Anyhow, hi, I'm Don, people are looking very awake today, and actually, you know, Emily, I'm kind of with you on this one, the audience is looking a bit smaller today, so I'm guessing that either last night's dinner had a truly abysmal survival rate, or that transportation today is provided by my internet service provider. I'm not sure which. Anyhow, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about what I like to think of as the human infrastructure of code, and that's why the talk is called to code as human. And to lead into that, I'd like to talk a little bit about how I got here, not in a biological sense, and not in like a philosophical existential sense, that's a bit long for this particular talk, but specifically how I arrived here on Wednesday night. So usually when I go into a hotel to check in for a conference, you walk up in the concierge, very politely smiles at you and says, so, sir, would you like to check in? This time, I stepped into the hotel in the concierge, smiled at me politely and just, are you okay? Never gotten that before. And the reason for this is that the flight here, I think, qualifies as the worst travel experience of my life. I don't remember when I booked with China Eastern that I checked the checkbox that said, yes, I want the authentic prison experience on my flight. I don't remember doing that. But I swear to you that the flight attendants were like drill instructors. They were marching up and down. I do mean marching up and down, sort of the aisles on the plane. They were making sure that your sheets were upright, that you could not recline. That was not allowed. They made me take out my phone multiple times to prove to them that the phone was off. Not in airplane mode, off. Never had that before on a flight. And it was strict.  And I was afraid to answer because I knew that any answer that I gave would be wrong.  And I took a picture of the inside of the economy class on China Eastern. I wanted to share that with you today. And I'm really disappointed because this is very different than the picture that was on their websites. So I'm usually a very solid person. I'm not, I'm not prone to panic. I'm not the kind of person that really gets angry. But when I got to the hotel, I'm not kidding. She asked me if I was okay. And it put me in a hugely bad mood for the trunk of yesterday. In fact, one of the organizers today said, oh, so did you get here, did you get here last night? I'm like, no, I arrived day before yesterday. You probably don't recognize me because for most of yesterday I was merely a hollow shell of a man. And the reason that I bring this up is because I'm a human being. We're not robots. And unfortunately as programmers, we tend to kind of look at algorithms and data structures and speed and performance and benchmarking as our sort of yardsticks for excellence in programming. And well, these are all important things. These are very, very good things to keep an eye on. We have to be aware of our human infrastructure of code because that's really what drives excellence for us as programmers. And so this is a talk on software engineering. But we're not going to talk about refactoring or about the way that you should structure your code or about functional programming. And we're going to talk about maintaining your own human infrastructure and leveraging that human infrastructure to be a better programmer. Now, there's an old joke. I have a degree in math. I actually picked this because it had the lowest number of units of anything in STEM, and I'm lazy. And there's an old joke that mathematicians are machines that turn coffee into theorems.  And in the same vein, programmers are machines that turn coffee into working software. And I don't mean to say that programmers are machines. Like, that's not what I'm trying to get out here, but that your body and your mind are incredible tools, absolutely incredible tools. And like any tool, they require maintenance and maybe a bit of training in practice to get the most out of them. And so in the same vein that a investment in quality tools is one of the best things that you can do as a crowd. So you have a good laptop. You have a good phone. You have a comfortable chair. You have a good screen. One of the best investments you can make is in your own human infrastructure. And we're going to break that into two categories. We're going to talk about the software, which is your mind. And we're going to talk about your hardware, which is your body. And we're going to start with the hardware. I'm a big believer that health is very important towards crafting quality software. And the reason for this is something I like to call anti-work. So you've heard of anti-matter. I think everybody in here has seen Star Trek. And so anti-matter is this sort of like mega-matter stuff that if you take a gram of anti-matter and a gram of normal matter and you say, now kiss, you get a huge explosion.  And anti-work is exactly the same thing. One time, many years ago, I was CTO for a startup in Japan as part of the Great Kuban Rush of 2009 or so.  And of course, to do this, I had pushed myself very hard, was working 12, 14, sometimes even 16-hour days. And we made the big launch on time and everything was great. The launch actually went really smoothly. So I went home to get some very, very much needed rest. After about four hours, my phone rang. And it was one of my developers saying, hey, Don, I really didn't want to call you about this. But everything's on fire. Yay. And the problem was that there were the database. They had looked at it at the database. And for some reason, everything was just getting locked. There were this huge number of locks. Every time they cleared them, locks would just come back immediately. Nobody could figure out what the problem was. And they called me and they told me this. And I knew instantly that that's my bug. I did that. Sorry. Because as it turns out that cache expiry is one of the harder problems in computer science. And I had made a catastrophic mistake.  And I probably cost my team the better part of a day developer of work because I tried to push things too hard. And so when we talk about getting the most out of our hardware, our bodies, what do we really want? We probably don't care as much about strength or speed. I mean, these are great things to have. But being the Incredible Hulk does not make you a better programmer. Being the Incredible Hulk does. The thing we really want is constant energy. We want to have constant energy that we can use throughout the day. And it's really important because it's something that we don't really pay attention to very much. So one of my mantras is that you need to manage your energy and not your time. We obsess over getting more hours, more time in the day. We pull all nighters, we drink caffeine, maybe even take new tropic drugs to get more time. And rather than trying to get more hours, rather than trying to increase the quantity of hours, it's to increase the quality of them. Everybody here as a programmer knows what the zone is like. You know what I'm talking about when I save the zone? It's when you and the machine are one, the code is just flowing. It's an incredible thing. I think it's why we're programmers because that spirit, that essence of pure creation is what makes programming fun. And imagine if all or at least most of your hours could be like that. And the most fundamental thing to having those quality hours is get enough sleep. Sleep kind of recharges your psychic batteries. And one of the core parts of getting enough sleep is to wake up at a regular time and go to bed when you're tired. So that way your body will naturally drift itself into the appropriate cycle. It's important to do this on the weekends as well, because if you don't do this on the weekends, if you stay up and party and I'm guilty of this as well, very guilty of this, then you will give yourself this sort of like little bit of jet lag every single weekend which you have to recover from on Monday and Tuesday. It's very important that you don't cut more sleep to get time. Remember this is about better hours, not more hours. So really make sure you get that time in. And be careful with alcohol because as much as I love my whiskey, alcohol reduces the amount of REM sleep that you get. And REM sleep is the stuff that you really, really need. So you might have noticed that after a night of drinking, you'll go to bed and you'll sleep a really long night. You may be sleep 10 hours, but when you wake up, you don't quite feel rested. And that's why. I have a couple of tools for this. I use bedtime on my phone. I also do not disturb so that my phone will not wake me up during the course of the night. And sleep is really, really important. I have an entire slide for this and I go on about it because it sets up your daily rhythm and this is critical because we are very rhythmic creatures. Our bodies have two rhythms actually. One is the sleep cycle, and that's nominally tied towards sunlight and light. And the other one is food. So if you aren't careful to actually have a regular food schedule, this will also screw up your energy during the day. Whereas if you establish regular meals, if you have your meals at a regular time, if you have your snacks at a regular time, rather than having this sort of up and down energy during the day, you'll get a much more level feed of energy that you can use and that will help carry you forward, which is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. It also reduces the amount of stress that you deal with. So when you don't have the sort of up and down energy levels as much when it's a lot smoother, it actually does reduce the amount of stress that you feel. It's really, really nice and it boosts your focus. I actually have calendar reminders, which I've turned off that remind me to eat. Because that's how dedicated I am towards this. And I keep the same schedule on the weekends because once again you can give yourself jet lag if you break it. Food is really important actually, because it's what powers your brain. And you don't have to let have some crazy diet. It's really about the diet that works for you, but your brain will only work as well as the fuel that you put in. And I'm a big fan of watching insulin sensitivity. So focus, like if I can give any dietary recommendations, I'm not a dietitian. It would be focus on minimizing the number of sort of high insulin carbohydrates. So obviously modulo your own dietary needs, but things like pastas, rice is good. Avoiding a lot of sugar is going to help you keep that energy really, really stable during the course of the week. And my tools for this are that I also do weekly meal planning so that I know exactly what I'm going to be eating during the course of the week. And I also avoid processed food. Last but not least, motion is life. It's one of my favorite things as well. Living things move. When we're alive we're moving around. We're dancing, we're running. Well I'm not dancing obviously, because nobody needs to see that. But exercise is really critical towards that energy. It boosts endorphins. It improves your blood flow. It's great for your brain and it improves your focus during the week. And a lot of people fail to get into an exercise routine because they're always obsessed with what is the best. What's the best exercise that I could do? It's not about the best. It's about what you love. So if you love dancing, dance. Dance is great exercise. If you like hiking or walking or running or playing badminton, all of these things are absolutely wonderful things. For me it's lifting weights. I really like doing that. That gives me my fix. Or rock climbing. Rock climbing is great for programmers because it's a very mental sport. But find something that you really, really like and make it a point to stick it into your schedule. And if you have a hard time sticking with an exercise routine, the one trick that I've used every time I don't want to go train is that my rule is I have to go to the gym. I don't actually need to do anything when I get there. I just have to get there.  