I'm going to introduce Matt Papola. He is going to talk about stop guessing, diagnosing and fixing WordPress performance problems. Matt is the founder of SiteDiscret, a powerful and flexible WordPress hosting platform. He has a degree in computer engineering and started off his professional career as a member of the design team for AMD's first 64-bit processor. Matt is passionate about understanding and helping people solve problems. He feels that WordPress hosts should do as much as possible to provide good performance, security, and automation so you can focus on your business while your host takes care of the rest.  Matt. Thank you, let's see. You guys hear me on this? I'm sure you got it. You are up and turned on already. All right, thanks everyone for coming to my talk. Obviously, we've been talking about performance today. We've got quite a bit of content to cover so I'm going to go pretty fast. If I'm lucky, I'll have some time to be in it for questions but not confine me out there and I'll post with all the nice little padded seats in the back there. All right, let's keep going. All right, so first, a little bit about me. This is probably mostly repeat from the intro. I grew up in Arizona and I went to school down at the University of Arizona in Tucson. So I'm another four years down there. So I think we can be engineering and work on. And I moved to Austin, Texas. I lived there for a couple of years and worked on my 21st for the first 64-bit processor and that's 64-bit and I was one of the least up there at the top. And after that, I left and I took a backpacking trip and went around the world and was supposed to be for a year and a half and ended up being three and a half years and I only made it a half way. I got involved with WordPress in 2011 when I started doing some plugin development and back end server and service development for a client and that project ended up being successful and went well. A few years later, they had hundreds of websites on WordPress, a bunch of clients, and they were having server performance and security issues. So by then, I ended up starting what has become the site network and we're now hosting hundreds of clients, thousands of websites on our platforms. All right, now we're going to have today's talk. I probably should stand back so I'm not turning my head around and get back to work. We'll talk about first life performance matters and how do we actually measure it. Talk about hosting and what effective has on it. Then we'll talk about your server response time. We'll talk about the full page load when someone gives a page. Just a few words on caching and then because I'm crazy and we have a little bit of time to do a quick demo at the end. So first, why does performance matter? So, I'm not used to these guys but I think they have the best marketing message at least that kind of sums it up. So how long does it take to lose a customer? 2.7 seconds, I say. That's the amount of time before someone visiting your website will stop and then start to look for your competitors. So that's one way and just summing it up. Convergence and page abandonment. So if you've got many customers, then you could be losing business if your site's not fast enough. It waits your time while you're developing and working on your site, especially at the back end and the word for this ad is slow. Perception on your visitors, your customers, when they come to your site, they have to wait for the page to load for too long and then that's going to leave a negative impression on them. Your Google ranking, if your site is extra slow that has some effect on that, no one probably decides if people at Google know exactly how much that is, but it's been published and said that's a vacuum. Your client's satisfaction, if you're an agency or you're building a lot of WordPress sites for different people, then they're more likely to come back for a new site or redesign or refer you to other clients and build them a fast website. And then I'd like to make the whole claim that speed equals happiness, and that's one of the biggest reasons so. So kind of drive that point home, think about this for a second. All right, so let's do a quick survey here of a show of raising hands. How many of you have worked on or developed on a cycle slow or became slow? All right, everyone look around and see how many people are raising their hands. Well, we've got some more questions. How many have spent time trying to speed up a slow site? Have given up on trying to speed up a slow site? Have switched hosting providers because their slides have switched off plug-ins one at a time trying to speed up a site. A lot of hands on all these. How many have a slow site now? All right, so this talk hopefully will be good for a follow-up. So I have a hypothesis, and that is why do developers and designers and site owners speed up or fix their slow sites? Well, that's because slow is comfortable and optimization is often risky and uncertain. You don't know how much. You don't know how to make the site faster, and you don't know if or how much faster your site can be. And so it's not that you don't want your site to be faster, it's that you just don't make it a priority. So I want to speak a little bit about priority. And I'm going to define priority as value divided by effort. And I started off by talking about the value of performance and speed. So what about effort? If effort goes down, then priority goes up. So my goal today is to show you how to minimize that effort. So first, before we try to fix performance, we need to figure out how to measure it and understand it. So some basics about paint speed loading. So I've created this diagram here. It's kind of a simplified waterfall view of what happens when your browser loads a page and a browser loads a page up and displays it to you. The first thing is you'll put your domain in the address bar type it up, and then your browser needs to do a DNS query. Look out, find out where that site lives. And then it'll make a connection to the server. And then it'll set up a secure connection with your site's running in HTTPS. And these days, all your sites should be. It'll then send that request and wait for the server to respond back and send back the initial page content. It's just one text file with HTML in it. And once the browser receives that, it can start doing a bunch of things in parallel. It can start parsing that HTML. It'll find out what else it needs to load, such as JavaScript, CSS files, fonts, images. It'll start making requests for those. And then it'll actually do the hard work of rendering and painting everything on the screen so you'll see the web page show on your browser. So this first part here, actually just that part right there is often called the time to first play. And that is from WordPress. That's WordPress running PHP and talking to the MySQL database at the end before it sends something back. How fast should that time to first play be? So for work, obviously, the faster the better. And I didn't talk about page caching yet, but we want to start by not covering up any performance issues. So we want to see how fast that time to first play is without any page caching turned on. So I consider very fast the 50 to 150 mils seconds, fast, 150 to 300, good, under half a second, average, slow, very slow. And some sites that I've seen have taken 15 to 30 seconds, actually even 45 seconds to return back that page back to the browser. So if you're sitting there staring at a blank screen for 30, 15, 30, 45 seconds sometimes. So for WordPress, I think under half a second has a pretty good goal, at least for uncached speed. So now how do we test that and see what your time to first play is? So one of my favorite tools is this Chrome extension. It's called page performance. And there's a link to it there, too. And what this does is it just sits in your Chrome toolbar there.  You can click on it and drop down. And we'll show you what the time to first play was for that page. Another way is you can actually use Chrome itself and open up the developer tools. And you can jump down to a little three-world button top there, down here, and develop the tools. And then you want to select the network tab. And you will need to reload the page if you do this. The network tab doesn't populate unless the developer tools are open. So you have the page, open this up, reload, and then you can click, kind of, hover on a little bar here, and it'll tell you down here what your time to first play is. And then one of my favorite tools is, and this is something you can share with other people, too, after you run the test, is a web page test. And so that's a web page test ad where if you go there, it'll see a screen like this. I recommend actually logging in with your Google account or something, because then you don't seem to need to do the capture thing, and identify street lights. And if you, when you do this, though, first, probably you want to set some settings here. So we're going to try and test the best case speed for your website. So first of all, pick a test location that is near your server, so wherever your server is actually located. Then set the connection speed to native, which means it's not going to try to slow it, but loading down, pretending you're on a slower network. Set the number of tests to one, but then click the repeat view, and the first to repeat view. And what that will do you is it'll run the test twice, but once showing the effects of browser caching that someone were a visitor site, and then they continue browsing it, or they come back later. Usually that second goal will be faster. And then click the capture video button, and this allows to see a film strip where you will actually be able to see what people are seeing in with a timeline as your site is loading.  And we're generally trying to optimize the time of the first byte and speed index, and that's something you'll just find on the web page test. So we're going to ignore the load time, and I'm going to tell you why in a second. So the speed index, they define that as the time at which the visible parts of the page are displayed, basically an average of that. So web page test has a film strip view, and it'll show you over time with a little label here as far as how much time is passed, how much of the page is shown up at that time. And so the lower the better on this, and why does this matter? Because this is what people are actually seeing on your site. There's also a waterfall view. I won't go into this, but it's a diagram that's similar to the one I showed earlier in the presentation. But it's specific to the page you actually just tested, and it has a lot more detail for what's going on. This is the film strip view I talked about. We can see now here in this test here on the WordCamp website that the user was looking at a rent link screen for 0.7 seconds or so. Not very long at all. At 0.8 seconds, started to fill in. The image kind of showed up just a teeny bit after. And then the menus and the cookie bar finally filled in at 1.2 seconds. But right here, at less than a second, we can see that most of the web page is already there. So that's what people are seeing, that's what they're waiting for. They can start interacting with it. People are going to see things before they even touch it anyway. So you want to just get enough up there so they can see it. And even though the load time was a little bit longer, that the actual time that the page rendered was less. Other speed testing tools, how many people know we're having to use GT metrics or Pingdom? All right, so I don't recommend GT metrics.  