OK, so, good morning. This little, this is my little transition routine. It's very necessary to get students' attention between different types of activities. So sometimes the focus will be on me. Sometimes the focus will be on you. And when I want to get your attention again, what I'm going to do is. And the good thing about this is it means it's a call and response routine, right? So it means that you have to put down your phones or your pens or whatever in order to be able to respond. So that means I kind of get your full attention. So it's a little technique that I use in. I'm Matthew Johnson. I teach in Magisterio, in Centro Universitario, Cardinal Fisneros, in Alcalá de Náez. And this is a teacher training college. I also have psychology degrees and degrees in social education as well. And it's affiliated to the University of Alcalá. And I coordinate the bilingual project there. So I'm involved in the training of future bilingual teachers. We have a bilingual itinerary. And those students have about 50% of their credits taught through English using the CLIL methodological approach. And the philosophy that we have really is that we don't tell them how to teach using CLIL. The group of teachers in the bilingual project, we actually use the CLIL approach with them so they get to experience it themselves. And we get them to reflect on the things that we're doing and the approach that we're using and the different techniques and so on. So that's the way I work and that's the way I'm going to work today. When I say that's the way I'm going to work today, that's not exactly true. It's the 12th of July. Friday is my last day working. I'm kind of in relax mode. So today you are going to work a lot and I'm not going to work very much really. My work happened before when I prepared the presentation and I prepared the session. So today you'll be doing the work and I'll be taking it easy. So the flip classroom or flip learning is something which is kind of fashionable at the moment. It's on everybody's lips, right? But I'm interested not just in how we do these things but why. The kind of thing that my students hate when in exams you know when you say Justificatura swesta, no? Well today I'm going to justify my answer. I'm going to kind of argue why I think this is a good thing and why it's appropriate for CLIL. So it's not just how but also why. So these are the three things we're going to do. We're going to look at some opportunities and also the challenges because I have done a very similar session to this one before and we had no internet. It didn't really work quite so well. So I know there are challenges but we got through it and it was fine in the end. We're going to look at some activities and you're going to do a few activities and use a few of the tools. We'll look at some of those tools but I'm not a fan of those presentations on technology where the presenter gives you a list of here's a tool you can use and here's another tool you can use and here's another tool. Have you seen this for making cartoons? There are many tools which can achieve the same objectives. So what we need to look at really is the objective. I can show you an example of a tool but more exists which you might actually prefer. So let's get started and I'm going to put the focus on you. I want to reflect first of all. I want to think about this. This is my question. Think about your time in class as a teacher and how your time is divided proportionately. How much time do you spend doing different things in class?  Now this is mine and it looks great on here but it doesn't look so good on there. Monitoring, that's one of the things I do a lot of. I spend 50% of my time walking around the class and watching what the students are doing. More or less I think. Guiding them, helping them. Sometimes I monitor and I say nothing. Sometimes I monitor and they ask me questions. Sometimes I monitor and I notice things and I want to intervene. So that's kind of 29% of my time. The smallest proportion here is time spent explaining. I don't really spend very much time doing this at all. The other one is extending and giving feedback and feeding back to the group and so on. So what I'd like you to do and you've got a minute, first of all, is to draw your pie chart, think of the things you do in class and kind of make it proportionate. Ready, steady, go. Your categories don't have to be the same as mine. You teach in primary, I teach at university. I'm sure we do very different things on some occasions. Thank you, that's working very well.  I'd also like you to reflect a little bit. Are there any surprises here now that you've stopped and thought about this? Are there any things you spend too much time doing or any things that maybe you think you don't spend enough time doing? So what I'd like you to do really is to share your pie chart and what you do and what you wrote and why with your partner. I'll give you a couple of minutes to do that. Go. Thank you. What about some of the categories or some of the activities or some of the things that you do in class? Mine were monitoring and guiding, explaining and so on. You probably wrote some different things. What other things did you write? I saw some interesting ones. I saw somebody who wrote control. Controlling the crowd, I guess. Of course, this happens. I saw somebody wrote something like inventing new activities which was a surprise for me in the class. Inventing new activities, but... We invent them because we have autism children and to attract attention, we use ICT tools, design flash cars or a list of words and chairs with the schools around us. Sounds great, right? Of course. We spend some time improvising. It's true. Improvising sounds like a bad thing, but really it's adaptive teaching. It's adapting to the necessities on the spot. Must be a good thing. Doesn't mean you didn't prepare. It means that things happen and you need to adapt. What other things do you do apart from controlling and adapting and evaluating? What does evaluating mean? Define that, please. So it's not just giving tests. Okay, good. Observing, of course, which is a part of evaluation. Anything else? Expand, please. So not necessarily problems with their learning, but with cohabiting. Anything else? How do you do that? There's a lot of social work going on here as well as teaching. Did anybody put up your hand if you wrote down explaining? Good. Put up your hand if you wrote more than 50% of the time explaining. More than 40%? 40. More than 30? More than 20? I mean, I guess we spend at least 20% of the time explaining, right? Did anyone write down giving input? That's a nice way of saying explaining, isn't it, or not? No, not. Good. Justify your answer. I think explaining is more like playing grammar. But giving input, although you can use it to explaining grammar as well, maybe it's more because I used to teach younger students from 6 to 8 years old, so they need more input, more orders, skills, more listening. So I say give input because they need the first input to get the output. And they need more passive input in order to, in the future, in the future, even they are in fifth year, sixth year, produce more, so they need more input. So this is like exposure, not giving them exposure to the language. Okay, good, good. Well, what I'm interested in doing now is taking a risk, taking a chance, no? I really hope that some of you or most of you have QR code readers. However, I'm going to ask you to work in groups. I don't need everybody to have one. So if you can work in a group of the people that are in the same line as you, and if one person in that group has a tablet or a phone with a QR code reader, that would be great. And what I'd like to do now is to, I mean, let's go here and we'll see what it looks like. Have any of you used a tablet? Have you used it? Let's have a look. Fingers crossed. Don't worry, I'll go back to the QR code in a moment. I just want you to see what you'll see first. So, give me one second. Okay, so I'll bring the QR card back in a moment. This is, I'll bring it back. This is what you're going to see. Padlet is a great sharing tool, okay? And as you can see, I put a little post on here. The question was, what do you like doing in class?  So, what I'd like you to do is just one person in each group to talk together and to respond to the question. And let's go back to this. Why do you like teaching and what do you enjoy doing in class? Because I'm sure some of the things like the disciplining and maybe even the explaining of grammar are not necessary of things which you most enjoy doing, right? Yeah, that's fine. We can have a cue at the front of people trying to focus from closer. That's fine. Even if the Wi-Fi is a bit problematic, even with your Dados, you're not going to use very much. So, if the Wi-Fi is not going very well, then you'll be fine to use Dados to write one little message. While some of you are in, I can see some activity. So, just to make my instructions clear, if you're in, you have to answer the question, why do you like teaching and what things do you like doing in class? Okay, so, of course we could go on and spend more time doing this. But we have a selection of a few comments here. And you see, obviously this works better on a tablet or a computer than it does on a mobile phone because you have a much bigger screen to play with. But the idea of this is it's a collaborative tool that you can use in real time or not. So, it's the kind of thing that you could use in the classroom but also the kind of thing that works very well outside the classroom if they have access to the technology so that they can cooperate, collaborate and communicate really, because it's a different medium. So, it's good that you... I mean, I noticed some things on here that having fun, I think that's a great one. You love having fun in class. Do you have fun in class when you're explaining grammar and maybe you do? It's not impossible. I love grammar. But quite often when it's teacher-centred and the teacher is like the fountain of knowledge and it's the teacher giving the input, neither the teacher nor the students are having that much fun, right? And there's one key idea here and it's kind of what I'm doing at the moment. And this idea is lockstep. Have you heard of this expression before, lockstep? What does it mean? Tell us. Kind of. It's like... Exactly. It's what soldiers do when they march, no? When soldiers march, it's the wrong pace for most of them because some of them are shorter and some of them are taller and their leg lengths are different but they have to go at the same pace. And the same thing in the classroom is that some of the students are doing the same thing at the same time. Quite often that's in a situation where it's the teacher explaining and for some of the students, the teacher's explanation is too quick and they get lost.  