And you can use that mental momentum to carry you forward. And these are really kind of the pillars of your constant energy which are what are going to drive you through the day as a programmer. And I cannot stress how important these are because optimizing your hardware and taking care of your hardware and your body is really what's going to drive you towards being able to build great software. And that's the hardware part. Maybe these are things that you already knew. Now let's go ahead and talk about software. Because we really need to understand how our software works in order to understand how to get the most out of it, right? Like there's this great talk about the Ruby object model and how all of these all these objects tied together with artwork that I'm incredibly jealous of. And the, by understanding that, by understanding how Ruby's object system works, we become better programmers. We have a better idea of what's going on under the hood. This is what a good programmer does. We understand our tools deeply. And so let's understand our minds a little bit more deeply. There's a lot of limitations to our brain and you may or may not be aware of these. One of my favorite is this, that you are blind. Literally blind for 14 minutes every single day, every person in this room. And the reason that you're blind is because of something called the saccade. So the fastest motion in your body, the fastest thing that you can do is called a saccade. It's the motion that your eye makes. See we don't actually see a full scene. As I look out on this audience, I'm not actually seeing all of you in perfect clarity.  And my brain is stitching that together into a whole image that says, yes, there is a room that is about 40% full of people. Now the thing about the thing about saccades is that there's a limited amount of motion that they have.  That's what you can see and everything else your eye is going to have to move.  So that means that if you hold your arm out like this, look straight forward and then look to your arm, your eye will turn to that.  So if you have something that takes too wide of the field of vision in front of you, it's going to require a lot of neck motion which is smaller and more tiring. So there's something that this ties into and you might have heard it before. It's one of those programming rules that people may think that's like, wow that just sounds kind of arbitrary. And that's that long lines. When you have a line that goes really over about 80 characters, it starts going outside of your saccade boundaries. And so if you have really long lines on a really big screen, you start scanning back and forth with your neck and it makes you more tired. This is actually a principle discovered by ancient typographers. If you look at books, like a lot of books the size of a page is actually quite narrow and it's because it allows you to scan with your eyes rather than having to turn your head. It's another fun limitation you've probably heard of and that's that your working memory is limited to about seven plus or minus two items. And the interesting thing about the way that your memory works is that it degrades. You get lossy compression. So for example, if you try and remember a long string of digits, like you know just you know a series of 16 digits, what your brain will do is it will chunk it down a little bit until you remember maybe like the first three and the last four or something along those lines and you will think that you have remembered all of it but you really haven't. And that's really kind of the evil thing is that when you're working through a really long function, for example, you think it's all in your head but you have actually lost stuff and you don't even know. This is one of the reasons why we talk about keeping functions small, right? In that if you have a function that goes outside of that working memory size, it goes outside of that seven plus or minus two items, you will drop things and you will make mistakes. And that's one of the reasons, probably the biggest reason, I think, that we want small functions. It's why they are comprehensible. And so these rules that you've definitely heard before are driven by our limitations as human beings, the limitations of our bodies and our minds. And a lot of people I've heard that I've worked with especially as a manager have complained that these rules feel very arbitrary. It's like a straight check but they really are rooted in our limits as human beings. And this why really matters. The why is very important because you can follow all the rules but if you don't understand why you can still do stuff like this. This follows the rules. It's a short function, it's got one line. That means it's the best function. See, we got the best functions here. And the interesting thing, you know, people and people talk about small code, right? Like, you know, if you have small code, well there's few places for bugs to hide. There are three bugs hiding in this. And I didn't actually realize that until I did something else. And we'll talk about that later. Now this is, we've got a little thing, oh it looks like my phone's decided that it wants to ring. There we go, you don't need to ring now. So this ties into something else and that this code is really hard to read. Like yes, we can make sense of what it does but it's not really readable code. And that's really important because of another aspect of how our minds work. And that is that we are built to remember stories. We remember, we remember tales, we remember epics. And this is because of how we've evolved. So writing, the, you know, human writing has only existed for about 10,000 years. But modern humans have been around for millions of years. And that means that for all of that time outside of, you know, 10,000 years ago, all that time before, all those millions of years, we were conveying information to each other and we were doing it by telling each other stories. You know, the Epic of Gilgamesh, all of these things were passed through oral tradition throughout history. And this is really important because some of you might actually remember since I told the story about a bug that I made and relating to Cachex where you probably remember a little bit of that about that because I told the story about how it was my big mistake because I was too tired and I wasn't respecting anti-work. This is actually, there's actually even a thing coined about this called the method of loci, where it was how I believe it was Aristotle once remembered all of the people around a dinner table because he had told the story and a joke involving all of the different guests. Now we're going to get to why stories are important in just a second. And when we, when we go into the latter bit, the, I've actually gone off the rails a little bit. Stories are, are so critical to us and the reason why they're critical as programmers is because that our code should tell the story. And if your code reads like well-written pros, you know, you get this cognitive fast track into your long-term memory because of that method of loci.  We don't remember facts, we don't remember data points like a computer, we remember sort of intersections of things. So for example when you think about a dog, you're not thinking of a data point of like, you know, this is a dog, it's a Labrador, you have this sort of intersecting memory of everything that is dog-ness and that is what you are recalling in your brain. So if we go back to that snippet and we refactor it understanding the why-by in this, we get something that is, I think, a lot more readable and simply by refactoring this we now understand a lot, you know, a lot more what's going on here. It's like, oh, we're dealing with short colors and long colors now, so we have the short RGB codes and long RGB codes. But we also, solely by refactoring, solely by refactoring this and by breaking it apart, uncovered several bugs. One of them was, and of course I've broken the rule of refactoring and then fixing some bugs, but I'm not doing those two slides, and we found things, for example, like the hex digits were improperly specified, there were places where punctuation was missing and there was a place where we were actually missing a method call, so that code would fail to even run. Now another really interesting aspect of your psychology that you can leverage during the day is that you only get a finite number of decisions that you can make. Decisions, making a decision uses energy. Remember energy, energy being kind of important? Well it uses it every time you make that decision. So if you go to one of those sort of coffee places that has a million different things on the menu, that's actually a little exhausting. There's a term for this in cognitive psychology, it's called decision fatigue. Whereas when you have a coffee shop like the one set up here where you walk up and it's like, well, I can have coffee with or without milk. And that's pretty much it.  Yeah, and so use those decisions really, really wisely. There's a, there's a, there's a really good decision, a really good story about this that I like, which is also taken from psychology research, and that is that, so if you're in prison, which I hope you won't be, then you have an option to do something called going up for parole, which means that if you have been a good prisoner, a model prisoner, then you can get released a little early than you would otherwise.  So this is a big important thing for you. And if you are a prisoner and you are up for a parole hearing, you want to go as early in the day as possible. Really, really topical advice for this audience, I know, right? And the reason for this is because early in the day, the judges arrested and they will actually listen to your case. They will look at your evidence. They will look and say, well, you know, this person's been really good, you know, except for that one instance where they, you know, they fixed a bug and refactored at the same time. I don't know if we can let them out. Whereas if you go later in the day, they've already made decisions. They made a lot of decisions. They've listened to a lot of other people and now they're tired. They don't really care anymore. And their default behavior for you is probably just going to be to say, deny. Decision fatigue is a very powerful thing and you will fall back on your path of least resistance, which is also one of the reasons why discipline is something you need to be very, very careful of. I don't like discipline. I really don't. I think that discipline is overrated and that you need to build good habits.  Discipline is you making a choice. You make a decision to do the right thing and you need to teach your brain to do that right thing automatically and a lot of best practices, a lot of the things that we hear about that we really want to be doing as programmers are nothing but good habits that leverage the way that our brain works. One of my favorite examples is the reward cycle. So you have a cycle that operates inside of your brain. It's called the dopaminergic cycle. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly. My pronunciation, I've read these things and unfortunately English is hard. So the way that this works is that your brain will, when you start to actually do something, you have a goal, you have something you want to accomplish and it doesn't matter what this is, this could be writing a feature, this is brushing your teeth.   You don't feel it, okay, I mean I don't think most of us finish brushing our teeth and think like yeah, okay I do, but okay. And this is how people, by the way, get addicted to things, because that, like if you, like you can get addicted to exercise because the bigger, the bigger the stimuli, the bigger the accomplishment, the bigger that rush is. This is how addiction works and the thing that's really, that really is interesting about it is that you get this strong reward and then it fades away really quickly.  