Silicon Valley at the Motorola office and hello, so who are you? My name is Steve McDonnell I'm the director of the mods ecosystem here at Motorola. And who are you over there? Oh, I'm Christian Flowers. I'm a member of the systems architecture team and the moto mods ecosystem team here at Motorola mobility And you are are you in Chicago? Yes. All right. So you have the Moto Z right here Which is a very innovative product? So can you describe a little bit how it's designed how it's made? Yeah, I mean basically what happened is a bunch of really smart engineers at Motorola in Chicago looked at the mobile phone and Decided that they wanted to make it a lot thinner and By making it thinner they were also going to provide a very new model for attaching Extra accessories to the phone and really truly beyond accessories. So this is crazy thin I mean, this is the thinnest high-end phone in the world, right? I believe it is This is a we're talking five point something millimeters. Oh Christian Yeah, I think it was five point two is there you go. I'm gonna trust you on this But that's that's and so how does it how do they make it so thin like oh that is made the battery much thinner I believe there's some liquid cooling going on in there You can imagine that they basically went all the way back to the drawing board and looked at what they could do to make to take some thickness off the device and Truly the reason for that is So you can do this So you can just easily dock like it's is it fully magnetic how's the system where it where the magnets? That's part of the secret source. There are definitely magnets involved Does it I guess that means here this little locator all that's really very important for the way that the Accessor the mods attached to the phone So those connectors down there is called gray boss, right? And and how does that work? What's the bandwidth and all that stuff? So gray bus is the the protocol that gives you the ability to hot swap and to essentially extend device drivers That are actually located on a separate piece of hardware up into the Linux kernel And they appear to the Linux kernel on the Moto Z like those devices are locally attached The bandwidth varies it depends on which interface you're using So over those 16 pins we actually support a variety of a very fairly powerful interfaces. So I can do a CSI camera at You know 10, I'm sorry 13 megapixel at 60 frames a second At the same time that I'm doing Oh the bandwidth. Are you still there? Yeah Rose does it automatically reconnect all right, but I think one of the important things to talk about at this point even is When you talk about throughput What you're essentially doing is with this speaker it now has access to raw digital Audio directly from the device raw digital audio. Yeah, we can there's a so there's a raw line that it can get access to So that's higher quality in Bluetooth potentially, right? Oh, yeah, definitely now what that means is that when I attach this I'm not just attaching an accessory to the phone I'm adding a new speaker to the phone. This is now the phone speaker And this is the highest quality loudest speaker in a phone ever as far as I'm aware But remember and you're absolutely and you make and you're along the right lines there This is not an additional Bluetooth speaker or something like that. This is now this phone speaker In the same way if I put, you know, a battery on there this now intelligently works with the phone You know, I can see should we click on try again to get him back or? Yeah, I can yeah Let's see if hopefully he comes back automatically. Oh wait, did I cut the wrong control just gonna this is this is really cool on the projector TIDLP Pico Hi, you're back So you were talking about the gray bus and you were saying that bandwidth varies But are you talking about is this the same bandwidth as if the hardware was like on the PCV inside? Yes, that's true. That's largely a true statement. So Christian the example I was just giving that is that you know by attaching this speaker to the phone. I'm not putting an accessory on the phone I'm adding a new speaker to the phone this speaker now has access to the To the data in the phone in the same way as we'd actually as if we'd actually built this speaker in so whatever The fastest format we can move audio around on the phone This speaker now has access to it doesn't have to go through Bluetooth doesn't have to go through Wi-Fi or any kind of other connection process it is now this phone speaker and So this is hotswappable technology. Yes, this is like There's some kind of safety in terms of like not corrupting anything in the Android I guess you modify the Android to support this or has a so there's like Advanced customization of how or very what's called efficient Integration of this technology in the way Android works Yes, we did a we did a lot of work to ensure that We we integrated with Android. Well, so it was seamless. So audio is a perfect example We're using audio devices and you could you could expose yourself as a multitude of devices And the the the audio device types for instance match the Android device types one for one That means that if you tell the tell what Moto Z. I am a loudspeaker It will route loudspeaker audio to your Moto mod as opposed to your phone's loudspeaker and these are dynamic devices as well So now if I plug in a headset Your Moto mod would inform the Moto Z. Hey, my audio device is now a loudspeaker and A headset The Moto Z's standard routing would say well a headset takes priority over Your loudspeaker and because this headsets on the Moto mod. I'm gonna I'm gonna push it out to the Moto mod So there's one example of just how it's integrated really tightly And not every instance actually requires an Android application along with And so for example, there's multi display because you kind of output the mirror display on the projector, right? And you could have another display outside Yes, so if you're aware of of Android and the operating system and the API as they provide We added Displays in as an Android secondary display Which means that any application gets mirroring for free and if application actually wants something custom on that secondary display They they use the Android presentation class right standard API and they can now Provide custom content on that second display that is unique from the content that their application would just provide on the primary phone screen So there's extended display and mirror display. There's optional different different things in there I guess and the app the apps API's can easily hook into that if you want to do an app that Let's say output something different like a ebook on a ink display outside and then on the main Android You keep having your normal Android phone Well, not quite to that degree.  So an eek application. That's an e-reader would probably be implemented in a different manner All right, so there's a there's display. There's data and this power And all that goes smoothly. Why do you need all these pins? So what do they all do though? There's six it was a 16 pins 16 pins. Well, so we've got A couple of ground pins because grounding is pretty important we have a Pin that allows the moto mod to power itself from the phone There's one pin that's dedicated to Charging power back and forth We've got a pin dedicated to a large amount of the command to control and Signaling between the two moto mod the moto mod and the moto Z Four of those pins are a fi So over those five pins you could either run raw USB 3 1 Raw I squared S or if you're using that moto high-speed bridge I can do CSI camera and DSI video and USB 2.0 and I squared S audio all in parallel simultaneous This is not that we've also got another USB interface and a mobility display port interface Display port so that's the that's the standard goes through for the display That's one of them. Yes. The other one would be DSI which is more for embedded devices Display port would be really good for a dock type implementation where you're plugging in something external And it seems a very stable and reliable when you when you dock it you just know it works, right? When you when you put it in on the phone Does you put it on the phone you get a nice connection tone a nice animation that lets you know it's there and ready to use So yes because the magnets and and the alignment pin And frankly the hard work that we did it with the mechanicals they line up nicely they almost just fall into place That's totally awesome. So you have a for about for a few maybe for like introduction kind of like moto mods and now you're talking about expanding this You are expanding this to hackathons and to indiegogo and you are encouraging all developers to Participate in this ecosystem. So really the the initial devices that came out are to prove the market Obviously we want people to be able to buy a mod, you know when they buy their phone But the real big play here is opening this up to a broader Ecosystem and truly what we want to do is encourage an ecosystem So, you know earlier you were talking about the idea of adding Bluetooth to the speaker I think that's a great idea, but I really hope that somebody out in the world does that Potentially it could be JBL potentially it could be somebody else There's a lot of ideas that that are out in the world that need to be You know developed and we we hope that people will will do that we've created the MDK in order to eliminate a lot of the barriers to getting to You know a prototype so the idea here is essentially this is just mostly an emptied out Mod so with all the connectors and gray bus and all those sorts of things that you need And then you can add whatever type of card you need to Define what sorts of things or aligned with what sorts of things you want to do This is just the perforated board. So you can kind of add whatever sensors or whatever you wanted to add to that So you would put the you connect some cables in each of those holes.  Yeah, some cables to it, right? Yeah, absolutely, but you know, here's one that's already got A lot of the it's actually got the battery in it. You can see that there So this is one that you would snap in and it would have a battery personality already So you can look at adding other things to that if you want to led or something like that You might you know, I think there's a lot of room for battery plus one type solutions out in the world So battery plus memory would be an interesting one for people to work on I think but I don't know battery plus an RFID reader battery plus You know, who knows a single button that allows you to turn your lights on when you've got you lights at home or something like that So that's a battery card This one's an audio one. So that's just pops in there and now I've got a speaker that I can start working with We give you the full electrical schematics The full firmware and where there's an application involved the full application that runs on Android We give all of this open source so you can use those to learn like oh, how does battery charging work? And how do I control this? To prototype so you can kind of get your project going and understand how is the platform work? And what do I want to do with it? So really with the MDK The motor mods development kit, you know, not only can you work on that perforated board and saw to your solution down And the reason we have the perforated boards is so you can reuse that reference motor mod again and again You're not ruining it with just one solder project and oh, I've got all these wires. I can't clean it up This is a reusable prototype board very much so you can use it for You know display for audio you can switch these all in and out use it for a number of different things put it together any number of Perforated boards you want to use this is the Raspberry Pi hat board So this would allow you to attach Obviously this