They also require you to log in to see a lot of this other stuff that's actually interesting. So I find web page tests much more useful. So I recommend checking that out. And just to sum it up, you want to remember, is whatever tool you're using, is it showing you what your users are actually experiencing? So we don't care about numbers. We don't care about both points. We don't care about some page score, like grade or speed. We care about what people's tears like are actually seeing. All right, so let's talk about what makes up that time to first bite a limited point. And so there's two main factors in that server response time, which will often model that for your page load. First is your hosting provider. I'll talk more about that later. And next is your website implementation. And word press, that means your theme and your plugins. All right, so I've got an interactive part here. And so I forgot to announce this at the game. You've got your computer open, or you've got your mobile device here with this page right here. And you should see something like this. And hopefully, this is connected right if you start. You can put in your own domain in here. You can put in some client sites you've developed, you can put in your friend site, word press sites. And if you fill this in, it should start populating up here in real time on both your screens and this main screen up here. So what this does is we've built a tool that will go off and it'll test the time to first bite for your site and it will show up in here if you're embarrassed or you have a really slow site. Don't put it in here because everyone's going to see it. But so we can see it's starting to fill up now a little bit. And remember I said the time, ideally your time to first bite should be under half a second. Well, that's right over here. Most of the sites we've seen so far are showing up over here. We can probably be definitely a lot faster. Thank you for running that if you'd like, testing word sites. On the right here, I've kind of tried to look at the hosting providers and classify them here in terms of the average speed from slowest to fastest and if they're faster than the bottom here, that'll fall itself. So next, I want to talk about jump back and talk about WordPress hosting. So, does your hosting provider, yes it does matter. It matters a lot. So, is better hosting a silver bullet for your speed? Much of the time actually is, yes. Other times, well, you have a slow site with a lot of plug-ins, a lot going on there. It may be faster on better hosting but it might not get any faster. How do you determine if your hosting is a problem? So, well, certain hosting providers are known to be well-optimized consistently fast and not have a lot of performance issues. Other providers, it depends on the plan, box, time of day, server configuration. I don't know, stuff like that. So, although some hosting providers are just known to be consistently slower too, so. Another indicator is what web servers are host running. This is slightly more technical but I tried to keep it simplified. So, most custom managed WordPress platforms are running like IngenX and kind of a custom stack and it's a little bit more optimized. The number of those hosts are small. More common is you'll find a lot of hosts that are running Cpanel and Apache together and anyone can spin up their own hosting company using that. And the takeaway from this is that if your hosting provider has Cpanel available, it's actually an indication that your site could probably be faster. So, you could also go through a checklist and check, hey, does your server have a whole bunch of stuff on it? I'm not gonna go through these and that's kind of the point. So, it's a big long list and plugins aren't gonna help you with these.  Otherwise, you might be thinking that. So, what's a better way, again, like we talked about the page loading. We don't necessarily care about a checklist of items. It's very important and if you're building a hosting then that's very important. We want to measure what your site, how your own site is actually performing. So, how do you know if your host is causing work or all of your speed problem? Or how do you know if your host is properly optimized for your server? Well, it's not easy to verify reliably. You don't want to go through that checklist and even that might not cover it. Well, at least not while it's on your current host. So, for another hosting provider, how? Put an exact copy of your site on another optimized WordPress host. So, there are several options for this. I've kind of rated them by how easy they are. The kind of average or harder is to use a backup or restore plugin and install plugin on your current site and host and provider. Download the backup and restore it on a new location. You can use a migration or a plugin that's kind of more integrated by hosting provider, or you can do sometimes a little bit more fully automated and I'll jump through those. So, here's some backup to restore plugins, some popular options that can be used and you can grab these from the slides later. Some hosting provider plugins that they built for migration. Here's a couple more that are provided by a service called LogVolte and for migration to Pantheon and WP Engine. They have a plugin that uses that service. And then we actually have an import that's I think faster and simpler than all these. There's more information on there. I'm not gonna show you the slides or anything about it now, but in the meantime at the end, I'm gonna be able to show it off. So, now let's say you've got your site copied over a new host. How do you test it and check to see if it's faster? Well, go back and reuse those tools that I just showed you a little bit before at the webpage test. Now we have some tools later in our live time because it's pretty short. I'll show you some of the tools that we have.  Now some others will let you crawl through your site and see how it's performing. So, let's talk about cost of hosting and a friend of mine came up with this term and I thought it was a great term and I didn't find it on the internet so I threw a little TM up there in the corner of it. So, I heard it here first and you all heard Bridget speak this morning, right? Everyone heard Bridget? All right. So, earlier this year Bridget decided to put up on Twitter and she decided she was gonna write a blog post about hosting her $25, you know, as an argument for managed hosting. And then she wrote this blog post and she said $25, that's what my manager costs with pressable. And some people think it's expensive. So, she argues that it's free to visit and it's isn't worth it.  There's a link to it too. Some of the replies, $25 and one button donuts. I believe speaking this afternoon, Starbucks. And then I think one of the best replies, at least the one I like best is this one here. So, and Bridget, I don't mind no thoughts. So, your time is money. So, if your host is not that fast or you've got a very issues to deal with, you know, you're wasting your money that way too. That's the kind of summing up the arguments for hosting. Pretty much what the people reply to you from a blog. If it's for your business, it's important. You get a lot of things with more managed hosting than other places will upsell or it won't be bundled with the office upgrade. And again, fine, I guess your time worth it. I've actually gone through from my experience from onboarding and migrating and testing a bunch of the sites of the last eight years. I kind of went through and turned on my host and providers here, but this is just for performance from what I've seen. And so, I put up this slide last week at Riverside and then afterwards I got a comment, like I got this comment the way. My site's pretty fast but I'm in a slow column. I think my site's fast, you know. I thought, that's a good question. So, I tried to come up with some replies to that and things to consider are, well, yeah, ignorance is bliss and your site might be loading two seconds but you just haven't seen it loaded in one second. Page caching, is your site loading quickly because of page caching? And what if you're logged in or what if you're on WordPress admin in the back end? Is it still this fast? And then, yes, maybe it's good enough. If you and your customers are happy, then great. It's fast enough. And then mobile, always consider a mobile. Something that loads fast under desktop might be a little bit slower on a phone over a mobile network. So, test it. You can use web page test to set the connection speed a little bit lower to see how long it will take to put that page to load if you're on a 4D, 3D network, something like that. So, you might be thinking, wow, I just spent 20 slides talking about posting. So, yes, it is not important. And so, just this last week, I'll just sum up all the underlying parts here. I posted a reply to a question on a popular Facebook group with 11,000 members on it. And this has had a little bit of a dialogue with one of the guys on there. So, he tried the other suggestions and the results were not worth it. I spent five days, oh, sorry. And he said, the results were not worth it, but now I believe that the web host is the key. I spent five days trying, and my efforts did not work. Thanks, Mr. Pricell. So, he was able to speed up his site significantly just by switching hosts after spending a month of time with other options. All right, enough thought, hosting. Let's talk about that server response time. And let's say you've already moved to an optimized host and your time to first light is, because that is controlled mostly by your server and your hosting, let's say that's still slow. Well, that's to most people, that's a black box. And that's WordPress and PHP and running, PHP and MySQL remain and you can't look inside of it. Well, today, let's take a look inside. So, I'm gonna show you some tools to do that. But first, if you're diagnosing your site and trying to optimize it, then you're gonna go through several steps. First, you're gonna generate or wait for some traffic to the site when it loaded up or if it's live in production and you just let some people hit it. And then you're gonna review, you're gonna need to have profiling enabled and then you're gonna review those results and we're gonna use New Relic for that today. And then, you'll make a change and you'll repeat. And the difference between doing this and what most people are doing is instead of guessing for this step here, we're gonna make step three based on what we learned in step two. We're gonna have real good data that's gonna tell us what exactly is going on with WordPress and why it won't be slow. So, let's check out New Relic. So, New Relic is an