You buy that new car, that really awesome new car, you finally got the Mercedes or in my case the Kia and you, it's a really, really, really great car for like the first couple weeks and then after that it's just sort of like well it's just my car now, because the reward fades. And this is how motivation works. This is literally why you do everything that you do, including writing software. And that's why test driven development is so important. Because remember the prize goes at the end.  And so if you put that, if you do test later development, which usually turns into test never development, what you're doing, your goal is not to write the test. You are not there to write, well at least most of us, are not there to write the test. That's not the thing that we're there to accomplish. We're there to build a feature. We're there to build something that gives somebody some new capability that makes people happy. And by putting the test first, we put the tests in the weight of that goal. It becomes something that we need to get over to accomplish what we're trying to do. And so what we're really doing with test driven development is we're leveraging that motivation cycle by putting the busy work first. And so you do that and you work through the test and you get the thing and finally when all those tests are green, you're done. Yay! You get the, you get the green test. That's awesome. And the feature is done. And you can use a little bit of that tail rush, you know, from, from actually accomplishing things, maybe to do some refactoring. And this is why red-green refactor works, because it actually leverages the way that your brain works. It doesn't rely on discipline, whereas test later development, when you write your code and then you write your tests later, means you have to be disciplined. You have to finish doing the thing and then afterward, and you have to be disciplined while you work to remember all the things that you need to test.   Another interesting little aspect of your brain, so speech is really distracting. This is something that's buried deep within our brains. If, if you, it's, it, you find this all throughout nature, birds chirping. So when a sparrow chirps or it makes an alarm sound, it registers in all other sparrows in the area. No other birds, just sparrows, because we've evolved to have these deep structures in our brains. In humans, it's called Vannikas area. It's literally located right behind your ear. And that registers things like alarm, danger, things that you need to be worried about. In humans, it's tied to our names. So if somebody is asleep, you can be talking to them and nothing will happen. But if you call their name, they'll wake up. And so that's because we have this deep structure in our brain. Now, it's always listening. It's like the NSA. Now, I'm sorry I didn't mean it. And the problem with this is that that means it's always processing. And if you're in a big open plan office, because as we all know, open plan offices are fantastic, and that's why everybody uses them, then you're getting this constant distraction of people talking. And it doesn't matter if you put headphones on, they don't block out everything. And so you're always getting this continuous feed that is keeping Vannikas area engaged. This is a bit of a problem because this is quite annoying. I mean, we've all experienced this kind of distraction when you're working in an office, but there is a solution. And it's pair programming. Pair programming actually solves a lot of things. I'm a huge, huge fan of pair programming. I will literally, I will talk until Vannikas area has shut down about pair programming.  Which means that that's not processing all the stuff going on around you. It's not processing like the sales calls that are going on, and the irate customer in the corner, it's just processing what you're doing with your pair. So this removes a huge chunk of distraction, and it makes you happier during the course of the day. And pair programming has tons, tons of benefits. I mean, you've got the real-time code review. Remember that reward cycle? Who loves to, you know, you get done right and something you're like, well, I need to, like, work on this feature, but I've got a stack of code reviews to do. You know, doing good code reviews is hard. You know, it is very, very hard to be a good code reviewer. It's actually one of the reasons I'm looking forward to a talk later on today on code reviews because I do want to get better at this. But if you're in a full pairing team, you're doing your code reviews in real-time because you have a pair there. You have a person there who is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is I? What does that variable mean? Why is there a variable called foo? Actually, no, why is there a variable called data? There should never be a variable called data. It's all data. It's the worst variable name ever. And so pair program gives you a lot of excellent things. There's tons of other stuff. Like, I'm not going to go into too much detail on it now. So we're almost at the end of our time here. And I think that really, you know, if you could take one thing away from this entire talk, it would be do not fly China Eastern Airlines. You're all far too young and you have far too much to live for and to give to the world. Okay. And if you could take two things away from this talk, the second is, don't fly China Eastern. I mean it. If you could take three things away, the third would be that you need to invest in yourself, which is why you don't fly China Eastern. Okay. And investing your health and happiness. And you leverage those cognitive limits.  And you learn to work with it because that is what will help you drive excellence in your craft as a software engineer. And this really isn't just about excellence as a software engineer because we all want to be good at what we do. We all want mastery over what we do. But it's also about just being happier and having a good life. So I always forget to do this part. I always forget to talk about like I have like a website where I write articles and stuff. And I do actually use Twitter now finally. So if you would like to see articles on how to CTO and how to developer and I guess how to Twitterer then that's all here. And I believe we have hopefully time for a little bit in the way of questions. Do we have anyone with questions? Okay. So Yay. So yeah, thanks for the talk. I actually have a couple of points. So I'll just bring them up. Sure. All at once. Okay. And pass the microphone. No pressure here. Chill out guys. First of all regarding the sleep cycles that you mentioned. I read quite a bit about different sleep patterns. Yes. How to potentiate your your productive time by sleeping less without feeling tired, without overexhausting yourself. So I would like to hear if any your opinion on that. So let's you have many points. This is the first one. Let's do these. If you don't mind, I'd just like to tackle that because it's a big one. Okay. So you raise something in interesting point, which is that there are multiple different sleep patterns that you can engage in. I think specifically, you're talking about polyphasic sleep. Yes. Okay. Cool. So polyphasic sleep, for those of you who don't know, is where you can actually break up your sleep nominally into two chunks.  This is actually a very common sleep pattern. In fact, it's one that I do right now not because of choice, but because my brain has decided that's what it needs to do. The thing about sleep is that you really do need to listen to your body. It isn't that you need to set eight hours and you must get exactly eight hours. It's that by having a regular schedule for your sleep and by making sure that you get enough, e.g. not forcing yourself to stay up when you're tired, saying like, oh, I need to get this code done. By having that regular schedule, now it's not about the number of hours to put the quality. That's what will give you your good sleep and your constant energy. So the goal of polyphasic sleep is not necessarily to cut out the number of hours because you really actually don't cut that many. Like if having switched from a normal sleep cycle or sorry, a constant sleep cycle to a poly... constant is not the right word. There's a word for that. A solbox. Continuous. There we go. Yeah, you can tell I have a math degree. So a continuous sleep cycle in one that is broken up into two different chunks, then having made that switch, I can definitely say that I sleep maybe a couple hours less, but it's... I kind of actually pay for that because I end up having to take a small nap or something later in the day. Like I do still pay a bit of a sleep debt. And also age, as you get older, I'm obviously quite advanced in years. As you get older, you do need a sleep lesson. So I don't think you're really saving that many hours. Have I answered that question? Yeah, we can talk about more. Okay, sweet. Sweet. Cool. And then just a note on the thing of the instant reward. Make your bed in the morning. It's another... Make your bed in the morning. It's another instant reward. Actually, yes. And regarding the pair programming, a bit more serious talk now. As my... We do pair programming in our company as well, but what I feel is that if the pair is uneven, which is, I think, somehow common to find uneven pairs, it's very easy for the strongest pair to persuade that his solution is better and the weaker pair, just accepts it and doesn't refute. I would love to talk about this, but this is totally outside the scope of this talk. I'm actually going... So I give a small talk at a meetup called Pairing for Happiness and we addressed a little bit of that there. So I'm going to pitch that at conferences and I'll send you a link to it. So if you follow me on... If you follow me on Twitter, this is how I get Twitter followers, by the way. Yeah, so if you follow me on Twitter and sign up for my blog, then you'll get... You'll totally get a link to that video when it comes out. Cool. Any other questions? I think... Did you have one? Yeah. Hello. Sorry, yeah. We'll... It's not a question, a few addendons to the things that you said. The first one is from... Somewhere in the Y Combinator startup school lectures that I heard that and it was about doing one thing at one time. It followed from the fact that when a person has more than one thing to do, they're likely to pick up B1 problems rather than the A problems which need to be done anyway. And it applies to the personal life as well in the sense that you can't be a superhuman. If you try to set your targets too high, that I'm going to improve myself technically, improve myself personally, health, diet, nutrition, you'll end up failing in all of them. Pick one of them, do it, make it a habit and routine then move to the next one. Other is, yeah, again something everybody knows but fails to follow and follows from the first one. Perfect is the enemy of good. So you don't try to be the perfect person or the perfect programmer or the perfect, look for the perfect diet or the perfect exercise. If you don't start, you'll never even reach the good stage. Perfect is something which will sweat much later in your life or stage. Very much so. Oh, please. Yeah, another point is it's easier to understand. I'm sure a lot of people follow sports and you will hear a lot of prodigies and stuff and then you'll figure out only some of them made through. And then there will be a lot of people that will find in sports. You will feel that they are not so talented but the discipline which brought them forward. And the person who's talented and disciplined will always do better but only the disciplined one will do better than the talented ones if the same level of effort that goes into that. So you actually raise a really important point and this is, I think part of also being a programmer, right? Like one of the things that we do is problem decomposition. Like a very important part of being a programmer is when you're sitting down to write the code. You don't try and code all the things at once.  