goes into the mod and then you can attach your Raspberry Pi projects directly to that and start using those You know with drivers and software that you'd have to develop so if you have a Raspberry Pi project What do you need to modify or adapt to have it like show up on the Moto Z? Like to put it to work it have to be the right kind of project right off the bat, but go ahead Christian You have to write firmware. So from a hardware standpoint You're done, right? You can just slap the hat on and it's existing working hardware now depending on what's on there You'll have to write I squared C Pi drivers right you have to write audio drivers if it's an audio hat So it really depends on what the Raspberry Pi hat is But from a hardware standpoint, you're largely done Attach it plug it in Wipe your hands or walk away But you do have to develop firmware and it's likely that the sensors that you choose or the what are on there Aren't currently supported in nut X and you will have to write that initial firmware Not X is the operating system the embedded operating system that Moto mods run on Gray bus is a protocol that runs a layer on top of that And then developers actually develop device drivers that sit on gray bus So you never actually have to contend with the complexities of the communication back and forth and interrupts and everything else You just write a device driver and you get callbacks That come up the stack. What's the mod X? Is that like a very small OS that runs on a micro controller on the? Yes, it's an it's an open-source RTOS, you know, very standard interfaces like POSIX APIs Flexible scheduling round robin interrupt, you know, but it's essentially it's a it's a nice lightweight real-time operating system It needs to be able to just instantly boot up when as soon as you connect the Moto mod and and instantly be a Super stable and everything right actually what's neat is if your Moto mod has a battery in it It might never turn off but So typically if a model motor mod has a battery even when detached It's still powered and running to an extent, but you're right. It needs to be very fast So if it was in an off-state say it doesn't have a battery You needed to get powered up get initialized to get enumerated quickly, right? Otherwise this would be a frustrating experience. So could you add with a motor mod? You could add a modem. Could you add white spaces different kind of connectivity? Yeah, external kind of like processing extra processor somehow Um, you could add a modem at that point. You would really just look like a USB data connection You would want to be a Device at that point from a USB standpoint not a host So you could do modems carriers might not be necessarily excited by it But it is possible to provide another data path All right beyond that What was some of the examples you threw other examples you threw out there I was thinking adding more processing power or something. I don't know some external a second processor that does something else If it's if it's fairly custom then you could But you know androids not just going to Buy default offload some processing power. It would need to be something pretty custom One good example would be if you were doing a camera And your camera had an ISP on it Right, so that's a that'd be a case where you'd have a second processor You're adding processor power essentially Yeah, because the Hasselblad camera you have is pretty it looks pretty great So what's the quality on that? How does that work? There's like it's zoom it's real zoom the big thing the big thing that's added is Mechanical zoom or physical zoom so instead of I think they call it optical zoom because every phone today uses every mobile phone camera uses digital zoom Which has its limitations But potentially you can have like a camera made that that would have 4k super high quality So there would be an ISP in the camera to add that kind of suddenly your phone becomes Like a high-end camera like not just like a smartphone camera Yes So that's that's possible And so you are What is it? What is the relation you have with indiegogo? How do you encourage projects in indiegogo indiegogo is a campaign we announced Very recently two weeks ago, I think and we're working with indiegogo To foster the ecosystem We've introduced the MDK to make it easier to get to a hardware prototype The next step is how do we actually help people get to market and how do we help these ideas flourish? And how do we help the ecosystem flourish truly and and obviously? Indiegogo is a big player in that space already the whole idea of crowdfunding is Increasingly important and I think this gives our customers an opportunity to vote about what kind of mods they'd like to see But essentially from a partner point of view or from the ecosystem point of view We've launched within the go-go the transform your smartphone challenge And the goal there is for people to submit their ideas and how they hope to get to market You know a little bit about their business case their team those sorts of things they send that information over to us We've already got hundreds of entries And we're going through those now Kristen's helping with some of that We look at those we evaluate them, you know, what's technically possible what addresses customer pain points, you know What is commercially viable? What is an interesting use of mods? Evaluate all those and we'll be sending out a motorola Z and an MDK with a kit of the Personality cards will be sending that out to the winners who qualify and those people will have as much time as they need Well, not as much time as they need they'll have till early January 2017 to have their project ready All those projects will go live on Indiegogo on our landing page the transform the smartphone challenge page and People will start funding them In early March, we're going to take some of those top programs the most funded programs About ten of those and take them off to Chicago and we're going to do a shark tank event We're going to have Lenovo capital there Verizon Verizon ventures obviously motorola And we'll be evaluating those companies for potential distribution Investment and then beyond that, you know, how can we help them get to market with? You know relationships introductions those sorts of things so There's a potential and there's a potential that there will be some motor mods You haven't even thought of right now. I hope so that would that'd be great That would be completely revolutionary for this for the smartphone industry, right fingers crossed This is what's potentially is gonna happen right now. Absolutely some some some people an amazing idea And it just makes sense and it just changes the way you use a smartphone Obviously, there's a lot of smart people at motorola. This couldn't have happened if there weren't a lot of smart people, you know Building amazing things, but we don't have every smart person in the world We know there's a lot of smart people outside motorola as well So we really have done everything we can to empower an ecosystem to do exactly what you're saying to come up with Something we've never thought of we could not be more excited with that possibility And you you have confirmed that the next generation will fit all the motor mods. Yeah, yeah proof, right? Yeah, yeah, we've we definitely committed to multiple generations Maintaining this attachment architecture, you know the software and hardware Connections we're very much locking a lot of that detail in so we have multiple generations Of phones supporting this architecture Like I think Marcus Broly he was saying he'd like to high quality DAC audio with a headphone jack That could be one more to mud. You should get on with that Yeah, good. I'd like to see you ink. I'd like to see some other kind of displays on the back Maybe a laptop doc or some other ideas, but I'm guessing over those hundred you already have some pretty We do exciting Submissions already do we do right? Yes. Unfortunately. I can't talk about them because their people's are business proposals But so very soon you'll start hearing about them in early January I'm I think you'll you'll start seeing those and can start finding them I'm just gonna throw some ideas out like solar panels. You could have Just a second display that they can normal display in the back or you can have There's so much potential.  I want a speaker now. I want a battery now I want solar charging now. I want whatever it is Remember the experience when you first started playing with apps on your phone and all the freedom that you got because suddenly You could address the specific thing that you needed to be able to do what we're doing with this Development is doing the same thing with hardware. So now your phone is exactly what you need it to be It's got as much battery as you need it's got Some kind of sensor that you need because you need to be able to measure infrared light or whatever it might be It's got a better camera because you personally care about photography and you want to be able to zoom in It's got a better speaker because that's what you care about But the person next to you doesn't care about photography. So they don't need that better speaker So we get all that better camera. So again, we go away from that incremental Very general approach that's been happening with smartphones where it's one size fits all We'll keep trying to make it smaller and a better camera, but that's really all we can do by opening this up we create an environment where The world is your oyster the limitations are the imagination and truly we're going to see an apification of These mods and what we can do with phones potentially point-of-sale They could be like sure like some They could be another one where it would be like used for border control like a passport where they have those or they can have You can have card readers for credit card payments Well, we think there's a lot of I mean this there's obviously a lot of consumer opportunities But there are B2B and you know really interesting Enterprise solutions as well because I mean don't forget everybody who works in the enterprise also probably has a phone So everybody's a consumer to some extent or another but in terms of you know a very focused enterprise solution A lot of the times you see somebody Having to build a phone in order to put this boost special solution on top of it You know RFID scan or a barcode scanner or whatever it might be some kind of comms or a card reader You know now you can start with a fully powered You know modern smartphone and then attach whatever you need to it to do that specific thing So if you need a solution that only does one thing if it's not a consumer oriented approach You can also begin with a smartphone and then attach what you need the reader the Whatever it might be like health care A little like hospital with all the sensors people need to I don't know measure blood glucose all these different things There's so much potential right here. So it's 5.5 inch Yeah, I'm like I've been addicted to the sixth inch. It would have been awesome But who knows maybe they could be like a different size in the future But for sure the 5.5 is gonna continue for multiple generations Definitely these connectors are gonna continue. So the architecture at the back We're gonna keep that for you know for at least for a while But certainly we'll have multiple generations of phones supporting the current mods System that that's awesome. There's a lot of potential. Maybe who knows maybe you you open the system up to invite Other players in the industry connect with your mods. Maybe never say never never say never There's a lot of opportunities as you say. All right, it's very rich All right, and there's there's a lot of reviews already and people are quite excited with your phone, right? Like what what is media saying you think I think they're saying super encouraging