Good to go. Before I start proper, I'd like everyone to put their hands together and just give a round of applause to all the organisers and all the volunteers at WordCamp Central. The Industrial Age is defined around the explosion of manufacturing and construction technology in the first half of the 19th century. There were great improvements in construction, in mass transportation, both of people and of goods, and the construction of bridges and tunnels, all of which led to huge time savings and much of which is in use today. And while the Luddites famously protested elements of the Industrial Age, it did contribute substantially to a great improvement in the standard of living. And it's contributing to improving the standard of living that I want to talk to you about today. But I want to do it in the context of our own lifetimes, the Information Age. It's the improved distribution of information through the internet that has led to the most recent improvements in the standard of living. Over the course of this WordCamp, literally thousands of people will download and install WordPress for the very first time, all across the world. Who knows where it's going to lead them? I'm sure it led some of you to unexpected places. It certainly changed my life, and that's why I like contributing code back, and I do this by contributing to WordPress call. And it's important to emphasise the word call in the title of my talk. I'm not talking about contributing to WordPress because there are so many ways of doing this that I couldn't hope to cover all of them at all today. So contributing to call is only a small fraction of the way that you can contribute back. Which begs the question, what do I mean when I say WordPress call? When I talk about call, I'm specifically talking about the code base that powers WordPress. The code that powers the dashboard allows you to select the theme and plug-ins and to write content that will appear in your theme. Since the end of 2014, I've been a regular contributor to WordPress call, although my first contribution was this in 2011. 47 characters. And this is the same contribution as I uploaded it. But I'm really getting way ahead of myself here. I'm getting ahead of myself because when contributing to call, you need to consider that the code will run on one in four websites. And as such, any code that's contributed needs to be considered carefully before being committed. No one really knows for sure how that code will be run. My day job is as a WordPress engineer at Human Made, we build high-end sites using WordPress and we use WordPress in a very specific way. A way suitable for building large sites that will scale for big businesses. I was lucky enough to be invited to be a guest committed for WordPress 4.6 and 4.7. And that's an idea that I like to keep in mind before committing code. I use WordPress in one way. But there are hobbyists, bloggers, small businesses and so many others around the world using WordPress in a different way. And this is why it can sometimes take a little while for a patch to get into a WordPress call. It's a desire to keep those one in four websites running. It's these one in four websites that have led to the WordPress philosophies. The best known aspect of which is to maintain backward compatibility. Let's move towards writing some code. Development of WordPress takes place on the WordPress core track. The track home page looks like this. It's pretty plain. It can be thought of as a code browser with an issue tracker attached. It helps to go exploring to see what's around. So the first stop will be a code browser. The code browser is essentially find at the track. So you've got your modified date, the age of files, all that sort of information that you'd expect from a regular file system. However, as it's hooked up to a version control system, it also includes a summary of the most recent change. The next screen I'll take a look at is the ticket screen. It leads to the various ways of navigating tickets. And there's a lot of ways that tickets can be navigated. But that's because there's a lot of tickets. Over 37,000 tickets have been opened on the WordPress core track since WordPress began. Around 10% of these remain open at the moment. Once you start participating in track, a really handy report is this one. It lists all the open tickets that you've shown an interest in. And once you've been contributing for a little while, it can end up being quite a long report. But that's okay. At any one time, there's quite a lot going on in WordPress core. Another helpful report is to see what will be included in the next major release of WordPress. Early on in the release cycle, it's full of tickets. But as the release approaches, it becomes smaller and smaller. I took this screenshot here. The weekend after WordPress 4.6 released candidate one was released. Which is handy because it means that all the tickets can fit on one screen. Right now at the start of WordPress 4.7's release cycle, we would not be so lucky. Now I understand that the administration of WordPress track is not the most glamorous part of contributing to WordPress core. It's necessary, though, for the reason that I showed you earlier, the high number of sites that are using WordPress. Enough about WordPress core track for the time being. Let's move towards writing some code. Development of WordPress takes place using SVN. So to check it out, you run the same SVN checkout command you would for any other repository. The WordPress SVN repo is at the address on screen. And it's recommended you check it out into a directory called WordPress developer. Enough about WordPress core track for the time being. Let's move towards writing some code. Development of WordPress takes place using Git. So to clone it, you run the same Git clone command you would for any other repository. The WordPress Git repo is at the address on screen. And it's recommended that you clone it into a directory called WordPress developer. That's right. You can contribute to WordPress core using either SVN or Git. For many of us, me included, SVN can feel a little bit like this, while Git is considered the more modern approach. As I can't hope to cover both today, I'm going to focus on Git. Once you've cloned the repository, as we did earlier, you need to set up a web server running on your local machine to run your local copy. And while it's possible to use to run your local web server as a virtual machine, I want to focus on the lowest barrier to entry today. And for me, that means running a basic web server on your computer. There's a lot of options around, but I first started contributing to WordPress core using the free version of Man. To my way of thinking, it's much easier to set up Man, select the preferences, and set the document route to the source directory inside the WordPress developed directory. Having set the source directory, I think set Man to use the default web port for setting up a web server. After that, you can click start and the server is running. I am prepared to accept that running Man, or another web server GUI, is not going to get you an award for the most advanced development environment of the year. However, it will get you to contributing to WordPress core in between 5 and 10 minutes, so I'll take that over any nerd cred that happens to be going around. The final step is to get WordPress running on your local machine. Before setting up WordPress, you need to create a database for your install. Man includes PHP MyAdmin for this purpose, so you create the database in your web browser at the address on screen. Some of you may have used PHP MyAdmin on a hosting provider's service, but for the uninitiated, it's a case of clicking new in the menu on the left and creating a new database and naming it on the right of the screen. You can then install WordPress on your local computer, as you would on a normal website. The install follows the standard practice for installing WordPress. You visit the address of the site, local host, and follow the installation. When it comes time to entering your database details, the database name is the same one you entered earlier, and the databases username and password are both through. On the final screen, you can set up the site details with anything you would like. I usually name it WordPressDevelop and use some ludicrously insecure login details, but it's only running locally, so it doesn't really matter. Now, I happen to think that developing anything without test data is about as useful as a car with flat tyres. So I tend to download the test data from WPtest.io for use on my development install. It's a really nice set of test data, particularly useful when it comes time to testing for edge cases. Once downloaded, the data can be imported using the WordPress importer. So finally, with WordPress installed, a really nice set of test data, we're ready to write some code at last for WordPress. There are two approaches you may want to take for this. You may have a particular enhancement in mind, or you may want to pick up something else that someone else has reported as a bug. It's really up to you. If you're looking for a good first bug, a good spot to start is the aptly titled good first bug report on track. For the demo today, I'm going to create a simple ticket to create an Easter egg on the body class for any posts that are titled WordPress Singapore. And this is the ticket as it would appear in track. So let's get started and work on making a patch. Creating a patch is done on the copy of WordPress that we downloaded and filled with test data a little bit earlier. It's always wise to make sure that WordPress is up to date with the main repo when you start writing a patch. This is done by running get cool in the command line, and once it's finished running, we can ensure that we had WordPress core up to date for writing our patches. My not entirely guilty secret is that I prefer a GUI for some activities in GIG. Again, it's not something that will win you any nerd credibility, but it's a good, but it's good development tools that can help you write the best code possible. So finally, we start writing some code. And it's relatively simple enough. We get the title. If the title happens to be WordCamp Singapore, then we add an Easter egg to the list of classes. But there are some problems with this quote. The first problem becomes obvious when we look at the HTML. The code is an adding one class. It's adding two. And they include characters that are going to make using these classes very difficult. So we can fix