Number one opening statement please tell us why you are running and what experience you bring to the position. What will be different for the people of the state of Vermont as a whole because you have been elected to this position and what qualifies you to make those changes happen. Up now candidate Chris Erickson. Hello I'm Chris Erickson and I am the best candidate for United States Senator. I have the only valid plan to reduce inflation and bring a lot more money to Vermont without raising your federal taxes. Now right now the US Congress votes to give billions and billions of your hard-earned tax dollars to corporations as subsidies and they use our hard-earned money to make huge profits for themselves. We're getting nothing in return for the fruits of our labor so what I will do is sponsor a bill so that whenever the US Congress votes to give our hard-earned dollars to corporations as huge billion dollar subsidies that we will get a share of their profits that they make using our money. That's only fair. What's going on now is modern-day slavery. Question number two what are your top three priorities and what committee appointments are you seeking? Up now candidate Chris Erickson. My top priority is sponsoring a bill to require that no subsidies shall be given to corporations unless they give back to taxpayers a share of their corporate profits made by using our tax dollars. We need a share of the corporate profits to use for all levels of education, higher teacher pay, health care, dental care, childcare, elderly care, infrastructure and to help families start new small farms and build trailer parks for homeless citizens. I will sponsor a bill for freedom of speech and freedom of association for all US senators to allow them to join any committee they want to join. The committee appointment system is unconstitutional. Question number three constitutional rights given that the Supreme Court has overturned what was thought to be settled law that is reproductive rights are you concerned about other rights that we may be taking for granted coming under threat? What rules should Congress play if any in protecting those rights? Up next candidate Chris Erickson. People take for granted their right to have weapons under the Second Amendment. They're two A rights. These rights are at risk all the time.  We don't want to be the next Ukraine having weapons and guns at home under the United States Constitution isn't just about hunting it's about protecting ourselves from foreign invaders. Just ask the Ukrainians I will work to uphold our complete Second Amendment rights to every last bullet. We also have taken our freedom of speech for granted and we have to fight hard now against corporations denying us our freedom of speech. I will sponsor a bill to give us back our freedom of speech stolen by social media companies who take our personal information and sell it for their profits while simultaneously denying us our freedom of speech. The internet is a powerful tool for huge corporations to abuse us and it is time to declare all social media sites equivalent to using a telephone in the privacy of our homes where we still expect freedom of speech. Question number four, health care. Health care costs are nearly 20% of the US gross domestic product. There seems to be no end to the cost increases. What does Congress need to do to curb cost and also assure quality health care? Up next candidate Chris Erickson. I will sponsor a bill to change funding for the NIH the National Institute of Health because right now we pay our tax dollars taken right out of our paychecks. They go to the IRS and then the US Congress votes to give billions and billions of our tax dollars to the NIH and they hand out our money for research design and development of new prescription drugs, vaccines and medical devices and under the Baydoll Act of 1980 the lead researcher owns the patent rights even though we the taxpayers paid for all of the costs of the research design and development. The lead researcher then makes a deal with pharmaceutical corporations and they sell the new products worldwide and they make all the profits. I will work to repeal the Baydoll Act of 1980 and I will sponsor a new bill so that when our taxpayer dollars are used and corporations sell new pharmaceutical products worldwide for a fortune, we will get our fair share of the profits to pay for all of the health care, dental care, home health aids, hospital care, nurses for all of our medical needs, our fair share of the profits that the pharmaceutical corporations are making because we paid for the research design and development when we demand our share of the profits which I will do that will pay for all of our health care needs. Question number five, criminal justice reform. What can be realistically achieved by Congress to curb gun violence in US communities? Next, Chris Erickson answers. I will sponsor a bill to require that all schools, shopping centers and government buildings have live surveillance cameras in every room, closet, parking lot, hallway, sports field and door and have them connected to YouTube so people can check in on their friends and loved ones on live surveillance cameras anytime. Question number six, foreign policy. Is there a limit to US involvement in the Ukraine war with Russia? What is that limit? Up next, candidate Chris Erickson discusses it. We have reached the limit. We can't afford to take care of Ukraine anymore because we have to start protecting our own border from the ongoing invasion of illegal immigrants that President Joe Biden is allowing. We need to impeach President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris immediately. Too many United States citizens are dying from fentanyl drug overdoses and that fentanyl is coming from illegal immigrants crossing our borders and working with foreign cartels. Just because you enjoyed the nice stimulus checks President Biden sent out in the past, that's no excuse to allow him to destroy our own national security with open borders. Question number seven, future of democracy. Do you share the concern that our democracy is in jeopardy? If so, what measures do you recommend be taken in Vermont? Chris Erickson responds as a candidate for United States Senator. An example of the erosion of democracy in Vermont is the marijuana law in Vermont, which allows for the for profit commercial growers to grow entire fields of marijuana while regular citizens will be fined, find money if they grow more than two adult plants and they can't afford that fine. And it's a violation of the US Constitution for the state of Vermont to pre plan the invasion of the privacy of your home and property to count your plants. They don't come into your home and open your refrigerator and count how many cans of beer you have. Question number eight, privacy. Do you think the United States needs a comprehensive consumer privacy law? What steps should Congress take, if any, to advance this agenda? Next response by United States Senator candidate Chris Erickson. We have to protect our right to use paper money and coins because every time we use a credit card or a debit card, the government and the big corporations are following every move we make. And that's not privacy. We can never let them take away the cash system. Question number nine, getting things done. You can't do this work alone. With whom will you build partnerships and coalitions to get things done? Response by US Senate candidate Chris Erickson. Vote for me, Chris Erickson. I'm an independent candidate for United States Senator, and I will go down there to Washington DC. And if either the Republicans or the Democrats are short one member to become the majority in the United States Senate, then I'll make them an offer. If they vote to make me Senate majority leader, then I'll join their side. I don't care which side I join. I just want to be Senate majority leader because that is in the best interest of the people of the state of Vermont to get bills we want passed through. Question number 10, should the filibuster be scrapped in the United States Senate? Response next by US Senator candidate Chris Erickson. The filibuster is an American tradition and it gives the minority party a chance to be heard. So it is valid, especially when your favorite party happens to be in the minority. Question number 11, who do you think should be the candidate for president for your party in 2024? Answer by US Senate candidate Chris Erickson, who's an independent. I'm Chris Erickson and I am an independent candidate for United States Senator. And thinking about 2024, it's too soon. You can go to politics1.com and click on presidential candidates and scroll past the Democrats and the Republicans and have a look at the minor parties and the independent candidates. That's who I would be interested in, but it's too soon to tell who. Number 12, closing statements by candidate Chris Erickson for United States Senator. My name is Chris Erickson and I am the best candidate for United States Senator. I'm an independent on your ballot. I will sponsor a bill to change the way we grant subsidies to corporations so that if they want our taxpayer dollars, they have to guarantee us a share of the profits they make using our taxpayer dollars. We need our share of the profits for all kinds of programs to help people. Giving our tax dollars away for free to huge corporations is just a form of modern day slavery. It's the wrongful taking of the fruits of our labor and that is a violation of the United States Constitution. If you agree, please vote for me, Chris Erickson. Thank you.


A Pike County woman is facing several drug charges following an arrest Monday by the Pike County Sheriff's Office. Deputies responded before noon to the Shelby Valley area after someone reported suspicious activity. They found 38-year-old Valerie Hunt of Belcher hiding in the Shelby Valley clinic. And when we contacted her, we discovered that she was wandered out of Electric County on some felony warrants. When we were searching her, when we took her in the custody for the warrants, we were searching her. And she voluntarily told us that she had one knife in her bra and another one in her pocket. And she said that she used those for personal protection because of what the times are now. We did find a small amount of crushed peel or powder in a key chain that she had with her when we initially placed her under arrest for the warrants. Sergeant Belcher said once jail staff conducted a more thorough search, they were surprised at what they found.  And when the jail staff started moving, those bags of meth started to fall out. In total, there were five bags of meth that fell out of her hair scrunchie. She's facing a promoting contraband in the first degree charge for bringing the drugs into the jail. She had mentioned several times when we first took her in the custody that she didn't have anything else on her. We take it serious and we don't want to make light of it because we would love to see people get help for their problem. But at the same time, you realize that what extremes people go to to conceal and hide their use and their problem. Valerie Hunt is also facing a charge of possession of meth as well as other related charges for Monday's arrest in addition to a meth related charge out of Letcher County.


