size, I am measuring right around 38 millimeters. Now this is, again, I don't have a laser to measure that. That is a caliper that I purchased a while back and I'm doing my best to measure it as accurate as possible, but I'm getting right around 38 millimeters for the stack height in the heel. And again, about 31 to 30 millimeters stack height in the four foot. So that's, you're looking at about an eight millimeter drop for the AlphaFly next percent. And for the weight of the AlphaFly, 6.8 ounces in my size or 194 grams, I am incredibly excited to make another vlog, probably in the next two to three weeks, I don't know when yet, comparing the AlphaFly to the next percent, to the 4% to compare all the weights. It's gonna be very, I can't wait for that vlog, but that is in my size. And again, I'm not getting a lot of data out there from other people's sizes. And for the upper on the fly knit, the top of the shoe, the material that wraps around the top of your foot, it is a fly knit, okay, they're calling it the Adam Knit, that's the official name, Adam Knit, and it is a fly knit material that has been heated up and then stretched and then pressed, okay? So that is the kind of the process that Nike went through to make this and it's wild. Very breathable, you can see through, so you can see right through it. And I must say, I liked it quite a bit more than the vapor weave that we found in the next percent iteration, okay? It's wild, I don't know what else to say other than it's a wild feel.   It almost feels like that type of material, like the old school from like the 70s and 80s type of lawn chair with, I don't know, that's the first material that comes to mind, okay? Also in the heel counter, there's a little bit of a pad there that we also found in the next percent. It did fine today. I think it helps lock down your heel pretty well. Again, I'll take it out for some more tests very soon and there's a little bit of extra, almost like a felt material through the inside of the collar of the shoe that wraps around your ankle. Again, just to give you a little more stability through that upper, and I guess, yeah, just so that that atom knit material is not rubbing right against your ankle. Also, they added a little bit of extra material on top of the shoe right through the, where the eyelet chain will lace over the top of your foot. I think it's probably a smart move just so that the laces aren't gonna cut into the top of your foot as you're lacing up for your races. And also through that eyelet chain, a little bit of extra rubber has been placed in overlay to make sure those laces stay nice and secure. So again, I think it's a good move overall with that extra rubber, just a little thin layer of overlay on that upper. Moving on to the midsole of the Alpha Fly right through here, that Zoom X midsole foam, plenty of it. I already gave you the stat kites coupled with these air pods, okay? This is new. This is different than the 4% and the next percent. And there's of course also, there's the carbon full length, carbon fiber plate throughout this midsole, what they're calling the fly plate. And it is wider, much, much wider than the next percent. So I am seeing it, you can hear it, hopefully you can hear that in the microphone and it stretches, the fly plate stretches from side to side, at least through the forefoot. It starts to get hit, it's hidden back here through the heel. Maybe we need to do a little surgery. No, not in the night yet. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. I'll come back to that midsole here in a second and moving on to the outsole. Very, very interesting rubber outsole through the forefoot. I would say very grippy. Like it's gonna grip the road. I suspect even in wet conditions, very much so. I think it's a pretty interesting overall tread pattern that is gonna do better than, definitely better than the 4% and again, probably better than the next percent, but I'll do that comparison later. And then there is that ZoomX exposed foam through the heel, but they have added some higher density. I don't know if it's the foam rubber composite on the edges here, right here.  So overall, a very fascinating outsole, especially when it's coupled with these air pods right here below your forefoot. Moving on to the fit and the comfort, the fit. This is a big topic. Big topic, everyone. I was reading so many reports early on right when the shoe was released that people were buying half-sized down for the AlphaFly, half-sized down. I decided to go true to size and I'm glad that I did. And I'm glad that I did, no issues, okay? Could I pull off a half-sized down? I probably could. You all know, if you watch regularly, I like a snug fit, especially in my ratios, but I don't see a necessity for me to go a half-sized down. Anyway, I don't wanna give conflicting thoughts at like, but a lot of people were going a half-sized down. I didn't see a need for that on today's 23-mile run, all right? And for comfort, well, it's a racing shoe. So I'm not as concerned about comfort when it comes to racing. I'm leaning more in the direction of performance. And again, no major issues as far as comfort through the upper. It does, I will say, take a little bit getting used to that carbon fiber plate through