things I mean, I think everybody loves the size of the phone So you can just start with the phone by itself, but you know this concept of what's beyond the current You know smartphone is truly we're beginning that conversation now There were other players, you know project ARRA was around and that what that was Google's approach I would say that was a much less consumer oriented type approach LG had their friends That wasn't plug-and-play. I don't think that was a really again It wasn't taken from the point of view of the consumer and the experiences they want to have This really is a whole new language around the way phones work I think and we're where we're at the beginning I hope of a revolution about what the smartphone is and project ARRA was an open Open-source Project and it kind of gave you some technology right here, right? It gave you a gray bus, right? We certainly pursued some of their innovations. Yeah, and we've added back to that as well. So, you know all of the Like I said, we were based on the NutX RTOS that legacy from ARRA and all the changes that we've done to add new protocols or to you know further shore up the gray bus protocol You know, we've pushed those back to open source. Those are available on github As well as all of the kernel changes in Linux Those have been pushed to open source as well The the only thing that's really proprietary that we don't share are our changes in the Android framework to integrate these Moto Mod devices Into Android and make it really that seamless experience that you get All right, but I mean who knows what happens in the future Maybe you you want to push this even more to make it like the new standard for smartphones. I'm just thinking who knows try to Encourage everybody to you know, follow your lead and doing some innovation Well, certainly and I think that as I say anything is possible But the key now is really to foster a successful ecosystem and that's why we're doing the crowdfunding campaign within the go-go And that's why we've also announced our first two hackathons We're doing our first hackathon in December in New York and our second one in January in San Francisco I'm sure there can be a link with some dates and that sort of thing So is a few days or today hackathons, you know There's the standard start on Saturday morning set some challenges and because of the MDK and the capabilities that it provides People will have a working prototype on Saturday on Sunday and we'll be looking at those For a variety of prices, but also, you know potential funding potential distribution all those sorts of things as well How can we help those people get to market? That's awesome So and this is this is the this is the vision statement of Motorola to to provide a custom Custom technology right for digital life for everybody, right? So this is it This is the next level after motor maker you were doing before where people just customizing colors and stuff, right? Now they're customizing that The the motor mods the technology it's absolutely a logical extension of everything that people have wanted from their phone for a while And again, I I start with the idea of applications because I think that was one of the first places that people were truly Really customizing what their phone was about by putting their own apps on there to do measurement to do Expense tracking whatever it is you need to do that was when we first started going Wow, my phone can be whatever I need it to be You know, I think the physical customization in terms of you know different backs and that sort of thing is really that's a personal You know preference a matter of taste and and there's we have style cells that allow you to do that as well with the same connector But then beyond that really adding true functionality. Yes This is an extension of allowing people to have a smartphone that fully integrates into their digital life and with the various other Aspects in the digital life as well. So this is this is so awesome I guess and in Chicago, maybe also here to say come out you have some amazing engineers working on this, right? You have a pretty cool team of Crazy experts in the smartphone business, right? Is that where you are that those are the kinds of guys you work with? Oh, yeah, they're all behind me in a lab right now And so that's pretty cool. And so now I'm hoping that the marketing is gonna Go in the direction of selling millions and millions of these we absolutely hope so well on November 3rd, I think it was we started a new TV campaign Which I love personally because it is definitely very different to anything we've done previously And I think that there's more to come around that Cool. Thanks a lot for showing off this awesome innovation. My pleasure. Thanks for coming along


Ond we're going to change focus now and we're going to start looking at apps and what do apps mean for arts organisations. We're going to have Mark Bamber talk through a whole bunch of apps that are related to the arts world. Which I think is going to be a very interesting thing to see some real world examples. And then we've got Chris Thawth, who's going to be showing us the latest on Art Finder. I think it's really the latest. I think he's working on it right now. yn ystod i fod yn oed yn ymwybod, ac mae'n mynd i ddweud o'r cyfnodol sydd wedi'u gennu rhyngwladol o'r cyfnodol a'r cyfnodol o'r cyffredin yn y bwysig fel yw'r cyfnodol yma'r hynny, ac mae gennym ni'n gweithio, mae gennym ni'n ganddofynau, mae gennym ni'n gweld ar gyfer amddangosu, mae gennym ni'n ganddofynu ar y cyfnodol o'i gweithio gyrwch ar gyfer y cyfnodol. Felly mae'r ffordd o bwysig i'r hyn, i'r wasiol y mae'r perffwyr nhw. Ond, nw'n rai'r holl o perffwyr, mae mae hwn o'n ddweud o'n mynd ar draws. Rydw i rydyn ni'n ymddi arbennidol eich ddysgu y ddweud o hynny diwinedd o'r fodai, ond yn ddwy'r ffordd rydyn ni'n penedig i ddysgu yw a ddiolch yn yn mwyaf, am gyd-ig o rhaid o plwyddiadau'n yddiadag ar gyfer yr oed. Mae'n fawr o'n dweud o'r cymaint o'r ysgol yng Nghymru, wrth gwrs, rwy'n fawr o'r gwrdd i'r llwyth i'n gwybod gwych. Mae'n bwysig i'n amser oedd ymyl yn rhanol o'r cymaint, fel ddim i'r cyfaint a'r iPhone o'r android o'r ddaeth, o'r ddechrau o'r ddechrau. Mae'n gwybod gwybod i'n ddechrau oherwydd o'n dweud o'r dweud. Not less. You know the standard thing is that they get like a new camera and you're really loving it for a while. And then about a year in it's like it's just somehow seems less useful. And then like two years after it's like it's sort of old and I don't really like it. And I can't really put the finger on mine right. But the interesting thing about apps is they constantly refresh the usefulness of your device. They tell you that there's something else that it can do that perhaps you couldn't do a minute ago. So that was one thing. And then I thought well the other thing I have to just admit is that I am looking for new experiences. I'm looking for a thing that's going to enable me to interact with this device in an interesting and exciting way. Something that I wasn't doing a minute ago.  For me it's a lot of painting apps. I don't want to show you how many painting apps I've got a bit. It's a fair number. And what I'm looking for each time is how have they developed this idea? How have they made this experience more pleasurable? How are they making it something that I can use as part of my life? And then it's most highfalutin and I really only reserved this for you guys is I think that apps and the development of apps have started a new kind of conversation in technology. And what happens is this is one developer it might be just one on their own comes up with a neat idea. That one of the neat ideas was that there was this great drawing application flash drawing application. No, sorry, it was a HTML5 drawing application on the web and it did all these really fancy things. And of course you had to use a mouse. Loads of people took that idea and I say took and they made apps out of it. And every time they made an app they took a new take on it and they developed it a bit further. And they said, you know, actually wouldn't it be better if it did this? There was this whole sort of, if you like, tier of painting applications that emerged out of this one person's thinking. And actually, do you know what?  He was like, oh, why didn't I take advantage of that? You know, he said, I am really silly. A couple of months later he came to the conclusion that it was the best thing he'd done in his life. Because actually what he realised was that he was changing the way people were thinking about the iPad. He hadn't even made the thing for the iPad. He'd made it for the web. There was another layer beyond that, you know, where people were seeing what had been done and saying, I think I can make something better. It's a kind of conversation that you have with technology, but it's at such a scale that it operates like a conversation instead of 10 months or two year development cycles between each thing. So something exciting about the way you can get involved in a conversation that helps develop what these devices are for, for your audiences. And I think we should bear that in mind today. So, again, I always like to end on a down note, and my down note is this. I've seen, working with lots of arts organisations now, that quite quickly when one talks about a future app, a piece of high-end technology, it gets shipped out to fancy agency immediately. It's like, we've got some budget, it's going to be great, we're going to work with fancy agency. Fancy agency have got great ideas and they make some lovely apps. Let's have a look. Thing is, you're wasting the creativity in your organisations if you think like that.  This is what happens. Creative people go to arts organisations and they look at it and they think, why can't we play any role in this development? And the answer is, you can. It's just that don't think of everything as a technology problem. Think of it as an experience problem. If you think of it as an experience problem, I bet everyone in your team can play a role. So, just having the back of your mind, when you're thinking of your apps and especially later on, how am I going to get everyone back there involved? Anyway, I want to bring Mark up to the stage. There you are, Mark. And he's going to talk us through some very interesting apps. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Welcome. My name is Mark Bamber and I'm a media trainer for BBC Academy. And this section that I'm going to do today is actually a cut-down. You'll be happy to know of a four-hour session. So, you're not going to have to sit here for four hours and listen to me, dribble on about how exciting mobile is and how exciting apps are. But I'm sure that you will find some relevance in what I'm going to talk about. So, just before we kick off, I would like to know how many smart people we have here today. So, if you have an Apple phone, would you like to put up your hand so I can see, how wow, excellent. Does anyone have an Android phone? OK, not as many. I'd say that at least half the people have Apple and only about three or four maybe have Android. And who has a Windows phone? Couple? What about a BlackBerry? OK, so there's some corporate people here as well. Excellent. And who doesn't even have a smartphone or know what a smartphone is? Wow. Only one shy person who might have a standard phone. OK. I'm going to kick things off by just talking a little bit about myself. I've been involved in mobile for about 10 years. And originally, I was in the BBC mobile team, working on the first thing we ever did that had video, which was the Olympic Games in 2004. And I became interested in mobile because at the time no one knew anything about mobile, which is always good if you're looking for a rise. And the thing about mobile is that since 2004, when I became involved, everyone has been saying it's the year of mobile. This year, it's the year of mobile. And actually it's taken a long time and even in the world of TV and video on mobile phones, it isn't quite there yet. However, it really has changed a lot in the last three or four years. So I've gone from editorial content through to advertising, and the last product I worked on with BBC was the iPlayer project on iPad and Android phones. And I must say that during this conversation, this is my personal opinion. I'm not speaking on behalf of the BBC, so if you have any questions about why iPlayer may not be on your particular phone, I won't answer those at the moment. And everyone always asks me when I do these conversations, which phone should I buy, or where do I think the market's going? And I think this is a really interesting thing and here's something that might just kick off some thoughts. Do we have sound? This is a receiver that you put on your dash. So it's pretty cool. Basically, it's like $6.99. I think it's kind of expensive, but it's really cool. And the screen is cool. You put in your make and model and it's like a mock-up of your dash. And you can do the window, which is cool. Oop, that's a navigation screen here. You can also do the door, which is kind of cool. It's pretty sensitive, like you can close it, which is cool. So you can actually start the car and just turn on the ignition. And then you can go forward. It's pretty sensitive, but it's pretty cool. And then you shift, which is kind of fun. You can go back with reverse. You can go in reverse and just guide it. And then you start performing stuff. So yeah, it's called iCar Remote. It's like $6.99 from the app store. It's pretty chill. I don't mind very much recommend it. Excellent. So does anyone here think that that is a genuine app? It's about a year old. It's a viral video. Very entertaining. However, in the last year, these types of things are becoming a reality and Microsoft have actually done a deal with Toyota to put their software or their operating system into all new Toyotas coming forward. So there will be a point of time soon where you will be able to do really useful things with apps, with your car and all sorts of other appliances. And it's happening really, really fast. So before we go too far, something to think about is that actually apps now have broken through the mass market and they are mainstream. BBC have been a bit slow at bringing apps to the market. And this is for several reasons in terms of commercialism and also some concerns from the market. But even the BBC now do have apps in the marketplace. And what you may find is that some of you guys maybe have apps or your competitive have apps, but they are generally absolutely mass market. And if you look in any shop window for a phone company, you'll find that about 75% of phones are smart phones that have been marketed now. If we have a look at the revolution of mobile, it started off not that long ago with the brick type phones that sometimes even had shoulder straps that you had to carry your bulky phone around. And then we've gone to the star phone. And the big evolution was really for business people when Blackberry arrived with their email phone. Nokia had a gaming device called an Engage that was maybe a little bit too early for market, but they did have a gaming device. But it was really 2007 when Apple bought out the iPhone, they got everything right at the right time and really they owned the smartphone market right now. However, there is definitely stiff competition. And I'll talk about some of these phones here because from an international point of view and even from a UK view, the market is quite different. And in the old days, everyone had a basic phone. It was really cheap to buy and they still exist now. They do text messaging and actually you can access the internet with these phones, but they are very poor, very slow. But if you're doing a product or a mobile website, for an example in an emerging market, there might still be and there will still be a significant amount of people browsing the mobile web with those types of phones. However, they are dying out and the feature phones are really coming in or they're actually on the way out as well. So these feature phones were where it was at, you could download things like ringtones, you could have games, they had a camera as well and also an internet mobile experience. And then the smartphones came out, which really you could download an app on and an app's really just software that you install on your phone to enhance the handset or what you're doing with usability. But as I said, the real game changer was the iPhone, touchscreen, big hard drive, GPS, so that allows you to find out what your location is and also something that's really important is connection to 3G and also Wi-Fi as well. And the thing about the whole mobile industry is that it's very fragmented. So running across these different types of phones, you can see they're different screen sizes, but also they all run on a different operating system. So in the world where we have PC and Mac, it's very simple to kind of think about what you're going to deliver to those mass market devices or PCs, but it's quite different in the mobile world. So we have Symbian, which is really a traditionally Nokia. They are really, they've lost a lot of market share to the other operating systems such as BlackBerry. But they have recently done a deal with Microsoft to do Microsoft on, say, Nokia phones. So they will be one to watch. I think everyone knows what an iPhone is, what a BlackBerry is. Windows Mobile have reinvented themselves now with something called Windows 7. They have lost a lot of way in terms of how many devices in the market, but they are certainly looking to improve by having this deal with Nokia. Also you have some open source operating systems. You have Palm. There's an operating system that's really based in North America called Brew. And also maybe more and more people are hearing about Android. So the thing about apps in particular is that if you want to create an app in real terms, you need to think about which one of these different operating systems you're going to create your app with. And most people today really are focusing on iPhone and Android apps because they have the biggest market share, even though it is changing. And it's called Smart for a Reason. And it's really the things that you have on this phone that make it really unique. And this is some of the reasons why you would want to do an app rather than a mobile website. And from my point of view, everybody should have a site, a mobile presence that works on any phone. So you need to have a look at your website. Does it work on a phone? Maybe you even have a mobile website. That's kind of your first thing to do. But what's really unique and one of the reasons that you might want to look at doing an app is that because it can do things like GPS to find your location. You can have video, which you might be able to record. It has obviously sound. They have a camera that can be used as a barcode scanner. So then you can do ticketing. Some of them can have a compass. You can tell which way the person is holding their phone. And these are really great things. And when we talk about how you connect with people, we're really talking about something called push and pull. So when you go to a mobile website or any sort of service where you'll even Google and you'll pull information towards you, that's called pulling. But when you're pushing something to somebody, it's like maybe an SMS or an alert or a certain sort of information. That's called a push. And what's really important is getting the whole push and pull right. And that's how you get your communication going because your app is obviously able to connect to the internet, pull down data and do things like integrate with your maybe things that are around you. And I'll just look at a little bit of penetration. In the UK, mobiles per se have about 131% penetration. So most people have one and a half phones. And at the moment, the majority of people, about 36%, I think, are on smartphones. However, in some markets, which you can probably just see there, the penetration is very low. So in Africa and Brazil, you're only talking about one or 2% of the population have a smartphone. Most other people that have a mobile phone will have a basic or a feature phone. And if we looked at the UK market, 37% of all UK users now have a smartphone. So that's about 18 million people. So that's your potential audience today. However, next year, we're hoping for about 50% penetration. So if you have an establishment, expect about half the people that enter your premises are going to have a phone that is capable of pulling down data being able to position, using Wi-Fi, using 3G. So it's a very exciting time to be walking around and producing services for these personal computers. And within the next five years, it's predicted that most people will connect to the internet via mobile phones, not via PCs. So it's a really interesting and exciting place to be. And when you look at some of the things that people do with their smartphones, what you might find is that if you looked at email, virtually everybody who has a smartphone is going to check their email on it. But if you have a feature phone or a standard phone, you're not really likely to use these types of services. And what's really interesting is we talked about IPTV and how, you know, is that the right thing to be even doing on mobile? Well, actually, if you don't have a smartphone, only about 1.7% of the population are even going to consume any video. So it's a tiny, tiny market. However, the consuming TV bit or a video bit is really increasing because of the way that people are connecting to these services. And these, say, video content might be more than an app, it might be more than a mobile website. And more likely than not, you'll either be on 3G, which some people have mixed feelings about in terms of is it a good experience. But actually half the people always connect on their mobile phone at home and generally on a Wi-Fi connection. So it's not always being about out and about at lost or looking for something to do. It's also a really convenient device to use when you're at home rather than starting up your PC, maybe just to check your email or your social network status. And the main focus, as I said, has really been on Apple. And they've started, I guess, the revolution as such. But what's interesting here is that this is just somebody predicting what is going to happen in the market, who's going to be the dominant player. And you can see there that the top blue line is Symbian. So that's traditionally been Nokia and as you can see now it's probably or might be even too late to sell your Nokia shares because most people predict that they are going to lose a tremendous amount of traffic to their handsets. The most predominant player is going to be Android. And everyone kind of agrees that Android now is probably about the same space or the same number of devices in the market as Apple. So the main three players in the market today are actually Apple, BlackBerry and Android. And people use different things for different phones. If you're an iPhone user you might find that you use much more content services than someone with an Android phone. And also if you're a BlackBerry user you might not even have any apps on your phone because it might be a corporate phone and it's locked so you can't even install any apps. So it's kind of a different market. And I just wanted to briefly talk about these different operating systems because it's really important when you think about your app strategy to think about your potential market and about how these different or how the different services might work on these different phones. So these are the dominant players