So when you're talking about setting goals, goals work the same way. And it's not just about goals it's about having the goal the thing that you want to achieve and building yourself a system that gets you there every day. But that's also another talk on habit formation and building systems within your life. I only have so much time. Okay, actually I think you have a microphone and you had a question. Yes, so I wanted to ask you how do you keep your habits when you're traveling? I always find it very, very difficult. Like, you know, I do 50 push-ups a day and then travel for a few days and when I travel I get very different rewards. And when I come back home I'm like, I already stopped doing push-ups for a few days. So the habit is gone and how to... So I would like a round of applause for this man because he has asked a great question. So it's difficult because travel exactly as you mentioned when you get on a plane because nobody here has ever done that. When you get on a plane and you go someplace it breaks those habits because you've had this reset to your cycle. Number one is that when I land I immediately get back on the food cycle of whatever my location is. So I set my watch when I get on the plane to wherever it is I'm going. So I'm on destination time and from that point I try and follow the routine that I would. I try and sleep when I would even if it's just relaxing and I'm not actually sleeping that's fine. Usually the airlines are good about actually having you on the same meal schedule. That's why those meals are always at weird times. And when you land have your meal at the right time even if you're not feeling hungry like you may land and you think, well, I'm not really feeling like eating right now but it's dinner time have a little dinner have something and force yourself back into that routine. Number one. Number two, especially if you're somebody who if you exercise in the morning or the evening once you get there set that calendar reminder and follow that rule if you just have to start like pushups. Pushups are a great example. The talk about what was it? Wheelchair, hacking your wheelchair really resonated with me because I actually spent some time in one as well. And so I'm finally recovered. I'm doing fine but I'm building back up to doing weight training again. And as part of that I've been doing a lot of pushups and I don't like doing a lot of pushups really if I'm completely honest. I did enough in ROTC and I'm kind of over them now but in order to get some in order to get my pushups in I have to do one. So I have my exercise time and it's like okay I have to sit down and do my one pushup and if I do my one pushup and I don't want to do any more pushups that is my pushup for the day. I owned that pushup. Yeah, that one was mine and so by doing that by by leveraging that mental momentum for those key habits you can't do it for all of them but you have just enough discipline to do that and you leverage their momentum that helps you get back into that routine back into that cycle. Yeah, have I answered your question hopefully? Yeah, absolutely. And second question which airlines do you go back to Tokyo with? Yeah, well I had options. There was there was there was some like con air prison airline that I was tempted. They had a pretty compelling offering swimming looked good. I was thinking about just going to the airport and just kind of like doing this as the flights went by and hope but maybe hope one would stop or just moving to Singapore was an option as well. I could stay but no, I actually I'm not kidding. I literally booked a one-way ticket back on on ANA. Yeah, so yes, yes. I'm glad that somebody got the point in my talk. All right, we have a question up here. Sorry. Hi, so I have a few friends who always tell me like, Oh, I have no time to even start all these salty habits. What would you tell them? Ooh, another great question. So the first one is you you only have a limited number of hours in the day, right? Like you don't get more. And if you really focus on quality hours that number is not only somewhere on 16. You need to prioritize religiously. So people say that they don't have time. There's probably a lot of stuff that they're doing that is friction in their lives. So they're, here's a great example. I have, I absolutely adore my brother-in-law, but he's very, he's the kind of person that has this sort of thing of like, you won't take one over on me. And he, he once had a case where I think his phone company built him an extra $40 on his phone, $40 on his phone bill. $40. You make good enough money. It's $40. And he went to war over that. I can't, I probably spent the better part of a week of concentrated effort to get that $40 back. That's friction. And so letting the little things go is a very important part of that. Like learning, learning to let those things go and not focus them. One of the other things is that to, to concentrate your efforts and then multiply them. So for example, I cook, I love to cook one of my biggest hobbies. But when I make pasta sauce, my ragu pasta, I make a gigantic batch of it and I freeze the rest so that later on during the week, if I'm untired, I don't want to make dinner, I have dinner available. I have food at home that I can eat. And I don't need to go through a lot of extra effort to have a nutritious meal. I'm actually going to be investigating, I think, joylent as well so that I have something at home that I don't need to worry about getting a meal. I do a lot of other things where, for example, my work hours are incredibly regular life. I follow the same schedule every single day part of having that regular schedule. And that means that when I hit the end of the day, I'm done and I know I have that time available to me. And I religiously prioritize that time. I keep the things that matter. Like, I really care about making sure I get exercise. So I don't watch a lot of TV.  And so I kick out, but I don't want to be drinking too much right now, so I focus that on like, okay, I'm going to combine exercise and I'm going to go out with friends, so we're going to go climbing together.  Like, those things together really help you get a lot of quality time back in your day. Have I answered your question? Yes, yes. I think it's like, what, four for four? Yes, sorry. I have to cut it short. Yeah. So if anyone else has any more questions, you can look for Dan after during the break or at lunch. Yeah. I'm sorry, bro. All right. So let's give a round of applause for Dan. Thank you very much.


Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here, day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. We have had a ton of great conversations. I believe this is our 24th segment that we filmed since Monday night. We have a couple of alumni joining us once again, which is great. We've got Drew Schulke Hughes here as well, VP Product Management, Primary Storage and Connectivity at Dell Technologies. Hey Drew. Hey there. Sheena Champion is once again with us, VP Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Guys, it's so great to have you back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. You guys. Let's talk about some hot topics. What's hot and driving storage today? Sheena, we'll start with you and then Drew will get your feedback. Yeah. I mean, there's tons of innovation happening here at the show. Hot topics for storage, really in three main categories, multi-cloud, cyber resiliency and efficiency. So, just a ton. You saw multi-cloud announcements happening in force at the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about storage announcement that really leaned into cyber resiliency and efficiency and customers are talking in multi-cloud about complexity, about their skills gaps and about managing unpredictable costs. So, those are the hot topics. Big topics. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think tying it back, kind of all comes back to innovation, right? And like, to what extent can we as Dell Technologies address these areas of complexity of multi-cloud, cyber resiliency and efficiency to allow our customers to innovate and differentiate their products instead of having to focus on those things which, to be honest, we should be taking care of for them. Yeah, it's interesting. Years ago, I asked an executive, what do you care about in storage? He's like, look, all I want it to be is rock solid, lightning fast and dirt cheap. Now, to do that, it was like you get inside talking about what kind of disks are there, what kind of flashing. You know, you mentioned those three areas. It's a whole different ball game now, isn't it? We're talking about cross-cloud, cyber resiliency.  They certainly talked about it after the pandemic. I guess efficiency always, but the way you get efficiency is different now. So, what are those sort of barriers to achieving these areas of innovation? Yeah, I mean, like you said a couple years ago at a show like this, we'd be talking about speeds and feeds of our storage products. And I was kidding with some of the folks in the booth earlier that we don't really even load the data sheets up in the booth anymore because it's not what the conversation is. People are trying to get innovation and drive those innovation projects and yeah, they want to do it through efficiency and optimizing operations, but more and more they're talking about power savings. That's critical to them. We know that 80% of customers or more are making sustainability and energy efficiency a key buying decision. So those are some of the conversations that we're having in the booth. Yeah, I'd say, you talk about the rock solid, cheap and secure it, or I forget what the acronyms used, Dave, but that's the price of admission stuff now, right? They're assuming that's all there. And the cyber resiliency and cybersecurity topic, boy, it's rare that I go buy a customer conversation where that doesn't come up as a conversation point unsolicited. We don't even have to put up a slide. It's top of everybody's minds for so many reasons, but we've done some pretty exciting things in terms of what we announced a couple of weeks back on that front. Talk a little bit about that. First of all, define cyber resiliency and how is Dell enabling organizations to achieve it? It was when we see the threat landscape, especially with Edge and Cloud and everything being so amorphous, the threat landscape is only getting bigger. The threat actors are only getting more sophisticated. So what are you doing from a storage perspective to help customers achieve cyber resiliency? It's really broad. And so you've got to go all the way back to actually like how it is we develop our products, right? So we have a NIST compliant development process, hardware root of trust that we design into our hardware products, software supply chain verification, hardware supply chain verification, data arrest encryption. Like it's so fundamental. And all of that stuff was foundational, by the way, ahead of, well ahead of anything that we announced here in the past couple of weeks. Specifically what we focused on just recently here is our power store product is now what we call Stig compliant. So it meets the highest levels of security standards for the Department of Defense, which allows us to open into opportunities for the federal government. But beyond that opportunity for the federal government, you know what we're increasingly hearing is a number of our customers have been deemed quote unquote critical industries by the executive branch of the government today. And what we mean by that are utility companies, transportation