the midsole here, especially since it appears to be a much more exemplified or a much larger carbon fiber plate in this AlphaFly versus the next percent. Now onto my positives and drawbacks after my first run. Positive, the AirPods, the AirPods. Now I don't know, if Nike has a patent, of course they have a patent on this specific, I don't know how patents work. Lawyers out there, let me know down in the comments. I foresee these AirPods being the game changer moving forward for Nike's marathon racing shoes. It was overly obvious how much energy return I was receiving on today's run. It's the air, like the carbon fiber plate, yes, helping. I'm sure I could distinctly see a difference with these AirPods through my foot strike. And you all know in this marathon training block, I've been focused on my foot strike a lot, really trying to get up on my four foot more so. I've been working on it now for a couple months and it paid off today because these AirPods are directly below your four foot. It was overly, like it was even right at the beginning, but also even later in the run, I could feel those AirPods. And so that's my positive. That's a game changer. And I don't know how Adidas, Brooks, Hoka, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. I don't know how they're gonna innovate, all right? In order to compete with that in the realm of patents, all right? I just don't understand, I don't know it all legally, but I'm hoping other companies can innovate as well because I'm telling you it was very, I'm really making this point clear because it was very, very obvious, okay? Drawback, cornering, all right? Turning sharp corners, which I did quite a bit today on my 23 miles. So I had to over, I wanted to make sure I didn't roll an ankle, basically. Now, I never got close to rolling my ankle, but I was thinking about it a little bit too much. So on a course with a lot of sharp turns, you know, anyway, just beware, I felt like I had to overthink the turning in the alpha fly. For my durability prediction, I think the big question mark for everyone is, what's gonna happen to the AirPods after 100 miles, 200 miles, 300 miles? We shall see, all right? It's like, I don't know. That's the big question that I see floating around there. Now, how will I use this shoe moving forward whenever I wanna run fast? So time trials coming up, absolutely. And who is this shoe best for?  I really believe that. And after 50 miles, I'll give you my final thoughts on that, but it's pretty special, it's pretty special. And again, I think it goes, a lot of it goes back to those AirPods, coupled with the carbon fiber plates. Yes, the stack height as well, but it was, it just was distinctly different than other shoes of the past. And on to that price point, oh, Nelly, $275, is it worth it? We'll see, but I will say, I'm actually pleased, because I saw early reports that Nike was gonna bump it up to, I saw like $350 being floated around $400, so I'm glad they didn't bump it up that much. So, you know, the next percent, the 4% was $250. So basically, this has been bumped up to $275. So $25 more, I'm actually pleased that they did that. I think that's okay. I think it's okay. I think it's okay. Obviously, that's still a ridiculous amount of money, but I do believe that with the AirPod innovation, the big carbon fiber plate, everything going on with the upper, that I'm actually shocked that it isn't $300. Frankly, no, anyway, I'll just leave it at that. And on to that question of the day, cannot wait to read your answers. Here we go. With all the marathons and half marathons being canceled or postponed for the fall, I'm really curious to hear what is going to be your purchasing strategy for your marathon racing shoes, shoe or shoes in 2020? Are you gonna buy now? Are you gonna buy in the summertime? Are you gonna buy in the fall? Now, listen, there's no guarantee that races are even gonna happen in the fall. We just don't know. So what is gonna be your strategy, again, for buying your marathon or half marathon racing shoes, let's say anytime in 2020? Like, yeah, yeah, because it's like, this is a lot of carbon fiber plate running shoes, racing shoes are coming onto the marketplace in the next four to eight weeks. Lots of them, Adidas, Hoka, New Balance, there's just a lot of them. So it's not great timing, frankly, to be releasing a marathon racing shoe right now. Anyway, I just can't wait to hear your thoughts on that. Thanks for watching. I know I spoke a little longer today, but it's because a lot happened in the 23 miles and I just wanted to get it all out there for you to mull over, discuss amongst your running buddies, probably through Skype right now. And we can move onward and upward together to fall racing, hopefully, right? I think we're gonna get this under control, but at the end of the day, special shoe. It's a pretty special shoe. So, all right, everyone, thanks for watching. Thanks for being here. Yes, I'm gonna toss it back to the 4% versus next percent comparison for a marathon racing shoe right there. 4% versus next percent right there. In case you didn't see it, I think I published it about four or five, three or four months ago. All right, everyone, seek beauty, work hard, and love each other. See you tomorrow.