that with the built-in WordPress class sanitization function. We've solved the obvious problem, but we still haven't solved the biggest problem. The biggest problem with the code actually relates back to railway in the industrial age. It's a massive problem with implications to this very day. During the industrial age, different engineers designed railways. So let's start by building a railway. First, we'll lay one track. Now, we'll lay another track. Although I'm worried that these tracks are a little close together, maybe I should move the second one out a bit. The trains will be bigger, but they'll be able to carry more goods so we can build less of them. Building a railway without any standards is really hard. So many of you will have guessed what happened. Everyone built railways without considering what happened at the border. For many years, there were border crossings that required passengers to change trains. Fortunately, such foolishness is behind us and we now have standards. These standards are very low, which brings me to the WordPress coding standards. This is what the code that I wrote in the last few years earlier looks like in my text editor. It's really trying to tell me something. You see, I have my text editor linked up to the WordPress coding standards. The WordPress coding standards are designed so that it looks like WordPress call is written by one person. It does this by enforcing the same set of practices they follow. My editor looks like this because there are a few problems with my code. The WordPress call coding standards call for spaces inside brackets inside function calls. So I can remove the errors from the first line by just adding spaces inside all those brackets. But that's had no effects on the warnings for the other lines. That's because there are other problems with those lines against the WordPress coding standards that need fixing. The inline control structure needs to be converted to include braces. WordPress doesn't allow the inline control structures because braces make it harder to introduce a bug down the track. If a second line is added, then the developer down the track, the future developer, can just add their own line of code. However, other problems remain. The WordPress call coding standards prefer single quotes over double quotes. Among other things, double quotes are unnecessary without variables being evaluated. But it also just keeps the code base looking like it was written by one person. Finally, WordPress uses yoda conditions for the if statements. Again, yoda conditions are to help prevent errors. If you miss an equal sign with a yoda condition, your code will throw an error. Without them, you'll happily set the title of every single post to word camp Singapore. You've introduced a bug. As you can see, we've cleared out all the warnings, but there is one slight change that I would make. I'd altered the double equals to be a triple equals. In this instance, we can avoid type chuckling, so it's best to do so. Again, this is all to make the code run consistently and look like it was written by one person. The next step is to upload our change on track. In context, our change looks like this. It sits within the get body class function inside the post template file. When patching call, we can't just upload the file that we want to change. We need to upload the diff, which is just the changes to the file. In the WordPress develop directory, we run the command get diff. It's messy, but it gives us a screen that looks like this. There are a few separate parts to the screen that it's worth looking at. First of all, we can see the file that is being modified. We can see the function that we're making the changes to and the lines of code either side of the changes that we are making. And finally, we can see the code changes that we want to introduce to WordPress call. Looking at the entire diff, I can see that it looks good and is ready for uploading to track for consideration in WordPress call. The next step is to generate the patch file for the purpose. And the command is very similar. Get diff, output to a file, and I put it into a file in my downloads directory. And I follow a common naming convention on track, which is to name the file for the ticket number in question. If there is a clash with an existing file, track will detect it and just add a version number to the file as you upload it. On our ticket, we can upload our file by clicking the attach file button, which you'll see at the bottom of the screenshot there, and then we choose our file and upload it. And by uploading it, we agree to license our code to WordPress foundation for use under the GPL. However, and this is really, really important, one of the most important things about WordPress. You retain the copyright on any code that you write. You are licensing your code to WordPress and to the wider community for use. Uploading a file, unfortunately, though, won't notify anyone. You need to, at a comment, letting people know what you've done. I just tend to summarize the changes that I've made. You also need to add the keyword has patch. Submitting your comment will notify anyone following the ticket of these changes. At this point, your code will be reviewed by a volunteer with a view as to whether or not it should be committed into WordPress code. And if all goes to plan, it will be. When I say it all out, it seems like quite a process, step by step, but it's really quick once you get some practice. And to help you through the process is why the community runs events like contributor days, word camps, like you're here today, and so on. I'll be around for the rest of the day, so if you want to help hand getting started contributing to WordPress call, feel free to tap me on the shoulder. Contributing code allows you to follow one of the fundamental rules of open source. Hack call and contribute the hacks back. You can follow along in the WordPress Slack or the WordPress Slack for the process. But if you don't want to hack call, you can write documentation, either for users or for developers. You can translate WordPress into another language. You can contribute in so many ways. In fact, you're contributing to the community by being here at the word camp today. And for that, I thank you. Thank you very much. And if you have any questions, follow up in my request you raise. Do I ask him? Sorry, how do I start? How did I start? I started doing it on my weekends, which is when I first got involved. I just started doing it as a hobby to just fill in time. I was working in a job that wasn't using WordPress much at the time, and I wanted to keep my hand up with WordPress. So that's when I got involved quite heavily. And that was, as I said, sort of at the end of 2014. And now that I do use WordPress every day at work, I've just sort of kept it up and continued doing so. Anyone else? Anyone else that's too shy to ask a question in a big crowded room but actually does have a question about contributing to WordPress call? As I said, feel free to come and tap me on the shoulder. I'll be sort of hanging around in the hallways and in the building for the rest of the day. And I'd be absolutely delighted to show you and help you get started. And if you want to ping me on Twitter and say, make me near the coffee machine, that's also fine. So you should feel free to do so. Thank you.


Number seven, takes her up and away we go. Raw to that first corner of the inside gate, he's working well. Thompson's on the outside trying to make that work and he's just about there. Jax and Doyle alongside and there won't be any room there. Doyle will wind it on there around the inside. Dudek there in mid-track. Oh, Thompson's done well there. He's responded really well to get the better of the Australian to force his way back into second place. My second lap was fantastic from him. It was indeed. Into the last lap. Then Patrick Dudek away from the inside, riding strongly out in front, moving forward on the bike. Look, Greg Hancock was pointing out, body position, all important in these conditions. Anders Thompson in second place with Patrick Dudek. Five points for him as well. A very useful win for Patrick. Eight number nine, takes her up and away we go. It's an even break. Leon Madsen's made a really good start from gate three. Very impressive indeed. Dudek's there, right alongside him. Dudek comes. Oh, that door is slammed shut down the backslide. That's for sure. Leon Madsen stabbing his authority. Jack Holder coming into the picture as well in third place. But Leon Madsen going wide, gone too wide. Got to respond now, surely up the inside. It's going to get tied in a turn three. Patrick Dudek. Wow, what a response from him. Madsen made the mistake and Dudek was ready to bounce. Do you need a road map for this track at the moment? Dudek showing so much more speed than he's had in the last few beltries. He has indeed, he's out in front. Took the opportunity with both hands there and fired himself to the front. He's into the last turn. Going to be a second heat win of a night. Move on to eight points. Almost guarantees his semifinal spot already. Here we go. Takes her up and away we go. And Yunovsky's made a really good start from the outside. But Dudek, Dudek once again, through the middle of the corner in the first turn has fired himself to the front. And Dudek is riding so well tonight. A real return to form for him. Robert Lambert back in second place. And that's the Yunovsky in third. Dan Buley at the back. He's also safe, he's in the semifinals. Dudek out in front, riding really well. Coping with conditions really nicely. Now Yunovsky's almost given up the ghost at the back. With Buley coming through in third place. Lambert picks up a handy second place as well. Green lights on now. Takes her up, Jarvis on the way they go. Dudek's made a good start from the inside. Hugs that first turn. There's Barca Smasik coming through in the second place. And Freddie Lingwin also getting the better of Robert Lambert down the back straight from the opening leg. Understandably so. Difficult conditions. But just one big effort round this last corner. Keeping it all together. Patrick Dudek, the rider of the night. No question about it. What win for Patrick Dudek? Yeah, from the inside, Patrick Dudek. Been an electric from the start all night long. Not necessarily known for his starting. But he's hardly put a foot wrong all night long. I think he was more than happy to take second place tonight. It's a great result for him. He will move nicely on. 35 points now for Patrick Dudek.