application performance monitoring tool and there's a free version available. The pro version is the most useful. You do need root level access to install it on your server but it also is provided by several WordPress hosting providers. And I have personally diagnosed hundreds of performance issues across lots of sites in very little time. Thanks to New Relic. And so, once we jump into New Relic, we're gonna see an overview tab here. I tried to turn that off but obviously it wasn't successful. And it's interesting. We'll see how long the average server response time is and how much time to spend on PHP and MySQL but that's not really all that helpful. It's nice to know but what is really valuable is what New Relic added a couple years ago and they added a feature which is WordPress specific and we'll actually break down WordPress and show you what's going on. So, if we click on that page under the plugins and themes, it's gonna show us how much time is actually being spent for each of the themes or each of the plugins or your theme. So, for this example site that we tested out, we found out this A to B testing plugin here was taking 50% of the response time up and it turned out for this particular site they didn't actually need that plugin. They were just able to turn that plugin off and the site got twice as fast as it did. Here's another example. If you need more information, you need to dig down in New Relic as something called transactions views and that's for a single request that you can dig down in and find out where it's spent time. So, I think this screenshot here because this is a request that actually finished relatively quickly but then there was a hook that ran at the end and after the generate of the whole page it was about to finish up. It went off and ran this hook that synced some data to Jetpack and that took it an extra two seconds. So, what would have been a 250 millisecond response turned into a two and a half seconds, 10 times as slow as it should have been. Here's some examples, either rather old and just because a plugin shows up here as a bad one, could be configuration as a starting point. But for this, whatever module was enabled with Jetpack here and we just turned off Jetpack and then boom, you can see right away the performance of those data improves significantly. Sometimes the WordPress admin could be slow and again, this is old and might not be applicable but in this case, the US SEO plugin was making all of the admin pages a bit slower. So, before New Relic, this is what I felt like trying to figure out problems when I very first started hosting sites and trying to figure out the issues. So, right away I set up New Relic and once I did that, I set it up. Right, some considerations though. It does impact performance pretty significantly, I've found. So, usually I'll turn it off when it's not being used but you can't go back in time. So, if you have some kind of issue that only happens intermittently or you need to wait for it to happen, it might need to leave it on for a while until that request comes through. It's not a number of plugins on your site but it's actually what they're doing. And a plugin shown up doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad plugin, like I said, it's a starting point. So, check the configuration settings, check out the plugin developers, or at least a new version or something like that. And then it may be fixed already or you might just need to change or turn something off with it. Your theme can also be a major factor with your performance problem too. So, that's often harder to fix so, profile it or site it early. There's some guides too, just skip over this but if you pull the slides up, several good guides on how to diagnose repressed problems with Neurope. All right, a few words about plugins, optimization plugins. Well, they can't optimize your raw site performance. What they're generally doing is just covering up performance issues. I generally don't recommend them. And you don't need them, for the most case, on better hosting. And they can actually make server response times worse because they're doing a bunch of stuff to maybe they're doing things to try and help your page load but then it's actually affecting that server response time. One possible exception is page caching and hopefully I will talk about that later. So, I actually don't use Neurope anymore. So, on our own hosting until earlier this year we did some performance upgrades and we got in our site to begin in, let's see, our servers were already a lot faster than in several places but they were not quite as fast as some of the fastest providers that I had experience with. So, we did some optimization and our sites got twice as fast and this was more than the 20 to 30% gain that I expected and sites, they're so fast now at least on our platform it's often not necessary or worth the time to optimize them more. So, kind of the moral of this story is optimized hosting was even more important than I realized and I think there's even more room in there as a group with that. Let's talk about the page loads. We talked about hosting and time to first blank and that bottleneck of getting the page to the browser but then the browser needs to load and pull everything else up. So, what affects the rest of that? So, one thing is, the HTTP2, this is a server level thing too so it needs to be an enable on your host but there's a newer version of HTTP that speeds up things quite a bit. It does need, you do need to have the HTTPs enabled to have an access to your token on your site. It's been around for several years, has some great speed benefits which I'm just gonna pull a point through but some WordPress hosts are still not running it. So, how do you check? So, just a few more things. A lot of things that are often been recommended to speed up sites such as combining, concatenating files, making, trying to have multiple, use multiple domains to have type one or like parallel requests going on aren't as important with HTTP or even necessary because of the way the protocol works. Inlining assets, other stuff like that. So, make sure your host has HTTP2 and how can you check your sites of HTTP2? There's another Chrome extension that I have installed and it'll just light up in your toolbar a different color based on whether the site you're connected to has HTTP2 enabled or not. And not when you can get that Chrome extension there. And when it's enabled, another way is you can actually go into the Chrome Dev Tools. It's a little more complicated but you can write the link on the inside the network tab and show this section called a protocol and then it'll show me what the requests are being made with. All right, now, fonts, images, asset compression. So, your hosting provider should have GZip enabled on at a minimum, and that's, your own web page test will show up as compressed transfer. And then, roughly as a faster higher compression tool that's from Google and more advanced tools off of that. And you can also check in Chrome developer tools whether that's being enabled if you click inside the network tab on one of the requests you can look for a content encoding here and it does a VR next to it that it's using probably. Image compression, this is a big one. So, on web page test also has a pie chart down at the bottom that shows how much of your data or that page load is attributed to images. So scroll down to the bottom, take a look at that. If your purple here is really large and you did not get a good grade on compressing images, then you probably want to compress your images. One cool plug in that I've seen that I like also helps you with scaling down huge images. So if you're trying to upload your 24-megabit pixel like image up to your website, it'll scale it down to something reasonable and that's insanity. And it can resize huge files on upload, you can adjust the image quality and you can also, you can convert PNGs to JPEGs. If you have a PNG that doesn't have transparency and it's large or it looks like a photo it should be a JPEG. And you can also bulk resize your images. Here's a screenshot with a couple of settings that you might want to adjust. So, I'm just gonna skip these. There's some more advanced topics. If you really need to, if you've gone through all these things and you need even more speed out of your site then you might look at lazy loading of images, something called servo push or adding a CDN. Some of those are a little more complicated but the CDN is often quite easy especially with cloud require. Let's save that stuff for last after you don't optimize everything else. And caching, so there are different types of caching. This is the exact I think I was gonna get to talk this afternoon about caching so I checked that one out if you're interested in that. Page caching, object caching, I'm not gonna go into details about this except page caching is a common one. Is it the solution for a slow site? And I say no. And caching was designed and it's great for scaling websites with a lot of traffic. So, I would argue that your site shouldn't be fast without caching. And caching on a site only hides poor performance and often only a part of the time. You use it as a last resort after you've tried everything else. Where does page caching fall down? Well, the WordPress admin is not gonna help you there if you're working in the back end if that's slow. If you're logged in often times, page caching is disabled so the front end of your site while you're developing it could be slower. You've got a large site with a lot of pages that might not be cached effectively. If you have content that's customized to the user again, you have issues. Caches can also expire and flush. And that next request, if it doesn't affect cached and you haven't optimized your site, it's gonna be quite slow for that visitor. So, summary, you want your site to be as fast as possible without the page caching. I found this really good article on a quote from him too is, it should be possible to turn off page caching on a regular day with normal traffic and not get nervous about it. And even on a busy day, it shouldn't crash your website. For WordPress, most managers and providers actually can provide page caching. It's not, if you can't get your time to first bite under, let's say, 200 milliseconds or you just want your site to be faster, then look into it or try to get that working. It'll often be noticeably faster if your hosting provider is not, isn't high performing or if your site uses heavy technology or uses certain things like WooCommerce and page builders, certain things, tend to start to put all those together and then it can slow the site, a WordPress site down considerably. And yeah, so you're saving it for last, test it out, you might still want it at the end but try and speed up your site as much as you can first. All right, and do it all right. So, summary, measure your performance first. Think a good hosting provider or switch to one. If your time to first bite is still slow, do some profiling with New Relic. Oh, sorry. Optimize your images, use a plugin with page caching if your host doesn't provide it already and add a CDN if your visitor's been around globally on warrior service far away from your audience, or yourself. And then, feel free to ask for help, ask your host and provider for help, ask a developer, ask someone here at WordCamp, sorry. All right, and it looks like I have a little time. And so, let me do just a quick, I'll do a quick demo of some of the tools that we have, including for testing your site performance. This is our website, if you come here and click on the little sign up button, feel like I'm just gonna create a new one now and confirm this. And once I've landed inside my account here, I can click this add an existing site. And so, I can pick a site here, I've set up a test site, go to any, thanks go to any, they gave me a great deal, I think it was $1 with a domain included, so 12 bucks for a year.  