company, financial institutions. They're beginning to be held to that same bar that was previously reserved for Department of Defense agencies. And so the kind of investment that we make in supporting DOD helps there. But beyond that we've done a bunch of other efforts furthering the cause of zero trust with native multi-factor authentication integration, secure and immutable snapshots. So if something bad does happen, we're giving you a very fine-grained recovery window that you can go do that and not having to worry about that becoming corrupted. So there's a broad set of things and it begins all the way back from design, all the way to how, if something bad does happen, how we're going to help you recover. We're talking about all these sort of up the storage stack anyway innovations. And then at the end of the year ago after Dell Tech World, you and I sat down. We had our does hardware matter discussion. You were super helpful in taking us inside. And it's funny because as much as we talk about the upper level value, there's still all kinds of interesting things going on in the hardware with the alternative processors, the NICs, the CPUs, the GPUs, the NPUs. And so that hasn't gone away. In fact, actually in many ways, the innovation is accelerating, but then you have to do all this other stuff on top of it. What's the symbiotic nature between that hardware and these upper stack levels? Yeah, so what you're hitting on is the importance of software really in integrating that full stack. And you may have heard in the plethora of innovations at the keynote, Jeff Clark threw out lots of numbers, but one of them was that over the last year, since the last time we sat down with you, we've delivered over 2000 software driven storage features across our entire portfolio from high-end, mid-range, entry, HCI data protection. Software is really the key to all of that. A little-known fact within our engineering staff in our infrastructure solutions group, 85% are software engineers. And their job is really to take that hardware and make it easier to use integrated into the full stack. And that's really the nature of the cloud announcements that we had. It's the nature of how PowerStore is originally architected. So over the next couple months, you'll see innovations that are all software-based across our whole portfolio, but we really are focusing in first, in leading the charge with PowerStore. The cyber resiliency updates that Drew talked about are part of that software release, as well as efficiency updates. Why starting with PowerStore? Just give us kind of a little backstory there. Yeah, I mean like across our entire portfolio, we're all on different release cadence. For PowerStore in particular, we're making a lot of noise about that because it has the most in terms of cyber resiliency and efficiency right now. So Drew hit on the cyber resiliency effort. As a foundation, we've always had sort of operational efficiency, but I talked about how important power is. So PowerStore with this new release is our most power efficient storage system, 60% more energy efficient, more IOPS per watt with several energy certified models. So we're listening to our customers, we're building in the things that matter and releasing them as quickly as we can. You were talking about the federal government certifications earlier, it's interesting. You know the overall, when we came into 2023, CIOs and IT decision makers expected to spend almost 6% more this year in their budget than they did last year and as you well know, that's consistently come down. I think they're projecting maybe 2% growth this quarter. So it's still growing, which is good news and they maybe hope to, you know, overall this year maybe it's 3%. Okay, but one area, there's actually two areas that are significantly above that, six, seven, eight percent and that's small business and then US government. And so how does this certification enable you to do more with the US government? What are those conversations like? Maybe you could give us a sense of that. Yeah, well so that certification allows us to be submit for what they call the APL, the approved product list, which roughly the total storage market associated with the US federal government is about a billion dollars. So it's kind of worth doing at that point in time. So that's certainly a huge opportunity for us. But like I said, it sends a clear signal to the rest of the industry, to the rest of the world, to government agencies outside the US as well, right? Look, if we're holding the bar high enough that we can power the US federal government, even the most secure agencies within that, I think it sends a very strong message on that front. I think as you pertain to the SMB thing, it probably dovetails more into the efficiency conversation where we've done some pretty exciting stuff over there as well. Well, so maybe you're talking about that. So Snowflake just reported lower guidance, as expected actually, because it's easy to dial down cloud. You saw that with Amazon's results. You saw that with Alibaba, which is not US, but so companies want to be more efficient. It's not as easy to just dial down what you've already purchased, CAPEX, but with new purchases, if they could be more efficient, do more with less. So how are customers taking advantage of that? What are you specifically doing there? Yeah, so from an operations perspective, PowerStore was always sort of built with that in mind. Intelligent automation, self-optimizing architecture, so making sure that the users can take advantage of and optimize their resources and do more with less. So it's been a core sort of principle from the start. Where security is concerned, and even for PowerStore, we talk about security being a board-level discussion, and it is across every industry. How have you, you were talking, Shannon, about some of the things that you don't need in the booth anymore, because the conversation has changed. Has the level of conversation within a customer organization changed as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that goes back to the innovation concept that Drew was talking about. You know, when customers are looking at the challenges that they have, it's less about what the infrastructure can do. It's about, I need a multi-cloud world, but it's complex, and how do I overcome that? I need to protect myself from cyber attacks. That's top of mind for me. And at the same time, I need to go faster because I need to optimize for my skills, my skills gaps and resource and everything. So those are things holding people back from being able to innovate, and that's the nature of the conversation. Like, help me with these things so that I can spend time on the projects that are going to drive more revenue, help me attract new talent, and really drive more customer value. And I don't know if you've heard about it yet, I'm sure you have, but there's a new Dell Technologies Innovation Index, and it's set out to sort of do exactly that, validate across, I think, 6,000 IT decision makers, and say, what does innovation mean to you? And those that are intentional and investing and able to overcome some of these objections to spend time on innovation and be a leader in their industry and innovating are seeing those outcomes and are leading the charge within their industry. So that's the level of conversation we're having. Yeah, I was looking at the Dell Innovation Index benchmark survey and innovation leaders, as you described, are twice as likely to experience big things, high revenue growth, obviously talent attraction, as you mentioned, but growing customer value, which is critical for businesses across any industry. Yeah, and I'd say the other thing that, especially at an event like this where we've got the broad portfolio and our discussion with all of our customers is, don't just tell me how you can make things efficient within that one product, like, look at, you've got the broadest portfolio in the industry, what can you do to bring those things together and make life easier? And really, we look at that as a huge opportunity to drive a ton of automation, and I'll maybe just highlight two areas that came out, one in the announcement last week, another one that we've kind of been discussing this week is, in that same power store released, we provided native integration of something called storage directs, so we can actually integrate our power protect data to main products and set them up through the power store manager, so the storage admin now has the ability to pull in that entire data protection process into a single unified storage process, no need for a dedicated backup server, we can use either a cloud or a physical endpoint, set it up in 90 seconds, a really truly compelling, better together story, but that one that drives a lot of value for our customers. The other one that I think is a personal favorite of Shannon and I is something we call dynamic apps on, and a lot of it came up out of actually the event that we had a year ago, where a ton of our partners were pointing out this idea that, hey, VxRail is like the hyper-converged leader, and we really love the operational model that comes with it, but look at, we also love power store, and we have a need for power store level storage capabilities and features like that, but it's a different operational model, how can we bring those things together? And this whole idea of dynamic apps on is, using what we call a VxRail dynamic node, so a storage less VxRail node, as that host in front end for power store, and what we've announced here at this particular show is we've actually pulled in the life cycle management of power store. So we, and customers absolutely love this, and I just finished a conversation with one of them, which is it allows them to ground their entire process on a single operational model, but gives them incredible flexibility in terms of the kind of workloads and storage demands that they want to go drive, and I love that we're at a company where we can, we're one of the few that can pull that off, and it's a nice place to be. Do you have a favorite customer example of a store that really just shines the light on the value of what you guys are articulating and you're delivering through power store? I'm sure there's many to choose from. Yeah, I know, there are a ton to choose from. I don't know what comes to mind. Well, I was just talking to a German customer and they had already been starting to use that dynamic note as a front end on their power store and they had set up six as a host and they had no idea that this integrated life cycle management thing was coming and I finished a briefing with them, and they were practically doing cartwheels out of the briefing room when we told them that this was now available with the next software release, so that was personally rewarding. I love being able to share the news on something that somebody hadn't vocally asked for it, but we anticipated that late indeed, those are the best. I'm glad you brought up the notion that in cyber resiliency, just optimizing for one product doesn't cut it, you have to have that in a full house and you guys obviously haven't advantage that. My question is how do you and can you be both best of breed at the product level but also have that full integration? And if so, what's the trick to getting there? Other than saying yes, we're best of breed, which everybody says, you know? I think we can and we've shown that we can with some of the announcements here at the show because really the nature of the multi-cloud announcements is doing exactly that. It's taking our best of breed software driven storage innovation that customers know and love on-prem and taking it to the public cloud and also at the same time, creating that operational experience on-prem and you can only do that if you have the product level specific differentiation in PowerFlex and PowerScale and others for example. And creating that