It's the 10th day of September 2019 and if it's Tuesday guys, it's strictly business. Good evening and welcome to Y254 channel. Today we are discussing Mata housing Kenyans and how affordable housing under the bid for agenda. Is it achievable or not? Can it be better implemented and it means today I have amazing people who will be helping me put that into perspective. Karibuni guys karibuni feel at home. Sawa sawa. We'll be getting back to them in a while but first I want us to look at news making headlines. Remember you can interact with us on our social media platform that is Y254 channel cuts across all social media platform. The hashtag to use on Twitter is Y254 updates or you can teach me directly at Miriam underscore masava. So let us take a look at our first news. Parliament convened its sitting today afternoon after a month long recess. The lawmakers are expected to pass the division of revenue bill 2019 following a breakthrough in talks over the settlement that had threatened to paralyze operation at the counties. Take a look. Relief for counties as parliament prepares to dispense off with the division of revenue bill this week. After weeks of statements senators yield ground accepting 316 billion shillings as proposed by the national assembly to go to counties. A mediation committee meeting set for Wednesday will ratify the agreement with counties expected to receive their locations as early as next week. Parliament resumed sittings today afternoon with a full entry among them debate on the impending evictions in the mao forest. The breakthrough over the division of revenue bill may however do little even before the dust settles on the controversial parliamentary power. The issue of equity and regional balance propped up due all right moving on is equity group holding inside to expand in the democratic republic of kongo as it it acquires majority stake in commercial bank of kongo and indication that the bank 6 to father consolidate its footprint in the central african market. In a statement the bank announced that it intends to merge the second largest bank in the democratic republic of kongo komashia bank of kongo with its current subsidiary in the dr kongo equity chief executive officer james muangii said the move will help the bank father penetrate in the african market equity group has been on a relatively aggressive regional expansion have entered a preliminary agreement to buy out banks in zambia mozambik tanzania and randa in april 2019 in the period ending june 2019 the group's business in drc posted the second fastest growth in net earnings equity group entered the drc market in 2015 through the acquisition of pro credit the competitions authority has stopped kenya commercial bank from firing national bank of kenya employees this comes after the national bank of kenya and commercial bank of kenya marja deal received the final approval from the capital markets authority paving way for the marja of the two banks nbk chief wilfred msao was the first casuality of the marja after his position was taken over by kcb's head of regional business paul russo following the following the accusation of nbk 1356 workers are said to lose their jobs as kcb moves to streamline the activities of the two lenders however competitions authority has given the workers an 18 months lifeline saying it is in line with the global best practices however it is not clear what will happen to the various margins managers of nbk who are in contract nbk which is a tire two lender has market share of 2.37 percent while kcb controls 14 percent of the tire one segment of the market following the marja the market share of kcb will stand at 16.51 percent making it's the largest bank in the region in market share and capitalization well here is some good news for potato farmers across the country naku gavana li kinyan jui has won potato traders that they risk arrest for packaging irish potatoes in extended bags that weigh more than 50 kilograms this comes after pleas from farmers to standardize packaging so the ministry of agriculture publish regulation in efforts to protect farmers from exploitation by traders kinyan jui says the devolve unit is keen on implementing the new packaging regulations on farm produce transporters have also been put on notice that their motor vehicles would be impounded and owners arrested for wearing irish potatoes in packages weighing more than 50 kilograms potato is the second most consumed crop in the country after maize about 8 million tons are produced in kenya annually remember this is business news we bring you business news from the country from the glove and across the world now moving on on to international business news is that alibaba chaman and co-founder jack ma is expected to step down from the e-commerce on tuesday bringing an end of an era for the farm daniel zam alibaba's chief executive will replace him as executive chairman details of these in other stories in our international business news round up the farm has become one of the world's biggest internet farms with the company being valued at 480 billion dollars the former english teacher co-founded alibaba in 1999 and it has become one of the world's biggest internet farms he oversaw the farms growth into an international heavyweight and it's listing in new york which set a record as the world's biggest public stock offering jack ma will be replaced by daniel zam alibaba's chief executive the tech entrepreneur will remain on alibaba's board of directors meanwhile british airways pilots are striking for a second day in an ongoing dispute of a pay and conditions tens of thousands of passengers have been told not to go to airports with the airline cancelling some 1700 flights due to the disruption the pilot union said british airways management cost cuts and damming down of the brand had eroded confidence in the airline the workout is due to end at midnight although there could be additional unexpected cancelations tomorrow both sides say they are willing to hold further talks but no date has been set the pilots are currently scheduled to stage another strike on the 27th of september finally voxfagen is picking up the pace in its bid to dominate the auto industry's electric future the world's biggest kamek announced that it had struck a deal with sweden's north volt to build a giant battery factory in germany the german company said production of lithium ion batteries will begin in the late 2023 or early 2024 a move that will be vital to voxfagen's ability to mount what it calls the largest electric offensive in the automotive industry worldwide the group plans to launch almost 70 new electric models in the next decade and hopes to build 22 million electric cars over this period it is investing in more than 30 billion pounds into electrifying its fleet over the next four years prompted by in part pressure from regulators and the fallout from its scandal if successful voxfagen could overtake rivals such as tesla and byd well that's all we had for you here on business news that is our news making headlines tonight but remember we have a serious discussion coming after after this break because we are going to discuss about housing canyons and how affordable housing what is not exactly is affordable housing you know it can mean different things to different people so we are discussing that with such an amazing panelist who have joined me tonight so don't go anywhere we are going to take a short break we'll be back after this


I love voting, but do you know what I hate? Voting. On election day, you have to take off work, catch a bus or drive across town, wait in line with the rest of the country, only to use some hackable voting machine and all before the polls close. Assuming you're not, you know, sick, hurt, flat tire, hanging Chad, or have any other surprise commitments that day.  So no wonder turnout is so low. But what if we totally fixed it? What if I could tell you there's a solution? So crazy simple, I can summarize it in three words. Vote by mail. Here's how it works. You get mail to ballot, you can take your time with it.  Mail it back, postage free before election day, or drop it off at a secure lockbox or polling station. No waiting in line, no rushing, no hackable electronic voting machines, just you and your ballot. It's more secure because there's a literal paper trail and all ballots are counted in one centralized, secure location overseen by judges. It fights fraud with barcodes and duplicates and voter registration is even more accurate and more efficient because records are updated automatically. And just like our military serving overseas, you can mark your second and third choice so your ballot isn't wasted if your first choice drops out. This is called ranked choice voting, by the way. It gives voters more control and it makes elections cheaper because runoff elections aren't necessary. Some states have already implemented vote by mail, both red and blue states. And guess what? They see a higher voter turnout every year, meaning more votes cast, more people heard from, and a more representative process.  If you want your city or state to enact measures like this, go to www.represent.us to find out how you can help.


have ponies, so let's do it. My name is Cary Miller. I'm a heavy metal software developer for Living Social. I like to say I'm heavy metal software developer because my title is Lead Software Development Engineer, which means I think very weighty thoughts and I can protect you from x-rays. Also we're hiring. I think I have to say that contractually. Before I was a lead engineer at Living Social, I was actually a teacher at Ada Developers Academy. Anybody besides these three or four people know about Ada Developers Academy? Okay, it's not a bad crowd. Okay. Ada Developers Academy, let me see if I can get this, is a 12 month educational program for women who are transitioning into STEM, specifically with a six month classroom training program educating them on Ruby and Rails and modern web development followed by a six month internship at a sponsoring company, which hopefully then turns into a job offer at the end of that time. Did I nail it? Anyone time now? Was that an elevator pitch? Yes. Yeah. And the wonderful thing I love about this program is unlike other boot camp programs, we actually don't even charge, we don't charge the students. We actually charge the companies. And in fact, the cost is even less than zero because all the students receive a monthly stipend for as long as they're actually in the program. So it kind of is a really, really interesting model. We just graduated 15, our first cohort, a few weeks ago and we're starting a new cohort of 24 about two months ago, kind of asynchronously there.  Does anybody not like ponies? Man, I'm sorry. Your day just got ruined. But seriously, welcome to the industry and welcome to RubyConf. One of the things I do love about the program, especially is because we get to work with the students for such a long period of time, more than just like nine weeks in and out. We really get to see people go from maybe a class or two in college, they worked on a side project once or did a Rails bridge up to their fully fledged software developers. And part of that is understanding what a career in software development looks like and changing people's story from I'm a student or I'm learning to embracing and defining themselves as a software developer and using that language to talk about themselves. And getting to see a lot of women sort of work through the same sorts of struggles and infusions and frustrations, I started to see a lot of patterns. Like a good scientist, I decided the best way to explore any sort of sociological phenomenon is to take a survey and do a questionnaire. And so I posted a little questionnaire about, hey, what should I tell these women who are in this program? What do you wish you could go back in time in a metaphorical DeLorean and tell past you about software development? And I got over 150 responses, tons of great people and quotes and some people were angry and typing out all the horrible things about their current job and some people were super happy. But there were a lot of common things. And so I picked five that kind of appealed to me, kind of resonated with my own experiences and that's what I'm going to talk about today. So without further ado, let's get started. So one thing we don't talk about in software very often is that this stuff is supposed to be hard. It is a very, very difficult discipline. There are shortcuts and metaphors that we use to try to wrap our brains around it, but we're not talking, it doesn't like learning another spoken language. You learn another spoken language, you're trying to communicate with another human and you can assume that there's some commonality about the human experience that we love and we're afraid and we're sad and we're angry and we're happy and we rejoice in some things and some things terrify us, but computers don't care. They're like, right, computers are super dumb things that only do exactly what we tell them to do. And so as we're learning to do that, the learning curve really comes into play and sort of understanding where we are. So we have to think abstractly about what our process of learning is. And so has everybody kind of seen a learning curve graph like this? Yeah? Like this is a super abstract way of thinking about learning. Because when you're actually, we're standing off to the side and watching somebody else's path on the learning curve, right?  