But we insist on doing this, now having them all doing the same thing following our explanation at the same time. And one of the ideas about the classroom is that element of teaching which is the teacher's transmission and verbal explanations can be done in other ways and we can spend more time in the classroom doing things that maybe we enjoy more and that perhaps they enjoy more and that is at the right pace for them as well. So, let me just go back to the... Let me just go back to the presentation. We could go back to the Padlet and do it again but it's being in a little bit time consuming. The idea of this is what do they enjoy or not enjoy doing in class? And I think the question really is if we think about it, how would those two lists compare? So, if you asked your students what they like doing in class, what do you think they would say? A give you 30 seconds to talk to someone near to you. What would your students say if you asked them that question? I said 30 seconds, I wasn't lying. Well, what would they say that they enjoy doing in class? Games, dancing, computers, singing, working in groups. PE, okay. Quizzes and things. I guess everybody's using cahooth, right? Yeah, since cahooth was discovered I've never met a teacher in the last five years who's not using cahooth. They love this kind of thing, right? Do the lists coincide? Do you like doing the same things you like doing? More or less, no? Do you like singing and dancing? Is this a group of it? Are these infant teachers here? It's a very different mindset, definitely. Okay. Some of the messages I saw up here I thought, sounds like infant teachers. Yeah, very good. So, the thing is I think we often insist on doing things in class which we don't like doing, but we continue doing them which begs the question, why? And what can we do about it? And the thing is, is I think these often, the songs and the games these are often the rewards for them behaving well during the boring stuff. Okay. It's quite often the case. It's a big generalisation. I'm sure that's not always true. But in many situations I think that can be that can be a reality, right? So, if we can make all the fun stuff really worthwhile, useful, the focus, the main focus of the class and kind of do the boring stuff outside the class, then that sounds like a win-win situation to me. Now, I have a little question. Every now and then I'm going to stop and I'm going to stop and ask you this question. The question is, how was it for you? So, from this session so far the things we've talked at that you've done, which was compare your ideas with your partners, draw the graph, use Padlet. How was the experience? And be critical. Think about it on practical and pedagogical levels, okay? Talk to your partners 30 seconds and then you can tell me. How has the experience of the session been so far?  I'm very receptive to constructive criticism. So, don't worry. So, what do you think? Okay. Any thoughts to share? No? Okay. Anything to share? Thanks. Yeah, that's a bad... Yeah. But that's a very good point. You don't want to teach in the way that you were taught. From my experience in Magisterio it doesn't matter how much stuff we teach them when they get into their practicum sometimes they revert to teaching the way they were taught. It's the biggest influence on them and we have to fight against this. I think you're right. Anything else to share? All the other speakers, Elena and everybody else has been telling me that what a great participative group you are all eager to see? And I come along and I kill it. Okay. So, a couple of ideas. I'm not going to read it. You read it. This is the key question. When deciding what we're doing class for me and of course nobody... It's true. We don't. But keeping it in mind I think we should only be doing things in class that the students can't do without us. And I quite often find that they do stuff in class then they go home and it's the parents who help them to do certain things that they weren't really clear about in the classroom. I remember I used to spend when I taught English as a foreign language years ago there was a lot of time doing listening in class. And it suddenly came to me that this was a waste of time because they could do listening that they didn't need me to press play on the CD recorder. So I reduced, I didn't eliminate but I reduced the amount of time spent on listening and I worked on listening in a different way because I realized lots of the things they could do at home. Do you know the think-pair-share technique? Does anyone use this with you so far? It's a scaffolding technique to promote oral output and also cognitive processes as well. If I ask you this question now let's do a little demonstration. So what can the teacher or students doing class that they can't do at home? Stay with the friends. See, I'm disappointed now because she was prepared with the answer. I was expecting shock and silence because I gave her no time to think so think-pair-share is a very nice strategy for getting students to think not only about the question and the idea, but also how they're going to express themselves. So this is what we're going to do. That's the question and I am going to insist on 30 seconds of silence which is thinking individually. Can we achieve this? Can we do 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm sure we can. Then the second step is share and in this case what you do is you talk to the person sitting next to you and you compare your ideas. Sorry, this is pair. And share is the third step where if you wish you can share it with the whole group. Now why does this work? First, you have time to think. Second, you have time maybe to generate more ideas with your partner to confirm that your ideas are quite good because if they think the same as you then and if they think something different then maybe you learn. And then because you're talking about it you're also practicing for the moment when you might have to speak in front of the whole class. So that's the idea with this. It's a very easy stage. Teachers often ask questions ask a student wait for two seconds when they get no response they ask a different student not going to help students to respond to questions, right? So, can we do 30 seconds? What can the students and the teacher do in class that they can't do at home? 30 seconds starting. See, impossible! You did 4 seconds of silence. Never mind.


So performance tips for a real stack. I'm a very cliched title here. So I actually want to clarify, I mean, when I first came up with this title, I was like, okay, let me come up with the stuff we've done at Grab. And then once I realized, like, these might not really apply to everyone. So I want to rephrase and be like, performance tips, we use at Grab for a real stack, right? So, hi, I'm Altaf Hamiz. I'm a lead engineer here at Grab. My colleague told me to put a picture of myself. I couldn't find a good flattering one of me, so I put a cap. And Youngshun convinced me to give a presentation here. So, you know, when we think about rails, the first thing that we hear is always like, you know, does rails scale? Does rails scale? And so then, you know, I went to Google, as we always do. And then we know we do, can rails scale? Yeah, very disappointing for me, right? And then here at Grab, we use rails extensively. And so, that wasn't very encouraging. So we decided, no, we want to make it scale. And so I just want to preface with what this talk is not about, right?  Use pluck instead of instantiating AR models. Cash frequently, use data, and ready some memcash, you know? The usual stuff that you see in pretty much any article that tells you how do you scale rails. Those are things that you should be doing, you know? No one should be telling you, don't do those things. Those are beginner traps, right? The main thing that everyone should know is that most of the time, it's not rails. It's how you designed your app. And that is something very hard for people to grasp. So what are our numbers here at Grab, right? This is what people are interested in. So our rails stack does around 360,000 requests per minute on peak, usually at peak. That's around 6,000 requests per second. And we just run that on 10 instances.  And our average response time is about 33 milliseconds, but our 99% time is around 128. The 99% is a pretty skewed by a few APIs, unfortunately, which we haven't fixed yet, but those are pretty decent numbers for any scale, right? 6,000 requests per second is nothing to be scoffed at. And we're just running it on 10 machines. And we're in no way throttled by machines. We could just pull out more machines and handle at least double the load easily. So the first thing that we do heavily here at Grab is something like this. So we use Redis to feature flag, right? So feature toggles or site bars, whatever you like to call it. So we do something like this. So we instantiate a Redis and then we just do like, if configurationRedis.get some feature and enable that new feature of some flag is true, we do a new feature else, something else. We do this heavily because we need to, we can't rely on deployments all the time. Deployments take at least like 10 minutes for us to roll out. So we need to be able to quickly turn on a feature. If things are not working, quickly turn it off. And so when these are on heavy endpoints, you get a lot of hits to Redis, right? And Redis is pretty good, but you start encountering the fact that you're hitting it a lot with a lot of gets, which are pretty meaningless because these flags barely ever change, right? You probably set them once.  So how do you cache something that's already in memory? I mean something that's already in a memory store. So active support cache memory store. So this is local memory, right? And this is exactly extract from the Rails guides. It's not appropriate for large application deployments, but can work for small low traffic sites. Yeah, we chose to ignore that. So this is something that one of my colleagues did. He think he's here. Oh, I'm not sure. Yeah, so soon. So what we actually did is we decided to basically delegate everything through here. And what happens is once we get it from Redis, we actually store it in memory on that instance, right? Because most of these times, most of these values don't change. Once they get fetched, we keep them for about 30 seconds. 30 seconds is pretty low TTL. And I'll explain why 30 seconds and why we didn't go higher. So what happens is you hit Redis once. You store it in memory for 30 seconds on a single instance. So at most, you need to hit 10 times, right? For all 10 instances to get a local memory store. And that actually works surprisingly well. Because if you look at our AWS graph, because we use Elastic H, that's right after we deployed, because we use gets and edge gets. That's the significant drop that we got. We got around 20K drop per minute, right? Which is pretty impressive. We can actually get more. The fact here is why it's so low in a drop is because we use a 30 second TTL. We could actually do an hour TTL. Why don't we? Is that when we want to turn off a feature fast, we can't wait for one hour for it to turn off. So we need a way to invalidate it in memory quickly across all instances. We just have to write a script that basically purges memory on each instance. We haven't done that. If we can do that, if we have a way to like say it. Look, we want to switch this flag and purge all the local memory stores, you could cache it for how long as you want. So as long as you, the moment you flip the flag, you bust all the caches, then you can actually increase this TTL to way more and get much more significant savings when you hit Redis. So this was pretty cool and everyone was like, okay, that's pretty awesome. But Redis is already very performant. You know, you don't get much gain from this. So big point is like always the DB, right? Can we do this with the DBs? And so surprisingly, yesterday we found out, yeah, we could do it with the DB. And so this is something that we actually deployed yesterday to production. So this is basically two models we have on ActiveRecord, which is content details and cities. And these are very static data on ActiveRecord, right? They have very basic