Hi, this is Raya Salter. We are live at the state Capitol for Think Tech, Hawaii with the mayor of our fair city and some other folks talking about the accessory dwelling unit example that is here that can really has a potential to change people's lives and make dense in the affordable housing issues here. So mayor, please, please tell us what's going on here and what's your involvement. Well, Raya, it's great to be down here with you today. I mean, it's a beautiful afternoon on a Friday and you have volunteers coming down, standing with us or Duncan be knocking and Jeff RC. You know, top, top, top people in our town who build a lot of quality projects and they're not here volunteering their time. But for me, accessory dwelling units are about providing affordable housing in a market that's not being met. This is a 400 square foot unit, more or less, easy to put up. You could provide one of these on your property. On the city of County of Honolulu has allowed this. There's about 120,000 lots on this island that could have an ADU along as their sewer capacity and parking, but that means you have another unit that you can rent that's affordable rental. You generate income that could help pay your mortgage in the home that you live in. It's a win-win for everyone. And we're just really excited, the Apple Seed Project and Habilitat has stepped forward to do one of these here on the capital grove. Thank you so much, mayor. That is so exciting. I couldn't agree with you more. Please, sir, tell us your name. I'm Jeff RC with the McDonough Group. Well, what is your involvement with this project? Can you tell us a bit about what's going on here? Do I can tell you a little bit? I just got here myself, but our company tries to get involved in the community. We do real estate development and we try to give back where we can. And this is a great project that we heard about through Hawaii Apple Seed and Habitat for Humanity. They're putting up this ADU. So a bunch of our people were here working yesterday and we just got here today to help out and work with these great contractors that are volunteering their time as well to put this thing up as a great example of a way to build a nice, affordable, living in a very nice area unit. Thank you. I couldn't agree more. I think it's so exciting. It's always great to see folks and volunteering in the Habitat shirts. Sir, could you please tell us your name and your affiliation and what you think about this project? Duncan McNaughton. I just arrived. I don't even have my outfit on yet. That's okay. So I think what the mayor said or what Jeff said covers the project and the McNaughton Group is excited to be a part of anything like this. It helps out the affordable new feature and we look forward to being hopefully an asset to our effort here. What do you think these type of units can mean for Hawaii? It obviously would provide housing for a community that really needs it but these houses are designed to go on individual lots that belong to other people and they rent them out and this allows more housing for the public in general actually and affordable housing as well.  I definitely think so. In fact, we've now approved through permitting process about 160 of them. There's another 800 that are being reviewed right now. I mean, I think we're just seeing the beginning of a ramp up. People need housing and this is a way to do it without government really putting a lot of effort other than expediting permitting and waiving fees. The rest comes from the private sector and from groups like this that volunteer and step up. I'm hoping that it's the beginning of a trend that will start to address our affordable housing challenges. Thank you so much, mayor. I guess just a couple more questions. I know you just got here but what might something, a unit like this, what might it look like inside and what are some of the ways that can someone sort of live comfortable in a small unit? Well, first I wanna compliment the mayor on this effort to get this program going because it's a great example of a public-private partnership and many times it does require both the private sector and the public sector to come together and accomplish something like this. So more of this and there's some other areas where we could do it too with higher density but this is a great example of the community coming together to do something really special. So inside, again, I just got here, I'm not too familiar with it but I did go in and walk around it and there is a trend right now. If you look at CoCoCo and all the condos, people are downsizing and they've lived, they've learned that they can live in a much smaller area and you spend a lot more time at the local Starbucks or coffee bean and tea and you just relax on the street and socialize out there.  It's a nice comfortable place to live. Fantastic and so when you do get your shirt on, how are you gonna be pitching in today? Whatever they tell me to do. You punch nails very well. Anything that stands out, he'll pound it down. Well, thank you so much gentlemen and thank you so much mayor. What a fantastic project and oh, let me ask mayor, can folks, when is this gonna be done? Can people come down and check this out? Yeah, I think it's gonna be done tomorrow, right? They're rushing to try to get in. They're going in fast and I encourage people to come down. People drive by, it's easy to find parking in the later afternoon and they should come in and look at it. It is something that may work on their property and as Jeff mentioned, sometimes you get older, you may not need the big house, you could move into the accessory dwelling unit and rent your house out to a family with children. Win-win for both. I couldn't agree more, that'll be the last word. Thank you so much mayor. Thank you so much gentlemen for your time today. Signing off for Think Tech Hawaii.


I talk a lot on this channel about Unify. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of their products. They work excellent, especially we love their access points and switches. But one of those things about Unify and their software is free to download, their software-defined network controller that manages all these devices is a free piece of software, but you do have to run it somewhere. You're responsible for the server it runs on, you're responsible for the hardware, you're responsible to maintain the updates on it. And that's fine. I don't have a problem doing this myself, but for some people, maybe they're looking for an easier way to do it. Now I've helped people set this up in like digital ocean, line out in different places, or even Amazon, wherever they wanna run their own controller. Or you could also look at getting a Cloud Key, which I just recently reviewed, which is also a great choice for the Unify software comes preloaded with there from Unify and has some automatic options. Then there's another option that I ran to. And it's started out as me looking for an easy way to have everything from the Let's Encrypt Cert, auto account generation, and an easy way to manage clients. And we do run our own controller for our managed clients, but I wanted a way that we could basically automate the deployment of this. And it turned out that was a kind of a challenge to write. We started just looking at all me and my friend Phil, who has been on a channel before, he's expert at a lot of automation and design. We've seen some of the challenges in doing it and we've played around with some scripts. And I started doing the market research before you get into a product. And I came up with Hostify as one of the people already doing it out there. And I see people because I'm specifically talking about Riley Chase. And I won't spend too much time on this, but I'll leave a link to it. I think a lot about who runs the company and Riley did something that I kind of wish I would have done when I started my company back in 2003. He has blogged about the entire journey of starting a business from leaving his job to starting up his software as a service company, Hostify. And it's kind of cool that he did all this. Like I said, just one of the things I found even more interesting was it wasn't just I found some company that was creating a software service product called Hostify for the Unify Cloud Hosting. It's that he has the entire including how much revenue comes in from there. This is not profit. This is revenue, by the way, for those of you wondering. But he talks about the costs of running a service, the methodologies and the thoughts he has behind the service he runs. And I thought this was kind of a cool thing. And I also reached out to Riley and we had some great conversation. He's definitely a very motivated, very innovative entrepreneur. Now let's go back to talking about the product itself. Launch Unify in the Cloud. This is pretty well done. I've been playing with this. I created the paid account. I created a free account and tested how each one gets created. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this and it's what I would have done. They have all the nice, clean website with all the features and everything else on there. And the short answer is this will create a hosted multi-site Unify and automate all of the functions for you in colluding something, let's encrypt cert, auto renewing the let's encrypt cert, and creating automatic updates for everything. So you don't have to say, oh no, there's another update. I gotta get around to doing that. That's all scripted and taken care of on the backend. Plus he provides support and help and he's very much familiarized himself with the way the database in the backend of Unify works. So that's been very interesting. So monthly, these are prices as of July, 2019. Prices can change. So always refer back to the website, not my video because the video becomes static. But 125 devices at $19 per month, 250 at 29, it's not awful and you get a yearly plan for 15% discount. So the pricing on it is very reasonable. I know it's really cheap right now to spin up like a digital ocean droplet and put it in there. But yeah, remember, what is your time worth because you have to maintain and update that. And we've learned to people who, we just had someone had a problem. They were numerous versions behind me because they didn't have it set up to properly update. They didn't have what's encrypted and installed or anything, but all the updates and everything you're behind on. So if you want to have someone else take care of that, hostifies a pretty cool option. And one of the other things I like, if you wanna try it out for free, there's a free plan that does not require a credit card. That is something I think is really cool is anytime a company lets you check out a free plan and not charging you any type of money. And what they, what he did for the free plan was just set up a max one site or 25 devices. For home users wanna get started with Unify, looking for a simple place to host it, can't go wrong. If you ever get bigger and wanna expand to more than 25 devices, which probably is more than you'll have in your house, but who knows, you will end up, you know, buying the bigger plan. So everything else is pretty simple. Now, how does it work? How do you create it? Well, let's get over there. And I'm gonna show you what it looks like when it creates, including my password. And I say that because I wanted to actually show you the screen and how it creates. So my free Unify site is done. I tried the paid one and deleted it. And then I tried the free one. They both work. Just like I said, I walk