It's really a matter of perspective on where we are. We can't really tell where on that curve we necessarily are.  Just add another semicolon and it'll all work, I promise. But you kind of have to hold back a little bit. It's hard to convince people that you're right at the edge of the cliff. Just one more pull and you're over the top. It's hard for people instinctually to understand that. And part of that is that some of the things that are really difficult about software that give you a hard time are things that other people seem to do just super easy. I struggled for a long time to really understand concurrency when other people just seem like, oh, yeah, concurrency threads, forks, blah, blah, blah. And that's just that. For me, that's something that I didn't get. And it's not a deficiency in who I am or my abilities as a software developer. But it was really just, we had a different set of experiences that we were both bringing to that problem. And their experiences were enabling them to think differently about the problem than I was. And it made it easier for them. And conversely, there are things that I'm really, really good at that other people just don't seem to get. And I have a hard time sometimes understanding why somebody doesn't understand a piece of technology that I get. It makes a lot of sense to me. I do a lot of work with asynchronous processes. That's really easy for me to grok. It's not everybody's cup of tea, though. But this is sometimes a blocker, especially for people who are learning things. And even those of us who are experienced, when we're used to having easy successes and all of a sudden we've come across something that's really hard, I'm learning closure right now. Any other closureistas? Closure writers? I don't know. A couple of people who don't really want to admit to it at a Ruby conference. I understand. Well, the problem is, is that a lot of times we had this expectation about who we're supposed to be as hackers. We're supposed to, like, jack in and hack the planet, right? I'm like, oh, I'm hacking the Gibson. And we're supposed to all get this reference from a 1980s movie starring Angelina Jolie. So much fun. So much fun. If you ever want a completely horrible example of what it's like to be a software developer to show your family, show them hackers and say, yeah, that's me. So, I mean, sometimes it's hard just to get, like, hello world to print out sometimes in some things, right? You have to set the whole tool chain and the compiler and then LLVM and, like, oh, there's a new X code out in the middle of it and it breaks everything and that's just my world, though. So, you know, how can we, how can we possibly live up to this image that we have or what it means to be a hacker, right? And we have to remember that, you know, if this stuff was easy, everyone would do it. Every single person in the world would jump at the chance to do what we do and, quite frankly, get paid what we get paid. And so just keep that in mind that this stuff is supposed to be hard and part of the compensation that we get for it and the freedoms that we get through employment, through, you know, flexible time off, or getting to go to conferences and getting two kinds of beer. You know, most people have to suffer through one kind of beer, you know. And come on, come on, don't get upset when you run out. So, most people who, if you see them and everything is going really, really easy for them, they're just really good at pretending. They're good at not getting frustrated, right? I'd like to say that most of the time, we spend most of our time working in the darkness at the very edge of our experience. Because this is my life every single day. Does anyone recognize this? Anyone not recognize this? I don't want to assume. I don't know who's in the room, right? So this is a stack trace from something that blew up on me. And whenever I see these come up, I feel like my computer is just, like, taunting me.  And you know what that makes me feel like? It makes me feel very sad, very, very sad. You know, and I'll pour over it, and I try to find the problem, right? And you find the problem, and you're like, sweet, I fixed it. Reload. Same error.  So I look some more, and I'm like, oh, I forgot that other semicolon. Oh, JavaScript. And so you fix that, right? And it still doesn't work. And then you go, oh, you pour over it, and you find this really subtle mistake, right? It's a super subtle, like, race condition that you hadn't considered, and you fix that. It still gives you the error. And then you realize you didn't degrade or de-migrate. That's my daily. That's probably yours, too. So whenever I'm helping a student, and like MRI, like, barfs up one of these stack traces, you know? Like, to them, it's magic, right? That I can look at a stack trace, and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's such and such a thing, right? Or it's, you know, you missed a comma or something. But for them, it's like, look at the friggin' matrix, right? It's just like, boo. And sometimes I feel like that character in the matrix who's like, yeah, I don't even see it anymore.  So one of the things I always try to emphasize to people, right, is like, do yourself a favor and like, read the error. I'm actually working on a gem for people just in funsies to take the output of the error, that part that says, like, you know, could not do this thing, and just like, have it pipe that to the text to speech on my Mac. So it actually tells me exactly what the problem is instead of like, so I don't see this panic wall of text like flying at my face. Because an error like this is a computer's way of saying, like, help, I need an adult over here. Please help me. Somebody bail me out of this problem. And it's really important to remember that one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that we are the adult in this relationship, right? The computer is a dumb, totally logical child, and all it does is exactly what we tell it. It's the most obedient child ever. You know, if we tell it to subtract zero from zero, it will try to do it. If we try to divide it by something like zero, it will try to do it. But then it will complain because it doesn't understand. It doesn't, it's not proactive enough to understand that we're asking it to do something completely illogical. So don't feel helpless, because you're gonna feel like this every single day otherwise. Because you're gonna write bad code. I guarantee.  It's not because you're not capable. It's not because you're not experienced. Even the most experienced people write bugs all day long. And that's why, you know, we all have jobs, fixing and maintaining stuff. The thing is, what do you do when you've broken everything? What's the next step? And it's your reaction to that, that you really are, that's what you're in control of. You're not in control of the fact that you're going to make mistakes. You're not in control of many, many things in this, but you are in control of how you address problems and what your attitude towards it is. And you can panic when you see the wall of text fly at you or the emails and the pagers start going off. Or you can say, hey, there's something wrong and we're gonna fix it. Because you have to have faith. You have to have faith that everything we do here can be understood that software was written by humans who thought this up, right? Computers just didn't fall out of the sky, right? And we washed up on the shore and then we're like, oh, computers, oh. We invented these, we humans. People from the previous generation and the generation before that, yes, some of them were very, very smart but most of them weren't. Most of them were just as smart as you or I and they came up with these things and they worked with them and so can we. We're all capable of this. What's really important in addition to having the faith that you can do that is the courage to take the step towards doing that, right? That courage is faith in action in many ways, right?   We have to accept that, that we're gonna do it, that they're gonna do it and have that sort of humility and compassion for each other if you'll pardon the touchy-feely for a moment. We have to have that sort of compassion for each other that we're all just human and that we're in this together. That's one. So you do you, which is kind of a nice way of saying be yourself. But every conference I go to, including this one, at some point, a speaker gets up on stage and makes an assumption about who Rubyists are and what we like and what we do. And I'm pretty sure that none of these things are true for everybody in this room. Does anybody fit all of this? Say, who fits like three? Oh, well, okay, you like JavaScript? Man. Yeah, I'm three of the four. Anybody just two? Couple people? See me afterwards, you get a prize. It's a key cord for your EMAC setup. So it's really important that you sort of question these assumptions. It's not just enough to sort of be yourself and be wacky and wear rainbows, right? You have to also sort of like look at the culture that you live in and the people that you surround yourselves with and the assumptions that you make about the tools that we all use and who we are, what our identities are. We waste a lot of time trying to figure out where we are and the hierarchy of other nerds. There's a lot of like, oh yeah, well I did the dial up with the acoustic coupler and like, oh, I used to work on a punch card machine, like all that kind of business, it's whatever. That's just people who are trying to figure each other out because they're human and humans we tend to be prone to hierarchical social interactions that way and it's a waste of time ultimately because it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. Things are moving forwards too fast. We've worried about what other people did in the past and it gives you a certain amount of perspective sometimes but don't fall into that trap, don't fall into that game and watch for yourself and like not pushing other people away by those games that you wanna play to figure out where you are, just be confident that you are where you are because there's absolutely zero connection between your ability to quote Monty Python and your ability to set up a server. There is no correlation whatsoever between the length of your beard or the tightness of your pants to your ability to use node. Actually, now that I think about it, love you node, love you node. But seriously, there really isn't any connection to your ability to fit into this community of people and your ability to do the work and so respect those differences and respect people for the work that they do and celebrate those sorts of differences because they're bringing vitality to our community, they're making us a much more interesting place in less of these assumptions about what the tools and the processes that we should be using and they bring in the next potential person who's going to disrupt our community and things that we do for the better. Like if we discriminate against DHH for, he says whoopsie all the time, well then that's kind of ridiculous, we wouldn't have had rails. Anyway, walk your own path. Because it's really important that you are on a path and you're always going to be constantly moving. Sandy Metz always says that you're never going to know less than you do right now. I'm actually a little bit more pessimistic, I've always said I'm never dumber than I will be, I am yesterday. But basically, you make the best choice you can at the moment that you do with the resources and tools you have at hand and so you have to sort of give other people that latitude that you don't understand why they wrote this crappy code this way, but they did it for a reason, right? They made a conscious choice.  