Apple, BlackBerry, Android which is obviously Google. Symbian, really decreasing Windows Phone 7 it's a relatively new version of Windows that only came out in sort of November-December time. Palm doesn't really have that much penetration in the UK but it has had a reasonable amount of penetration in North America. And actually it's getting even more fragmented and more complicated because there are new players coming to the market like Nokia that are creating their own operating system. So this is really difficult when you are thinking about investing in an app chances are that it's going to have to be what's called a native build of an app and that's where software developers create something from the ground up to make sure that it works on these phones. And there are different types of apps but what I will do before I start on that is just talk about the different languages. So it starts to get fragmented difficult because each operating system has a different markup language. So it's quite interesting on the web or easy on the web because it's kind of more or less just HTML. However in the app environment they have different types of languages that you need to know to create your app. Some tools coming that are making this a lot easier however at the moment if you wanted to do a really sharp, fully interactive application these are the types of skills that your development team or your agency need to know. And actually to be honest there is a real shortage of developers so that's something to be aware of if you're developing an app it might take a little bit more time and money than you might think to get it developed but there is a real shortage, skill shortage. And the BBC really focus on creating native apps so that's something where you think about all the interactions you might want and you write the code from the ground up really but there are different options as well and if we looked across the top native apps are very rich experience you can interact with all the features of the phone such as the camera and the address book GPS for location but it takes a lot of time and it's expensive but you can also do what's called a hybrid where you create this app and it might go out to the internet and just pull in little bits of web pages so it kind of still all looks like an app but it's a mix of both native and more a traditional web view and if you have a mobile site and you want to get into the app stores you can also do something like create an HTML wrapper so basically all you're doing is you're wrapping your little mobile site into a little piece of code that allows you to get it into the app store the users download it they click the link but actually all it's really doing is taking you to a mobile website rather than an app and if you have a mobile website you might be able to make some changes or even get it into stores by doing that way and the thing that everyone's talking about now are things called widgets and they are something that's developed in what's called HTML5 and it allows you to create a very rich experience but it's much easier to do than creating a native app it's faster and it's more traditional in the terms of how you build it and Flash has always been talked about it's something that is really cool it's on the web wouldn't it be great if it could work on your phone the reality with Flash is that actually it's not quite there yet it's not there on any Apple devices for all sorts of reasons but it is starting to appear on some mostly Android phones where if you do have Flash parts on your website or your mobile website they will actually work however it is quite buggy still and it isn't quite yet the seamless experience it could be and in terms of video it does take a lot of processing to do Flash video so it can kind of create some issues with using a lot of battery life on the phone in the simplest way if you wanted to get into an app store would be purely to create a shortcut and not all app stores allow you to do this but it's basically just a little beast of code that you create or maybe if you go to a store like an independent market that does apps you can create code there and it will just go straight to your mobile site so that's the easiest route so if you're going to do cross platform it's expensive generally and time consuming but as I said there are some things coming there is no silver bullet but there are some tools coming that allow you to create apps so what it will do is the engine once you've created it will kind of spit it out for the different versions that you might want to be targeting but at the moment this is really an emerging area and the thing about smartphones is that they are really constantly changing so every three or four months you're going to get an alert on your smartphone that might give you a whole range of new features to enable your phone to do a whole lot of new great things so if you do start creating apps you really need to think about what is your long term strategy because every three or four months for every operating system you need to ensure that your app still works and if you're someone like the BBC they have lots of content coming in via feeds and you may also do content coming from feeds where if anything breaks it can cause all sorts of problems and actually what happens is if you build an app it takes a long time for it to get approved and updated and each operating system really has its own app store and all you guys will probably be familiar with these Apple have their own Android market have their own and there are some independent ones also not on the Apple side but on the other operating systems that allow you to create or put your apps into the app stores and the amount of apps that people have on average is 37 if you have an iPhone and only about 10 if you have a feature phone or a Blackberry so really the big numbers or the social consumption of apps is really centered purely in the iPhone or Apple world and actually what's interesting is that the most popular apps aren't really what you would call utility apps that do things and games have been around for a long time but they are classified as an app and the future of apps is really interesting because it's not really just about smartphones it's about all sorts of devices that are coming including in-car stereos, tablets which everyone knows about and also you're going to be able to create plugins for your smartphone or your tablets that make it much more like a PC so you were able to walk around or you can now with more or less a portable PC in your pocket just to finish off on some BBC apps we do two types of apps we've really classified apps as two different things enduring apps which is something that really is going to last a long time things like BBC News BBC Sport iPlayer and then there are more apps that are much more topical things like Glastonbury Doctor Who or World Cup but BBC don't really do any topical apps at the moment we're really focused on enduring apps something that is high quality that people will keep coming back and using I'm sure that some of you have already seen these but these are the iPad news sites they've been very successful it's available in the UK it's available externally as well outside the UK but there are a range of different food that you can see just on the right hand side we also have it available on iPhone and BBC iPlayer is the most recent app that's been developed and that's available on iPad and also Android phones and we talked a little bit about apps that maybe have a shorter shelf life like Glastonbury and for BBC most of that stuff really lives with BBC Worldwide rather than BBC UK but there are a range of different food and children's apps that are available the greatest threat I think for smartphones today is really it used to be data plans, network speed and battery life which was concerning everyone which is still kind of there but I think the critical thing that we need to get right is fake apps, viruses and sharing your location where you're working people need to be a little bit more wary about that telling their Facebook status that they're on holiday for two weeks and it might have their address as well it's probably not a great thing to do and also security on Wi-Fi networks if you are connecting to a Wi-Fi network you really need to make sure that it's secure because it is potentially possible that people can intercept all of your emails and messages as well so these are my three top tips you need to ensure that your mobile website works on or your website works on mobile first before you consider apps because most people, the mass market are not connecting via apps just yet they are more likely to hit your site with your website and apps are really a commitment so they could be useful or it could be a gameplay but you can't just launch it and then expect not to have any more investment in it and also just really consider your marketing there's about 250,000 apps in the iPhone or iTunes store you need to really work about how you're going to get your apps in front of mind for people when you develop them because a lot of organisations where they spend lots of money building a very complicated app that does really great things but there is no marketing budget and no one downloads it that's it, thank you thank you Mark


Marketing is an important step in moving products from farm to table. Farmers should consider marketing their goods in more than one way and in more than one location. Direct marketing options include roadside stands that may or may not be located on a farm, pick your own operations, online platforms, community-supported agriculture, and farmers markets. Farmers should be on a well-traveled road near a population center. They should have good visibility from the highway, be away from sharp curves, hill crests, and high-speed highways. Have easy turn-offs and return flow of traffic. Provide plenty of parking space. Offer access to power and clean restroom facilities. A farm may not be the best location for sales. A stand in another location may be a better option. Farmers need a variety of produce, but it can be difficult for one person to grow everything. Growers sometimes purchase additional products from other farmers. Pick-your-own operations are popular for crops such as blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and musketines. Other crops can also be marketed this way. The location of a pick-your-own farm is not as critical as the location of a roadside stand. Even customers doing the harvesting requires less labor, handling, shipping, and storage. At pick-your-own farms, think about parking, restroom facilities, and additional insurance needed because of a higher risk of accidents. Online options are available for marketing produce. Many farms have websites, electronic newsletters, text alerts, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages. Many farmers post pictures of their harvested crop and buyers contact them instantly. Community-supported agriculture is a marketing option where customers pay money before the crops are planted and then receive produce during the season. Farmers refer to this as purchasing a share, and a customer could purchase half shares or multiple shares depending on the amount of produce needed. These shares are picked up at the farm or another convenient location once a week. A farmer's market has several advantages. The location is usually in a high-traffic area. It provides small farms with a sales outlet. It is a great way to advertise farm products that ripen at other times of the year. The disadvantages of a farmer's market include time and travel away from the farm and consumers who purchase in small quantities. Before participating at a farmer's market, contact the market manager. Quest information on rules for a particular market, times, location, days open, fee, and items allowed to be sold.