Well, if I switch test and site, it might work. There we go. This will go off, it looks up some information about the website, where's it hosted, where's DNS being provided, and stuff like that, and I can then click add site and I'll go and then we'll add it to my dashboard here inside site district. And once that's done, it takes a little, I'm gonna actually skip through this next step here, I'll go back to installing the plugin for migrating a couple of sites. But just from adding a site in here with the domain name, I've got a few tools available to me. Over here on the side, I can run a web page test directly from here and it'll keep the results on site, site district, so I can kick that off. And then I'll pop that in a new tab and it'll probably take me a minute to run. I can do a speed test and this is one of the cool tools that we've built in. This will go off and it'll hit up to 30 pages on, well, you can actually control the number of requests on the site and figure out what the server response time is throughout the site. So this will go off and crawl through the site. I don't actually have much on the site, but it's hitting different pages on the site. Looks like they're all coming in and right about the same speed. And that'll go off and finish in a little bit, but maybe an idea of throughout your site how fast is the server response time on your site. And I haven't had to do anything complicated, pretty much just add my URL and click a few other things in here. And it'll finish with a summary of the program. Then you go back over here. Well, I actually import my site. I can just pop open this dialog and install the plugin. So I think that's my username. So I can put in any WordPress administrator username and password and try to go off. And our server will go off and try to install the plugin on that program site. You know what I mean? Yay, it worked. And then I can just click through, click import site, and it'll go off and I'll verify it. And try to pull in a copy of that site. So while that runs, it's basically just a fresh WordPress install 2017 theme, nothing special on it, so it should be pretty quick. But we can jump over here and see the web page test results from running it there. So we can see, we click in here to the film strip view, we can see what's kind of going on. So on this test site here, user was looking at a blank screen until about 1.2 seconds, and started to get this gray background fade in and then at 1.4 seconds, but the site's actually showing up there. You can see how long it took that site to live. So that's the web page test there. We'll come back over here, that's still going, see. And then on a repeat view, this is with the page cache, the browser cache enabled, should be a bit faster. We'll see here, blank screen, blank screen, and then boom, everything appears at 1 second. So it's a little bit faster. Like I said, very light site, just a 2017 base install. But that's how web page test works and how you can see inside of there. This is still setting up, I was gonna show off. Three minutes, all right. Hopefully this will finish up and I'll be able to run just a couple more tests real quick. If you've got your questions, get your questions ready, and we'll see if I have time for those. Like, don't have time for questions after this or I'll just let that run. I mean, I'll just take a couple right now. So got one in the back right there. You haven't said anything about Google PageSpeed Insights as a diagnostic tool, so I'm just curious what you're thinking is about that. So the question was about Google PageSpeed Insights and I think it gives you some great insights. But again, I would say still focus on what your users are actually seeing.  And you can use web names to test mobile versions and different connection speeds, stuff like that. So I would personally focus more on that. You could use it as a guide for helping optimize that, but then just keep your end goal in mind. Two, go ahead, we'll do it right there. What do you suggest for like areas with slower internet speeds? So the question was for... So like, there's areas within this, within the country where like, not like Seattle, where they have learned McDonald's, where they're operating on Seattle to have four McDonald's. Yeah, if you've got visitors that have a very slow internet connection, then yeah, that's a tough one. You're gonna, again, just test it as well as you can. If they're located far away from your server, get a CVM in place there. But see how it's performing and then see what's slowing it down. Is that your, is that your time to first play or is it your images or some other things loading down and you can do as much as you can off. It's kind of a diminishing returns. You optimize what you can and then to really speed it up even more, it gets harder as it goes, but test it and then kind of try and see what's going on there. And web page test, I think we'll cope with that. So once we've imported this site here, we can click this tool and it'll actually load up the two sites side by side and then click this test again. We'll kind of test it over and over a few times. See how long that actual page load is for the main site, the main test. So we've imported a copy. This is the exact same site, nothing has changed. We're bringing it over from Godaddy in this case and over to the site district and you can see the speed difference for loading. Now if we want to test throughout the pages that speed crawl that I showed you, we can do a crawl of both sites simultaneously and this will go through the pages up to 30 pages on both copies of the site and show you how fast they are. So. Yeah, so our import includes the plugins. It grabs all the files underneath your main folder and then the database and this copy's in the word restores. I think we've excluded, like if you're using backups and stuff like that, we've excluded backup archives and stuff like that, so we don't pull a bunch of extra data. And so that's that ours. In this case, the site is five times faster, nothing changed just by switching posting colliders. All right, that's that for the quick demo. I won't show you relic too much because we're out of time. I think all I have left was the link back to the site again and more questions. Okay, go ahead. What happens after this? How does that translate to the admin users? Often times, yes. Yeah. Yes. Do you have to be one of our community partners to make sure that the visual work has a lot of traffic in it and that you want to make sure that you get that, do you have a seal or do you have to make sure? Traffic can make a difference if there's a lot of traffic to the site. For sure, it depends on the hosting and the setup. I think the biggest reason, this is a little speculative that sites are slower on certain hosts, is that the server is overloaded. There's this high load on the server. So that load affects the speed quite a bit. So on our environment, for example, we make sure we balance that load and give a lot of space there. So that it keeps, even if there's a spike in traffic, it kind of keeps the speed constant. So it doesn't have traffic, but it can, but it's for most sites, it's not really a factor or something. I have seen on our platform, these sites can get a lot of traffic and the site won't slow down, but I have seen on other places that once they, once you get quite a bit of traffic to the site, the site will slow down there. It just depends on how the server is shut up. Hope I answered that. Yes. I have a question on your demo there. Yes. If that had been the year on the site that we would want to move over, then all you have to do is go in and change the DNS and use it. Yes. Yeah, so, well, we charge for hosting, so you have to sign up and pay for that if you were to migrate to us. But then, yeah, the only thing left after that is pretty much updating the DNS. Other many other questions? All right, I think one or two more, right there. You're going to reach optimization. We want to optimize the user load problem of what they're going to work with. What's the practice in terms of that? Do you usually use the plug-in in terms of compression? Do you even bother optimizing the Photoshop for the other brand first? And then you have to optimize the plug-in or do you just replace it? The plug-in? That's a good question. I think you might save time by not worrying about optimizing the day in Photoshop unless that's a streamlined process for you. We, let's see, I don't have any plugins really to recommend it. I listed the one up there and that's mostly because it'll do the work when you upload the images, which is nice, and we'll take care of really huge images. We actually, I didn't download, we actually built an image optimization tool into our hosting, and we did that because we can do it 20 times faster than other services because we can do it all on the server. So, and we actually get quite a bit better optimization than some of these other plug-in tools. Not sure exactly why we're not doing anything. I was going to say we're not doing anything magic, but we're using image magic actually to optimize the images. And I've seen images optimized elsewhere, and we run our tool on our server and we'll shave off another 30% or so. So yeah, I'm not sure what the best thing to do for that is think about what your time is, but in the end just make sure your images are well optimized, and I'd recommend about 75 card jpegs optimization. One more? All right, I think you have your energy. So I was using APM, which is application performance monitoring. And so it's a PhD extension that is installed on the server. It's very easy to install, but you do need access to install PhD extensions. It's like one command on a server to get it up and running. Yes? I'm curious what you can operate with. So we're not, we have just, our servers are located in one location right now. We have to spread out. There's some of the other hosting providers because I know Kinsta is geographic. They have the usual cloud engine. They're all over the world. I think Pantheon just has locations in the US. So we haven't branched out globally yet. Our servers are more like Alphan than we know. On Amazon's infrastructure. All right, I think I'm done. So thanks again everyone for coming. I hope you've heard of something. If you have any questions, we'll be right back.