Actually, well you write Pearl though. JK, what's up? Sorry folks, sorry conflicts. So ultimately, be nice to others but be nice to yourself here, okay? Don't beat yourself up, if you don't know something, you're supposed to make mistakes, it always comes back to this. You're on a journey, so be nice to yourself and be nice to future you, right? Code that's easy to understand, easy to change, all those good things that we're trying for, make them happen for yourself. It's also really important to take care of your personal health. We have, like I said, this hacker ethos that we all drink surge and eat cheetahs and stay up till 2 a.m. And although that's a little bit ridiculous and we all kind of know that, right? We still live with that sort of stereotype from the larger culture that we work in. Sometimes not just the wide culture of our societies as we walk around town and say, yeah, I'm a computer developer. But like the people we directly work with who don't do our work, accountants, business people, sales folks, they have certain assumptions about who we are based on the larger cultural dynamic and that can be a struggle sometimes.  We do a lot of sitting around programming and there's a lot of people making the change to standing desks for health. Go for walks, do these sorts of things. It doesn't, you don't have to buy an exercise bike and set up your laptop and be programming when you're on the exercise bike or anything like that. But just pay attention to the lifestyle habits that you're making and how they affect your body and your mind, your ability to do what is effectively very difficult mental work. For me, I have a lot of hobbies as a lot of people here know. Everyone here knows me. I do glass work. I went to cooking school for a while. I was a professional poker player. I played poker like two or three nights a week. I like to work on Vespas, like vintage engines and things like that. Just things that are like physical and mechanical and are not computerized, they're not virtual. And this is actually a huge boon to me personally because I'm a very tactile learner and I've learned that about myself over the years. And so being able to take an engine apart and think critically about it and put it back together again has directly translated into how I look at code because I can look at it like an engine or like an electrical circuit. And my understanding of how code gets refactured feels to different parts of my brain the same way that glass feels as it melts and solidifies and cracks under different temperatures. And I wouldn't have that understanding, that very intuitive understanding if I wasn't doing things that was engaging different parts of my entire limbic system, my brain and my heart, getting my hands involved with things.  And you'll bring a lot back to the job and that actually improves your higher ability in the long run. Excuse me. So we've talked a lot about imposter syndrome the last year and a half. I think I feel like it's been a constant refrain. And everybody seems to feel this to some degree. I don't know if it's a little bit of selection bias for who talks about it or selection bias like people who tend to be have a little bit more of imposter syndrome tend to gravitate towards software development. But everybody kind of feels this, right? And we don't really know what we're doing but I love this quote. If you're hired for the job, you could do it, right? Like if you struggle and you get through like a rigorous interview process and they offer to pay you money, you can do this job, right? And if you can't, we'll take the money, right? Like don't worry about it. Don't doubt yourself. It's easy to say like, oh, don't doubt yourself. You're really good. But really, if you have done this professionally, you can do the job. Like it's that simple for better or worse. So being yourself looks really different. Sometimes. Because it's tough to stand out in a crowd. I know a lot about standing out in a crowd. And I didn't like that for a long time. I used to wear a lot of black. And I would tell people, oh yeah, I wear blacks and grays because I used to be a stagehand. And I go to the Merc and like listen to sad music and blah, blah, blah. But that wasn't true. Oh, get a little weepy. No, I really didn't want to stand out. I'm six feet tall and I'm a little chubby. And I kind of stand out. I didn't like that. And I started wearing rainbow bandanas and then people were like, hey, you seem like a fun person because you wear rainbow bandanas. That's pretty cool. So I was like, you know, I'm gonna stand out. I'm gonna stand out.  Because I really like talking to people. I really like people. So I embrace that because here's gonna hate, right? You can't, you gotta deal with it. So you're gonna encounter people that are like, oh, you don't know what the RFC 1103 for email is?  Don't worry about that stuff. You do what you have to do and keep pushing forward. Let the haters hate. There's no magic whatsoever to what we do. Not a drop of it. It seems like magic, but there's none whatsoever. Has anyone seen this kind of graph before? I first encountered this in seventh grade, IFL, Introduction to Foreign Language. Someone was trying to explain to me why I couldn't learn French and Spanish at the same time. I was very ambitious. I still am. We started out with unconscious and competence where we just simply don't know what we don't know. We know nothing. And then we move, we become more conscious of what we don't know because we start learning things and we realize there's this huge, huge world out there that we don't know. And then as we gain more competence, we're still aware of what we know, but we start to identify these big regions of things and we're aware now of what we don't know very clearly and we understand where those boundaries are. And then finally, we finally move into this unconscious competence.  You're so competent that your brain, you don't have to use the higher functions to be aware of what you're doing. And software is a little bit like that sometimes, but it's not really in a lot of ways. How many people are math majors? I always liked to do this. How many math majors? People who did math, like a minor, anything like that? Well, compsci, CS degrees. Everybody else doesn't have a CS degree, okay? That's about the normal split. Like Ruby is a weird community, right? It's about 50-50. People who came through math or computer science and everyone else is like artists and crazy hippies and a few musicians. And that's so cool, that's so cool, right? But we don't do a really good job about having different ways of explaining how software is. We don't teach it very, very well. So I'd like to give you an example of what would happen if we taught math the same way we teach software. Let's imagine we have a pony. Everyone agree this is one pony? Now I give you another pony. We have two ponies. One plus one pony equals two ponies. One plus one equals two. Does everyone agree that is a true fact? Great, we'll do this exercise for homework. This is just a simple extension of what we've already done, folks. We don't teach math this way, but pick up a programming book, man. It's like, here's how you do Hello World. Here's how you do a loop. Here's an if, else, conditional. Go make rails. Have you ever seen this chart? The Rails competency chart? This is amazing. It's so big, I can't even fit on this slide so you can read it. Everything on the left side is the generic stuff you quote unquote have to know as a web developer or someone who's writing web applications and everything on the right is all the competencies you need to be a Rails developer in addition to the stuff on the left. This is an amazing, amazing, insane amount of stuff to know. So if you only know a quarter of this, where are you on that original chart? Do you have conscious competence? Conscious uncompetence? Where are you on the learning curve of being a Rails developer? Is anybody 10 out of 10 on all these things? How do you rate yourself? Because I'll guarantee you there are huge chunks of this graph. I don't know. I really am not very good with, like JavaScript. But you know what the coolest thing is? You know the super cool thing about all this is? You do not have to learn it all at once. You don't have to do it. You don't have to know every single one of those branches in order to do a passable to good job at things because the entire internet is at our disposal to answer questions and we have a community of people that we can reach out to. Your job is to learn one thing on your first day and then learn a second thing and then a third thing and see the connections between those three things and then go on and learn a fourth thing. Nobody just sits down and reads a book and is an expert at all of this stuff. It takes time. So give yourself the time to understand and learn this stuff because it's all just code. There's no magic. There is nowhere where there is a black box where wires go in and wires come out and no one has ever looked in the box because it's magic. Oracle servers aside. There really is no magic. We can look at the source code or we can look at the APIs and it can all be reasoned about and understood and it feels like hell. It feels like climbing that cliff some days. Hello, close your docs. But you can do it. I swear to God you can do it. I did it and I'm, who am I? I'm not special. I'm no more special than anyone else in this room. So the underlying theme of all this sort of stuff, right, is that you need to learn how to learn. And the interesting thing about how we teach in America is we have a set of finish lines, right? We focus on graduation. You graduate from sixth grade which really isn't a graduation. I mean, come on, right? So now you go into junior high and that's a couple years and you graduate, right? You get another diploma except that's not really graduating, right? So now you go into high school and you graduate and it's so amazing, right? And there's valedictorian speeches and homecoming games but that's not the finish line either. So then you go into school or college. That's not it. Master's degree programs. There is no finish line. Education is a process. It is not a destination. And especially with the amount of stuff that you could learn and the amount of stuff that you can learn, education is an ongoing thing throughout your entire life. One of Leonardo da Vinci towards the end of his life wrote down something to the effect of I am upset about dying because there's so much left to learn. You can't know it all and so you have to pace yourself and understand how you learn and what your approach should be, what your relationship with discovery is. So imagine this is Ruby. This is everything you can ever learn about Ruby contained in this box, right? Will everyone agree that that is in fact everything you could learn about Ruby? So you learn one thing, right? You learn one thing. That's your first day. Maybe you went to a Rails bridge or you read the first chapter of learn Ruby the hard way. You learn one thing. And then you learn a few more things, right?  