configuration information that could exist in config files, but they exist on ActiveRecord, right? So that when we expand and stuff, we can just act, we have interface pages to add them up. Most of the majority of this data barely ever changes. So we decided to cache this in memory as well with a much longer cache family. And then these are most significant drops on queries. So this would be like 25K and 30K dropping to around 10K. That's around 40,000 queries per minute. Of the DB, by just caching it in memory. This is something I have not seen being done a lot in Rails apps, right? You don't see memory, like local memory caching being promoted anywhere in like Rails performance guides. I think that's something we should be exploring more because there's definite use cases. You need to be aware of all the edge cases with obviously storing in local memory and the fact that it's local memory and it's not a shared cache. But I think there are much bigger opportunities here and we've just barely started touching the surface on what we can do here with local memory because it's way faster. It reduces all your hits on your data store and it's way easier to manage, right? The problems, however, come with debugging, right? There is no easy way to debug this. So don't cache data that you feel as, you know, you'd want to be able to debug because it's really messy because you don't know when it's coming from local memory and when it's coming from either Redis or your DB. So that's something to keep in mind when doing it but we found out that it's pretty useful to cache these kind of data that you pull frequently by the rally average engines. So the next thing that we did was sort of partitioning our data, right? Rails apps are very much tailored to use a single DB and this single DB quickly becomes the bottleneck, right? As everyone would have experienced. And so usually when we say partition our data, we partition the DB, we might do some sharding and so on. But what we, so we are on RDS. We use AWS RDS and you could, we do partitioning of certain tables but RDS doesn't have really good off the box sharding abilities, right? So we decided to use something called a gem called octopus. So octopus is a gem that is mainly used for read replicas to read off replicas, which we don't use but it also has ability. So if you read this section, which is called mixing octopus with the Rails multiple database model, you will find out that you can actually, you can actually connect to multiple databases. So this is super useful when you start segregating your data. So you decide, let's say, for example, in the case of grab, let's say you want, you know, certain system of yours in your Rails app is quite, how would you say, encapsulated. It doesn't require a lot of other data. As long as it has its subset of data, you put that in a separate DB, right? The core data, you put in a main DB. The data that you might use frequently, you put in a separate DB. The one that has high reads, you put in a separate DB. So you can also then optimize your DB for the kind of workflow that you need. You need high write, you need a high write throughput. You can do that. So we have a database which is mostly analytical info coming in from the apps and so on. And so it's just like no one reads from that DB ever in production. It just basically goes straight to our analytics pipeline. So it doesn't need to be optimized for reads. My SQL by default would be sort of a balanced approach. When you put that DB on high writes, just partitioning, you can just forget about it, right? It definitely does have some gotchas there, right? You can't do joints so easily. So that's why you need to have your data quite segregated or you need to do multiple queries to get the data where you need, right? You need to be careful of transactions and rollbacks, especially when they do multiple, over across multiple databases. So because if you start a transaction on one database and then you start doing a query on the second one, you might end up rolling back only one of them and not rolling back the other. This link here, I won't go through all of them because this link actually summarizes most of it about what things to watch out for when you use the various database, multiple database model. But how does it work for us, right? So we were on RDS 8x large, which is the largest RDS instance available. And on average, we used to do like 30% CPU, right? So these are four databases, all different sizes, right? Names have been hidden unfortunately because it's recorded. So our main database, which is like you can see the most number of connections is like 10%, right? That's actually where the bulk of the data is. The second database is actually what I said about the analytics. So it's where all the writes go through and it's around 12%. The third database is interestingly used for a very cron-specific kind of system. So it basically runs mostly at midnight, past midnight. So you'd see the database spike up then to around 30%, 35%, and usually it's doing nothing during the day. And the fourth DB, which is something we introduced newly, which is why you don't see much CPU there, is something that we started to do for some filtering, right? So it's not yet aggressively used, so that's why it's so low and so little connections. And we found out it works pretty well. As long as you can encapsulate your data decently enough, Rails actually provides all the tools to work well with multiple databases.  So we could actually do something like RailsG migration database name and it would actually generate the migration for it. You could do Rails, I mean, you could do React, DB, migrate that database and it will migrate that database and so on. So you could keep your exact same workflow, same deployment pipeline, I mean, just add these commands and you pretty much, it works out of the box. There are some problems with, as I mentioned about the joints, but most of them are work aroundable, right? But this applies to Redis as well, right? So we actually use multiple Redis, which is common, but we split it up again, same for workflow reasons, right? So our Rails cache is on some completely separate Redis. The configuration Redis, which I showed you, is on a completely separate Redis. Sidekick runs on a separate Redis. We have a general Redis that is used for whatever low-level caching that we do, or maybe, you know, when we use some of the data types that Redis provides. And then we have a shared Redis where we share some data or when we want to invalidate caches across stacks, right, across another service. So we have some services written in Go. So when we want to invalidate their caches, maybe, we would push something through Redis and they would then read the latest data of Redis, right? So we decided to talk about Redis, we talked about the DB, now we need to go deeper, right? Partition Rails, right? So if you talk about our Rails app at the moment, when it started off, I mean, as a general monolith here, you grab, it used to do a lot of things, right? But if you distill it, it stooped things in one. It was basically a front-end for our sort of a management page, which all our Ops teams uses, like, you know, to see the current status, to update, you know, to see bookings, details, and, you know, the same, you know, the usual CRUD flow and all other things, right? But it was also a backend service that was processing bookings, you know, was the API for our passenger app. And so it was two very much different workflows, as you could imagine, because one is basically a backend API JSON server, and a second one is basically a full-stack Rails app. And we found out that they have very different performance requirements, right? So we actually use Rails engines here, and so we actually split it up. So we defined a core, which basically had the shared models and methods across two separate Rails apps, right? So we called one Web API, which is basically the API for the front-end management system, and one we call Control Center, which is basically all the internal backend systems, and including the API for the passenger. Why would we do this? So one thing we found out was Control Center handles the bulk of the throughput, right? And because obviously, because it's coming from the app, while the Web API is coming from users accessing the page, which is our staff, right? Which is much significantly much less. So we could actually provision a few machines for Web API, very small machines, I think it's C4 large, and we provisioned C4X large for Control Center, right? The second thing that was more useful is that, for example, when we have to communicate with external APIs, for example, bookings is now, we have a Go service that handles bookings. So we have to query that API to get some details. Now the APIs that Control Center calls are related to the PAX app. So then you want very fast response times, right? A PAX app is not gonna wait one second, two seconds for a response, you know? You'd order it on the order of milliseconds. So we want to set timeouts, like very low timeouts, like three seconds, forget it. I don't care whether I get the response or not. I'd rather time out on the client side, right? But for the management portal, you're probably doing a bit more heavier queries. You're probably doing searches, some filters. So you don't mind waiting as a bit longer for the query to come through. So by splitting it, you could actually set different timeouts for your application or YML, however you load your configs, that actually treat them two differently. But because they share the same models, you don't have to replicate two different code bases, right? So that proved very advantageous. The second thing is different gems. So we don't want that math n problem, right? So if Control Center wants to use math n, that's fine. We're not including any in Web API, right? So that's something, so you don't want to get surprised by gems. So the core gems are things that are very core. So New Relic, RPM, and you know, Redis, and so on. Very few Puma, our web server. But we don't include any gem otherwise. So we include it first in the specific app that wants it. And if you want to migrate it to core, it has to be really reasoned why. The third thing is optimizing Puma. So Puma, I mean, if you've used Puma before, it has, it's a process, a multiprocess and multi-thread. So on Control Center, we run because it's very fast response and you know, each request lasts a very short time. We spin up a lot of threads and a lot of workers, right? We can't do that with a Web API because some requests take longer. They are more memory intensive. And so what we used to happen to us before was that we used to have memory constraints because someone would do an export and they suddenly like, you know, that instance is like running out of memory because we have so many threads as well because handling all the requests. By splitting that up, we could have fewer threads on Web API and more threads on Control Center because these ones process faster and are done quicker while the Web API ones can be slow and people are willing to wait for a thread to be ready to serve them. Finally, the Web API doesn't require background workers. So we've had, why do we need psychic running on those instances? Just throw them out. However, your packs up on replicas, your packs up once real-time data. It doesn't want outdated data. If we having replica lag, you know, that's probably something going to go wrong when we start returning data from our replicas lagging. But on