common storage layer that Jeff talked about is the integration horizontally that drive consistency and flexibility across all of those but then also taking that software driven innovation to create that lifecycle management experience that's a tightly integrated vertical stack. So there's integration that we do horizontally and vertically to connect all these products but in each their own right, they are best of breed. So I think we are pulling this off successfully and it's exciting. I didn't realize this, that we learned from Jeff today on theCUBE that that common storage layer actually stretches to native edge, that it's the same sort of underlying substrate which is obviously that's really, really important. But I thought they were sort of separate stovepipes for now but they're clearly not. That was my misunderstanding so that's huge. Absolutely. Another proof point. And how have you seen final thoughts here just thinking about multi-cloud and last year when we sat down with Chuck Whitten and we sat down with him again yesterday, last year was multi-cloud as by default in so many organizations and it needs to be by design. How is PowerStore, PowerFlex and those tools, do you see I'm sure you do as a facilitator of customers going from by default to by design? Yeah, so our multi-cloud strategy from last year that was set out, what's most exciting to me about this show is that it comes to life in so many products and so much innovation. The strategy was really, the foundation of the strategy was as a service and modern consumption. It has grown from ground to cloud which is what we delivered with Project Alpine which is really all based upon our best of breed storage software and then also bringing that cloud to ground but down with our Apex Cloud platforms and as Dave alluded to, having that common storage layer across not just multi-cloud but to the edge, that is creating a lot more simplicity, flexibility, agility, control for our customers so I think we're delivering on the promise we set. I think we've heard that the last couple of days. Drew, last question for you. Little sneak peek into the roadmap. We talked about PowerStore. We know there's more things coming. Any little nuggets you can drop that the folks with me, audience would love to know. Oh man, you're going to get me in trouble. I don't think so. More is coming. Show a little leg, Drew, come on. More is definitely coming and I'm going to go back to like right, how many of our development resources are in software, right, so expect to see a software release from us each and every quarter across our entire primary storage portfolio, be it PowerMax or Mission Critical, be it PowerStore for the enterprise, be it PowerFlex for software defined. We've got a very compelling roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months. Stay tuned, I would just say that. I don't want to get in too much trouble here but the same themes though, I'll give you a sneak peek. Multi-cloud, cyber resiliency, efficiency, expect to see a pretty consistent landing zone across those three and everything that we do. We'll be watching. Drew, Shannon, thank you so much for joining JVME on theCUBE today. Thank you. I look forward to watching this space. We want to thank you for watching for our guests and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. Our next session kind of up, David Hardy and Brandon Peterson join us. We're going to be talking about efficient, cool IT systems. We've been talking a lot about generative AI power, et cetera. You're going to want to hear this conversation and how it's going to affect efficiency in your organization coming right up.


Hey guys, this is Matt Beck from FreeSalonEducation.com here to show you the easiest way to email communicate with your guests. I've used Constant Contact, I've used MailChimp, I've used a lot of different things that have templates made for you, but you still have to do a lot of work to customize them. You've got to find the wording. Today we're going to use DemandForce.com, which is a company I've been working with for about five months. They've helped grow my business. I want to show you guys what they have to offer and what I can do with them. So we're going to switch over here and I'm going to show you guys my screen real quick. So I'm going to pull up DemandForce and this is the dashboard on DemandForce.com. So when you sign up, you get all of this information about your business, the customers that you have. Right here we have incoming appointments. So that's people that have requested an appointment. It says it's pending. So today we've got to contact them. It shows when they're looking to come in. So it makes it really simple for those requests come straight from our website. They're working to have that come straight from Yelp, email campaigns, different things and it gets submitted right to the incoming appointments section. So today we're going to work on building an email campaign to send out to our guests, which will have a request appointment tab in there. And what they'll do is if they click on that tab, they fill out a form and it goes right to this incoming appointment section. So just from an email, we can get customers in our books and ready to go. Also we have upcoming appointments here. This shows all of the guests that where they booked from, where they were scheduled from and also if they were confirmed via appointment text, phone call, email, all that stuff. We have all of our latest reviews for the company. So you can check those out there. And then we also, now we're going to go to email campaign. So we're going to click on campaign. This is our ongoing campaigns, continuous promotions, email marketing. It's got all the stuff that you have been communicating with your guests on currently. We're going to click on create promotion. Now the cool thing about demand force and really what makes it so simple is that just from this screen, what you're looking at right now, it has already all these custom made things that have to do with the beauty industry. And that's the biggest difference between constant contact and MailChimp and all those companies and demand force. They've already written out the script for you, so you don't have to think about it too much. So you have a gift from us, $10 off products, $30 off services, holiday sales, all these different already customizable things that you can use. You can also create your own HTML template if you'd like to do those things. Half of you out there are going to be like, I have no idea what that is. And that's fine. You don't have to. And also create a custom promotion. So you don't have to go based on just what they've created, but for today's sake, in this tutorial, we're just going to show you an already created one. So let's say we want to do $10 off products to some of our guests. So we click next on that. Then you can customize what you want the name of the email to say. So when your customer is reading it, you really want it to be something catchy, something that's going to tie them in. They already created a gift from us, $10 off products. I think that's great. Then you can go through here and customize. Now every email, they help set all this up. So I didn't create any of this stuff. It's already pre-done through them. So what we're going to do is we have this section here. Now, if we read this, it says life is busy, but don't let it get in the way of pampering yourself. We care about your wellness. Now I'm going to change wellness to hair for this email because we don't do any of the spa treatments or any massages or anything like that. So we'll change it to hair. So we care about your hair, which is why we'd like to offer you a little something for your next visit. Now this is a $10 gift certificate that they can print out. We'll put the expiration date as the end of March. So let's say 3.15 or 3.31.15. And then some restrictions apply. What I'm going to do in there is say offer good with any purchase of $30, $330 or more. So now I have that in there. So really what I'm trying to do is explain to my guests or not explain to my guests, but when they get the email, I'm trying to get them to buy a little more product than they normally would. And that's going to be a benefit for me and for them because they're using more professional products to take care of their hair.  So we add that $30 in there, which is going to push them to try to get a little bit more product. So then the other great thing about this email is it has a request appointment tab right here. And like I said before, that's what's going to send them directly to that form. They'll fill it out. They can request an appointment.  So we're going to save that. Everything looks good. We're going to click Next. And then this is the easy part. How many recipients do you want it to go to? Like I said, we've been using demand force for quite a while now, about five months. We have 658 emails. And like I've told you guys in the past, my salon is small. I have four chairs. We have five stylists. So that number might seem smaller to you. It might not. It might seem big. I don't know. But the point of it is we actually have 2,000 contacts in our demand force database. So what that tells me is we need to do a better job of collecting email addresses through Millennium and then demand force pulls from Millennium all of the client's information, all of our new clients. So we don't have to do any of this work. But you have to be checking out your dashboard and all of your stats through demand force to make sure that you're staying on top of everything. So we've been working really hard to collect email addresses before the people leave. And then the great thing about it is we tell them, you know, that's how we're going to confirm your appointment and all that stuff. So they're pretty good about giving us their email address. And then we can send them promotions like this. So we're going to send it to all 658, yes. And then the last step is to send the campaign. When do you want it to go out? My big thing is you want to make sure I like to send it in the morning because a lot of people check their email in the morning or in the evening. But in midday, they're going to not maybe not check their email.  So I would send it either in the morning or in the evening. So you could set it to go out just in the afternoon. You can set it to go in the evening, the morning or send it right away. So it makes it really simple, easy for you guys. So or you could schedule it for a different day. But there's a lot of different tips in there. I already sent one when I was making this video.  So that's pretty much it. That's that's the easiest email campaign ever. I have had a lot of challenges with this in the past, just trying to keep up with it. I think consistency and staying in communication with your guests is what's going to grow your business. So if you guys like what you saw, it's demandforce.com slash free salon education. It'll take you to a form. You can fill out your name and somebody will reach out to you. It's totally worth the money that you spend on it. It's going to grow your business a lot. We've been using it for, like I said, five months and it's helped us tremendously. This is just one thing that it does. It does a lot of other things. It does voice confirmation calls, text message confirmations. It collects reviews every time a guest leaves our salon. There's a form that's sent out to them. Automatically, we don't have to do it and it asks them to review this salon. So we've gained over 40 reviews for our salon business in the last five months, which is huge because before we had four reviews on Google over the last five years.  So I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Make sure you check us out on YouTube also at freesaloneducation.com. Subscribe to us right here. There's a button below. Hit subscribe and we will see you guys on the next video. Thanks.