I saw a great talk at RubyConf 2014 about how to do innumerable, but a hurdle guy. And you start to see how these things relate to each other, right? They start to describe a shape. And so that shape is knowledge and wisdom is gonna get put together. And you can start to define the centrality of your knowledge, right? So things get pushed further. These boundaries get pushed further and further back to the darker corners of the thing you're trying to learn. And the interesting with software, right? Software works together with other pieces of software. That's where really interesting stuff starts to happen, right? So for like a Rails application, right? Like you start to learn things and there's some overlap between these. So now think about these. These are data points within a larger conceptual structure of software engineering, all those things you could learn. And so you're always gonna be pushing back against what the edge of what you know is, against that darkness and making less and less darkness and more and more light as you learn things. Because we have no idea what the next thing we're gonna have to learn is or what its relationship is, but it's gonna be outside of this box by definition. And so you need to be comfortable with working outside of the box of what you already know in those dark spaces. Things changing all the time. Two years ago, RubyConf Denver, when I gave one of my first conference talks, everybody was talking about how do we get Ruby into the enterprise environment? People were still talking about that. I haven't seen a talk like that this year. No one's talking about that anymore because we did it. We figured that thing out. But now we're talking about Ember and how do we do concurrency and static versus dynamic typing and should we use closure as elixir of the next hot thing? We're talking about new things. And so being able to learn, learning how to learn, how to acquire knowledge and really understand things quickly and integrate it and see where it falls on that map in relation to the other things that you know. So you can define regions of knowledge as a critical skill to acquire. And you can do it. I mean, you've done it. You're alive. Everyone here alive? Yeah, you're actually a pretty responsive audience. I really appreciate that. You're alive, you can acquire knowledge, right? You can learn. You are not fixed in stone forever. And so I actually wanna show you all something that I got really excited about last night. And I went on IRC and I was just like, oh my God, this is the best thing ever. This exists. For those in the back who can't read it, this is Friendship Is Magic Plus Plus. It is an imperative dynamically typed interpretive language that takes the form of the pony of your choice writing a letter to Princess Celestia. I wrote Hello World in it last night. This is a program, this runs. Who wants to write code like this? Okay, I got two, three people, all right, that's good. Look, I get it. Okay, Friendship Is Magic Plus Plus is not gonna be the hot new language, right? We're not gonna write some accounting software system in this. But what are we gonna write it in? Yeah, I thought so. Nobody wants to tell me, right? I feel exceptionally lucky, right? I learned Ruby, I won the jackpot lottery, right? Like this is awesome language with awesome people and I get to have fun and hang out with y'all and wear whatever I want, this is super cool. But we just got lucky, some of us. And so you have to kinda keep looking for your career to always be looking to acquire new skills cause you never know what direction things are gonna go. I'm learning closure at work. I'm also playing around with rust when no one's looking. Because I don't know what the next thing's gonna be but it's not always gonna be Ruby.  But if we're all awesome, we can then go to the next language and bring that awesomeness with us, like that's super cool. I like that, so let's do that. But I don't know where we're going, so I don't know. This is kind of a, let's all go there together but you all lead. And I guarantee you, unfortunately, that no matter who you are and no matter what you're struggling with, the likelihood that you are the first person to ever struggle with that, to ever cry and swear and bleed and flip a table, that's probably not true. You are almost never the first person. Every single time I hear about a cool new idea, like on Hacker News or something, like they're very exposed just like, oh, Dijkstra wrote about that in 73. But that seriously happens all the time, like every cool new language that comes along, someone says, oh yeah, they tried that in 78, or oh, there's a list version of that somewhere. We're all kind of like standing on the shoulders of giants. And we also stand in their shadow, right? The work that other people have done have got us to where we are today and it's our job now to step forward and lift the next group of people up. But we also stand in the shadow of those giants that they cast, they cast very long shadows because they did some really revolutionary stuff. That doesn't mean that we can't do revolutionary stuff. We have to understand what their influences are and where it comes from. Because we're not alone in this. For every single person who's tried to get JavaScript to work in IE6, man, I couldn't find a screenshot. I couldn't bear to put a screenshot of that error in this talk and I'm sorry. I really wish I had now. But you are not the first person to struggle with that horrible, horrible thing. So take some strength from that.    And I can say this because I worked for five years in the Amazon Personalization Team, looking at what you people buy and you're all horrible people. I think I can say that. It's I'm no longer under contract. So it's kind of horrible, right? We all want to be special snowflakes, but oh my God, it's so great. It's so great because I can go find those people who have struggled with these same things and find out how they solve it, right? And like talk to them about what I struggle with and what I rejoice in. And so it's really important that we build communities around ourselves to be successful as developers, right? We're not supposed to be sitting up in our addicts programming all night. Go to meetups and things. Everyone says, go find a mentor. And I'm saying it again too, but you should find more than a mentor. You should find coaches. You should find people that give you good feedback that are able to give you advice about your career. Is this a good job offer? Are they paying me enough? Should I take this job? What should I be learning that I don't already know? What should I be working on so that I'll be employable next year? How can I help you? You wanna bring something to that table, not just take things away. And so building these communities, I think it's awesome. I think Ruby is an amazing thing that we've all done. I could say that's in front of this crowd, right? We all agree, right? Ruby's pretty good. It's not bad. Yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad. But where would we be without conferences and meetups and blog posts and Twitter, right? None of us would have, Ruby would not be where it is today. So be involved. Go share the learning. I love teaching. And I think teaching, if you're at all good at it at all, even if you're kind of bad at it, it's an amazing way to solidify what you know. Really interesting things happen in our brain when we teach. And I'd love to talk to other people about it. I won't take up any time without doing entire talks about what happens when we're teaching. But it supercharges our ability to retain knowledge. So go teach a class, go volunteer, go to Rails Bridge or Rails Girls. Clojure Bridge is really cool. Start a study group or a book club at your office. Like if you've always wanted to read SICP, but you never could bear to do it, find somebody else at your office who wants to do it or go online, just say, on Twitter, like, hey, I want to read Sandy Metz's book, but I don't want to do it alone. Who's with me? And they just do a Google Hangout every week or two and talk about it. Book clubs don't have to be just for Oprah. And this is why we tell people, like, write a blog post or do lightning talks, right? Because it's like, once you're involved in the community, it just, it gives you so much more confidence and your ability to feel good about strides you're making. You're able to start to track where you are in that graph of competence and confidence. So who here is going to sign up for a lightning talk?  If you want to do, if you didn't raise your hand and you want to do a lightning talk, come see me and I will help you. I will do anything. I will help vet your idea. I will help you with keynote. I will let you borrow my cool thing. Look at this, look. Super cool. It's got fresh batteries. Totally cool. I will totally help you do a lightning talk. If you want to do a blog post, I will edit your blog post, right? And this is a standing offer for anybody, forever. I'm there to help you just come see me. I'm pretty easy to find. Pay attention to people around you and how you communicate with them. Communication skills are super key. I've told a lot of people, like go take a relationship skills class. Like we just like, why would I want to learn how to date? Like why is that important to my job? But it's not about that. It's about understanding other people and listening to their needs and desires and whatever. But I mean, as far as the pitch goes, but the actual content of it is understanding that other people have fears and hopes and dreams and goals and desires and things that they want to do. What do they want to accomplish, right? And taking a class on that is super great. Because we're making it up all the time and learning to understand other people and how they're making it up at the same time, like that's gold. So speaking of things being hard, you know there's hard problems in software, right? There's two hard problems. One of them happened to me. But seriously, this is actually a really, really critical thing that I wish someone had come to me, maybe myself in a DeLorean and said, get started. Don't wait. I fretted. I love telling this story. I fretted for about a year and a half and didn't get into Ruby because I couldn't get the MySQL gem to install correctly. Really? Really? Has anybody else done that?  Yeah, a lot of people have. It's important to get started and just get in there and do things, right?  The act of doing makes you right, which is one of the tenets of the Done Manifesto, which is, came up with by Bree Pettis who's the CEO of MakerBot that made the cool 3D printers and his partner, Keo Stark, who wrote an awesome book called Don't Go Back to School. These are just three of the things that are on the Done Manifesto, but it's this idea of if you sit and fret all day long about being perfect, you're never gonna start. And you can never be perfect, so why worry about being perfect? Don't worry about the perfect framework. Don't worry about the perfect transport protocol, the perfect language, the perfect editor. Those are refinements. It's only through the act of doing that you become correct. Worrying and not getting started doesn't get you any closer to being done. Okay, so that was a lot. There's a lot of ponies. It's a lot of things. I'm gonna just kind of sum up here because you really shouldn't be afraid of things that scare you. The five things that I wish that I knew, that this is supposed to be hard. There's a reason we're well compensated for it. There's a reason why we're all a little bit crazy. It's hard. We're not unusual because we find it hard. Be yourself. You do you. Whatever it is, don't worry about other people's perceptions about your skills and abilities and so much as it means a thing.  There's absolutely no magic in what we do. It is all just code that we can think about, that we can reason about, that we can write blog posts about and someone could explain to us. We're very capable intelligent apes using tools made by other apes. Learn how to learn. Take some time to understand how you approach new things and what your reactions are and how you take them in and retain them best. Find your communities and if you can't find that community, build that community. There's this really, there's a guy up in Chilliwack BC who didn't want to drive the two hours every week to Vancouver BC to go to their local Ruby Meetup so he started his own. Does anybody know about Chilliwack BC? A couple of people from Seattle I think. Yeah, it's a nothing little town. It's like 5,000 people. But he found one other person who did Ruby and they get together every week at a local community center and they do Ruby. And those two people became three, became four and they've got, I think he said like six or eight people. He built his own community and I think that's an awesome story. And finally, number six, go and get started. Go today. When you leave here and you go home, if you are not excited to do this thing, get excited to do it because this is an awesome job and we deserve it because we're putting in the time and the effort in making this happen. Go do it. Thank you.