through both steps on this. With the free one here, here's the launch. It actually gave me PZera1.hostify.net. So you get a prefix on it. That's gonna be your informed URL, the username I chose, and it generates a password, a temp password. As soon as you log in, it prompted me to change your password. But once you're logged in, for the most part, it's pretty much the same that you'll see for Unify installation. With the exception of when you do the free one, you're going to not have the multi-site option because that has been disabled. So that's the one thing about the free one. There are some restrictions on there, but you still can add 25 devices. You just can't set up the multi-site version of it on there. So other than that feature being missing, the SSL's installed, and we don't have a little red X. We actually have a proper valid certificate. So it's at P1.hostify. It's using Let's Encrypt, and it's all set to auto update, which is wonderful. I set up a wireless network, and then I adopted this guy right here. So I have the Unify HD in there. Now it works fast, so we'll go ahead and hit locate. And it pretty much instantly, if you can see it blinking within, I don't know, was that one second, two seconds? From the time I hit locate till the time it started making this blink. So the communications is really fast to everything else, and you're done. It's a simple set up Unify controller. Now I will comment, and I'll leave a link to this, but if you don't know, when you do a set and form on these, you do have to have your set and form URL, and my inform URL would have been this, P01.hostify.net. So really straightforward to set up, really easy to spin this up. When I had adopted a couple devices, deleted them, adopted them, I was playing around with it. It's snappy, it's fast, it was really trouble free. The whole set up was like, no problem at all. And being here in my office, it notices all the other stuff, all the other wifi networks. So it's like, I go into the menus on here. It's actually quite a fast controller, so you just put the time into setting up the backend properly and everything else. And I did ask a lot of questions. I had a great conversation with them, including I wanna know what he's using for payments, and how is he handling it, how is he tokenizing the billing? He followed best practice. Everything was like, you know, set up with a straight backend. And those little things kind of mattered to me when I'm, you know, before I put my credit card in on something. And I told him I was gonna go ahead and stick my credit card in here and walk through the process because I don't like recommending a product unless I've done a little bit of testing with it. So overall, my impressions of Hostify were, it's a simple solution for those people who go, I don't wanna maintain any of this. And maybe, you know, if we maintain it as a service for clients, without giving them access to the control panel, like we do take over Wi-Fi for people to manage it, but there's those in between people, those home users, or even small businesses, they go, you know, I kind of want my own dashboard and paying a few dollars a month to have someone else update and maintain all this infrastructure for me. That'd be great. And I tell you, for some of them, I'm gonna really recommend this to at least a handful of people that are one-off because every time they call us, they're way out of date. There are a lot of versions behind. And I try to recommend, please keep all these things up to date. If you're not going to pay us, at least, you know, this is a good happy in between, I think, for people who wanna maintain and have their own dashboard and have something auto update. Full disclosure, I do have, but you're not required to use it at all. An offer code that does help out the channel on our affiliates page for Hostify, and I'll leave a link below in this video. But my overall impressions are it's a neat service. I wanna look at some of the other services that he's offering, because he's got some cool concepts. He's really trying to build the business up. And if you are just an entrepreneur in general and wanna read about some of the entrepreneurial process, he's got some good write-ups on there.  This is, I almost like, wish I would have started in 2003 talking about my entrepreneurial and divergent experiences, because there's always a lot of lessons learned when you're very open about things. And hopefully, you know, you don't make some of the mistakes that you make when you're a new entrepreneur. I mean, mistakes are not just mistakes. They're often expensive mistakes. And some people won't survive some of those mistakes when starting a business. So how are you doing well? I'm excited and it's cool that he keeps posting every month how much recurring revenue. The goals he's got set, I think these are kind of cool things about the openness. And he's very responsive. So I had questions about a few things and he's very, replies right away to start things out. So I'm already got the impression that you get really good support on this. A few people I've seen people talk about reviewing this and have asked me about it. That's the other reason I'm reviewing this, it seems like a pretty good service. And after speaking with him, reading through his blog post and everything, everything I like it about it may not be something I personally use because we manage your own controller. But for those people who go, you know, I want to have a dashboard and want to auto update, I think it's a great value. And like I said, I have an affiliate offer. We always have actually a lot of affiliate offers. I wanted to bring that up. Ways to keep this channel is minimal amount of ads and sponsored placements as possible. By the way, this is not at all sponsored. I just reached out to him because I thought it was a cool product, but we do have an affiliate link. So full disclosure. But we have a few other things we have affiliate links for too. So if you want to run it yourself in line node or digital ocean, we have that. And we have an Amazon affiliate link if you want to buy the products to our link. It always does help out the channel. I do appreciate it. But yeah, that's my thoughts on Hostify. I thought it was a neat product and I wanted to share that with you guys. Thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to laurancesystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you want to help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.


Cell-in-cell is a unique phenomenon mostly documented in human cancer tissues. A recent study demonstrated that cell-in-cell might promote lymphopenia by internalizing and killing immune cells in COVID-19, which implicates cell-in-cell as an emerging player in a broader spectrum of pathological processes, such as immune dysregulation. This article was authored by Sun Chang and Shen Wei.


So this is my presentation from the oculoplastics one and from the oculoplastics conference. And this is something that Dr. Patel helped me put together. And I'm really hoping for a good discussion on this patient. I'm going to talk a little bit about the medical side of it, but Dr. Patel suggested and I think it's a great idea to focus a little bit more on the ethical and on the ethical side of this case. So I'm hoping to have a good discussion as that comes up. So this was a patient that was initially a telephone consult. So Dr. Patel was contacted regarding a patient who's an 86-year-old lady. And he was contacted because he'd seen her before and helped out with this. So she had an advanced left forehead squamous cell that was resected in 2013. And a pretty significant reconstruction done at that point. It was treated with radiation. And she had shown up at the ENT clinic who had also participated in her care, presenting with new masses in the left lacrimal gland and left parotid gland. And so the consult, so she had shown up at the ENT clinic. And the phone call was basically, we'd like you to biopsy the left lacrimal gland because if it is squamous cell, which they really suspected it was, she will need an exenteration, hemifacial resection, which is an invasive surgery. So she came to our clinic for evaluation. So over the past few months, she had noticed this new bump over her left eyelid. And then another bump, she'd also actually noticed these at her left jaw line. And so she had a little bit of blurry vision in her left eye. And no pain, no paristhegias. So her medical history, I'd mentioned this before. So in 2015, so this was just a month before we saw her, she'd had a squamous cell on the nose that was removed with Mohs surgery. In 2013, she'd had this wide resection of squamous cell in the left forehead. And still had positive margins, was treated with radiation. And then she'd had several other different places on her skin, resections of basal cell and squamous cell. Also arthritis, GERD, depression. And then in the past, she'd had non-Hodgkin lymphoma that was treated outside of the university, so I don't have a lot of details on this. But she was not receiving any treatment at that time. So this is a picture. So you can see a lot of this is just post-surgical changes from the previous surgery. But what she had noticed, and what we noticed on exam, was this new swelling here laterally in the area of the lacrimal gland. So the ENT service had already ordered the imaging. And this was what they had noticed, a 2 by 1 centimeter mass at the left lacrimal gland. And then they'd also noticed a second mass at the parotid gland. So sorry, I picked on Chris at a bad time last time. Are you OK now, Chris? Any thoughts on a differential diagnosis here? Right. Nice, yeah. Perfect, kind of right where we were. I just include a little bit more of a differential. We've got O-caps coming up. And I feel like sometimes these lacrimal and orbital tumors are some of the toughest ones. So squamous cell definitely bolded here, given her history really concerning for that. The pleomorphic adenomas, pleomorphic adenocarcinoma, adenoicistic carbosinoma, with her history maybe less concerning. Lymphoma, she does have a history of lymphoma. And then just a benign reactive lymphoid hyperplasia, as you mentioned. So I want to go back to the initial consult that we were called about. So we would like you to biopsy the left lacrimal gland, because if it is squamous cell, she'll need an exeneration and hemifacial resection. And so that is kind of the ethical discussion that I want to focus on, just kind of directed towards that treatment plan. So if it is squamous cell, so these are some of the questions we're going to discuss. I'm going to do a little bit more background, but I just want to introduce these so everyone could be thinking about them. So if it is squamous cell, should she have an exeneration hemifacial resection? How should we make that decision?  