our management platform, it's a bit fine. I mean, we can stand with replica lag. It's pretty obvious when replica is lagging and it's not a deal breaker. They can wait for their data to come maybe a few minutes late, they don't have to process it then and there. So we could reduce load on our main DB by actually using replicas for our management platform. So in short, it's basically optimizing each cranny for each app, right? And by doing that, you could actually reduce the overall load on your system by separating the different workflows that you have for your app. But again, you know, you have problems, right? So let's say for example, there's something that happens to your booking. And let's say for example, your management system can also cancel a booking. And so let's say, you know, the person tries to do something and you try to do something in your management system, you need to make sure that there's some locking in place, right? So we use optimistic locking. It works well across Rails app because it checks the lock version and then it raises stale object errors. But you need to be able to add the error handling to handle those stale object errors if they occur. So that's one thing that you need to be careful. Debugging. So debugging issues now span across both apps. We've got two sets of logs to Skyan. It's not in order. So those kind of issues come up as well. There's also operational overhead, right? If there's something changing on core, right? And if let's say control center deploys, then they are running a different version of core than the one that's running on Web API. And we haven't had too much issues with it. But if there's something that, you know, changes a fundamental behavior, we need to be really careful with how we deploy the change of production. So we might have to actually then, you know, do this whole feature flag, deploy both versions. They both read the same flag, then flip the flag over. So then they both start reading at the same time. And then they flip the behavior at the same time. So in managing stable releases, this can be a bit tricky because you don't, because it's still one repo, one, this thing, we don't do sub-modules. So it's a bit tricky to create stable releases. But other than that, we haven't had much issues. And for me, generally, the advantages generally outweigh the problems with it. So these are some of the things that we use at Grab to scale. We've done a lot more. Unfortunately, don't have much time to talk about it. I could go, I don't have much go to share here as well because it's pretty lengthy and I don't think anyone's interested in it. So you could contact me if you want to see some things on how we did stuff or you could just let me know. So yeah, thank you. Any questions? So you're saying you had engines. Is your core engine in a gym like separate to the main repo? Yeah, so it's also separate to the main repo. It's still in the repo, but it's pretty much we... It's written like a gym, but we require the rails engine directly in the core base. So is the Web API and the admin section and the core all in the same repo? Yes. We could have packaged it as a gym. So that would actually solve that verging problem, but we don't make much changes to core as often so, and most of the changes aren't breaking. So if you're introducing a new model, we would first introduce it to core, then deploy it. So then there's a core already out there, then we'd put the specific code for the specific app. Yeah, that would call it. Yeah. That's curious. If you put the engine in the repo and then when you're using engines, that means you have multiple rails app which is using the same engine. Is that true? So we don't run multiple apps on the same instance. We run only one of those apps. I mean the rails actually... Yes. The rails actually is only for one particular app, for your case or... So the engine is actually core, right? And both of the apps rely on that one engine. So there's only one engine. It's one repo and then the two rails app... No, no, they're all in one repo. Oh, it's not. Yeah, so it's all in one repo, so they all spin up, it's one rails instance, that spins up. So you start to start off things in memory that's GC-affected anyway. It's not real. So we don't, I mean, we don't store 100,000 records. I think if you... So for the active record models, I think they are about 200 records that we're storing in memory, which doesn't seem to be affecting GC at all, according to our stats, yeah. I haven't still, because we did this only on Monday, we haven't still got size comparisons to see how much of our memory store is being used, because I know it starts off with like 38 MB default or something. You need to expand. If it runs out, it will actually start throwing things out of memory. So because memory store already specifies the maximum it stores, and if it starts going to exceed that, it will actually just start throwing out things which are not last in use, yeah. Regarding the partition, how do you do the question? Sorry. Regarding the partition, how do you do the question? Questioning for the DB or for the app. So for the app, so when we deploy, we create tags on GitHub. How we do it is we basically, each team creates their own tag if they want to. So because it doesn't matter whether a change on core goes both ways. So what we make sure is that as long as you're changing core, it doesn't affect us, then you are fine. So we basically try not to, we always keep core as something that's backwards compatible, right? We don't introduce breaking changes on core. If you want to introduce a method that's going to change existing behavior, you'd introduce it as a new method. Then you'd ask the two apps to change to that method. So they can do it independently of just changing core. So that's how we keep versioning in track. So it requires a bit of a manual review there, which is where that step comes in. But otherwise, we create releases independent of each other. Sorry. What was the question? Such a heavy usage. Have you ever had any issues with memory leaks? Yes. Quite a lot actually. So we had a memory leak, but most of them have been through gems. We've never had a memory leak that was caused by us. We've had things like where we instantiate too much memory because we load too much active record models. So we need to switch to SQL instead, right? But so we had a gem that used to do push notifications. I do not remember the gem name right now. It was an Apple push notification gem. I think it was pusher, I can't remember though. So it would actually start leaking memory and then it would cause psychic to seg fault. We actually couldn't figure out, other than do a git bisect and figure out. It started somewhere around this release. So it's probably this and then we just switch out the gem and then that's one. The second memory leak we had was, when we tried to use GRPC in Rails. Unfortunately, the GRPC Ruby gem is absolutely horrible. Don't ever use it. We tried to patch it ourselves. We submitted pull requests, but it's very slow and it has a ton of memory leaks. Psychic also has some memory leaks, which is unfortunate. The recent one that they patched up in the latest version for psychic. Our web API app has a small memory leak, which is so small that we've chosen to ignore it at the moment because it doesn't affect us, but we need to figure out, but we haven't still figured out where's the leak from. But majority of the time it's been from gems. If you have more questions, can you talk about how to do it after that? So next up we have young, oh sorry, thank you all for your questions.


Today, we're going to be looking into the world of Instagram dropshipping. Instagram. Instagram. Instagram. Now, this probably isn't something that you've heard about a lot, but trust me, Instagram, when it comes to your dropshipping store or dropshipping in general, is a very popular platform and a very powerful tool that you can use to be able to promote your store and bring in more profits, get more sales, and just ultimately get your products in front of the eyes of a lot more people. A lot of people.  This video could introduce you to a much wider demographic of people, and you never know. At the end of the day, some of your posts or some of your videos could potentially go viral and you can make a ton of money just because of one video. So let's go ahead and check out a few different Instagram profiles, all from some of the most popular dropshipping websites, their niches, let's dissect some of their posts, let's see what they're posting. Let's check out how many followers they have and see what they're doing in order to bring in more traffic to their stores. This can actually help you in turn start to kind of mimic what they're doing. So that way you can start to build up your own brand and start to build up your own following. And in turn, build up your bank account by getting more sales. And before we do go ahead and get started with checking out these different Instagram profiles, if you want a bit more information on Instagram dropshipping, or if you want all of the different links to the different profiles on this list, just go ahead and check out the description down below. There's going to be a link to a relevant article down there. So Instagram, the place where everyone goes to share photos of their families, of what they're doing, post stories about what they're currently doing, or just sometimes just post a couple funny videos on Instagram Reels. Now me personally, I've never been much of a social media person, but I've always seen the benefit that I can have for pretty much any business. Instagram is the place to be able to go showcase all of your products, what they do, your reviews, pretty much anything that has to do with your business, you can essentially post on Instagram. And on top of that, you can also post whatever you want that's relevant to your business to be able to attract more customers. Instagram right now has 1.2 billion users.  