Okay, thank you for coming along, we're going to be talking about developing a website brief. This brief I actually designed for business owners originally and designed workshops to go with it for business owners. And what I found when I started doing that was actually the website designers that were going to me, can I grab a copy of that? Because they started realizing why I've created this and you're going to see this too. Okay, so disclaimer, this is generic information, I don't know your circumstances, use your story. So what are we talking about today? Why am I talking on this topic? Are the clients ready for you? How to develop that brief? How to use it? How to get the reviews for your site and get the maintenance going? And then Q&A at the end. Okay, so this is about me and this is why I'm talking about this topic. So I am three days a week a business connect advisor. How many people here are from New South Wales? Hands up. Keep your hands up. Have you ever heard of the business connect program? Yeah, that's not good. Okay, the business connect program gives you four hours of business advice at no cost with no catches. There's no spruaking, there's no upsell, there's no nothing. So if you are a small business owner yourself, take advantage of the service. But if you also know clients who need the service, and we'll talk about that in a sec, send them our way, send them to the business connect program. For those of you out of New South Wales, you can still take advantage of similar programs. There is ones across the country and you can look up on business.gov.au slash assistance and you will find what's available in your area. So at that place, at Western Sydney Business Centre, I've worked with 800 small business owners in the last three years. Now that's not in situations like this, that would be many thousands. That is face to face one on one in two hour plus meetings. That's a lot of insight into clients and I'm going to be talking about the five clients I saw this week because this is a good representation. So what I found from doing all these meetings with clients, I got sick to death of small business owners being ripped off. It really pisses me off, okay? So I'm like, you know what? I can't beat them, join them in some cases, but if you can't beat them, educate them. Treat these small business owners so that they can educate and empower themselves to either do it themselves or outsource with confidence. And that's the key thing, right? Choosing great people. Now I was just speaking to Zach before. The thing is, I've met a lot of website developers and that, to be honest, are not very nice people. But you know what? None of them are here. This community is awesome. I came to Woodcamp Brisbane last year and I was amazed at how friendly and welcoming you guys were. Those other website developers, they're probably the ones I'm going to be talking about later with some of the problem sites. I'm sure it's not you guys, but you guys are here because you want to learn a bit more and that's awesome. So I started FAQ business training to deal with this issue. So the Business Connect program, I talked about four hours, no cost. You get another six hours for $249. You get 10 hours for $249. So as I said, you or your clients take advantage of that service. As space I will warn you about, it is a digital program across the whole of Australia. The Australian Small Business Advisory Service is a federal government service. They have just launched in July the Digital Solutions program. Western Sydney Business Centre that I work for is the provider for the whole of New South Wales. We organise it. Now what I suggest is if you're awesome in the digital space, get in touch with your ASPAS provider in your state and offer to be part of the webinars, the workshops and things so you can get your messages out there. There's four streams they're covering, web and e-commerce, social media and digital marketing, cyber security and software. Okay, so why are we talking about it? I have seen so many crappy websites, okay? Some of the websites you would swear the person has developed themselves with no idea. And then they go to, no, no, I paid $10,000 to a web designer for that site.  So why are they bad? What are the common themes that come up? The first one is it doesn't meet the client's expectations. And there's reasons for this, which I'll go into in a sec. But a lot of them also can't update their websites.  What if their phone number had a typo in it like one of my clients had? She had to contact her Melbourne provider for a website and wait two weeks for them to update it and paid $250 for the privilege. That's not good service. It's not fair and it's not necessary. No SEO at all. So as I mentioned before, I saw five clients in my business advice sessions this week for over two our meetings. And of the five clients, one had no website at all because she's brand new. So we were doing things like setting up her company and stuff. Two of them had done their websites themselves and two of them had used web designers. One of those sites had zero visibility. The business had been up for three years. The website had been up for three years. I went site colon domain name. How many pages showed in their indexing? Zero. Was that a web designer site or a self-built site? Web designer.  Like seriously, not to be found at all on Google. So she's saying, oh yeah, we have some issues with our website. And I went, yeah, one really big one. It doesn't appear. The other ones are things like security certificates, brand new websites still going up without security certificates. Are you real? Like seriously, I'm not a web designer. I know you need a security certificate. Simple. The content that doesn't flow, and this is a big issue, people go to a website and they go down the page and the page just stops. There's no link to another page. There's nothing to tell the client, what do I do next? So think about the flow. So it's a poor user experience and it doesn't connect with the client's customers. So the other web designer site of those four that I saw last week, that site didn't rate. That site had over a 50% bounce rate. Why? Because it had no user experience whatsoever. This client has an amazing bridal shop with amazing experience. It's one of these ones.  You've seen that one? Yeah. That one. Right before that scene, they're actually in a bridal shop going through the experience of choosing a dress. So it's not about going to a rack, it's about having all your friends around you and having a champagne and all that. She does that experience. Her website? Nothing about that experience at all. Completely misses the point of what her business is. So why is that? Because there's no brief being done. She actually made the comment to me. She said, when she first got her site, she thought, oh, yay, cool, I've got a website. She was excited about it. After that, however, she's now realized how bad her website is. And she said to me, her comment was, lawyers used to be people that didn't have trust. Web designers are now filling their space. And it's true. A lot of people don't trust web designers. But why is this? The expectation thing is often because clients have no freaking idea. Remember, some people are coming from ex-corporate. They were niche specialists in their tiny space. They didn't cover this, they covered this. Now they're doing all these other things. They don't know about web design. You need to help them out. So without a brief, you're missing what they need to tell you, because they don't know what they need to tell you. So they're not communicating it to you. Some of them get over complicated websites that they can't update at all, which is just not going to work for them. As we said, no SEO. Poor user experience. We haven't thought about who is actually going to use that site at the end of the day. And what does this all come down to? It comes down to not having a website brief done. Hence why we're here. So how do we fix this problem? Well, first of all, are the clients actually ready for you? Are they the right clients? Now, in Australia, 97.5% of all businesses in Australia are small. Smalled is defined in this case as less than 20 staff. Okay, so that's pretty much every business in Australia.  We don't want to do that. Stupid. But we need to work out if they're ready for you. Are they the right type of business? So for instance, if a hobbyist comes to you to do a website and you're going to charge him 5 grand for a website, think about it. Are they going to recoup the cost of that $5,000 website? If they're a hobbyist, probably not. So really should you be doing that service for them? Probably not. Do they understand their business? Now, I see a lot of intenders and startup business owners. They actually don't have a clue what they're going to be doing in their business. So how can you create a website for somebody that doesn't actually have a clue what they're doing? You can't. One client, 40-page website, I said to him, what happens if someone comes to you and says, I love what's on your website, what can you do for me? He had no idea what a service that she was going to be on the back of that. It was 40 pages of information. Can they afford you? Or should they just be going for a cheaper alternative? Do they know their customer? Have they done segmentation? One of my clients is a personal trainer. She'd segmented her business to disabled kids and to elderly people. What she had on her website, though, was photos of herself running and stuff like that so she looked like she was the end client and she was a 30-year-old woman. Her clients would look at her site and would not engage with it because there was no pictures of people like them on their site. If they don't know any of this stuff, please don't deal with them. Send them to a service like Business Connect or whatever you've got in your state. Send them that way.  So I said, avoid hobbyists. Avoid those that don't have a clear idea or are too soon in the start-up phase and they just think, I have to have a website on day one. No point if they haven't actually tested what they're doing. And the other one just to be wary of is income replacers. These are people like builders or electricians that work for themselves as a sole trader. They never want to have employees.  They just want a site just so that they have some credibility. So think about what it is that your client needs. So developing the brief, this is about being consistent. It's about talking to your client, engaging with them, making written notes and then, most importantly, agreeing with the client. And I see some of you are chuckling and laughing because obviously you have this issue. Agree with the client. Manage their expectations. A lot of business owners do not know that a website designer, a website developer, a copywriter, a graphic designer, a photographer can all be different roles. They don't get that because there's some people that offer a service that covers all or most of that. They don't get it. So you need to communicate to them what part of the process you're doing and what things they're going to have to do separately. So what is the purpose of the website? As I said for some income replacers, it's not a big marketing tool. So that's not what they need. So actually ask them what do they want out of their website? What would a great website for them do for their business? Is it an online brochure? Is it purely just to give them credibility that they're a real business? Is it to be a massive marketing tool? Like where do you want to drive their inbound marketing cycle? Or are they doing e-commerce and they have to have a great website that allows them to distribute to their clients? Who is the website for? And you might think, well, this is obvious. And it is obvious. But you know how many websites I see that miss the second thing on this list and the third thing on this list? Your client is who you're building the website for. But the users of that website primarily are their clients and their prospects. Make sure you remember that. Ask the person and really understand what are their needs. How is it going to work for you? They're also obviously search engines. As I said before, if you have an invisible site, completely useless, right? So get to know the business first. The wedding shop was an example. It's not just she sells dresses and she's a wedding shop. That's