Does the way we present information influence the decision that the patients ultimately make? And as consultants, because Dr. Patel was a consulting physician in this situation, what is our role? And so I'm going to do a brief review of squamous cell and exeneration just to kind of aid with this discussion. So squamous cell is the second most common malignancy of the face, and it's the most common secondary epithelial neoplasm in the orbit. And the way it frequently gets to the orbit is perineural spread. And so this perineural spread, which is what we were concerned about in this situation, was first described in 1842. And so about 5%, when they cut out squamous cell, you can see evidence of perineural spread pathologically. But if it is recurrent, then the percentage is much higher if it's recurrent cancer. The symptoms, so formication. Let's see, Rhys, do you know what formication means? Because I didn't either. I had to look it up. So it's not formication. Formication means the feeling of ants crawling on your skin. So formication, I thought that was a good word that I learned. This athesia, peristhesia, numbness, so a lot of, as you'd imagine, symptoms associated with the nerves. And something that's important to keep in mind is that the perineural spread can take a long time to show up. It can be small amounts of cancer along the nerves, but then eventually that gets to the point where it's symptomatic. So it can present years down the road. And poor prognosis for squamous cell spread to the orbit. Five-year survival ranges between 20% and 30%. And this was just a nice case series, because it is fairly rare, so most of these are case series. 21 patients treated, 14 died with a median time to death of three years. And there's not, there aren't really good studies or good guidelines in terms of treatment. Most people recommend excentration plus or minus radiation, and definitely a multidisciplinary team. So because orbital excentration is the treatment that's frequently recommended, I just want to do a quick review on that. So first described in 1500s and again in the 1700s, the aim of excentration is to control the disease locally, so just get rid of the disease that's there that you can find. And 40% to 50% of exenerations are required basically for this for skin cancers. So tumors that originate in the eyelid or periocular skin. It is, there are a lot of complications with it. So fistula formation, tissue necrosis, chronic drainage, chronic pain. So it's certainly not a benign procedure. And I found one quality of life study that showed as you'd expect that there's significant reduction in quality of life. A lot of the exeneration studies are on what they call younger patients, so patients in their 50s or 60s. One did it in older patients, and the oldest they had was 85. And their patients did OK, but they were very carefully selected to be patients that were otherwise completely healthy and didn't have other health issues. Interestingly, so there was one comparative study that looked at exeneration versus conservative management. And they had 66 patients, which is, and it was sinus cancer, so not completely related to ours. They had similar survival, but the biggest problem with that is that it wasn't randomized. And so you can't really make conclusions on that, because patients who got the exeneration perhaps had had worse cancer in the first place. So there are some pretty amazing prosthetics that I learned about that look really good, but it turns out that most patients actually end up, in the states they've been done, prefer just not to use their prosthetic, because it's awkward. It still looks different enough that people still ask questions. And so I was surprised, the two studies I found said that most people just wear a patch instead. And then, so survival rate, so all comers, a few studies said 80% to 90%, five year around 60%. But again, if it was because of the perineural spread from squamous cell that they had the exeneration, the survival was much lower. So now we'll kind of get to what I'm hoping to spend most of my time on is this ethical discussion around the issues. I thought it would just be helpful to give a little bit of background information that we just did. And I also wanted to review the ethical values in medicine. I think sometimes we forget that we have these values that kind of give us a framework to look at a tough situation. And I feel like when we step back and look at what our community of physicians, what we recognize as important values, I feel like stepping back and looking at those values can kind of help us look at a tough situation in an objective way and really make a better decision. So these are the ethical values that are kind of accepted. So one is respect for autonomy. So not just deciding and determining everything for the patient, allowing them their autonomy. Beneficence, so that means what we do should be good. So we should look to do good things to help the patient. Nomileficence, so that's the famous one that we all, I think the one that pops into everyone's head which is first, do no harm. Justice, so fair treatment. Respect for person, so recognizing that they are a person, they're a person, not a patient. We're all human beings. And then honesty and being true in the way we present patients. So I just thought reviewing that might give us a little bit of background. And then just work our way into our ethical discussion questions. So any thoughts on this? So this first one, if it is squamous cell, should she have an exenteration hemifacial resection? And then just kind of how would you approach that? So any comments from the audience? 86. So that's a good question. And so she is a really sweet lady but that's what kind of gets to what I'm saying down below is the way you presented it to her totally influenced how she was doing it. But I think you're thinking along exactly the right lines. Make sure that it's her decision to see what she thinks or what she wants. Dr. Harry. Especially all of her pretty big decisions. Yeah, I like that thought a lot. You still have to be careful to respect the patient's autonomy but family help with it can make such, can be really helpful. And that actually brings up something that Dr. Patel always brings up that I think is a really good way for us to think about it. He always says if it were your, and I won't do the accent, but if it were your mother what would you want done? How would you take care of this patient if it were your mother? So I mean that's another way to look at this discussion. I'd be interested in this patient aside but just your own thoughts on that. If it were your mother or if it were yourself in this situation what would you, how would you approach that? Particularly if the cure rates are, at her age if the cure rates, we don't really expect necessarily cure to be a goal for her. And I think that her quality of life may be as good for the remaining time that she has depending on her health otherwise but it may be much higher if she doesn't have a really extensive ex-generation of facial resection. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. I forgot to kind of reiterate that that they would also do a hemifacial resection. So I mean even more morbidity in this figure than just an ex-generation. Dr. Joe. Is there any other options presented to her for how that would be in the year? Yeah, so at this point, no. Yeah, at this point that discussion hadn't come up, so. I agree with that. I think, I mean especially when you look at the studies that are mostly done in younger patients, cure for this disease probably isn't, you know, the five year survival is 30%, you know. So cure might not be the best goal, but you know, local control. So yeah, I think that was a really good thought. Great, yeah, that's a good thought. Yeah. What's the natural course? How would she look if she did nothing? I mean, she looked like a man of stage which is very farming. Or would she look fairly, I mean, she might be worried about that. She wouldn't mind to not going out anywhere. Right. Yeah, very good thought. Thanks. Two things that I think may really direct the role of the physician and then also lead into what is our role as consultants and how comfortable we are with our arguments. It's really what is her, I guess, level of comprehension of her options. Mm-hmm. And then with that, assuming that that's, you know, an adequate level of comprehension, understanding options, then there's just personal preference among patients. We have some patients who really enjoy the more paternalistic relationship where it's asked the physician to make the decision based on their best judgments. Whereas others really want that ability to, on their own, autonomously make that decision. And then, you know, assuming that she comprehends, assuming she doesn't really comprehend or she just wants us to make the decision, then you're in question about what is our role as consultants? I think that would be... Right. Exactly. And that, I think, was kind of one of the big, just one of the big things for me is, you know, the question of your role as a consultant because we do the biopsy, the biopsy comes back positive. Probably see her in follow-up, but she'd be seeing the ENT service and if you disagree with what they decide to do, you know, how to handle that. And I think that was something that Dr. Patel also thought was interesting is just what, how, you know, so any thoughts on that? What's our role as a consultant? If, say, the information we don't really like the way that it's presented to the patient that she feels like she has to do the exeneration or she's giving up, she feels some sort of pressure into it. And that's what ends up happening. What's our role as a consultant? What could we do about that? Dr. Crum. I think having two surgical services come in, but it's very tough when you have a primary team as a surgery service and then also being a consultant as a surgery service because you can't do those nice, tolerant, but you can't have conversations. So I agree, that's very difficult. Right. Yeah, but you make such a good point about face-to-face conversations that I think sometimes in the world of electronic medical records don't happen as communication between knows. But I think that's a really good point about sitting down and talking. Dr. Zog. So the key is, the thing is step back and say, okay, what would I do again in this situation trying not to money happens a lot just in regular consults, you know, have a patient with monocular pneumonia. If you go in thinking that they have monocular pneumonia as a diagnosis, it muddies your assessment of the patient. So you have to kind of step back and ask the questions yourself, the history, you know, take somebody else's report. It's the trying not to be too fast and coming to the same conclusion that you're trying to hopefully come up with a different, a lot more confident in things, it's not just in these big cases. Right. Not just go along with the department. Yeah, I like that. I think reminding ourselves that we're not just a diagnostic test, like you said, you don't order an ophthalmology consult the same way you order an MRI, but we're physicians and should use our skills and think about it for the patient. That's really good. Let me frame this, that looks like you're saying, procedural services, when you're a consultant, you have to provide a service. The whole history pointed to metastatic breast cancer, serious changes, and I always feel chronic development and so on, plus the textbook case. To relapse into a reticence was a very scarce place that I scarce, and about a month later, I went to follow up with a patient and she had had a hepatectomy, a small normal section, and we all know that survival would happen. And so, I do go on there with a whole book on just this one case called Being Orphan. I and my fellows read about five books that I keep on my life in the U.S. government. Good that in this 21st century, we have philosopher surgeons, people who actually stand back, look at the history of medicine and think about who we are and why we're here today. And he made the point that we were, we asked the first question we asked this lady was, so she's been booked for a surgery. You and I all have patients who tell us, Dr. Katz, you're the doctor, do whatever you want, I just want to get better. We see these patients all the time, and this is that lady, she's a charming lady, but she just wants to be.  