Hello everyone this is Victor Hernandez. I am a solutions architect at GitLab and I'm here today to provide you a brief overview of GitLab's professional services offerings. Why is this an important topic?  GitLab, congratulations. This is the beginning of an exciting initiative transforming your current tooling ecosystem into an efficient collaborative automated platform, single platform for end-to-end development and operations. Understandably, as simple as GitLab makes the software development process, a transformation of this type requires strategy, careful planning, scheduling, and execution. The journey ahead is far from treacherous, but there are important considerations to be addressed to ensure success. From your perspective, there may be some challenges. We call them perceived challenges. GitLab is obviously your platform of choice going forward, but you may have some of the concerns that we have outlined here and I want to allay those concerns. For example, there may be a lack of subject matter expertise in your organization on the GitLab technology stack. This also may mean lack of adequate resources to promptly stand up GitLab and or to stand up GitLab in a highly available or geographically distributed way. There may be concerns or a large number of uses coming off of legacy systems and about change management of new processes and also there may be a lack of confidence in the ability to deliver on the transformative promise of adopting all of GitLab. The solution is rather simple. Our professional services team will help you align your people and processes to match your transformation initiative. This team is made up of not only GitLab subject matter experts, but seasoned DevOps professionals who have experience in deploying and maintaining both large scale applications as well as creating and teaching best practices throughout the SDLC. As an example, our experts help lead concurrent DevOps transformations, providing direct support to our customer strategic business initiatives. Their experience with other Fortune 500 enterprises allows you to crowdsource your enterprises digital transformation. We provide direct implementation support to ensure your GitLab installation is resilient and secure, for example. We offer migration services to facilitate your transition to GitLab by delivering you with a clean data set to resume operations at once. And our education and specialized training provide education in best practices such as CI CD, version control, metrics and more. With this in mind, let us briefly consider with some detail the specific offerings from a professional services team as it pertains to implementation. During a discovery engagement, our team will consult with you to provide advice such as doing a technical deep dive into your existing infrastructure, networking topology, virtual machine environments, inter data center connectivity and security constraints to provide you advice on how to best implement. They will do scope planning for short and midterm goals to deliver GitLab to your internal customers relative to your enterprise SLAs. As per your existing infrastructure, they will provide recommendations on the installation and configuration, but also best practices for backup, upgrade and maintenance. Our interest is helping you achieve a successful deployment of GitLab also in a highly available mode. In regard to migration services, your organization has existing tools and systems. And as part of that migration, our services include consulting with your technical staff on the best method to migrate source code and your entire SDLC to the GitLab platform. This also includes implementing either a faced or a replacement approach for the migration depending on the comfort level and plan or an adoption. These services will also include importing your projects from GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab or other SCMs into GitLab. And we'll also include, for example, things such as migrating from SVN, converting an SVN repository to Git and GitLab. In all cases, a GitLab adoption plan will be created to outline the goals of the migration and the adoption. Respecting our integration services, our team will work with your technical teams to devise an integration plan for the GitLab implementation. This integration plan considers your existing systems and corporate policies that pertain to authentication services with LDAP, Active Directory, SAML or SSO, integration to JIRA, Jenkins, RedMind, Mattermost and others. There will also likely be custom integrations and specialized use cases to address. And certainly, advice on automating GitLab via the API and webhooks. Education is paramount for ease of adoption. Our team offers the main courses for training outlined below. As an example, GitLab with GitBasics. This course is for users that are new to Git and GitLab. And it works through the basics of Git, committing, branching, tree strategies and so on, as well as how those basics work in the context of both the GitLab user interface and interacting with GitLab through the command line interface. GitLab CI CD training is useful to developers, administrators and DevOps professionals. As the topics covered include using GitLab CI CD with your projects, the GitLab CI YAML file and the various ways in which GitLab can be used as a complete DevOps platform. GitLab admin training is for new GitLab administrators and it covers topics about installing, configuring and maintaining a GitLab instance. Our trained trainer course is a number of workshops designed to enable super users at custom organizations to be able to train their teams on Git and GitLab best practices. There are likely areas of specialized training that have not been clearly outlined in our catalog of offerings. No problem. The expertise of our team of professionals spans technology, business, process and market domains. And we can provide specialized focused options and training to feed your organization's needs. Coming soon is our GitLab certification program. The details of this program are still emerging, but the focus will be on enabling individuals to master different aspects of GitLab usage and application with the goal of providing badging and certification. We have briefly discussed GitLab professional services as a strategic partner for your organization's successful software delivery. Through our implementation, migration and integration services, as well as our programs for education and specialized training, GitLab is invested in your success. Your success is our success. We hope you found value in the presentation and look forward to continue providing you not only the best single solution for modern software development, but also the professional services to implement GitLab successfully. Thank you.