Hello everyone, this is Amit Dan of AmitDan.com Today I'll have another episode of Vogue Video and I'll walk from Toronto's Neville Park to Udbain and Queen Street intersection. So, if this is your first time here, thank you for your support. On this channel, I'm always trying new and different ideas. If that is something you're interested in, please visit for more. If you're only interested in Vogue videos, there'll be links in the description box below. So today, I'm at Neville Park and you're looking at Lake Ontario. This actually looks like an ocean. It's hard to see that this is a lake. And I'm going to be starting from here, up to Queen and Udbain. And then you can see that it's a nice view here. So we have a very nice and sunny day. It's a little bit chilly. Probably the weather is at 0 to minus 1 degree. And then you can see that lots of people out. And you're looking at the Toronto skyline and there are some rocks here. The format up to this video will be I'll walk and I'll talk once in a while. The plant you're looking at on the right, that's actually a trading plant. So it's a nice park around here. And you can see that lots of people are out here. Enjoying the warm weather is a little bit warmer than for the last couple of days. Although it's not in a warm yet. So here we're going to climb a little bit uphill and then we're going to hit Queen Street. And this area is the beaches and we are at Toronto's Neville Park. So I took the streetcar here and this is the last stop of the streetcar, which I believe is 501. And looks like a very nice neighborhood here. Very quiet and peaceful. So let's climb these stairs and I'll show you once on up. Okay, so I had to fix my camera a little bit. And so here's a view from the top and you can see a very peaceful neighborhood. So we're just going to go take this street. So today I'm trying a very different audio setup. I'm not recording to the mic or using any wired mic. Instead I'm directly recording to the digital audio recorder. And this is actually a new audio recorder which is high definition audio recorder. So if you have used my or if you have listened to my vlog videos in the past, starting this video is going to be very high definition or high quality audio. But most likely if you're just watching on TV or on cell phone you may not notice any difference. But if you use headphone or headset then definitely you'll see the difference in sound quality. So this street is going to hit Queen Street and then we're going to make a left turn and keep walking towards Woodbine and Queen. The sky is really clear. I can't see any clouds or anything. So it looks like the sky is doing a turn. I'll just wait a little bit. Good to go. A tiny squirrel crossing the street. Hopefully you're able to see it. So I'm going to try to walk slow. What happens that you know once I start doing the video, I cannot forget what I'm doing and sometimes you know I walk fast. So today I'll try to keep my pace steady and slow. So that way you can see things better. So these houses look old but they're very nice. And I kind of like place like this is not you know in the hustle and bustle of the city. Still it's in Toronto but still you know it has quite peaceful neighborhood. So this is the last stop of Neville Park and here is where the street cars you know they turn and go around. So the name of the city is Norse Wood Road and this is going to further east and that's where we were just now. Now we're going to walk towards west and looks like there's a small artwork here. It looks really cute made from wood or branches. So it's really nice work. Looks like a man sitting with something. There's no name or no anything. So just move on. So the street car is just started to move. So it's going to start its route from Neville Park and it's going to go all the way to Long Branch and you can see there's another street car coming. So the street car is going to turn here and the other one just started its route 501. So here you're going to see nice mom-and-pop stores on the side of the street and there's going to be stores all over. So I kind of like this type of street. You have different types of stores on both sides. So basically you're never bored. You always have when you go for a walk then you have something to do. So look at the street going to the lake. So you can see the nice lake view. Neville Park branch right here. Keep going here. To crowded in this part of town. So we're in the beaches. Very nice neighborhood. Not far from downtown Toronto but still it's like a different world. So I'm directly speaking to the audio recorder without any help from Mike. So I'm not sure how the voice quality is going to be but I'm hoping it's going to be better. But even the voice quality is not good. Outside everything else, the ambience, nice quality should be much improved. And then we have another small street. All these streets leading to the lake with a nice lake view. And you can see lots of nice stores along the way. So these apartments look very old but looks like well maintained. And I kind of like the name Life on Queen dot com. On the other side we have some apartments too which you can see. People are enjoying outdoor dining. If I'm not mistaken starting tonight the city is going to the phase shutdown. So no more outdoor dining allowed. So I think today people are grabbing this opportunity to sit outside and enjoy the time. Because it's going to be locked down for another month. They're nice and straight leading to the lake. So each side is different. Each store is unique. When you take the same Queen Street to downtown Toronto then the whole store is going to change. It's going to look different. It's going to sound different. So if you have noticed on my channel recently I got interested in doing long videos like three or four hour video featuring ambience, noise from different parts of Toronto. And in the future I hope to do the same thing from global locations. And these ambience noises or soundscape videos are getting popular due to walk from home. And you can use the noise as a blackout music or relaxing music. Looks like we have 100 delts off. So I haven't seen a delts off for a while. And on the other side of the street you can see lots of nice stores. This side has just some old apartments. So the delts have just passed. Here you can see it again. I haven't seen this for a while. So here we have Beach Avenue. And you can see that lots of people out sitting outdoors. So Beach Avenue leading to the beach. Let's store lots of beautiful stores. On the other side you can see more stores. And here some apartments looks like. Most of them have some sort of sign outside looking for new tenants. So due to COVID actually the apartment prices have gone down. So it's cheaper to rent right now than it was a few years ago. Which is a good thing. We have a nice street here. Some more stores. And some bakery. All shops. There's a bull right here. Actually I'm sorry this is a rhino. Not a bull. And if you look up you can kind of see Toronto skyline a little bit. So we have something going on here. Looks like a restaurant. And there's something right here with lots of glasses in the middle. But not sure what is the purpose or what is actually this. But at night you can see that those lights are going to be on the glasses and it's going to spread glittering lights. So must be a beautiful scene to see at night. Balsam Avenue. Another small avenue. And on the other side you can see lots of nice stores. Dog-friendly neighborhood. I see lots of dogs walking around. Beach or cafe. Nice small cafe. There's a nice road going up. So that house or apartment looks a bit old or run down. But it has unique designing. I kind of like that. So it doesn't feel that cold right now. The wind kind of died down. And I haven't looked at the temperature but my guess would be we are staying at 1 to 2 degrees Celsius. Ivan Forest Gardens. There's a nice park on the other side. And this actually doesn't even look like we're in the middle of Toronto. It looks like we're somewhere remote in Canada. If you just look at that part of the park. Glen Manor Road. Another beautiful street leading to the beach. So on my left side is a lake and if you're living along the beach you have nice view. So if you kind of look on the top you'll see a set of antennas. Signal catching devices. So the old apartments before they used to have those but they don't have that anymore. And I'm not even sure what was the real purpose of those when they built it many years ago. Probably to get TV signal or cell phone signal. But now probably there's no need. The avenue. Looks like people are lining up. People are lining up to enter the restaurant or for outdoor space. Here's some empty chair table. Another beautiful street. It kind of reminds me of walking in Auckland in some parts. There's small streets like this leading to the ocean. But here it's just leading to the beach. So I have another video on Queen Street going other parts of the town. You can see that going to my playlist. Queen Street is always the vibrant and lively street. Lots of people. Stores. Cars. Noise. I like that. Colors also. The colour of that pizza hut is nice. Gingerbread house. Some stores have shut down. And on the other side you can see a fruit shop. TD Bank. The naughty chocolate here. Looks like an old shop-me-shop. There's a dollar store. So we're going to just stay here for this light. And let me show you around. We've got the walk sign. So when you're watching this video you're going to see that one side is dark and the other side is sunny. This is because of the positioning of the sun. So it should look a bit unique. Toronto Public Library. Looks like they have something standing here. Actually I just found this interesting display of cakes. I'm not sure they're real but they kind of look real. So... I don't know if they're real or they're for sale. But it looks very interesting. And you can even see from this side but there's no one to sell or mention what is this about. So... we're going to take a look at the library and you can see that there's an owl right here. I'm not sure if... yeah, it looks like it's an owl. And this is the beaches branch. A few gardens. And actually it looks like you can go far taking this way. And if I have time definitely I can try going there another day. So a lot of people are here hanging out. And we have some interesting stores on this side. These are all... some of them are restaurants. And actually I can get the food smell. Looks like a good place to walk. And... this is one of the many benefits of doing a walk video. I've been to places which I never thought