Those of you who haven't seen the hemifacial perception, you basically have a phantom of the opera, you have nothing from the forehead down, you have a free flap that comes out from your back, and it looks like a slab of meat, doesn't matter how good surgeons we are, that's the way it works. So, the first question was, has your team discussed with you the option of not having surgery? And that daughter in the room says, you know what I'm not really told, this is the best way to treat it. Probably because the patient said, I'm at your mercy, you do whatever you think is best. And that little girl out there, spends a whole world of 360 pages, saying this one thing, tell your patients they have a choice of not having treatment, and then you make this a very good case, price of, what will you look like? Will radiation allow you to have a reasonable three years, five years of life, and not looking for a test, like it went from last year. That's the way it works. So that one statement was never used, and the question arises, what is our role as consultants? Do we pick the phone up and say, this will matter with you, perhaps why don't you tell him that you can't have surgery?  Just because you have no quality of service does not mean you do this, just because the family, many of the people I see, they haven't seen their loved ones for five years. They show up in my waiting room and say, do whatever you can to save this person's life. Do we really do that, and how do we present the patients? So these are philosophical questions. If you haven't read Atul Gawande's book, I strongly urge you, it's called Being Morphled. And then just a few months ago, an old professor of mine, you know, a surgeon called Henry Marsh came out of the book called Do No Heart. And if you haven't read that, I would strongly urge you to read this. And he tells you a neurosurgeon's perspective about tubers that grow in the brain, and the decisions that he makes about life and death and how aggressive to be. And then how do you handle the complications that we as orbital and facial surgeons put on our faces all the time when you get a result of just suboptimal? All the time. Fortunately, it's rare enough that we remember a few places. How do you handle that? Do you really go chasing a tuba that might be like right now, the one I'm asking the tuba and the apex of the orbit?  It's not going to blind the patient. Doctor, I can't just bear having this thing in my head. I'm walking out.  You can't do that. Well, we mustn't be afraid of the past self-gaming that the patient will say, oh, you're so rude. It's your job to be rude at times.  So this breast cancer of a patient was after, I told you to put this case together, and that was even more jarring to me because now the patient has had $200,000 worth of surgery. And we have to bring our dollars in the sense here. I'm sorry, but hospitals, whether you like it or not, will push you to do more surgery, or virtually or covertly. This is the problem I see in all the hospitals I go to. They're very happy to put cases on. Nobody comes to me and says, oh, there's this patient I really need this doing. It's not that I expect them to say it every time, but it is good. We say, what are you doing and why?  So this second case for frames, the dilemma we were faced with this patient, surgery's booked for so-and-so days. Would you call up the doctor and say, cancel the surgery, we all need to have a talk with the patient and the family, but I'm not the primary surgeon. I'm not the primary physician. I'm simply the mechanic who's going to diagnose to make a decision about what this particular tumor is. So short pants, how many of you would pick the phone up and say, please talk to the family and tell them there is an option of not having surgery? And I understand that there is this concern about, oh, the doctor will get mad at me. They'll refer patients to me. They might think I'm intrusive. Most of us, I think, would work on a phone call like that and I'm proud to say that people I work with around, I frequently get those calls.  These are conversations I think we should all encourage to have. Again, although Henry Marsh's book is very revealing, and it's almost like a wonderful story, I took a honest book, I'll be mortal, I think we'll change you if you read that. I don't agree with everything he says, but that's the whole point about the loss of the surgeons is you don't have to leave everything someone says. Some degree of distinction. Thank you, Dr. Patel. So I wanna make sure that Russell can graduate from residency and give his neuro-ophthalmology presentation. But just real quick, I wanted to let everyone know what happened, so we did the biopsy, which was definitely indicated, and a good thing we did, because it actually came back as low grade follicular lymphoma. Remember, she had that history of lymphoma, so we'd actually, Dr. Patel and I had discussed this, discussed all the options and planned on presenting it before the biopsy came back. So it was interesting, it didn't come back as squamous cells, so fortunately, she didn't need that. Unfortunately, it's still cancer. And so she ended up seeing her oncologist in January, who's outside of the university system to discuss further treatment and complete staging, so I don't have any of those results. But it shows the point of do the biopsy, find the diagnosis, and then also, I thought the really big learning points were just to think about quality of life for the patients, remember the way that we offer something to patients can really influence what they decide to do, and then also consider our role as consultants and always try to do what's best for the patient. So thank you, Dr. Patel, for your help with that, and a lot of small references there. And then, Russell.


Welcome to All Hands Update, here's what's happening around your Navy. U.S. Southern Command Admiral Kurt W. Tid told the Center for Strategic and International Studies that networked threats in Latin America pose a danger to U.S. national security and to our roading stability in the region. Addressing the threats goes beyond drug trafficking, smuggling of weapons, and human trafficking. Southcom is changing its singular focus from drug trafficking to the expanded network threats in the area. Two sailors from the Navy's information warfare community represented the U.S. at the International Martial Arts Games in Johannesburg, South Africa. Petty Officer Second Class Rebecca Jorgensen earned a gold medal in grappling and silver medals in open hand Japanese forms and team creative forms while also earning a bronze continuous sparring. Her husband Petty Officer Second Class John Jorgensen earned a silver medal in open hand Japanese forms and a bronze in grappling. You can read more about what's happening around your Navy and Navy down the middle.


Anyone who knows me knows my absolute favorite objects to photograph are emission nebulae. I just can't get enough of them. So while the Messier catalog is cool and all, it's not the catalog that I turn to the most often. As for my taste, it's just too full of star clusters and galaxies and galaxy clusters and things like that. My favorite catalog of all time is the Sharpless catalog named after American astronomer Stuart Sharpless, who cataloged 313 distinct H2 regions in the northern sky using glass plate photographs from the Palomar sky survey, and he did this in 1953. And that same survey you may know because it was digitized with other surveys to make the digitized sky survey of the whole night sky with red and blue plates. And there's some overlap between Sharpless, Messier, NGC, IC, all these different catalogs. But my favorite objects are often not in Messier or NGC, they're Sharpless objects. And the acronym for Sharpless objects you might see is SH2- and then the number. And the reason for the two in there is that it's the second release of the Sharpless catalog happened in 1958, and they updated some of the positions. Anyways, there's a great website out there called SharplessCatalog.com where amateur astronomer Dean Selman has photographed almost every object in the Sharpless catalog. And he gives great information about them, including their name, their constellation, their location, their shape, their size, brightness. He writes a nice paragraph about them. So there's all this kind of cool stuff in here. He also often includes a map. And what this map, what he means by map is mapped color. So he often shoots the HA, the O3, the S2, and you can sort of understand the relative signal of the different common neuroband filters and what they would look like also if you then map the monodata into a full color RGB image, you know, like a Hubble palette. And this is very handy. It's something that I get lots of questions about along the lines of, well, how do I know if it's worth shooting S2 for this object? And this is the kind of work that can tell you. I mean, if someone else has done it and you can look at what they've done. Now, before you get too excited, he's only done this for a few of the 313 objects that have the full map of all the narrowband channels, because he's mostly focused on just getting a color image of any kind. So getting just an RGB or sometimes an HA RGB image. But he also includes the inverse. He includes zooming in and out. So there's all kinds of cool stuff here. And so on ones where he doesn't have the map, like this one, if you want to know if you should shoot O3, you might just have to go out and do it yourself. But that's actually how some people have made cool discoveries. Because while we have HA surveys of basically the entire night sky, there I don't know if there's really an O3 survey of the whole night sky. So there's probably still cool stuff to find out there. And the closest corollary to the Sharpless Catalog that I can find for the Southern Hemisphere seems to be the Gum Catalog created by Colin Gum, an Australian astronomer. And it was published in 1955. So around the same time. And my favorite representation of the Gum Catalog on the net is Kevin Jardine's galaxymap.org site. He seems to have info on basically every gum object. And he's made full color photographs as well. These aren't ones that he's photographed himself, like Dean Selman did. Instead, these are from the Digitized Sky Survey, just a combination of the red and blue plates. So that's why they sort of come out pink like this. But great information, links to scientific papers, all kinds of stuff. And this whole site galaxymap.org is one that I go to and get very absorbed in because it's very rich. He's written this whole book, you know, about Milky Way cartography. And there's all kinds of like cool integrated tools within the book, like this Milky Way Explorer, that lets you sort of look at the plane of the galaxy, but with different surveys that have been done. And let's you zoom in and do all kinds of cool stuff. So I would definitely check out galaxymap.org and sharplesscatalog.com. These are two sites that I think I haven't heard many people talk about that I go to for inspiration all the time. Well, this has just been another hopefully short edition of Five Minute Friday. And we do this every week, just short videos that are released at 1030 a.m. Eastern every Friday. My name is Nico Carver. My website's nebulaphotos.com. Clear skies, everyone.