Hi there. Welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Dave, we've been here all day having some great conversations with the VMware partner ecosystem. With real live people. Within 3D. Yeah. People actually sitting down next to us. Still appreciate it even though, you know, we've done a few of these events, but yeah, it feels like things are getting back to normal. It does. You and I were both in the keynote starting this morning, standing room only. We're hearing somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 attendees. We're in Moscone, West, so we're kind of away from a little bit of the main action. But talk to me about some of the things that you heard this morning in the keynote. Some of the announcements from VMware. Did it meet your expectations? Yes. And because I didn't expect, you know, this is very, very different than going to say an AWS event where they're going to launch 300 new shiny objects. This was very much in my mind so far about VMware focusing on its core value proposition and an aspect of its core value proposition. That is the cloud stack and how they are shoring up places in that strategy that needed shoring up like addressing issues with licensing. So you don't have to have separate licensing for on-premises VMware things you're doing. Separate licenses in hyperscale cloud providers for doing those very same things. That looks like something that's going to roll out over time. That's very, very interesting. Something that wasn't really, wasn't mentioned directly but actually one of our guests mentioned it. It's this idea that if you take the VMware cloud provider partner community, VCPP is the inside term for it. There are thousands of VMware partners that deliver VMware cloud software on top of infrastructure all around the globe. If you take that VCPP community as an entity, you can argue that it is the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. If you look at that as a core value proposition and you look at Broadcom acquiring VMware, assuming everything goes through, it isn't just vSphere that is exciting to Broadcom or it shouldn't be at least because you have the entire cloud stack when you look at it from that perspective. I think they were trying to get some of that across today. So they addressed the Broadcom acquisition, obviously. It was the elephant in the room. It was impossible. Well, they had Hocktan stand up at the way. Hocktan stood up, did a wave to the crowd. Because he can't say anything and I've got European approval still, pending, all sorts of stuff. But what we heard today from, I'll say the partner ecosystem, we talked with NetApp, we talked with Pure Storage, we talked with PhoenixNap, others I'd have to look through my notes. Everyone's actually quite positive on the acquisition and what it can mean for the future of VMware. Did you hear the same? Yes, absolutely. And I think partially that's because the partners that we talked to are really close to the core of VMware's value proposition that's never going to go away. So if you're talking about NetApp and AWS partnering with VMware to deliver NetApp storage services into that environment, that's core VMware proposition. It's nowhere near the bleeding edge of what VMware has been doing. So they're going to be bullish. The other thing that's interesting from some of the partners that we've talked to, if you would ask us five or 10 years ago, would those partners be successful today? We might have predicted that they'd all be gone. Right? NetApp, what's going to happen? Well, all storage is going to cloud. Guess what? NetApp's doing pretty darn well with its cloud partnerships and cloud strategy. VMware, old school virtualization on premises. What are they going to do? I'll tell you, I was skeptical when Pat Gelsinger first pursued the VMC strategy with AWS. Hey, it's worked out pretty well and now they have the same capabilities everywhere. So I think that it's interesting to see how solidly positioned some traditional good old fashioned blue gene technologies are, how well positioned they are in this era of cloud and how VMware is such a core part of that. So of course they're happy, yeah. Yeah, we talked, we had AWS, NetApp and VMware on set for a segment and talked about, and you and I were talking about that segment before it went live, just the power of, look what AWS is doing. How many years ago, 10 years ago, would they have been, I'm not going to partner with them in VMware. And now look, it's a core to their business unit. Yeah, no, they wouldn't have acknowledged it. In fact, there was a time when AWS thought that they could maintain their stratospheric rise at the level they needed to while just letting all legacy existing stuff just sort of fade away. They'll just do it on the backs of everything new. They ran headlong into something we call stickiness specifically around the area of VMware. They found that application environments for a variety of really good reasons belong in this context and it's hard to rip them out by the roots.  The reality is there are a lot of really good reasons to maintain that VMware context. They embrace that with VMC. And now I think that it's really interesting, the NetApp announcement is another indication that the world of hyperscale cloud sees VMware as something that is part of the future. That is a very, very long tail. That very, very long tail is clearly what Broadcom is interested in. They don't see this as a flash in the pan. Let's make revenue really quickly. This is about a long time of future, long future. Long future. Well, VMware's coming off solid quarter earnings that just announced beating estimates growing the top line by up to 6%. So there's momentum that they're bringing with them into this acquisition. Yeah, definitely momentum. Big argument over what the strategy might be moving forward in terms of growth versus efficiency. I think that virtualization that includes the traditional VM with a resident full-blown OS is definitely something that is behind us but that we're carrying forward for good reason. The transition from a VMware perspective into the world of Tanzu, critically important. It's critically important that they get that right as they move forward so that net new cloud native applications could be created in the VMware context that way. So it's really going to be interesting to watch over the next couple of years, the direction that this goes, but it's easy to get immersed in the Kool-Aid when you're at an event like this. I try to be as skeptical as possible and I'm actually feeling better about VMware's future than I did before I arrived today. That's interesting. Yeah, no question about it. I think, I mean, there is such a large core that I think it's going to take it into the future a long way. Well, they definitely have a lot of tailwind behind them. The one thing that we didn't get to do today was talk to any customers. We will get to do that tomorrow when I always love hearing from the voice of the customer. We heard voice of the customer stories from the vendors, from VMware, from NANA, from AWS. Right, a little skewed, a little skewed. Exactly. They're all happy, all the customers are happy. And very successful. And very successful. But tomorrow we get to actually crack open and talk with some VMware customers. Obviously, customers in the ecosystem as well. And I want to hear from them what their thoughts are on the acquisition. Yeah, we know. They're not bringing their disgruntled customers. Right. This is my ex-wife's, my ex-mother-in-law and she's here to tell you that she didn't have a good experience. Yeah, that's not going to happen. We're going to hear good stories tomorrow, but it's always nice to hear the stories from the customers themselves. Yeah. I always like doing that. No, it's always, it is informative. It's interesting from the perspective that you hone in on what they care about. Because even if they have sort of an idea of the message that they want to get across in terms of what they're doing, still they'll default to that core of what they really care about. And that's interesting because what the customers really care about is part of that core. And as VMware becomes part of Broadcom potentially, it's going to be all about those things that are important that, you know, that customers find important. And that's exactly what it should be about. You know, every conversation that we had today, probably every conversation, was inclusive of customer outcomes. What outcomes are you helping businesses achieve regardless of industry, especially as we're hopefully coming out of the pandemic, still in a dynamic remote hybrid work environment, but it's all about enabling businesses to achieve their goals. So I always want to understand from VMware's perspective or AWS or NetAppure, what are the goals that your customers are coming to you with and who are you having those conversations with? We also heard today a number of, probably almost everyone that during the pandemic, the conversations are going up the stack. And maybe they've been talking with the director of IT, now it's the VP of engineering, maybe it's the CFO. We're seeing much more strategic initiatives and focus here as customers in every industry have to pivot and have got to get to the cloud. Yeah, I think that's why we work together well, Lisa, because you have the virtual leash and you can yank me back from diving into the technical stuff because I get a pit in my stomach when someone says, oh, technology doesn't matter. It's all about outcomes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Try doing this on technology that doesn't work.  Both are equally important. No, no, no, they are, I know. And it's important that we focus on those things because that's what customers really care about. They do. They really care about the business outcomes. They do. And on theCUBE, we care about those as well. We want to get that message across. I wish they would care more about speeds and feeds, though. It's super interesting. It's like horsepower and torque, and it's all kind of. He does, he gets really excited about that. But the good news is tomorrow we have more opportunities. We've got a great guest lineup tomorrow. Dave and I are going to be talking to them from right here on this set. So we encourage you to come check in for day two of our coverage of VMware Explorer Live from San Francisco. We hope you have a great rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow.