And the best part about it is that Instagram makes it pretty easy and best of all, free to get in front of the eyes of all of these different people. And that is where dropshipping comes into play. Since there are so many users on Instagram, there's a lot of people that you can put your products in front of the eyes of. And of course, we all know that we're targeting impulse buyers. So whoever comes across your post, if it's interesting enough, if you're doing a good job with what you're doing, they can potentially click on your profile, clicking on the link on your bio, and go to your website and make a purchase. So with that being said, let's go ahead and check out the top 10 dropshipping Instagram profiles. Alright, so first up on this list, we have Meowtons Co. Now Meowtons is a specialty cat shop that specializes in, well, cats. So the first thing that we're going to notice when we jump onto their Instagram profile is their little logo. It's pretty cute with a cat on it. And they have a few pinned stories. These pinned stories are pretty much a few things that the creator thinks are important, and they decide to pin it to their profile so anybody can reference them or anybody can see what these are about or what they're about. Now, aside from that, one of the first things that actually jumps out at me is right under their bio, they have their link in their bio. Of course, as a dropshipper, this is something that's absolutely essential. Whether you're on TikTok or you're on Instagram, you always want to have your link in your bio, so that way people know where they can purchase your items. Now clicking into that, the first page that it takes us to is their fall arrivals. Here you can see they have actually a mix of different things. So check this out. All three of these are definitely 100% dropship. But this seems to also be somewhat of a hybrid store, incorporating both print on demand and dropshipping. So while these are definitely dropshipping, this right here, these are also dropshipping, this shirt, these two shirts, this cup, these bags, this is all print on demand. So they have a pretty good mix of print on demand and dropshipping. But of course, everything is geared specifically towards their niche, which is cats. Now going back to their profile, let's see some of those different things that they actually post on there. So the last thing that they posted on here is actually a meme, which is really good. So here's the thing, you don't want to flood your Instagram with only your products because it's going to get boring. You're not going to really have that connection with your customers. If you're only uploading posts that have to do with your products or with somebody using your product, it's not going to resonate with an Instagram audience. When people go on Instagram, people like to be entertained and simply just looking at products over and over and over on a page, it's not entertaining. People will typically just scroll away. So having memes on here or having different types of posts, informative posts, educational posts, funny posts, things that people can relate to, things that can answer people's questions, that is imperative to have in your store as long as it's relevant to your niche. Of course, this right here is definitely relevant. Here has a pair of green cat eyes. Huh? Is that you, Milton? What are you doing here in the bathroom? Flix switch. And they're just eating away at the toilet paper. My dog actually does that and it's so annoying. But aside from that, you can see that their caption is there's a monster in the bathroom. And this is really to just have fun with your audience. You don't want to be too serious when it comes to Instagram or social media, because it's not all about business. You want to have some fun on there. You want to make sure that your viewers are entertained. You want to make sure that they're informed and most importantly, that they're engaged with your content, because that's what's going to make your viewers share your content and you're going to reach a way broader audience. That's how you're going to grow. So aside from that, let's check out what else they have. Let's check out their last five posts. So this is the first one. Number two is their actual product. Of course, it's always okay to promote your products on Instagram because I mean, that's what you're there for, right?  Keep scrolling. Another meme. My parents don't have grandchildren yet. So this is what's on the bedside table in their guest's bedroom. And it's a picture of a cat. Then as you can see here in the comments, people are resonating really well with this. People are loving this. I think it's perfect, very true tags. This is what you want. You want people being tagged because this is what's going to get more people to follow your account. And look at this, a whopping 5,000 likes to continue another meme and a little reel. Reels are something that you really want to get onto if you're not doing yet because when you upload Instagram Reels, you reach a way broader audience than you would with a typical post. Instagram Reels is kind of like TikTok in the sense that Instagram will push out a ton of different content to some really random people. And if they resonate with it and interact with it, it'll push it out to more people. So those are just a few of the last posts that they posted on here. As you can see, it's more of a fun. It's more of a light hearted page. It's not strictly business. This is done super well. Looking at their follower account, they have over 782,000 followers. That's a lot of people. As far as posts, they have 13,000 posts, so you can see that they're very active on Instagram. And of course, you can tell that they're pretty successful. I mean, if they have this many followers and this many people interacting with their posts, they definitely have people clicking on that link in their bio. Now, second up on this list is Notebook Therapy. Let's check out what they say about themselves and their bio. Welcome to Notebook Therapy, a place where everyone's welcome to create memories and express themselves. Shop Buhos, Bujos. I'm not sure exactly what that is. Washi tapes, stencils, and more. And right there, link in bio. Let's check out their website. Notebook Therapy. Oh, this is really nice. This is really clean. This right here, this banner is beautiful. All right, keep scrolling. You got the Lunar Mystery, a special Halloween collection inspired by the moon and stars. Releases in a day. That's pretty cool. High quality images. Everything looks really good, really clean, easy to navigate. Got the All Categories up here. Looks good. Absolutely fantastic. Oh, and they even got a blog section. This is great. Now, let's jump back over to their website. And they have 1.6 million followers with only 5,000 posts. That's pretty crazy. All right, so let's check out something else here. Let's see. Of course, they have their different pin stories. Let's take a look at one of these. Let's see what they have. So, Journey a Paris. I'm assuming this is Journey to Paris. And this is pretty much just showing, I guess, their collection, their collection of Paris notebooks. Okay, pretty cool. Now, let's take a look at what they post.  So, this is actually one of their items. This is a stamp set. That's pretty cool. All right, so they have a stamp set that they're showing on here. That's actually a very nice image. The way that they have this image structured is very clean. It really centers your focus to the product itself. All right, so this next one is the Lunar Mystery Washi Swatch. So, this is a reel, and they're showing you their sticker set with their notebook, and they're just drawing along with it. This is something really good because this captivates the viewer. This keeps people's attention with all of the different colors, the stickers, the drawing. Everything that they're doing is actually really entertaining, and it's pretty peaceful and relaxing. Let's check out some of the comments. Beautiful and relaxing to watch. I knew it. Relaxing to watch. Can't decide. They are also beautiful. Everything's my fave. How can one choose? Let's keep going. And this is a very good image as well of their notebook. This is actually really cool. This is a really nice page. You have, again, another product page over here. And as you can see, all right, this is one post that doesn't necessarily have to do with their products. I was about to say that all they do is post their products, but I mean, if it works for them, it works. So here they're doing some artwork, and they tag the creator. So this is actually pretty cool. This is nothing that you can do. If people actually submit artwork to you, if people submit posts, if people tag you in posts, reposting it and tagging them, can it also help you reach a wider audience? That also helps your viewers notice that you're actually appreciating them, that you appreciate their tags, that you appreciate their interactions, which ultimately gets them to interact more and other people to interact more because they want to be featured on your page. Continuing a couple more, we have another notebook and another nice little image here. Watercolor flowers and plants save for inspiration. Incredible artwork by dang underscore. Of course, you see another tag with another feature on the page. Next up, we have Kenzie. Now this is actually a very interesting one. This is one that I actually wanted to check out and cover because this item right here, this laser hair remover is pretty wildly popular. I've seen a bunch of different versions of it, bunch of different people that sell different variations. So it's interesting to see a successful Instagram profile that's actually promoting this product. So first off, you have their website, let's check out to see how that is. And you have Kenzie, and it takes you to all their products. So you can see everything that they have to offer, which all seems to be skincare and hair removal and a little bit of all that stuff, obviously stuff that I don't use. So let's check out their different posts. Oh, actually let's check out here. So they have a few different pin stories. They have the results, which is actually pretty cool before and afters are really good for items like this. It provides social proof, especially if it's like this in the form of testimonials. So they have their before and afters like that right there. That's really good to see. You know, it tells people that it actually works, shows you how it works. Now let's scroll down a little bit and let's check out some other posts. So here you have Paris Hilton. Whoa. Okay, that is a huge celebrity endorsement. All right, that right there is just get a celebrity endorsement and your Instagram profile is going to blow up, but let me see something. Can't really use them into that, but yeah, it does seem to actually say the logo. Aside from that, let's see. This is actually from 68 weeks ago. This is pretty old, but it's got some pretty good interactions, 233 likes. Now let's continue. You have the actual product. Typically when you post just a basic picture of your product or whatever it is that you're selling, depending on your brand and depending on your audience, they might react to it. But a lot of the times from personal experience, it's not always going to be the one that's the most interacted with. So they actually have a couple of different slides with some of their different products. Okay, let's see what they're doing here. So continue on. What have you done for yourself today? It's so important to add self care to your daily routine. This one actually doesn't really have many interactions either. So as you can see in this particular profile, they don't have too many interactions. And the reason is because they more than likely run a lot of ads. A lot of times whenever you see an Instagram profile that has a ton of followers and not a lot of interactions, that could mean one of two things. One, either they have purchased their followers, which is a huge no no because there's no point in doing that. That's literally just a waste of money. Or two, they're just simply running ads and all of the interactions are primarily going to be in the posts that are being ran as ads. Now looking at the profile here, the celebrity endorsement is huge. That's something that honestly you can't get away from. If you have a celebrity endorse your product, you're bound to get sales. But aside from that, taking a look at some of their other posts, they have some pretty low interaction rates. They have one comment, two comments, 13 likes, it's not huge. So my takeaway on this is that more than likely either they purchased their followers, which I don't want to say that because you never know, or they're just simply running a lot of ads and they're getting a lot of interactions through those ads. It happens a lot. And I switched over from the posts to the reels and let's see how the reels are doing. So some of the reels are actually doing better. As you can see, this one has a thousand, this one has 18,000. This is another huge thing. Like I mentioned earlier, Instagram reels can get a lot more views than your typical posts. So always post reels because you have the chance of going viral. This one right here being the perfect example. As you can see, the regular posts don't have a lot of interactions, but this reel right here actually has 18,000 views with 520 likes. So here I can safely say that their views, they're not purchased. They're not purchasing their followers. They're not doing any of that stuff. They're simply just getting their views from their reels. So here you have this one that has 3,000, 5,000, 9,000, 13,000, 18,17. Yeah. So that's what they're doing. 