Hello and welcome to today's episode of the International Daily Roundup by People's Dispatch where we bring you some of the top stories from around the world. Let's take a look at today's headlines. Horrific surge in migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Palestinian face brutal violence in Israeli prisons, United States finally authorizes aid to Afghanistan and John Donner workers on strike in the United States. In our first story, 164 people were killed after two separate migrant boats capsized in the Mediterranean Sea in the past week. The first incident took place on December 17th in which 102 people died after their wooden boat capsized. The second took place on December 18th when the Libyan coast guard retrieved the bodies of at least 62 people. A third boat carrying 210 people was intercepted the same day. According to the International Organization of Migration or the IOM, around 1500 migrants have drowned and died so far in 2021. There has been an increase in migrant crossings from Libya which serves as a major transit point from Africa and West Asia to Europe. This surge has also been fueled by an increasingly brutal crackdown on migrants by Libyan authorities. The IOM has estimated that 31,500 people were intercepted and forced back to Libya in 2021. This has almost tripled the number of migrants detained in 2020. Once captured, people are sent to militia and detention centers where widespread abuse has been documented. Dozens of people are feared dead after another shipwreck was reported of the Greek islands of Folligandros on December 21st. Greece has remained one of the first destinations of people trying to seek asylum in Europe. However, arrivals to the continent have reduced drastically owing to border forces and pushbacks. The European Union's border agency Frontex has also been found aiding the Libyan coast guard. Israel reportedly shut down all prison sections holding Palestinians affiliated with Hamas on December 22nd. Rides groups Adamir also reported that section 12 of the Nafa prison had been closed. Prison officials transferred 80 prisoners outside their cells and beat them severely in the freezing cold. Several people have been hospitalized or sent to solitary confinement. This followed an incident where a Palestinian prisoner injured an Israeli prison guard. Palestinians across Israeli prisons had been protesting for days. The actions were undertaken in solidarity with female Palestinian prisoners who were brutally assaulted in the Dhamon prison. Between December 14th and 15th, Israeli forces beat female prisoners and forcibly removed their hijabs or headscarves. They were also prevented from showering for three days and the electricity was cut off to their cells which were also tear-gassed. The violence began after the women began resisting collective penalties imposed upon them including restrictions on family visits. Three women, Monak Adan, Shorukh Dawayat and Mara Bakir were removed from their prison cells and shifted to solitary confinement. Bakir serves as a prisoner's representative. Their confinement sparked protests by the Palestinian prisoners movement and rights groups. Three fellow prisoners also launched a hunger strike in support of the three women on December 21st. Finally, on Wednesday, Palestinian outlets including Wafa News reported that the three women had been released from solitary confinement and returned to their cells. The United States has finally issued authorization to allow aid into Afghanistan. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC issued three licenses on December 22nd. U.S. officials, international agencies like the United Nations and the NGOs will now be able to conduct official business with the Taliban and Haqqani network. The decision followed shortly after the UN Security Council approved a resolution to allow aid into Afghanistan earlier on Wednesday. It permits the payment of funds and other financial assets or resources and goods and services needed for the timely delivery of assistance. The U.S. froze $9.5 billion of Afghan reserves after the Taliban took over in August. The World Bank and the IMF reportedly froze another $1.5 billion in foreign funds under U.S. pressure. This pushed Afghanistan's economy into collapse after decades of making it dependent on such funding. Nearly 23 million people in the country are at risk of facing life-threatening levels of food insecurity this winter. Out of this, 8.7 million people are nearing famine. The wheat harvest will also be significantly lower as 73% of Afghanistan's provinces are undergoing a severe drought. Hundreds of people marched to the now defunct U.S. embassy in Kabul on December 21, demanding the immediate release of frozen Afghan reserves. And finally, we go to the United States where workers at the John Donner Deserts plant in Santa Fe have been on strike for over 50 days. 175 bakery workers organized by the BCTG have walked out on November 3. The strike was called to protest mandatory overtime, low wages and a punitive point system which gave workers only three days of sick leave per year. The action is being led by mostly Latina migrant women who are being forced to work up to 15 hours a day. This is a violation of their contract which stipulates 8 hours workdays. Moreover, strikers told Moe Perfect Union that their production quota had reached 13 cakes per minute for a worker. Workers say the number of cakes on the ice cream line has gone up to 34 to 43 per minute. They have also stated that there has been instances where the company gave points when people went for cancer treatments or for taking off time for medical reasons. If workers exceeded 7 points over a period of 12 months, they lose their jobs. On top of the brutal schedule, workers are only earning between $16 to $18 an hour. The BCTGM is demanding a dollar per hour wage increase. Workers have also demanded better retirement benefits. Last week, the striking workers overwhelmingly rejected a contract offer by John Donner. Among other issues, the deal only offered a 50 cents an hour wage increase. That's all for today's episode. For more such stories, visit our website at www.peepersdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Thank you for watching. Thank you very much.


Welcome to the end of RailsConf. My name's Sumit Jain and I'm the Development Director at Unabridged Software. I'm gonna talk to you today about leveling up teams. This conversation of leveling up teams has been going on for a long time now. I think since the coming of coding schools, we have found repeatedly over the past several years to say nothing of the past three days a constant stream of ideas that we should value the mentorship. That said, I don't think that anybody disagrees with that. Did anybody come to RailsConf thinking mentorship is worthless? And luckily, over the past three days, you've been convinced, finally, that mentorship is a good thing. Probably not. We all agree that mentorship is valuable.  So there's some kind of a disconnect somewhere. What's the issue? Are we lying? Are we just secretly haters of mentorship? I would argue, actually, some of us are. There's this idea, I think, for a lot of developers that our skill isn't Ruby, our skill isn't SQL or JavaScript, our skill is that given enough time, we can solve any problem by ourselves. And so, when we see that other developers need active mentorship to solve those same problems, it's borderline offensive. And so it's worth considering if you're building a mentorship program at your company that that attitude may be somewhere inside of your developers. That this idea that you shouldn't need mentorship, so why should we work extra hard to provide it? That's probably a small minority of us. I don't think that most of us identify with that attitude, at least consciously. For most of us, we just don't know how to mentor. There's a hopeful assumption that mentorship skills are in you as long as you've been doing this for long enough and as long as you're good enough at it. But they're not intuitive skills. Sometimes the very things that you think you're doing that are going to be valuable mentorship to your junior developers or anything but. And so given that these aren't intuitive skills, I thought it would be worthwhile to at least talk about things you can do that over a long period of time or a short period of time, maybe you will slowly become a better mentor. And these are not values judgments. In fact, many of these tactics might not work for you at all. I expect maybe for some of you, none of these are going to be that useful whatsoever.  But ultimately what I'm hoping is not so much that you get direct value out of every single one of the numerous tactics I'm about to present. Mostly it's to consider this. I think you'll get more value out of debating the merit of the tactics to follow than you will from just taking this idea that mentorship is good and letting that simmer. This passive idea that if you let that value simmer, you'll just become better at mentorship. To me, all that is is companies recognizing that mentorship has become a trendy value in the marketplace and now they need to say that they're mentors. So you'll do better disagreeing with these tactics and debating them amidst yourselves than you will just by taking the value of mentorship at face value. Okay, every time you see a fun picture, that's a tactic coming up. So the first one is provided you have a lot of questions being asked in whatever channels you use for questions, I would suggest codifying some format for asking those questions. Probably this is done implicitly already because the pattern that I have in mind is inherent to everything we do as problem solvers, let alone engineers. I would say that you can lint a question in the same way that you can lint your Ruby or JSON or anything else. The pattern that I think is the most useful for question asking is probably the one that you expect and you expect it because it's there in every single unit test you've ever written. Codify it, write it down, tell your employees, your team members, this is how we ask questions now. What are you trying to accomplish? Give me steps, what did you expect to happen and then what actually happened? Right, this is not a revelation for any of you, I would think, because this is again what every test looks like, but the idea that you can make this an enforced format for every question before you answer the question, I think that there's power to that tactic. The reason I like this is because first, it allows the question asker to slowly, more methodically understand their question. Why are they struggling? Well, now they have to spell it out for you. Sometimes they'll even get the answer before they finish writing the question. The second reason I like it is that it gives you the mentor, the question answerer, a way to be helpful without jumping to the end and just giving them the answer. As you help them formulate the question, because it's hard to do this a lot of the times for questions, but as you help them formulate the question in this way, you're being helpful. You're mentoring, but you haven't jumped to the end and saved them a stack overflow. Instead, you're walking them through the process of solving problems, probably similarly to how you do. Okay, new image. I'm gonna kind of be rushing through these. Not rushing, but I'm not gonna spend as much time as you might think I will on each slide. Okay, I know slack usage is a little bit controversial today, we're finding ourselves distracted, but if you're using some channel for frequent communication, there's a good chance that that channel allows for private messages, like Slack does. So what I'd like to suggest is a rule that you can't have technical conversations in Slack private messages. Anything that is technical. I mean, if you've got an HR concern, find a private channel. But if you have a technical question of some kind, put it in a public channel or a private channel, but put it in the channel where all of the eyes for that team can see it. This does a few things. First, it exposes the most knowledge possible and pain points. There's a good chance that somebody else is gonna have that same question if they don't already. Now they don't have to ask it again and they've seen that question asking is something that this team does a lot of. There's something else that it does. If you're the team lead or in a position of leadership on the team, now you get to see what the most frequent questions are. And if you can see what people are repeatedly asking questions about, that's a pain point and it might be something worth you investing some time ensuring up operationally or the documentation or something. But if you don't have this rule in place, your most insecure developers, the ones most in need of help are going to be reaching out to people privately and getting help and now you don't see any of that.  