Hey everyone and welcome back to a monthly plan with me. This is my December 2016 spread. I am actually filming this. This is, um, today is actually October 2nd. The reason I am filming this so incredibly early is because I am going to a fun event called the Planner Games and that is going to be in Minneapolis and I'm going to have a fantastical time. However, I need to do some things because, okay, so they have like some actual like games and unfortunately, oh I need some undo, unfortunately I don't have a lot of stickers that kind of match with the theme of some of the like contest entries. So what I'm trying to do today is kind of make up some entries because I said you can like pre-plan some spreads or you could like enter in some spreads from before. Like I'm only going to enter in two separate categories because I just don't have enough stickers for like other things. Um, I don't know, like I'm just not going to, not going to waste my time and energy when I think other people will probably have a better chance of winning those. So anyway, I'm just going to use what I have and I'm not going to go out and like buy anything new, you know what I mean? So anyway, I think I'm going to pull this one up. Yeah, I will pull that one up. These are actually matte removable stickers, which is pretty awesome. I'm actually going to pull this guy up too. This bill sticker, this is from Adriana Piper. I actually had her custom make these for me and I absolutely love them for like the first couple of months. And I just felt like I wasn't really utilizing them anymore and it's just really sad because first of all, they're super cute and then like I'm kind of angry that I like spent like all that money, you know, so anyway, but I'm going to pull this sticker up because I want to do something different in the sidebar. Oh my goodness. Don't break the paper, Emily. All right, let me see if I can just lift this up a little bit until about that point and then I got to pull some more liquid on it as far as I can take it. I just don't want to like ruin the pages. Oh God, it's like so much liquid coming out, but I know, I know it's good. It's fine. It's fine.  It's what I do best, you guys. It's what I do best. And this actual like sticker, I'm not going to reuse because it really only fits the sidebar. I mean, I'm sure I could put it somewhere else, but I mean, if I'm not using it in the sidebar, I really ain't going to use it. So yeah, it's just one of those things. But as your planning style changes and evolves, sometimes you have to just kind of like let go of some things. And yeah, it's, you know, sad that you spent money on it or whatever. But you know, if it wasn't already laid down, I would totally like give it away, but it's already laid down and has my handwriting all over the darn thing. So it's unfortunately going to go somewhere else. All right. Come on. And I'm really not concerned. There is a little spot that's like coming up, but I'm really not too concerned because I am going to, here we go. Perfect. I'm going to actually put washi over that section. So that'll be good. All right. Let's get this baby to dry and then we'll get into the planning. Actually, while I'm doing that, I need to do this side because this little Christmas thing needs to go bye-bye. Say bye, guys. Perfect. All right. That's gone. See, this is already like dry on this side. Oh, it's like really tacky. That's okay. I was on there for a long time, but I am going to put some washi down in just a little bit. So anyway, I was going to tell you the theme for this specific planner spread is like silver based. So I am going to go with like a silver and purple theme just because this is obviously purple.  So these are actually matte removable paper from Coffee Break Planner. I will post them below if you are interested. Oh my goodness. Oh, that feels so weird. It's like so tacky. Charles is on the 16th or Neil, I'm sorry, Neil is on the 16th and Charles is on the 21st. Okay. So in my Erin Condren monthly designer sticker book, I think I'm going to take like a couple of these that are silver and put them in like right around these. I don't know. I don't really know what I'm doing you guys. It's like seriously, I have no idea what is going on. Just because this is just really, I use this mainly for travel for the most part is kind of how I use my monthly view and, you know, it all works out. All right. And then so perfect. All right. I like the way that looks. And then let's see. I have this. This is some like crackle, like silver crackle washi, which I thought would be really cute in here. I'm actually going to be traveling for quite a bit of time. So this will be exciting. I'm going to just mark off my days here. So I'll put it at the bottom of the days and then I'll like write in where I'm going and what I'm doing like up above it. I feel like my lights are oops about to go on me, but we're just going to go with it guys. We're just going to go with it. Where is my sticky note? I think I come, yeah, I come back on the 27th. I'm trying to remember like all the things. It's really difficult in P.S. you guys, like I know this has like no bearing on anything, but it is probably about like 1130 at night and normally by this time I'm like winding down and like washing my face and the dogs already walked and we're just like chilling in bed or whatever. And oh my gosh, I am like trying to get so much done this week so I can, you know, have a nice relaxing vacation. I'm actually going to Boston this upcoming week. So I'm super excited about that. Oh man, what's up with this? Oh, there we go. So I'm like super pumped for Boston. I've never actually been to the New England area ever. So I'm pretty sure that I'll like it. The photos look amazing and I am a huge fan of seafood. So I think it's going to work out really well. And then I get to visit my friend Kristen. So that'll be super exciting. Fun fact, Kristen actually has two Shiba Inus. So she's got like double trouble. I mean, I've only got one trouble and it's intense sometimes. So yeah, okay, so that is done. All right, let me do this side because honestly, like this is like so tacky right now. I think we need a moment with that situation. Uh-oh, one of my lights just went off. Sorry, you guys, that means my other light's going to go off soon. I don't like it when it does that. So what I'm going to do is see if I can get this whole thing to be lined and washy. And if the bottom's not perfect, that's okay. I can like always change it up a little bit too. Oh, I think if the other light goes, I'm going to have to stop. I don't want to stop. Can't stop, won't stop, right? Miley or whoever said that? I don't even know who said that. There is like a little section in the center that isn't going to be covered, but I think I have a solution to that problem. I'll address in a moment. Kind of like the way that looks so far. All right. I think the way I'm going to address this is to put a little strip down the center as well. Okay, I am going to go with the lavender. I'm going to put it over here so you guys can see it a little bit better. I so apologize for the light going out, you guys. I've actually filmed like three... Well, this is my third video since I've been home. So I think that's the problem. I got a little overzealous and all of them require lights today. This almost looks like a road or something. Oh, I don't like that it's like coming up. That's irritating. Come on. How can I put this down a little bit easier? Okay. So I am going to try something new. This is a Scotch repositionable adhesive roller. I actually got this a while back, but I'm just going to put a strip all the way down and then see if I can maybe mark it like take it off with my thumb if I just apply enough pressure. So maybe this will give us a little bit more tackiness that it needs to just stay down. Oh, I think this might actually work. Maybe. I think I might need some stickers holding it down, but this might actually do the trick. I think this might actually be good. All right. So now I'm just going to go like this and see if I can get like a little extra adhesive off. Oh, yeah. This is like totally working. Oh, yay. Frustrated Emily is now not a frustrated Emily. Okay. So that worked. Oh, my fingers are really sticky now. Let's do this little airline ticket thing. Okay. So I'm going to put this on the 17th. I don't think I'm actually going to write anything in actually because it's just kind of like, well, duh, I'm leaving, you know? Like I'm not doing anything else on the 17th. I am leaving on a jet plane and I will be back later. If anyone's interested, these little stickers, darn it, I always do this wrong, are from Emily Henry. I got them quite a while ago. All right. I laid that down like so crooked. I know it probably doesn't look crooked to you, but these, this specific planner has these nice little guidelines. So I know when I'm messing up, which is kind of nice and also kind of like irritating too. So I think I'm just going to like use the little guideline. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's better. Also, this keeps coming up. So I think I'm just going to put this like repositionable stuff down over here too. This was like the first tail of that washy. So I think that's, that's the problem was there. All right. And then my other little airline ticket will go up here coming back on the 27th. I'm coming back actually like super early in the morning and then like kind of the bummer part is that I got to go to work right afterwards because, you know, I said I would. So there you go. Okay. And then I have some stickers that I want to put down. These are some like little anchor stickers and I'm actually going to be going to Florida. So I'm going to put these down. Oops. Oh my goodness. And they're like a clear backing. They're from I think stick abilities is what it said on there. So I put that right there. Yeah, maybe I'll put it like right there. That looks cute. So I don't know just kind of to like signify Florida, I guess. And then I have these guys. These are the Mrs. Grossman's and let's see here. These are let's get you out of there.  And I might as well just put a couple snowflakes on this little bad boy over here. I don't really mind if it goes over a little bit because like I said before, I really only use this for travel and birthdays. Like I don't really use this for much else, honestly. Okay, so that is done. All right. How am I going to mark off like actual Christmas? Do I need to do anything? I don't know. I think I'm going to use this little sticker from the sticker book. It says Mary and Bright on the 25th just because it's like Christmas and most people celebrate Christmas on the 25th. And then I think on the 24th, it's like super sticky.  That's a day that we typically will go to my aunt's place. I know she's selling her house right now. So I don't know if we're actually going there this year or not. But we shall see. Actually, this is not the right size for this, but you know what? We are going to just go with it because I don't want this like sticky and tackiness. And it kind of like bleeds into the 31st, which is just fine because that's kind of like the thing, you know, like it's supposed to be a fun night. I won't be doing anything, but it's supposed to be a good time. All right. Then I'm going to put in more of these little like planes right here because why not? They're cute. They're very, very cute. I still don't know what to do on the right-hand side, but my other like light is just dying as well. So I think this is going to be it for my December spread. Let me get you guys center here. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I know it was kind of janky with this light completely like shutting off, but I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I just had way too much stuff to do today, but we powered through and thank you guys so much for hanging out until the end with me. If you have any questions, feel free to post them below and I will get back to you. Feel free to thumbs up the video if you liked it and then also subscribe. I'm here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for you guys. I hope you all are having a fantastic day and I will talk to you all in my next video. Bye, guys.