Social Economic Right and Accountability Project SERP has filed a lawsuit asking the court to compel President Mohamed Abu Harid to disclose pending details of the overdraft in loans obtained from the central bank of Nigeria since May 29, 2015, including the project in which the overdraft had been spent and repayment of all overdrafts to date. SERP is also seeking an order to compel the president to explain and clarify whether $25 billion overdraft reportedly obtained from the CBN is within the 5% limit of the actual revenue of the government for 2020. The suit followed SERP's freedom of information request to President Mohamed Abu Harid stating that disclosing details of overdraft and repayment would enable Nigerians to hold a government to account for its fiscal management and ensure that public funds are not mismanaged or diverted. In the suit filed last week at the Federal High Court, Abuja, SERP is also seeking an order directed and compelling President Mohamed Abu Harid to disclose details of overdraft taken from the CBN by successive governments between 1999 and 2015.


My name is Marina Sluansky and I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, pursuing a major in biomedical engineering. In this research project, we developed a method to program protein-based hydrogels using divalent metal cations and induce specific movements based on solution conditions. The ability to program a temporary shape in a biomaterial that can revert to its original shape in response to a stimulus is important to the field of soft robotics, which deals with robots made of highly compliant materials similar to those found in living organisms. In Dr. Popa's lab, we synthesize biomaterials from pure proteins using a light-activated reaction. Proteins are very important molecules of light as they perform most functions and cells. Their unique 3D structure determines their function. Under force, proteins can unfold and extend 10 times their original length. When the force is removed, the proteins revert to their original folded state. The new type of materials developed during this project used the unfolding response of proteins and their interaction with divalent cations to fine-tune the overall stiffness of the biomaterial. The adsorption of metal cations into protein hydrogels causes an increase in stiffness, which allows us to program complex shapes like a ring or a spring shape. When removed from cations solutions, the hydrogels morph from their programmed shape back to their original shape in response to changes in solvent conditions. We were able to induce specific predictable movements and physical changes in biomaterials dictated by changes in solution environment. The method of shape programming and morphing demonstrated here is an important step towards the development of new soft robots made from pure proteins, which follow design principles similar to biological tissue, like muscles, and which are capable of controlled motion. For more information, please take a look at our recently accepted article in Science Advances. Finally, I'd like to acknowledge the support for undergraduate research fellows for their help funding this research.


Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, but a company we've had on the program before. Brian Gregory is the Director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering at Express GRIPS. Hey, sorry, Express GRIPS, and Express GRIPS. Booth is actually right behind us on the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, you were giving us a little bit of background about, I believe it's a little about three years you've been with a company. Why don't you share with our audience Express GRIPS company that many of us have probably used, less likely that everybody knows who you are in your role there. Yeah, so my role today, again, is a Cloud Strategy and Engineering Director, but it's really kind of focused on building out the next-gen platform, making infrastructure kind of irrelevant, if you will, and making our developers go faster and making everything as seamless as possible. And Brian, just for our audience that doesn't know Express GRIPS, give us, what's the brand of the company and what are they known for? We serve 85 million patients today, 3,000 contractors. We have, if you go look at what we do as a business, the pharmacy benefit management side, our goal is to basically make prescriptions safer and more affordable for all of our patients. So if you think about what we're doing, that's really what we're doing. And we like to say pharmacy smarter. And for us, that's our major goal and everything we do. So my team, anybody's team, doesn't matter what you're doing in technology, that's your end goal to deliver value to those patients and your clients. And so that's kind of what we focus on. Yeah, well Brian, it's a good thing. I mean, IT's changing all the time, at least healthcare, nothing's been changing, radically changing all the time. So bring this inside, what you did when you came inside the company, your role as you said, infrastructure, want to worry about that less, that's something we hear a lot. Right, and one thing I should clarify is that Expresscript has always been a technology company. If you look at their grassroots and what they were built upon in 30 years, they grew to $100 billion business really by utilizing technology at the end of the day. When I came in, I was managing some infrastructure teams and database organizations, and we decided that this was the whole digital transformation or cloud strategy was like a real thing. So my leadership asked me to kind of take this on as an initiative, that was my background, that's where I kind of came from, my grassroots, if you will, from SAVS and CenturyLink. And that became a full-time role. It came to one point where like, you can't do both, like this has taken off and this has been a real thing. Our major, like our main goal was to say, how are we going to step outside the box? We still have to run 100 billion dollar organization, but we got to figure out what the new is, right? You're going to invent that next light bulb and we got to maintain the current one. And so for us, we wanted a full-fledged platform. It wasn't about just spinning up VMs and delivering those. I think we had that kind of covered. It was really about figuring out how are we going to figure out cloud, right? Cloud in general, and then what about multi-cloud and how do we get a platform that could seamlessly integrate with all of those? And Brian, what was the underlying driver there in the business? Is it you needed to develop more software? You needed to move faster? What's the why? Was it cost savings and things getting out of hand? All of the above, I think specifically, it's about delivering value, right? Delivering value to patients as fast and seamless as possible. And so we wanted to figure that out, right? The old ways, if we all go back in our years there was days that I would get hardware and physically, like I'm going to figure out how to put the drive so that they're getting more IO or whatever. Those problems have been solved, right? And if you look at companies 10 years ago, they were like virtualization scary. I can't do that. I have production workload. So the trend in the market is to keep moving up the stack, right? And so ultimately, that's where you end up focus on. Where do we deliver value as an IT organization? That's not for us to go build a home-brewed system that does any of those things, right? You can go buy those things, integrate them and figure out how they can drive value in your business. So that's what we wanted to do. Get a platform, the first goal we had was actually a really interesting story. We wanted to build a new mobile application that would allow consumers to go on and make a user experience like much better than it had previously been, right? If you wanted to order prescriptions, you could go into this app and say, not just can I order that, but I can also see what the prices are at different places local to you, the distance to those. And then what would it take if you did a 90-day fill for our home delivery program and you could sign up via that method. And that was really what we were going after that end user experience to say, how do we change the experience for our consumers? Not necessarily the back-end stuff that the day-to-day batch processing that they don't really care about how that's done as long as it's done within the time threshold that's supposed to be done. Brian, can you talk a little bit about the process of getting to where we are in terms of, you talked about trying to figure out cloud. Part of that is figuring out which platform to go with and part of it is finding the people with the skills to kind of, once you've decided on a direction to kind of help you figure it out. Can you talk just a little bit about maybe that learning journey for you? Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really interesting, because when I talk I feel like this was five years that I've been doing this specifically at Express Scripts, right? When really it's like 18 months that we really stood up our internal hybrid cloud and got our platform installed. So yeah, it's learning by doing, but the nice thing about everything we're doing and you hear this all the time is that we can iterate, right? You can make changes. It's not like you have to wait three months and then you can't shift or can't course correct. Learning, the team's been amazing. So I grabbed some people within. They got retrained on, this is the new stack I also brought in some people that had previously worked with me that had kind of some of the skill sets. Really people that are curious in nature and want to learn, but then you go, that's a neat story, right? We can stand up a cloud or use an external one, you can stand up your paths, but at the end of the day, what do you do next? How do you start to engage developers? Because when we opened the doors for business, it wasn't like we had everybody standing there waiting to get in. You had to kind of convince them of like, hey, these are the features and not convince them. Show them the features and the functionality and why it mattered to them. Why does it matter now? Then you go, okay, that's great. And you start to kind of, I would say, my team focuses probably 80% of their time on teaching people how to fish, hoping that the developers get better and consuming the platform, they help each other. And we see a lot of that happening, right? In our Slack channels and HipChat, different things, communication tools where they're helping each other. So we're not even having to answer all the questions. But then you get the whole problem of like, all right, well, now we've got release management we're going to start working with. And that opens a whole new can. And they're transforming as well. And they're definitely changing their processes. But it gets kind of hairy when you start looking at, you know, like, well, we got to keep the tourniquet over here because we can't afford any disruption or outages for our patients. But these new guys, if they check all these boxes, they should be able to deploy whenever they feel like in the middle of the day and we should feel comfortable doing that because it's now microservice, it's not some monolithic thing that they don't understand. So. Brian, can you give us a little insight on the kind of the state of your applications? So I think most people understand something like Cloud Foundry, oh, I wanted to build that new app. You know, that's a great use case. How many applications have you moved over? Do you have a percentage you measure?  