It's everywhere. You hear people tell it to newcomers, to any industry, to any field. It's a way to give them reassurance. You don't have to shout it out. I'm not gonna do one of those. All right, one, two, three.  There's a good chance that you've heard this time and time again. I would argue it is a mistruth or at least a partial mistruth.  If only because the asking of it makes that person feel stupid.  It's not very helpful advice. Instead, let's accept the fact that as humans we have ego and there's really not much that a team can do to completely negate the impact of having an ego.   You've got the Slack channel. You've got whatever room is there for general technical questions, but people won't ask because it's not anonymous. For the ones that we feel the most insecure about, we don't want our coworkers to know that that's something we don't know. When we hear four other developers over there laughing hysterically about something related to the code base, but we don't even know what that thing is, that's stupid question. Not because our actual ignorance is stupid, but again, it makes us feel that way. So where do you go? IRC, train your developers on how to connect to Ruby, Ruby on Rails, whatever, but there are channels full of developers that at least in my experience are maybe sometimes a little bit short, but helpful. It's an anonymous place where you can quickly get a new alias if you find yourself feeling too insecure to keep your old identity. It's a place where you can actually go and ask questions that nobody else should see from your perspective. This doesn't mean that companies are off the hook, right? This doesn't mean that you get to hold a culture where people should feel bad for asking questions, but at the very least, it gives your developers an outlet when there is something that they just can't quite muster the courage to ask. Okay, a little bit of a new frame then. One of the misconceptions about new devs is that, or that many seniors can have, that is, is that they're struggling with something due to a lack of coding knowledge. So when the junior and senior work together, the senior assumes that the thing they need to explain is related to how the code works or related to how the Rails framework works. Aside from being unhelpful, that misdiagnosis can be particularly infuriating for the junior dev because, first, they're not struggling because of the API. I know there's nothing on the slide, by the way, if you're wondering. First, it's infuriating for the new developer because that's not why they have that problem, and so you're not being helpful. But second, it's also infuriating because now they're afraid that other people on their team underestimate them so much that they're explaining some basic part of the application. Junior devs often have enough coding knowledge to work their way through a problem. What they're missing are business knowledge and tooling. Think about what the path is or what paths plural exist for getting unstuck when your problem is code. You can Google it, you'll find Stack Overflows, stick a binding.pry in it, even just brute force trial and error, and you sometimes will find an answer when your problem is code. What do you do, though, when your problem is that you have eight different classes and you understand every single one, but you still can't solve the problem? What do you do when you know that a bug was caused by a form submission three months ago but you don't know how to get logs for that far back? That's frustrating because you feel like you've learned the things that you're supposed to know by now, but it's this extra knowledge outside of code that's holding you back. Business knowledge and tooling are among the most opaque parts of writing software to new devs. This knowledge tends to live just in the brains of your senior-most developers and it's why we're so desperate to cling to them and we don't wanna lose them to any other company. It's because we recognize that code knowledge, while important, tends to be one of the first things that people get proficient with and we need to hold on to our seniors. So there's no silver bullet for this. This is a very hard problem to solve but a couple tactics that might help. First, consider removing or at least documenting the abstractions that live in your application that are everywhere. I'll explain what I mean by this. It's unlikely that a new developer is very familiar with anything beyond the rails way of doing something in your application. So if your application is littered with patterns or abstractions that change how forms work, for example, it's gonna be frustrating for a new dev to jump in and find that what should be an easy task is actually now unfamiliar to them. Using cells or draper for views or vertus for your form objects or other popular tools that speed things up in rails for developers that know enough about it to get them. That's one thing but you're gonna have a junior developer that you tell very simply, go add an update action to that CRUD resource and they're like, yes, finally, I know all of those words, I can do this. And then they look at it and it looks nothing like what they learned and that's because you have a layer of abstraction between standard development and your rails application and that was never communicated. Maybe there's a small line at the top that includes a module that they're supposed to know totally changes how Active Record is gonna handle that one form. But they haven't internalized the rails way as much as you have and as a result it's just a frustrating process for them and now their self-doubt continues to bubble. These tools, these patterns, these things that we do to make the life of a senior developer easier, they're not inherently bad. I'm not saying you have to kill all of them. What I am saying is that if you're going to keep them you have to at least discuss the ramifications on new developers and how they'll take to your application. Either remove them or write something in a very clear place that tells new developers this is a change that we're making to how we develop rails beyond your basic 15 minute blog. Here's what you should check out to get familiar with it so that you can actually contribute. One of the reasons that you might be proud of your code base is that you have factored it down into very small classes that each contain a few concise methods. We often talk about how this makes code easier to reason about, easier to test, all of that is true but a trade-off can sometimes be that it makes it really hard to get a macro level understanding of what's going on that touches all of those small classes. Sometimes it's a lot of effort to traverse through the long chain of join tables to figure out which one column needs to be updated. Again, there's no silver bullet to fixing this. Method documentation can help you understand the inputs and output of a single method but usually that doesn't help you with the high level understanding of what that class is about. So the goal with what I would call domain level documentation but the term is confusing, call it whatever you like, the goal is simply to make the macro intent of smaller classes more explicit. The more testable, the more modular your code is, great but for humans trying to get an understanding of the business logic driving the need for 18 classes, that needs to live somewhere. Don't assume that 28 consecutive belongs to and has many statements expresses the full intent of some class. Sometimes a paragraph at the top is a lot better. It's easy for me to say this standing up on this stage, go document all of the domains in your application, go figure out a way to make the macro level explicit. Writing that out is a big job, I get it. It's not easy to document a complex system. That said, part of the reason why it's hard is because as engineers, we love to find the perfect data structure for documentation and that holds us back. Are we gonna use this folder structure for our documentation? Should that big block of code come and go at the top of the class? Or should it be like a markdown file in a subfolder of app models? All of those decisions will eventually mean that you just don't write anything. A fix for this is using screencasts as documentation. Don't write it at all. Take five minutes, record yourself talking about those 18 classes, explaining why those 28 consecutive association lines mean what they mean and put that in a Google Drive. No elegant data structure, just five minutes if it ends up being six, no big deal. If it ends up being 20, honestly, no big deal there either. Just try to keep it short. Record a video that explains to the viewer why this code exists and what it does. You'll make that in a literal five minute time period and you don't have to worry about where it goes. Just stick it in a Google Drive. If you end up with a whole bunch of them, figure out the folder structure and stuff later. Don't worry about figuring that out first. If you are so blessed as to have hundreds of documentation videos, you'll make time to put it into a folder structure. What else? Pair programming. Pair programming is great. If it's working for you, keep doing it. It's a wonderful technique. I have nothing bad to say about it except that sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes it's hard to make it practical. Sometimes the gulf that exists between two developers' skill sets makes it so that pairing is just frustrating for everybody involved. Sometimes, sometimes the best thing is to just spend some time helping the more junior developer ramp up context so that they are parable. Instead of pairing, consider just for a while watching other devs work. Let go for this time for a short while that we need to have equity between every single one of the developers on our team. If it's just not possible, then you're not doing anybody a favor by trying to force it in. You can get a lot out of watching a more experienced developer just do their job. Not really even expecting them to teach you anything. Just sit next to them for 20 minutes, two hours, whatever's comfortable, just watch them. Sometimes experienced devs don't even have the awareness of how much they know. And so they can't teach you it, because they're not even aware that they know it, so their unconscious competence is now a barrier to teaching. And so instead, just let them watch. Sit somebody next to you and consider all the things that they are learning that you would have forgotten to call out directly if you were trying to teach them. How you phrase that Google query. The manic but methodical way that your mouse moves around technical documentation, because you've learned to into it where the meaningful bits are gonna go. How you organize your screen, shortcuts you use in your code editor. How you debug in production by grepping for the unique ID of some record. Things that again, you would just do, but now they're seeing you do it. And as very intelligent pattern detectors, you'll find that they are picking up on a lot of what you're doing without even realizing it. I missed all of this chat about training and mentorship. It's easy to forget about the after. After you've got a team that is suitably leveled up, don't lose them. Stick on to your talent. You invested in them hopefully, and you want them to continue to grow within your company. These are big topics. So tactics for these could be really an entire conference unto themselves. But a couple things that I think are useful, especially within the context of junior devs in this industry. Affirm the hire. This is a difficult field that we've all chosen. Every day we solve problems that feel just a little bit beyond our abilities, and then somehow we find a solution anyways. We've learned to live inside of that fear, uncertainty, frustration, and it's very engaging work. But it's very difficult work, and for a junior developer, sometimes that job is double difficult because they're doing it while also trying to silence a raging self-doubt that they don't actually belong on your team.  