33,000, their views and their followers all come from their reels. So if you're not doing reels, if you're not filming Instagram reels, what are you waiting for? You're definitely missing out. You're missing out on potentially thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Now let's just jump over to their tagged really fast and let's see what people have them tagged in. So here they have a couple of tagged posts, which actually have some pretty good interactions as well. 3882, 68,000 likes. This is where a lot of the followers come from as well. If you can get people to start tagging you, then you can start reaching other people's followers. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to the next one. This is actually something that I really like, Kauai's. So Kauai Pen Shop. So here they have these little Kauai figures and they pretty much specialize in pens, I guess. Let's see. We are full of super cute, pretty and eye-catching stationery. All right. Stationery. Shirts that satisfy all stationery addicts. Free international shipping available. Check out their website. So they have the Kauai Pen Shop. As you can see here, they have a pretty clean website, a nice little banner there. Everything looks good. Everything matches. Everything matches the theme. Here they have the little character desk lights. They got some pens. So things for the office, things for your home office, your desk, things like that. A little milk box pencil case. This is pretty cool. This is pretty unique. Let's check out their posts. So they have a few different pinned ones here and let's start with this one. Transform your desk into a whimsical space with Kauai Japanese Sakura coaster set. Okay. So these are coasters. These are pretty cool. So these different coasters, let's see their interactions. They have, this was only posted a day ago and you actually can't see how many likes they have, which means they probably have that hidden. So I guess this was one of those profiles that says and others. So let's see. Can you see? Well, it actually has quite a bit of likes on here. All right. So they have their coaster set. Then they have a paper organizer or a file organizer. I'm not exactly sure what this is, but right here it says paper storage solution. Okay. So I guess you just store your different papers on here. See what else they have. More products, different products, some pins. So as you can see, they pretty much just have their products on here. They don't do memes. They don't do any of that stuff. A little Pikachu. I love Pikachu. All right. Let's check out the reels. And as far as the reels, again, look at this. $51,000, $32,000, $23,000, $64,000, $38,000. Reels is where it's at, yo. If you're not doing reels, you need to get on it. But let's see what they're putting on their reels. Let's go with one of their popular ones right here. This fall, send a bouquet of Ginko Roses or Ginko Roses. So I guess it's showing you how to make these little roses from their different stationary sets. Maybe they sell these different products, video by natures. Okay. So this is another feature that they have. They re-uploaded one of their followers videos. Now let's keep going, see some of the other stuff they have. A quick drawing and starry night using acrylic paint on canvas. I'm pretty sure this is stuff that they sell on their website as well. So yeah, reels. You got to get on reels. So how many followers do they have? They have 2,070 posts and they have 391,000 followers. Not bad. Up next, we have Pet Boutique Shop. Now Pet Boutique, co-stunning products for stunning pets and their owners. Let's check out their website. And it looks pretty, it actually looks modern. It looks pretty high end, pretty, it's got a good modern look to it. It's pretty easy on the eyes. And of course, it has pets on it. Who doesn't love pets? Who doesn't love dogs? Who doesn't love those big fur babies? All right, so it's pretty easy to navigate. You got the shop button up here. Let's see what they saw. So they have pet plushies. They have a calming bed, a calming blanket and a couch pillow. And it seems like that's it. They actually specialize on these three different products. So that's going to be interesting to see what they post on their Instagram page. So jumping back on here, they have 14,000 followers and they only have 65 posts. So they have a Christmas giveaway post. This is, I'm assuming from last year, Make Your Dog Happy. Now you can do that and save some money. You got a Black Friday sale here, which we actually have Black Friday coming up. And you have this one right here ready for the obstacles this week will bring. So this is just again, another meme. It's not necessarily focused on the product itself. I guess it's time to get all Christmasy. And you got the person that tagged them or that originally uploaded it. So that's pretty much what they do on their profile. They don't necessarily post their products, even though you can see right here, there's one, but they do a lot of reposts. They do some informative posts. And they also do memes. So let's check out this one that actually shows what they're doing. What are you looking at? Just chilling on her new furniture pillow. So this is somebody that purchased the item, took a picture on their dog, tagged the company, and then the company reposted this.  So if that's the case, just make sure you smash that like button. And while you're there, make sure you hit that subscribe button and ring that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Now let's get back to it. All right, up next we have inspire uplift.com. It's funny that they actually put dot com on here. So here they have actually they don't have any pin posts. That's fun. That's crazy. So they have Tagos to be featured. That's actually something really good that I think everyone should have on their bio if they have enough space for it. Tell people that they'll be featured if they tag you. This will motivate people to tag you, which again, will put you in front of a broader audience. Now let's check out their website inspire uplift. Let's see what they sell. This is a pretty big website, fun, practical and inspiring products. They have things from women's clothing, men's clothing, rings, earrings, skincare and learning in school. They sell a little bit of a lot of things on here. Home, garden and tools. So let's see what they have. They have something for fishing, a little kid's chair, cutting wood or branches outside. This is quite a mix of items. This is obviously a generic dropshipping store. And to be honest with you, it's it's all over the place. It is too cluttered. I think the homepage is way too much in your face. It's pretty overwhelming. I think this could have been organized a little bit better. Pretty sure that if you decide to do something like this, you could make it a lot better than these people do. But aside from that, let's check out their page. They have 72,000 followers, which is pretty good 4,700 posts. And let's start with the first one. DIY Fox ornaments. Find it on inspire uplift marketplace. All right. So this is one of the items that they sell. And I like the fact that they're promoting it, but they're not directly promoting it. They're showing you how to make it. And then they're telling you where you can get it. They're not telling you, look, this is where you can get this item. They're showing you what it is, how it works.  And on top of that, it's a reel. Reels always do well. Not always, but you know, find it on inspire uplift embroidery mannavi 05. What is that? So this is an embroidery machine or a patch. I'm not entirely sure. Not much information on this. They should have put a little bit more in here, something explaining more or less what it is. I'm assuming that it's probably the embroidery machine considering the type of page that it is, but you never know. So it seems that all of their posts are pretty similar with the same text. They tell you where to get it and they show you more or less how the item works. Yes, you see the same exact text. That's pretty lazy.  I don't really like that. Be unique, you know, make the posts different, make the text different. But the videos themselves actually aren't that bad. So that's pretty much the same thing all around. I'm pretty bored of this one.  I'm not a fan of this particular one. It's a bit generic. The website's a bit cluttered, but I mean, it seems to be getting the job done. So now I jumped over to the tagged section really quick. And while the tags don't have too many interactions, 12, 13, 7, 2, 3, 1, they do have quite a few of tags. So quite a few people have tagged them in their posts. Next up, we have Material Shop. And they only have 83 posts with 8,400 followers. Now, that's not too bad considering the amount of posts that they have. Let's check out their website. 50,000 happy customers since 2019. All right. Let's see what they have to offer.  So that tells me that this could be a few gadgets. Yep, that's exactly what it is. Different gadgets, different drop shipping items. These are pretty cool right here. Pretty clean, pretty straight to the point. You can tell that they niche down to right there, pretty gadget items, I guess you can call them. You got a few comb improvement, which gadgets. All right. So aside from everything, it's pretty clean. The images are pretty high quality. Everything looks good. Let's check out what they have to offer on their page. So the first one they have is this right here, which is pretty interesting. What is that? It deserves a gentle wash. That is freaking me out. Oh, okay. All right. Let me pause that for a second. That tripped me out right there. I'm not going to find you. That kind of freaked me out. I was like, what is that? What are they trying to promote? They're promoting this waterfall extender. So it's just an add-on for your sink. It's a pretty good way to do it. You know it doesn't have a lot of interactions. It only has two likes. It's a pretty good way to do it. I like it. It's funny. Aside from that, let's see what else they have. They have this clock right here that works with this little bicycle chain. This is really cool. Got a few more. Messy leftover. What are they going to do? Let's see. Labelmaker. Perfect. Got it. All right. So it seems that pretty much what they do on their page is they promote their own products and they make their own videos. So all of their posts are them promoting their products. Let's go ahead and check out the reels. See what they have here. They have a few with some pretty good views. 