not what her thing is. She's selling an experience, the experience of buying the dress. It's a big thing. So why do they exist? What's their unique value proposition? What do they do differently to their peers? Who are their clients and how are they segmented? How, therefore, is your website laid out? For instance, is their website going to be laid out by product or is it going to be laid out by customer? I have a client that has what could be a billion dollar product. It is awesome. He has five target markets that he's identified. But what does he go and do? He wastes that by marketing one message to them all. And then he sells about 50 products. So instead of having sales of a billion dollars, he's got sales of like, you know, 5,000. Stupid, because he's got people that are conflicting. He's got builders and architects that could use his product. But they don't want to deal with someone that's selling to the other and taking business away from them. So you've got to think about that. So they should be talking to architects differently to the way they're talking to their builder clients. What they do and how they sell, do they have a funnel they need to go through? If they're selling a $3,000 course, if I come today and say, right, I'm selling a $3,000 course, you're going to go, I don't know you from a bar of soap. Why would I buy that? So what journey do they have to take to buy that? What values does a business exhibit? Values I'm finding is becoming more and more important. People are starting to realize that values are what makes a difference. I got rid of a client a couple of weeks ago because our values clashed. I found that she'd created fake Google accounts to create fake reviews to put on Google. Not my kind of customer. I'm really big on customer service. That ain't going to work. Branding and budget. Can they afford you? Have they got their branding sorted? Or is this something that's going to be chopped and changed over time? So what are the website components? Do they already have things like their domain name, their email provider, all that stuff? Are you doing that for them? So this is part of the brief. Never ever please register domain names in your name. They must be registered in the client's name. You cannot hold someone's domain name hostage. I'm sorry, that's not fair. You can hold the website hostage or whatever, go for your life, but don't hold the domain name hostage. That is really not on. Be careful about offering hosting. I saw an example of one lady. She offered hosting for her dodgy business. I'll tell you she's dodgy. 30 or 40 complaints to fair trading. She's dodgy. But she was using Wix as her website that she was designing, really lovely. And she said, I'm going to offer 12 months hosting. But the 12 months hosting was through Wix, but she wasn't paying the bill. So she doesn't pay the bill, what happens? Sight goes down. So all the client's sites would go down. And it would be for three or four days before she could wrangle up some money to pay the bill, before she'd scammed another person and paid up. Terrible. Might be funny, but it's not. It's really not. There's poor women, a lot of these poor women, they were hobbyist type people. They just got completely shafted, it was horrible. Logo branding colors and fonts. Do they have that already? So my logo is a dark blue and a light blue. Do I know what my RGB colors are for that so that I can use that across my website? So get all that stuff from them. Graphics and photography, what styles do they like? Again, like the age and that, the demographics, what are they creating? So make sure it works with their website. What copywriting do they need? When I speak to people, a lot of people freak out about copy. And I know for you as web designers, a lot of you have a massive issue with this of getting copy from clients. You've gotta be upfront in that start of the process and tell them what they need to do. And I know some of them still won't do it. I've had people I know that just haven't done it. But be really crystal clear. But also you can tell them voice record. I literally just open up a Gmail blank email and voice record straight into my email and it transcribes for me. It's awesome. And if I'm doing a blog post or something, it's really quick and easy to use. The website flow, as I said before, pages shouldn't just stop and stop. Think about blog posts. Why do we blog? We blog a lot of the time for SEO. We get thousands of hits to a blog on a website and then nowhere do we think about the fact they've come from somewhere where they haven't actually known anything about a business. A little blurb at the bottom, like you put on a press release, about a paragraph about your business with a link to your about page or back to your homepage or a link to your booking page or whatever's relevant. Think about this, the links in that that you have, the flow through the website. What is the client like and dislike? Simple. I have one client, she told a web designer, I do not like certain colors. The first design that comes to her was of course in those colors. Now what does that do to her as a client?  I asked you not to do that and you've done exactly what I said not to do. Do you listen to me? So she's immediately off with that web designer. I spoke to the web designer later and I said, why did you do that?  But you need to communicate that to your client. Don't present it to her. Tell her in advance, is it okay if we actually do something using the colors you said not to use? Because otherwise, you've just already written that client off. And she was, she was very disgruntled about her website. Divi layouts and that are actually a really good place to use is to give examples of different things you can do. So like the new diagonals and stuff, the curves, it's a really good place just to say, do you like that style? Do you not like that style? Get a feel for it. Get them to tell you what websites they like, but then also tell them, you're not going to copy someone else's website for a couple of reasons. One being copyright and things. So don't just copy someone else's. Be crystal clear. Things like the buy now button on an e-commerce page. Does that scroll down the page with the user or not? Because the client might think, well that's obvious, duh, it should just happen. But you as a web designer, put the buy now button on the page, which is what you agreed. So if you do e-commerce sites and think about things like that, they have a place. So my brief looks a bit like this. So I started creating this little brief thing thinking it's a three page document or something. It ended up a 12 page spreadsheet. So it was a little bit more complicated than I expected. But it's about things like desired delivery dates, multiple page site or not, preferred platform and preferred theme and all that. So as I said, the idea for this was that a business owner could go through this largely themselves and then either create their site using something like a Divi or a Beaver Builder or they could go to the web designer and go, yeah, this is what I've created so far. I would like you to then do the wire frames and stuff and finish the job off. So think about how you wanna work with a client with your design. So the wire frames obviously had probably left the designer but somebody might still have some ideas about things they like. I still see clients, I one that has said to me, she wanted to copy the old version of Gumtree. Do we all remember how ugly that was? How horrible that was? Like why would you wanna copy that? But she was an order to type. She liked lists and it was kinda list-driven and she connected with that and I'm like, yeah, but most people don't. So probably not what you wanna create. Mobile and desktop, obviously that's a given. So the proposed wire frame, what I start at the top is things that maybe should be on the homepage, for instance, things like social proof, contact details, logo, most popular links and all that stuff, videos, whatever. One thing I would say for websites, remember, do not have autoplay without sound muted. It's nothing worse than when you're in an office looking up a site you shouldn't have been looking at and it goes bleh! And you're embarrassed, don't do that. So using the brief, usually it's gotta relate to the client and not about not delivering content. So why have I lost my plot? I'll get back to that. Add-ons, how many add-ons do you have? Things like their buy now button. If you have to go and fix that so that it moves through the page, that's gonna be extra rework for you. So if you have that in the brief, then obviously it's gonna help things. So the idea of the brief is so that we don't end up with problems. We don't end up with rework. Often the current websites are delivered that they deliver a site, not the site the client actually needs. So I don't wanna see people delivering in about a service as a contact in a homepage and not actually thought about what the client actually needs. Install monitoring tools. How many people here put Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and they end as a standard? It should be everybody. We should all be putting this stuff in. Clients need to see that information. Basic SEO. Have just a few keywords matted in. Again, maybe it's something you get the client to do some research on. But at least have some decent keywords in there. So the person has a chance of appearing and as we said earlier, make sure the site's actually indexed. It is indexable, it's indexed and Google can find it. Make sure you've got backups installed, not just through the host, but separately.  It had all the deal information, all the client information, none of it was exported. It was a disaster. Handover and maintenance. Small business owners need assistance, okay? They're not gonna be to do this themselves a lot of the time. So particularly someone that's coming from a Wix or something that just does itself in the background, they come to WordPress and they're like, oh my God, what's this? What's this update I need for this plugin? What's this? Do I need to do it? When do I need to do it? Think about how you're gonna deal with those issues. This can be where you can offer packages and you can offer them some training that might be some video training, online courses or checklists that say, this is what you do and when you do it. So offer them a website review a month or so later. Not just on the day one, get a review from them, they're testimonial going, yeah, you're awesome! But then a week later, it's a disaster. This site is up today. Obviously a website has gotta evolve over time. This site, you probably can't read it. Last updated, 30th of June, 2006. That's my Kiwi accent coming in.  