It is such a small action. But for some of your more insecure new hires, or really just for all of them, in your one-on-ones, simply saying you were a good hire could go miles. Just to let them know that though they may have self-doubt, they're a good part of the team and things will get better eventually. But at least you've mitigated to some degree this idea that they're afraid that they should never have been hired in the first place or that they're gone as soon as you find somebody a little bit more competent. That fear will be in them and it'll be easy for you to ameliorate it. This one's a little bit harder to explain. Let me paint a picture. Five devs on a team. There's the boss, three experienced devs, and then one newer developer. Every day everybody works hard. But of course, like with a lot of teams, there's a bit of gift sharing and Slack and there's some chit chat in the hallways about unrelated things. When that happens, usually it's the three experienced devs that are doing most of the gift sharing, most of the chit chat. If you're a more junior developer in the audience, you're probably gonna relate to this one person, the more junior developer. If you're maybe a tech lead or an engineering manager, maybe you're thinking you're the boss. Whatever you are, consider that as the story finishes. The three developers are enjoying themselves, chatting, taking their breaks. It's not like they're doing a bad thing wasting time. It's part of the acceptable amount of the day that we want people to waste 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever your culture might be, four hours. And so. The question is, why isn't the boss joining in and why isn't the junior dev joining in? And the reason maybe could be that the junior developer won't join in because they're afraid that if they are seen to be having fun, that the secret's out. The reason they're getting just one story point done every sprint is because they're having too much fun hanging out with everybody. They don't wanna seem like they're enjoying their job. They wanna be like the boss who's heads down all the time working through the day. And so there are a few fixes to this. One is better communication on your team. Tell people that it's okay to waste time, that they should have breaks as part of their day. Some teams are better about this than others. Some teams are really good at doing this without saying anything. It's just part of the personality or the ethos of the people leading the team. But think about what it is for your team and at least be deliberate about it. I would say though that the best fix for this doesn't come from any of the employees. It comes from the boss. If you're an engineering manager and you feel like you are always heads down and you feel like the tone that you're setting on your team is one that taking 20 to 40 minutes out every day for a break is no good, add five minutes to your calendar every single day to deliberately waste time with your employees. Just see what happens. Give yourself that break. You probably need it too. A lot has been said and written about investment time. I've written a little bit longer of an article about this which if you wanted to learn more about my thoughts on it, you could read, but just a couple things here that I wanted to point out. If you're not familiar, investment time is at some companies like Fridays every lunch, they'll lecture on some gem that they're learning about or something like that. But it's any kind of extracurricular, so to speak, work that's done and supported by the company. I'm a fan of it. But I think that sometimes teams squander opportunities to get the most out of investment time. Mostly, this has to do with failing to prioritize depth over breadth. Most of the investment time that I hear about is things like, oh, on Friday, I'm gonna have, we're gonna have lunch brought in and one of our devs is gonna talk about a new JavaScript framework that they've been tinkering around with. But the problem is that developers don't need another avenue for getting breadth added to their world. They're getting that already. Breadth of tech ecosystem is being flung at them from every direction. Depth is elusive. How do you factor depth building into your investment time? I think before I talk about how you would do that, a quick point about this is that if you were to talk to the people on your team who do have depth, talk to your most senior developers, ask them how they got that way. Did they read some article that gave them depth? Did they read eight articles? Did they read 800 articles that gave them depth? I doubt it. Most of the developers on your team that have depth got it because at their previous job or previous, previous job, they were the only dev and they needed to learn some skills. And so it's irrational to expect anybody else to build depth any other way. You have to create an environment where your less senior devs are gonna be confronted by the need to build that depth. So give them a long running project. Give them something big to build that isn't gonna have stakeholders breathing down their neck the whole time. Let them work on it for a long time. Let them launch it and let them find that there are issues with scaling it or let them add some of those patterns that end up being prolific across the app and see how they fare with them. But let them do whatever you would have that the other senior devs do and just don't let the senior devs touch it because this is something that's meant to provide depth to the newer developers, not breadth. So I would really reconsider the learning lunch approach because as much fun as it is and it's good for team bonding, it might be sacrificing an opportunity to add depth to a team and instead just doing an easier, let me introduce you to one gem per week type of mentality. And finally, if you are gonna do this, try to allocate enough time. Two hours every Friday for lunch is just not enough. That's, first of all, it's two more context switches in the day. Mostly it's just not enough time to really write any code to get deep in anything. So give it a full day if you can. Leveling up your developers continues as you want them to become bigger parts of the industry. If you want your developers to eventually come to conferences and speak, you can have them start to write pros. Every time they implement something new at your company, have them write a tutorial about how they did it. So one of them implements elastic search in your application, great. Have them write a blog article about that process and then stick it on the company blog. Benefits of this are actually pretty numerous because for one thing, when you are writing something for the first time or implementing a new utility for the first time, you're probably just falling some kind of paint by the numbers implementation of it, but you're gonna miss some things and when you write an article, it forces you to crystallize what you've just learned. Also, your more senior devs can do a technical edit of that article and find that there are things you should have mentioned but didn't and maybe that's a gap in the knowledge that the junior developer has. It creates documentation. Every time you do this, that's internal documentation that explains for that application why we used this pattern or this library. And of course, as I mentioned, it builds authority. Your junior developers, your senior developers, everybody's gonna benefit from boosting their personal brand. Your company as well can benefit from that. Some of the most well respected companies at this conference as Ruby Consultancies made a lot of their authority through the writing of these blog articles. Maybe they do great work, maybe that work is not meaningfully greater than everybody else but that brand is untouchable. This is the last one I've got. People in general and engineers specifically are very, very good at gleaning wisdom from patterns. And so, for example, how you manage a meeting, if that's what you're doing right now, how you manage a meeting probably has a lot to do with how meetings were managed at your last two jobs. Nobody ever sat you down and said, Alec, let me teach you how to manage a meeting step by step, right? Probably you just saw it done. At some point, somebody asked you to do it and then you did your best to confidently recreate what you had seen for many years. And that's how we train our managers. At some point, some of your devs will want to become tech leads. And instead of having a more abrupt transition into that role, just let them audit those meetings now. Let your devs see what it looks like inside of a mock-up review session. Let them see what a sprint planning meeting looks like. Let them see what it looks like when stakeholders are part of it and how the tone changes all of a sudden. Give your devs the opportunity to have extra curricular knowledge being built and slowly they'll start to bring other people up with them as well. I probably should have switched to this slide before, but this is what I just said. At the end of the day, like I said, this is not about here's a playbook, go follow these things exactly and now you have a mentorship-driven team. What I'd really prefer is that you ask yourselves and ask your team if these are things that would be useful for you. And sometimes they won't be, but that debate, I still think, would yield more value than just thinking to yourself mentorship, we need to be it. That's not gonna give you a lot. Disagree if you'd like to, but at the end of the day, this is gonna give you more return than anything else. I mean, I said no values judgments, but this is at least one. Your junior devs are probably more competent than you give them credit for. And if you try to help them without listening to them, there's a good chance that you're just gonna frustrate them. Miss the mark on what they're actually asking you. And every time you do that, you make the next session of pairing, the next instructional session harder. So debate this stuff amidst yourselves, but also listen to your devs as you continue. This is something I started working on just today. I don't know if it's gonna be useful or not. This is not the actual thing, but it's a screenshot of the various tactics that I've talked about today, aligned with some of the values that I think they might provide, like questioning format, might help other people become better mentors. This is about a fourth of the table, which I haven't actually styled up much yet, but it is on my website. So if you wanna look at the whole thing, you can look at it, your exes might go in different places than where I placed them. But again, the point is to mostly talk about it, not to just take this as a concrete plan of action. If you do want to look at slides, they're up now. And if you want to talk to me, good luck, I'm gonna be leaving for a flight pretty soon. But you can tweet at me, it's me, Jane. As I mentioned, I'm the development director at Unabridged Software, we're in Omaha, Nebraska. If you are looking to hire a consultancy or if you're looking to work at a consultancy, let me know and I'd love to put you in touch with the right people. That's all I've got, thank you.