existed or I never been there. But I'm just, you know, going there because of doing walk videos. So it's not just you who are watching these places. I'm watching with you for the first time as well. So thank you for watching these videos. I've been to many places which I would have never known. And the sky is super clear. It's really amazing. Spotted a team of orphans on the corner. Belfair Avenue. So it looks like this place is Q-Garden in this park. And we have some more unique restaurants here. So we've already rolled. I think my camera setup is catching attention because of the wind muff and audio recorder and camera sitting on a gimbal plus with an additional attachment. It kind of looks weird. So I'm probably... that's why people are looking at it. There's a huge pizza shop. So this is actually a small mall. It's called the Beach Mall. 1971 Queen Street. So there are a few stores inside. So I can smell lots of different types of food. So we have more restaurants and stores on the other side. And there's all over food smell. Actually I smell barbecue as well. So let's cross this street. So you have a nice... It's like a new building. And there's Starbucks. Starbucks is closing some of its stores. So there's one is to be close to my condo. It's like colorful Louisiana kitchen. So I'm trying to show both sides of the street as much as possible. But it's not as possible to show you everything. So if you feel like camera is moving here and there Sorry about that. But I'm trying to still make the transition as smooth as possible. So it doesn't hurt your eyes. You have a book city. The Toronto Popcorn Company Open restaurant. And I see lots of people here. We have Elmore Avenue. And I see there is a clock on top. It's like a public school. And then they have a big playground. And if you see this, you'll see a clock on top. So it could be a charge. Only have some more stores. So I have some interesting artworks right here. So I think these are related. And you can see what they made. Actually when I was looking at it from the streetcar, I kind of thought there are real people standing or sitting. But it's not more stores. Okay the clock. I was mentioning before actually is a fire station. It's not a charge. So initially I thought it's a charge. Look at this. There is a unique croissant store. And they have actually a variety of croissants. And you can see that you know apple cinnamon, nutella and banana strawberry and banana ham and cheese, tuna, turkey. So it looks like lots of different types of croissants here. So it's one of the unique stores which you're going to find on Quinn Street. So I found another store or restaurant. People are enjoying outdoor dining.  So this is fire station number 17. And it kind of looks like an old building. With a clock that actually works. It's giving the right time. So we are at the corner of Woodbine Avenue. Let me show you just a little bit. Actually I used to live on this street many years ago. So this area is not near to me. I used to hang out here a lot. And this is leading to the Woodbine Beaches. So let's wait to cross the street. And once we go to the other side of the street that's the that's going to be the end of today's video. So thank you for watching. There will be more videos coming up. See you shortly. Thank you.


At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. Friday, September 2nd, U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell met with local and federal officials to discuss flood disaster recovery efforts. I think I could best sum it up by saying this is going to be a long process, much tougher than coming back from the tornadoes in West Kentucky in December. And I think all of us are committed to staying here for the long haul and trying to finish the job even though it's obviously going to take years, particularly to solve the housing problems which were pre-existing before the floods. McConnell stressed the importance of effective coordination with FEMA, state emergency management and other state and federal resources. Well, I think today's meeting underscored that there are still big challenges. And number two, as all of us have said, this is going to take a long time. So I think the challenge for people who are in positions like all of us is to stay the course. Some of the things that each of us have talked about, the difficulty of coordination among agencies, restrictions that these folks have that don't seem to make sense. I'm glad that this situation is challenging as it is. The worst thing that would happen would be people outside of the area that lose interest. And I think all of us are committed to making sure that does not happen. For a full list of flood resources, go to governor.ky.gov. For Mountain Top News, I'm Breonna Robinson.


In a bid to ensure food security in this state, the federal government, in collaboration with the International Fund for Agricultural Development, have developed 20 tricycles to 20 farm groups in Nassarowa. The state program coordinator Eunice-Ad Guizet made the disclosure while speaking with newsmen during the distribution exercise in Lafayette. She added that the initiative was also targeted at reducing the pains and suffering of poor farmers across the five benefiting local government areas who would have been heavily affected by the recent petroleum subsidy removal. In his remarks, the Permanent Secretary Nassarowa State Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, Issa Aya, who was represented by Sunday Akum Commandery Initiative and assured of the continuous support of the state government to ensure the success of the program in the state. Once we bring here test points of view today, as you took your tricycle, you were able to solve the problem, you were able to engage in a business. How you have been able to use this and your livelihood has changed? How has these tricycles impacted on you and on your businesses? And for us in the Value Change Development program, it will even produce and multiply more. And I encourage you as you take your tricycle today, you will make use of it efficiently. And by the grace of God, God will help you to protect it. I will pray that you, as you go back, if you would like, thank you folks.


Good morning. I'm Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin, the Assistant Commissioner responsible for Metropolitan North Region of the Queensland Police Service and as part of my roles, I'm also the District Disaster Coordinator for the Brisbane area and that includes the Brisbane City Council area and also Redlands City Council as well. This briefing is current as of Monday the 31st of January 2011 and current as of 1140 a.m. Over the last couple of days, we've been monitoring the progress of ex-tropical cyclone, Antony. Antony overnight crossed the Queensland coast and immediately formed a rain depression that has caused very significant winds and some localised weather events such as localised flooding, roads cut and some very minor damage. But we've been monitoring the progress of tropical cyclone, Yazi, that that we've been watching since the latter part of last week and over the last 12 hours or so that system is now steadily moving from the Fiji area in the Coral Sea progressively east, sorry west, toward the Queensland coast. At the present time, as a result of a briefing received a short time ago, that Yazi is moving in a direction consistent with the Queensland coast, it's 2,000 kilometres away and is moving in the vicinity of about 30 kilometres an hour or so. This is a very significant tropical cyclone event and based upon the current predictions is likely to impact the Queensland coast at an unknown location sometime around the latter part of Wednesday afternoon evening to the early hours of Thursday. Now naturally enough, cyclones are incredibly unpredictable events and we're monitoring the situation as best as we possibly can, but the advice that we have received at this particular juncture indicates that it could possibly make landfall somewhere at the coast in the area of approximately towns for. But as I indicated before, cyclones are inherently unreliable, but we're monitoring the situation. But certainly for those of us that are in the Brisbane area, it's a timely reminder that we are not immune from cyclones. We do live in the tropics and the subtropics and equally cyclones can impact the southeast corner of Queensland. They can impact and our history shows that they can impact upon us directly or they can impact upon us indirectly as a result of a significant weather pattern, including increased rain that can occur within the context of a cyclonic event. So this is also a good time to remind the citizens of Brisbane and the Redlands area to not be complacent, to make sure that they do some very simple things and that is to make sure that they have torches, to make sure that their torches have batteries, to have a radio that has batteries, to make sure that the home is provisioned with things like first aid equipment and what have you and to make sure that they're alert to the bulletins that are put out by the Bureau of Meteorology and other reliable government sources, including the Queensland Police Service. Some other general precautions as well and that is to make sure that motor vehicles, that they have fuel in their motor vehicles and to make sure that their home is reasonably provisioned with respect to food, water and the basic essentials, such as their medications, those sorts of things. This is not a time to be alarmed, it's certainly a time to be a precaution in terms of making sure that those very simple messages are heated. I'd also like to remind people that in an event, such as a cyclone or other storm, simple messages such as down power lines are flooding in local causeways, rivers and low lying roads and making sure that people not enter those water courses and to make sure that people don't drive through flooded waterways are always very simple messages, but also other things such as we've seen significant water inundation across the greater Brisbane area and in fact right across the state of Queensland. So high winds with respect to large trees, the risk of those trees falling over or branches falling is something that people need to be alert to as well. So I guess my simple messages are one of being informed and being alert, taking reasonable precautions with respect to your safety, the safety of your family and your general community and I'm sure that we'll all get through this event as best as we possibly can, but to make sure that you're constantly alert to the messaging put out by reliable government sources. Thank you.