3,000, 3,000, 5,000. Let's see if they're tagged in anything. They only have one. Whoa. They only have one, but it's 22,000. All right. That's not bad. The Florida canvas. I'm pretty sure they have some pretty good followers on there and they probably gained some pretty good followers from that. Overall, this page is pretty straightforward. You know, there's not too much going on here. It's not too interactive. There's not a lot here that can keep your attention. If you notice the difference between this one and the first one that I showed you, the Mealtons Co, obviously this one has a ton more followers, but they also have more interactive posts and more than likely that's why they have more followers because their posts are more engaging. People can resonate more with them. People find it more relevant to what they like. And as you can tell, they're niching down to cats and all of their posts have to do with cats. On top of that, like I said, they have memes. They have videos. They have a lot of different posts that people really do interact with because they're entertaining. People can relate to it. So I'm pretty sure with some of the products that they offer on here, if they had more relatable posts, if they had more funny posts, you know, more tags, maybe even a few memes that have to do with a certain problem that's solved with one of these products, let's say, I'm pretty sure that their follower account will start skyrocketing. All right. Next up, we have until gone com or until gone. I'm pretty sure they just put com at the end of this because just a simple handle until gone was probably already taken. But aside from that, here they have until gone.com. They have 10.8 thousand followers with almost 2000 posts. Let's check out what they sell on their website. And the first thing that it jumps to is a 404 error. So while it is directly on their page, it's not taking you to a specific product or a specific landing page. So this right here is a big no, no. Always make sure that the link in your bio leads to something, not this, but at least it leads to their page, right? So let's check out some of their different categories. They have animals, apparel, baby and toddler, business, electronics, health and beauty. Nice. This is a pretty generic store. They sell a little bit of everything. Let's go to their homepage. Oh, look at that. A 500 game in one handheld, a Bissell cordless pet pro vacuum and a solid gold chain. What are random three items to have in your homepage? Oh, wait, and a food processor. All right. So this is obviously a very generic store. Here you can find probably a little bit of everything. And it looks like they're currently having a sale for Halloween. Treat yourself, no tricks up to 77% off. Halloween's at the end of the month. So if you see a lot of Halloween stuff on here, it's probably why. But aside from that, the website itself, it's pretty basic. It just shows you a bunch of different products of what they sell and their reviews. So I mean, it could be better. It gets the job done, but it's pretty plain in my opinion. It gets the job done. You could structure it a lot better if you actually spend some time on it, organize the different sections, organize the different categories, add a couple of different pictures, some details, some testimonials, things like that. It would make it stand out a little bit more. Okay. So now let's check out their Instagram profile. So the first thing that I see on here is just straight advertising. Nothing to interact with, nothing fun, nothing really that catches my attention other than them promoting their products. Actually, this one right here. Look around. You're in the center of the action now, grandma. You see, this is the type of stuff that works. Put more stuff like this and guaranteed some of these are going to start blowing up. But anyway, aside from that, I've always wanted to put my grandma on a VR headset to see how that goes. But anyway, aside from that, so they have the guest of price, got an electric scooter here. I guess they try to be interactive with it by having customers guess the price. But as you can see, it's not necessarily working. Next one, how to use Airpods Pro with active noise cancellation. I don't think too many people really need an explanation on how to use AirPods, but sure, link in my story, just a few different advertisements. Yeah, this right here isn't something that really keeps my attention and I'm pretty sure it's something that won't keep your attention. So again, like I always suggest, put some memes, put some fun stuff. Don't just be all business. Be relatable. Well, these are the reels. Let's check out the posts. My bad. But when it comes to the post, it's pretty much the same thing. They're just posting on their same products and nothing else. Now let's see if they're tagged and they are tagged on some random posts. I mean, maybe this one. Thank you. You extra deals for this possum toys. I don't think this has anything to do with it. Okay, so I'm not going to lie to you. This Instagram page is why it does have a good amount of followers. 10,000. It's a little bit all over the place. And really, it's just not optimal. They could grow so much more if they put a little bit more effort into their page and start to be a bit more interactive with their followers. All right, up next on number nine, we have the mellow dog. Now the mellow dog has 43.5,000 followers, 296 posts. And let's check out their website. They actually don't have a website. What they have is a link tree. Here they have the links to their different products, though the calming pillow, carrot farm, a calming couch cover. And let's see where these lead to. All right, there, the mellow dog. All right. So it's pretty much just a link tree that leads to the different products on their page. That's actually pretty smart. So here the first website that we came to was the calming pillow, 105 reviews, pretty straightforward, some pretty high quality images and more to love. Pretty basic drop shipping website, but it looks pretty good. I like the fact that they have a bunch of different reviews here with pictures. Pictures make all the difference. So let's check out what they have to offer on their actual page. Again, tag us to get featured, DM to collab, always good to post on your bio. Now let's see what they have on their posts.  All right, the most dashing thing, stuff like this is pretty fun. It starts to actually engage people. See what else they have. They have some pretty good interactions to 110 likes. This is actually a really cool toy. This is interesting. So they take out the carrot and there's treats inside. I have a pit bull. This whole thing would be destroyed, but still a pretty cool item. Still a pretty good toy. When people ask me, what's the one thing that made me smile today? Got a video of their dog of their pup playing with that same carrot patch right there. All right, so it's pretty cool. I like the fact that they post a lot of user generated content. So, you know, content that's actually produced by people or themselves and the fact that they actually have dogs using their items is even better because things like this will really get people to interact with your products or with your posts. People love dogs. Check out the reels really quick. I'm pretty sure most of those were reels, but let's see how much views we have. 20,000, 12,000, 8,000, 6,000, 43,000. Doing pretty good with what they're doing. So overall, they're actually doing everything really well. They're doing their Instagram well. Their link tree is pretty interesting. It's something a little bit new. It's unique compared to what everybody else has, which is pretty much links in their files. And their website is pretty well structured. I will say it's a little bit cluttered. Like there's a lot going on, but it's not that bad. Mellow dog. Good job. All right. And last but certainly not least, we have AstroNord. AstroNord CD player. What? CD player in 2023? Let's see what they have to offer. AstroNord CD player album collectors favorite. This is interesting. All right. So their website is actually really nice. I like how it is. I'm interested to see what this is. So their website looks pretty good. It's pretty clean. It's straight to the point. It's easy to navigate. See what their CD player is. I guess it's just a regular CD player. Interesting. But it has some pretty funky packaging. It looks pretty cool. As you can see, it's actually powered by USB. All right. I'm getting a little bit too into this. I'm sorry. Let's go back. So the website is pretty cool. Let's run back to their Instagram page and let's see what they have to offer. All right. So now that we're on their page, let's check out the first post that they have here and they have this user has her favorites on display. Yep. CDs and photo cards are pretty not to display it out are too pretty not to display it out. Sorry. Design with me. It's a display case that you can hang on your wall that has a particular album and you can add a picture to it. This is pretty cool because you can put something like a CD for, I don't know, maybe your first date with your wife or your husband. And you can put a picture that goes along with it. So this is pretty good. It's pretty well done. They do it good. Now let's see what else they have. All right. So they're promoting a giveaway on this one. Simple, clean, satisfying, love the unboxing video. Unboxing videos are fantastic, especially if they're done through other users or people that actually purchase your items. So here they're unboxing the digital clock, 2433 likes are doing something right. And the one thing that I think they are doing right is the way they're making their videos. The way that they're making these rails is the colors are good. It's clean. It pops. They're sharp. It looks really good. See, aside from that, what are you listening to tonight, asking their users a question, get some good interactions, even though you don't have too many here, but you do have a good amount of likes. Oh, look, it's their CD player. All right, so continue on. And it's pretty much just the same thing going on. I mean, they seem to be doing something right because they have a good amount of followers and some pretty good interactions. Checking out the reels, they're averaging around the three, four thousands. When it comes to views, 10,000, close to 10,045,000. And when it comes to tagged, they're tagged quite a few different pictures and posts. So yeah, again, as I always say, or as I've been telling you earlier, make sure you tell your viewers, your audience, whoever it may be, your customers to tag you in their posts. All right, so those were 10 examples of Instagram dropshipping stores. Now let's quickly go over how you can start dropshipping on Instagram yourself. So the first thing that you need to do is you need to create an Instagram account. This is pretty obvious and it's pretty simple to do. All you have to do is just go on over to Instagram.com or download the app, sign up, fill out all of the necessary information, which is really just going to be what you want your page to be called. And I suggest using the same name as your website. Then after that, you actually need to create your store. So decide where you want to sell. Do you want to sell on Shopify? Do you want to sell on your own website? So if you want to sell on your website, you can choose Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce. At the same time, you don't have to sell on your own website if you don't want to do that, if it's too much work for you, or if you don't like designing websites overall, what you can do is you can start selling on different platform. You can easily sell on eBay. You can sell on Etsy. You can sell on Amazon. Then the next thing you need to do is choose a niche and choose the products within your niche. Once you know what niche you want to sell in, then you do need