What percentage of people code? How fast they release code on this thing? What metrics do you use? Yeah, so I had this conversation last night. We don't have, I can tell you that we have over 1,100 applications that have moved in 18 months. So I would tell you that when it started out we had specific goals of migrating existing, lift and shift and refactoring and things like that. What we found was that there's all this net new coming in. Not just, you know, what we're doing is blowing up within the company but they're also doing that on the developer side and they're doing some, a lot of new things. So those new projects clearly migrate over or come in the door starting out with Cloud First Strategy. Then you start to lift and shift and you really kind of have to start cherry picking like what makes sense, right? Some things you go, there's not really the value. There's no user experience behind this. There's no, it's literally just a monetary thing maybe or maybe not but you start taking the dollars that you're going to put towards migrating this and then you're like, well, it's not really a win-win. So what we found was that all net news coming this direction on the Cloud Foundry platform and the workload that makes sense and then we started cherry picking things that we rewrote in spring and they're slowly migrating but today we're at 1,100, we just hit 1,100 apps. Which is pretty good for 18 months. It's really impressive in 18 months. Any lessons learned there as to things you could do to move faster or mistakes that were made that you tell your peers, hey, watch out for this? Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those but at the same time, I feel like lessons learned are like the best thing you could, the best thing we do is fail. Like literally, because then you learn something from it and then you move forward. I think the one advice, some advice I would give to people is that don't get hung up on trying to be perfect. If there's a lift and shift opportunity and you only get 60 to 70% of the goodness of moving this thing, then just go ahead and do it. Don't say, well, but it's not perfect and we want to make this app completely different because that's where people get stuck on. I think once they realize they just try some things and then you can get over there and change it and make it perfect down the road. But some people were like, why would I move one to one? I should refactor this app and maybe have it multiple per one. And those are great conversations but I think it keeps people, the whole analysis, paralysis conversation and it's like just try it, just go. I would say another good story we had is we have an outcomes conference that we host Express Scripts. They were trying to come up with a new way to do like a basic content management solution, show the digital benefit guide and they came in and they wanted to try one technology. Didn't work out, two weeks later they came back like, well it doesn't deliver that. So we tried something else and we ultimately tried four different things for this person and they got to where they wanted to be but the important part was that we could change on the fly. In the old days it was like you ordered hardware or you ordered VMs, you were stuck because he had dates to deliver and we basically can change things. If it doesn't work we'll try something else and you can kind of move around and do things at scale where you couldn't be for. That sounds like a set of outcomes that the business side, the executive side and leadership can actually point to and recognize as helping transform the business. You're here at the conference, a sponsor of the conference, participating at the conference.  So I mean that's an interesting position to be in. But it sounds like the business and management supports you and recognizes that this is helping move with velocity. Yes, so from the top down we are a technology company at heart. I mean this is what we do and the company's come a long way with where, and when I got there the fact that we're here sponsoring that means a great deal to me because this isn't after all an open source tech conference which is amazing. It's nice to talk about, get some branding out there and talk about what we're doing so people know that, hey there's a lot of really cool things happening. Maybe we recruit some people at the end of the day as a result, you never know. But yeah, it's really about just branding and then supporting the community and getting out the word of what we're doing and why it matters. Last question I have for you Brian is a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and things like Kubernetes, enable that. Can you share what public cloud or public cloud you use, how you look at that dynamic? Yeah, so we've got a few things in the works. So there's a few POCs happening. I would tell you that our internal cloud is where we have everything hosted today. We've built an internal hybrid cloud. So you have the data centers or? Yes, yeah, we have multiple data centers and we have our internal hybrid clouds built out. We are evaluating some external capabilities. We are also doing some partnerships. You can actually go read about our CIO just release a story about that. But yeah, we're definitely looking for that. Where's our burstable capacity? With our data and with what we have going on, going external is a much different conversation than where like my previous company, like we're talking about HIPAA compliance and a lot of different data issues that we've got to make sure we're protecting and our most important thing to do is protect that data from our patients. So there's no reason for us to go, we have to get out external at this point. But we do see that as an important part of our key going forward to say this is part of our strategy to say we got to get an external solution as well. Brian Gregory always loved the stories of how digital transformation are helping to impact everyone who uses prescriptions. I mean, no better way of helping people. So we'll be back with lots more coverage here of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. When I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era.


How do you make a decision if you don't know what you know? Data helps you make decisions, whether you are a student or a faculty member trying to improve your course or an institution trying to be more efficient. Now people still have to make the decisions, but analytics, the data, the predictions help you do that better. Imagining the future of higher education often involves a world of technology, ubiquitous computing, flexible classrooms, audio-visual innovation, and more. But one of the most dramatic evolutions in higher education is happening right now, and it's called analytics. Analytics is being used in a variety of applications in higher education, from addressing student retention to evaluating teaching and learning tools to finding enterprise solutions. Analytics can help campus leaders make informed decisions. So it's important for IT leaders to continue to make the case for analytics. Frankly speaking, five years ago, or ten years ago, twelve years ago, we had the ability to throw money at problems. With the decline in resources and the scarcity of resources, we have to be very good at the top of our game and we've got to be better at having evidence to understand the problems we have because simply we don't have the ability to be less exacting in our solutions. I think the critical items to consider when you start an analytics program are there's essentially four. You want to make sure you have a long-term funding commitment. It's critical to make sure that you're going to be able to continue whatever programs that you put into place. You want to make sure you're getting your executive leadership buy-in. There's no reason to pursue a program if nobody's going to actually pay attention to the results that will be presented at the end. Once you have that buy-in, you want to find out what the priority issues are for the various stakeholders. The critical piece is the usability, the ease of access. How will you be able to transition that information back into valuable, applied usage information that they can bring back into the classroom, bring back into their college, or just make the entire institution a better institution because they're making better decisions using the analytical responses that they've found. Don't try to do everything at once. Have some limited goals, pick an important problem, and try to make some real progress with that problem. Try to really have some short-term benefits coming out of the analytics program, and that's going to then lead to what should be a long-term successful program as well. Don't go out and buy a software, and don't start collecting data. Really understand your problem, really understand the domain area you're working in, and if you're trying to collect some data to affect some planning or change, really have your outcomes well-defined. And then once you have that, then you can go to what kind of data is appropriate and helpful, and then you can talk about tools if they're necessary. While some argue that analytics can raise questions around the commodification of the student experience, it remains the most affordable, most scalable, and lowest-risk path to performance improvement. Analytics is a tool that can penetrate the fog that has settled over some aspects of higher education. It can empower leaders to move forward with confidence, can provide proven outcomes, and can help students overcome obstacles to success. But analytics is only a tool. It must be combined with the intelligence of our leaders and our community. I think the power of learning analytics is it gives the CIOs, it gives IT a reason to be at the table. It allows them to do that. So the question is, are we asking the right questions?