It's still live, I don't know why. They actually do have another website but they Google my business link straight to that one. So think about how you can manage their expectations for how these websites are gonna get updated. You may offer a maintenance program to say I will handle your updates for you but as I said, train them to do the basics so they can update simple text, add their blogs and that themselves. It gives you a business opportunity though to say to them for the bigger changes, come and see us. So what we've learned today, hopefully, why do you need to deliver an effective website through an effective, properly formulated brief? It helps to keep your clients happy, deliver within their time frames, make sure it's visible to Google, all obvious. Who we should avoid, your hobbyists, your startups that really don't yet have a clue, they're too early, get rid of them. Go through all the whole process but the key in developing the brief is to consider who will be using the site. Make sure that you're developing the site not just for the client but for the client's clients. Hand over, make sure there's training and make sure you know who's maintaining. So my homework for you, if you choose to accept it, if you already have a brief, enhance it, make some changes to it from what we've talked about today. If you don't have a brief, definitely start doing one from now and if you would like my one, you can send me a message and do it because being the crappy person I am, I still don't have my website up. It would have been, go to the page there and it just didn't happen. So unfortunately, if you message me or whatever, you can get access to that. So thank you. Thanks. Guys, any questions? Hello. How do you deal with things around copywriting when your client says, all right, just take it. I saw this image of one that, usually I'm trying to explain them what it means. Yep. Accepted? Yep. Yeah, just an idea. Okay, so I had a client contact me and she said, I just got this letter and the letters was an email and it said, you owe me $300 for using one of my images and she's going, is this a scam? And I went, oh no, not a scam, this is real. So when they get those type of letters, they suddenly realize the importance but what she had done, she had gone onto Google and if the image didn't have a watermark on it, she thought it was okay just to use it. You know, not so much. I tell people you can go to things like Pixabay, Pixels, Unsplash, you can use their site's images for free but always do a check. Do a right click, do a Google image search and check it because the person uploading the image could have uploaded an image that's not actually theirs. They don't actually have copyright for. So it's still a risk. With regards to text, I had a client who wanted to copy the same client that did the Dodgy Google review thing, by the way. She wanted to copy government websites. So the government family and children services website, she wanted to copy text out of there and put it on her site because she couldn't be asked to create and copy. Like two issues. One, breach a copyright and she was a lawyer. Think she'd know that but anyway. Second issue with it was that she, obviously for SEO, they're a higher ranking site than hers is ever going to be. How is she going to rank for SEO when she's just copied information off their site? She's going to be down because it's going to be duplicate content from their site. So you've just got to be clear to them and say it's not going to work. So like I said with the wording, I would ask them to voice record. It's a good way to get around it. Cool. Sorry. What? You said to avoid people that are just looking for income. Not to avoid them but just to watch how much you over capitalise. You're not doing a big bells and whistle site that's trying to attract them a whole lot of clients because they don't want them. But check with them what their vision is for their business. So some of them will say I don't know or some of them say I definitely want to have staff down the track. I want to have multiple vans on the road. I want to franchise. Those businesses go for your life. But if they're a pure income replacer and absolutely do not want to have staff, then they only need enough clients to keep them satisfied. So that's what you've just got to be careful of. Don't give them a $5,000 brochure site when a $500 brochure site would be perfectly fine for them. So it's about thinking about what you're offering. And you can make a call and go, I don't want to offer things the low end stuff. Perfectly fine. Have maybe somebody you can flick them off to. They'll just do a straight little, quick and easy website builder for them. Sorry. Anybody else? Yeah. You mentioned that it's important to know the client and the customer of the client. Yes. And a question about what do they expect from the website? In complex business like consulting and the other really esoteric type of activities, that is not available. What would you do to make it more agile rather than have requirements and deliver? So that's obviously where you've got to consider your client's needs and know that there's going to be scope for the future to change and add to their website. So you would make sure that day one you're going to say, okay, so what we want to do is create pages that we can easily duplicate. So obviously most people would have a services button and then they'd have multiple services under that. So you wouldn't want to make sure that each service then becomes a replication of the other services so it's all nice and uniform. But you would definitely make sure that that functionality is in there. You don't want to create them a four page site and that's it. So make sure you build it with that in mind. So it's always thinking about the end of mind. That's why we've always got to think about our vision for our customer. Where do they want to go in the future? And make sure that we're creating today is going to uphold for them now, but also allow for changes. So like I said, we empower them to make their own little changes. Things like they should be to change their phone number. They should be to change an image here and there, change some text. They should be doing that. We should be encouraging them to. But if it's creating a whole another section to their website, that's when we should be asking them to come back to us or come back to you guys as web designers and go, you know what? Come back to me and we'll sort that out for you. That's where you're actually building that ongoing business opportunity. Things like when the WordPress update came out, the big security one came out, right? Because so many people have been told before that you don't need to do updates right when they happen. In fact, leave it for a little while in case there's a change or a tweak. People left it. People were leaving it for a month or so because until they heard about, oh, this is what it's there for. It has to be put in now. But you as web designers, how many people in here are actually web designers and developers? How many of you have a CRM or an email list that you actually maintain contact with your clients? Not so many hands as the first lot, okay? Another point too for homework, create a CRM, create an email list. Actually keep in touch with your clients. When something like that's happening, you should be sending out a note to them and saying this email, this update for WordPress must go in immediately. It is a massive security issue.  It reminds you what an expert you are and they go, oh, that's right. I actually wanna add that other service to my page. They will come back to you then and you'll get more work out of it. It is such an easy thing to do. But how many of you create something, give it to someone and then that's it? How many of you have used this service? You've done something and that was it? All the time, right? So why don't we use our existing customer base more? They're there, use them. Yeah, I wanna go into that. Anything else? Do you have any suggestions in terms of language you can use to perhaps remind a client when they're working with a very limited budget? Because we very often get caught in this horrible phase where we hand over what they want in terms of requirements and then they're like, oh, can we add this and then all they'll put together designs and then those designs imply kind of like a redesign of existing infrastructure. And we're constantly caught in this process of handing over them wanting new things, us having to not have another discussion. And we end up spending a lot of time that should be spent developing, re-scoping, re-finalising all this sort of stuff we don't get anywhere. So part of that comes down to the brief discussion at the start, but part of that's also creating some documentation with clients. So one of the things you could put on a site as a web designer, as a downloadable, is something like how to work with a web designer. And actually give them all those instructions up front. But do you know the funniest thing with those changes? Isn't it always that the client comes to you thinking it's the easiest change in the world and it's a week worth of fixing? Whereas something they think's really complicated is like a two second job, it's always the case, right? So we've got to be up front with them saying to them, this is what you're agreeing to and this comes back to them signing off. You've got to sign it off and say to them, this is exactly basically what it's gonna mock up and look like. There will be nothing changed from this, that's it. The other big issue is the timeframe of delivery. Because they're not giving their content on time, they lose their window. You've gotta be clear to them they've lost their window. When they come back with content, they can't think then you're gonna turn it around in two days or a week or whatever because no, they lost their window. They actually have to wait for a new window to open. That's the sort of thing you've got to communicate clearly at the start. And as long as you do that, most people are reasonable. You're dealing with small business owners. They understand because they get clients doing that to them. So talk to them like that.  And then they're going, oh yeah, I get that. Oh, that's so annoying when that happens. And then they're suddenly on the same page as you. You're not just a service provider.  Assuming you are. If you're an agency officer, it's a little bit different, but you're still talking to them on their level. Cool, is that it? One or two more questions and then we'll wrap it up. Any more? I will just mention again about the government services. So just so in case you didn't know that down before. So business.gov.au slash assistance. All of you, anyone here that's in a business that's less than 20 people can access a lot of services. But that assistance tab has things for everybody. So for instance, if you're a small business owner and you hire an employee in New South Wales, there's a grant of $2,000 available for hiring that employee. There's a lot of things like that that a lot of people don't know about. So that's why you come to people like the Business Connect program or whatever's in your state. And take advantage of that, because we can let you know all those things that you don't know about. So like I said, you can use the service, but also you can refer clients that aren't ready for you to use the service as well. So make sure you take advantage of it because the government does provide stuff. The reason they don't just go out and go, here, New Business Owner, here's $500. It's because most of them will go and print flyers and drop them in their surrounding area and then go, I got one customer. They come and see someone like me or go, yep, unless you're a restaurant business, maybe you get away with that. Anyone else? No, not flyers. We'll go a different strategy. So it's about them getting money for something useful. So instead of giving someone money, they give them advice. So take advantage of it. Thank you, everybody. And it was useful if anyone has any questions. Privately, they can come and ask me. Thank you. Thank you.


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His fingers are separated. They're all doing this till he talks about his staff and look at his fingers lock up. I have my own staff. Does he have people issues with his staff? Don't know. Something changed when he talked about his staff. Navarro says fingers separated thumbs up is confidence. His job taught you about yourself. It's the people. They're all so different and how you deal with the people. Here we are again, that lack of confidence. Look at his hands. His hands are locked. We're noticing he's owning the conversation, controlling the conversation and allowing you to ask certain questions. But he's very concise with where he goes with the answer. Now that doesn't mean he's a psychopath. There's a ton of reasons why people do this. And for you, if you see somebody suddenly change the way they're talking every time they talk about people, you might even just be a friend and say, everything okay? That's all you got to say. I'm not talking about finding a psychopath. I'm talking about getting across to people who may have something going on.


Taking a look at the pitching problemals for Wednesday's third game of this four game set, Garrett Cole, 3-0, 2-9-5, ERA, strike out to walk excellent. Jordan Lyles will go for Baltimore. Coverage begins 6 o'clock on yes. John, the Yankees look to keep things rolling with their ace on the hill. You know, Ryan, when I look at Garrett Cole, I think of your buddy, Cece Sabathea, and when we watched him over his Yankee career, once he got it going, it would be about 10 or 12 starts in a row where it would be dominant. If you look at Cole, started off a little bit slow this year. His last four starts, 1.42 ERA, he has definitely found it, has great numbers against Baltimore in his career and seven starts. You just expect this Yankee team to show up tomorrow with their ace out on the mound, continue their winning ways. We'll see if they do.