to find the products. Now, the easiest way that you can do this is by simply going to AutoDS. Once you go to AutoDS, you are going to have to create an account if you don't have one. And if you don't have one, then you can get started right now for the trial period for just $1. But this is going to be probably the easiest way that you can find some of the best products to Dropship and the fastest way you can import them to your store. So here you have the winning product section and you have the marketplace. Here you have tons of different products that are currently trending and have been proven to sell in the past. This is all backed by years of data that's collected through expert dropshippers. So let's say, for example, you want to start selling toys and games. You can go ahead and just click on the toys and hobby section over here and start looking through all of the different products that they have. Now, let's go ahead and let's try this right here, the flying balloon ball. Let's say you want to sell this in your dropshipping store because you're focusing on toys. So if that's the case, then you can just go ahead and import the draft and what that's going to do is import it directly to your store. It'll be ready to sell within minutes. Aside from that, you also get a bit more information here. So you get a profit analysis, which for one helps you find out more or less how much you can sell this item for and how much you can make from each sale. Aside from that, you also get an example Facebook ad. Now this is an ad that's actually currently running on Facebook. And the reason this is here is so that way you can more or less figure out or start to structure your own ads. This can help you structure your ads if you don't know how to do it. Now on top of that, you also get a target audience. This target audience can help you target a particular demographic of people for your Facebook ad. So the people that are being targeted for this Facebook ad more than likely are using a very similar target audience as this right here. And just in case you need a little bit of help with your dropshipping store, if you don't know how to design your own website, then you also have a website that's selling this same item. This can help you structure your website by more or less using it as a guide. Now of course, if you have your own suppliers or if you want to source your products from a few different websites, you definitely have the option to do that. If you're looking for a few different suppliers, you can always go with somebody like AliExpress, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, Amazon, Alibaba, Banggood. The list goes on. And again, if you want a full list of this, just go ahead and check out the description down below. All of the information will be in the article linked. Then once you have everything set up, you need to start marketing your store. How do you market your store? Easy. The same way that we just saw everyone doing it on Instagram. Start taking pictures, start making reels, start making videos, tell people to tag you in their posts, tell people to tag you whenever they receive their items, and have them do an unboxing. I know a lot of the times customers are going to be like, I don't want to do that. And they just end up doing it. So what you can do to incentivize them to do that is offer them a discount, give them an extra five or 10% off their next order if they tag you in their posts, or let's say in their first unboxing video. Aside from that, you can run ads on your Instagram posts. So whenever you make a post, whether it be a picture or a real or a video, you can go ahead and pay to have it advertised to a wider audience. Personally, though, I like organic marketing. I like making the videos. It's a bit more interactive for me. It's really personal preference. And you have to find out what works for you. Once you start marketing your products, you're going to start getting a few different orders. And at that point, the next thing you need to do is actually fulfill those orders. Now, the good thing about this is that you can do this manually. So you can either go to your supplier's website, place the order and have it shipped directly to your customer. But as I always say, that takes a lot of work, especially when you're fulfilling multiple orders. So I like to use AutoDS. AutoDS has automatic order fulfillment. So whenever somebody places an order in your store, it'll automatically be rerouted to your supplier. So that way they take care of absolutely everything. AutoDS will automate your entire store. So essentially, you're becoming hands off. And that's pretty much all there is to it. As you can see, it's pretty easy and pretty fun to actually start a dropshipping store on Instagram. It's fun to market it. It's fun to make the videos. And at the end of the day, it's probably one of the better ways to start getting your name out there and to start getting your brand out there. Now with that being said, I hope this video was helpful. I hope it was informational. If you did find it helpful, if you enjoyed it, please make sure you smash that like button. And while you're there, make sure you hit that subscribe button and make sure you're reading that little bell notification so you don't miss out on any future videos. Let me know down in the comments below what you think about dropshipping on Instagram or using Instagram to actually promote your different products. Huge thank you for watching, especially if you made it all the way to the end. As always, my name is Mario with AutoDS and I'll catch you all next time.


My cause, Mike Leach, is coming up and you will be representing the non-profit smooth that you founded with your mother It's done some very special things empowering women Against or who have been affected by domestic violence safe to say this is a personal issue for Deandre Hopkins. Absolutely a lot of you guys know my mom was involved in the incident many years ago and you know just Found ways to turn that negative into a positive and this was one of them starting this smooth foundation to help other women who Could have been or was in a situation like that You know to try to prevent it and so you know it's something that definitely hits home for us All right, so let me ask you about going back to college to finish your degree. Have you been surprised at how many people are Fascinated by Deandre Hopkins going back to finish his degree at Clemson. I am Surprisingly shocked. You know, I didn't think it would be a big deal I didn't know that going back trying to you know graduate or get a degree was a big deal But you know, I'm just doing something that I promised my mom and my father that I would do It was just that simple really it I mean there are other things you want to do in your life and finishing a degree I'm sure is something important to you But it's still a big deal it is it is and that's a big deal because you know in my community now a lot of people Make it to college and I and you know better yet graduate so for me I want to you know kind of be the person to set an example for for the youth in my community The graduates important not just playing sports. Okay, so it's in parks Recreation and tourism management. Okay, how many hours do you lack? Man, I'm lacking a couple. I probably got two semesters left. That's not too bad.  Well, you know, I've always been into country music. I want to I want to throw and have my own Festivals and concerts. So that's my plan after football one of them to get into The festivals of country music You know Alternative music that world. Yeah, man. What what sort of got you interested in the concert festival promotion aspect of I went to a concert in South Carolina where I'm from it was a small Festival and it was actually like one of the biggest festivals well from not the highest promoted But you know it was something for my small town for us to get a joy out of and You know it meant a lot to us locals having that little festival there and I just seeing everybody come out You know all the people who make IPA's and just you know all the locals who do all the little knick-knacks in their backyard You know come together and I always thought that was cool as a kid You know how something like that can bring bring a community together. It's so impressive because it's clear You love the game and you take the game seriously and you put everything you have into the game But there are other parts of your life, too. The game is not your entire life fair. I was very fair to say I'm you know, I like art likes to ceramics You know love music, you know, so, you know, man, it's like slot to me other than the game But football is definitely my passion


Hello everyone, my name is Melissa Armo with the Stock Swoosh, and today I wanted to talk about the theme for 2017. This is my theme for 2017 for myself and also for my business, the Stock Swoosh. And guess what it is? The theme for 2017 is love. It's a great thing. I got this idea about two weeks ago. I went on a date with a young gentleman and he actually gave me a Tiffany's cookie. Here it is right here. It's a pretty little cookie. When you buy certain gifts at Tiffany's, you get the cookie over the holidays. And anyways, I forgot about it, and then I stuck it in my pocket that night in my co-pocket and then I found it again right before the Christmas. And the cookie broke. It actually broke. It broke. It cracked a little bit in my pocket. And then I thought, gosh, there's some symbolism to this. There's a symbolism to this. This was at the end of 2016. I thought, this is a sign. It's a sign that 2017 is going to mean that a lot of love is going to come into my life and into my business. In the Gap class, for those of you that have taken the Golden Gap course, I talk at the very, very end of the class, it's one of the last slides, about love. I actually talk about love in the class, at the end of the class. I'm sure that's very unique. I highly doubt anyone in any trade education class discusses love in a trading class. However, I do. I talk about love in all forms. It is about loving the market, loving the strategy you trade, loving yourself, loving making money, loving learning, loving gaps, if that's what you trade with me, which I love gaps, loving shorting, if you prefer to short, which I do, and really loving your life, loving your life, love where you live, love your friends, love your family, love your home, love what you do. A lot of people do not like what they do for a living. And one of the reasons that I got into trading was that I didn't like what I was doing for a living and I wanted to find a new career. And I love the US stock market and I really love gaps. And 2017 is going to be about bringing more love into my own life, attracting it, manifesting it, and also into my business. And I honestly love my students too. I reached out to quite a few people and had phone conversations with them in the last two weeks, and it was great to talk to people. I see my students in the trading room on a daily basis, but I don't talk back and forth with them. They listen to me. And so it was great to connect with a lot of those people. 2017 is going to be about love for me, Melissa Armel, for the stocks. This is the sign. I'm putting it in my jewelry box for good luck with my very expensive jewels. And we're going to see what happens. It's going to be a theme throughout the whole year. So look for more videos or more emails of signs of love and think about what I said today. Thanks everyone and have a wonderful day.