So, good morning everyone and today we will talk about one very interesting alkaloid called starosporine as you can see. So, this is the structure of starosporine actually originally they assign the enantiomer of starosporine as the structure of starosporine. It was isolated from streptomyces starosporis by Omura and colleagues in 1977 and if you look at this molecule it is a very interesting combination of 3 important substructures one obviously you can see this is a sugar unit ok. Then you have 2 indoles ok one here one on the left hand side. So, 2 indole mites and then sugar in the bottom then you have an isoindolinone ok. So, these 2 indoles are connected to isoindolinone on the northern hemisphere and sugar portion in the southern hemisphere ok. So, this is a very very interesting and challenging alkaloid and it also showed very interesting biological activities. For example, it showed protein kinase C inhibition activity at very low concentration a nanomolar concentration it showed activity and because of that it was expected that it could be a potential anti proliferative agent. And the first total synthesis of starosporine was reported by Dynashevsky and here the major synthetic challenge when you look at this molecule was the connecting these 2 indoles ok the 2 indoles to the sugar portion ok. So, you have to connect in such a way that you have to get only the required enantiomer that has been the major challenge and this all these challenges in addition to this were overcome by Dynashevsky in his total synthesis and his retro synthesis actually started by introducing a carbonyl group here ok. So, later he thought it can be selectively reduced and when they reduce it may be possible to make both the starosporine as well as the other epimer and he also connected this oxygen and nitrogen by a carbonyl group. So, it is cyclic carbamate. So, this is a precursor while making starosporine in the total synthesis of Dynashevsky that was further disconnected as you can see clearly what he has done is he has removed this Cn bond ok. So, this can be made using iodo. So, once you make iodonium ion here ok on the double bond then the nitrogen can open the iodonium ion to form a Cn bond as well as the CH2i that i can be easily removed with tributyl tin hydride and this as you can see you have a hydroxyl group that is because why that hydroxyl group is required you start with glucose ok. So, that is why the hydroxyl group is there and also you can see here now the 2 indole portions can be clearly seen and this can be cyclized through a combination of electrocyclic reaction followed by aromatization ok and this can be easily made from these 2 fragments one is from bisindole mighty the other one is derived from the sugar mighty basically it is derived from glucose ok. Now let us see how he started his synthesis and how overall he accomplished the total synthesis of starosporine. He started with this di bromomiliumide ok and then he protected this nitrogen as n-bomb ok by treating with benzyloxymethyl chloride and base then he did 2 successive 1, 4 addition followed by elimination first with this 3 indolile magnesium bromide. So, the addition of 3 indolile magnesium bromide took place in a 1, 4 fashion while coming back the bromide will go then that NH was protected as SEM ok by treating with sodium hydride and SEM chloride. Now the second 1, 4 addition and elimination was done with another indole 3 magnesium bromide. So, now you can see the 2 indole moieties are attached to the meliumide ok. So, what needs to be done now you have to add the sugar unit in the southern side. So, before that you have to prepare the sugar unit. So, he started with L-glucose opposite to the one which is commercially available. So, the L-glucose was treated with carbonyl diamethazole to form this cyclic thiocarbonate ok. So, there is a 1, 2 diol and then when you treat with CDI that is carbonyl diamethazole it can form the cyclic thiocarbonate. The reason for making this cyclic thiocarbonate is to remove these 2 hydroxyl groups to introduce a double bond. So, that was easily done when you treat with a trimethyl phosphate. So, the trimethyl phosphate or triethyl phosphate is known to do this job. So, you could easily introduce the double bond ok. So, this is called L-glucol ok that was a starting material in fact ok. The L-glucol once you have the primary alcohol can be easily selectively protected as tip seether by treating with sodium iodide and tips chloride. Then you have the 2 secondary hydroxyl groups. This upon deprotonation with sodium iodide followed by addition of trichloroacetamide trial it forms trichloroacetamide ok. Then you treat it with BF3 etherates. So, when you treat this with BF3 etherate what happens you can see the Lewis acid can coordinate with this nitrogen then the lone pair on the oxygen of L-glucol can come and then expel this trichloroacetamide. So, that will give you this intermediate ok. Now, this nitrogen can utilize the positive charge on the oxygen. So, you get a phi Hombard right ok and it also comes from the same beta side. Now, if you hydrolyze this just if you hydrolyze this you will get hydroxyl group and this side the amide ok. Then the next step is you simply treat with base ok. If you treat with bases like sodium iodide what will happen it will form anion here that will intramolecularly attack the carbonyl group and CCl3- which is a good leaving group. So, that will lead to the formation of the carbamate ok. Once the cyclic carbamate is there then this NH is protected as bound. So, by treating with sodium hydrate and benzyloxy methylchloride ok. Now, the primary hydroxyl group which was protected as tips can be released. So, that was done easily by treating with fluoride source like Tbuff. Then you protect the same primary alcohol with a sturdy protecting group like paramethoxybenzyl group ok. Then you have to epoxidize this double bond ok. This was done with dimethyl dioxidane. So, when they did they got a mixture of these two epoxides where the required one that is A was the major isomer. So, he took both the epoxide ok and then treated with the bisyndole which he has already synthesized. So, now you take this compound and then treat with sodium hydride. So, it forms the N minus and that opens the epoxide. So, when it opens the epoxide you get this as the major product. So, I have written the sugar unit with the standard chair like conformation ok. So, once you have this the next step is to remove the hydroxyl group ok. So, now once you formed the Cn bond using this epoxide opening next the hydroxyl group is normally removed via xanthate formation. So, it was treated with thioposgene to get the half ester and this further addition of pentafluorofenol gives this intermediate ok. This is a treatment with tributylinhydride and it undergoes elimination of the whole group to give a CH2 at that carbon basically you have removed the hydroxyl group there ok. Now, what is the next step? You have to connect the second indole ring with this sugar unit ok. So, the first step is to remove the PMB ok. So, because basically you want to convert that into CH2i. So, first remove the PMB group with DDQ to get the primary alcohol. So, once you have the primary alcohol then remove the SEM using Tbuff to get the NH then you treat with photochemical condition ok. Then you subject this compound under photochemical condition in the presence of catalytic iodine. Why catalytic iodine and aerobic condition? This reaction should be done because once you do this electrocyclic ring closure of this hexatriene you get a cyclohexadiene ok. This was oxidized with catalytic amount of iodine under aerobic condition to get this aromatic ring ok. So, now you can see the top portion is done ok. You attached this indole with millimide. Now, you have to connect these two carbons. So, these two atoms nitrogen and carbon. So, how we did? So, you converted the primary alcohol to CH2i then treated with base. So, the base underwent elimination of HI to form the corresponding enol ether ok. So, once you have this enol ether, it is a treatment with iodine and bases like potassium tertributoxide. First, iodonium ion will form then this N- will attack and open the iodonium ion to give the CH2i. At the same time you can see the other indole also is attached to the sugar units. So, what is left? Now, the iodide should be removed to have the methyl group. So, that was done with tributyltin hydride. So, you can see this is the structure which you would have seen in star sporing. Now, remove the iodide using tributyltin hydride to get the methyl group ok. So, now what is to be done? You have to remove this carbonyl and also remove one of this carbonyl and clear the bomb group ok. So, these are the things he has to do to complete the total synthesis of star spore ok. First, he has tried the hydrogen aliases. So, hydrogen aliases will remove both bomb group ok. So, to get this carbomate as well as the melimide, then you selectively protect the carbomate nitrogen as N-bock. Then you do protect the melimide nitrogen as N-bock by treating with sodium hydride and benzyloxymethyl chloride ok. Now, you have to cleave or remove this carbonyl group. So, that can be done by treating with CCM carbonate and methanol. So, you get an amino alcohol and the amine is protected as bock. What is to be done? The NH should be made as N-H-Me. So, that means the bock should be removed and methylation should be done. So, this was done by treating with sodium hydride and dimethyl sulfide to introduce the methyl group. After introducing the methyl group, then hydrogen aliases removed the bomb group. And if you treat with TFA, trifluoracetic acid is known to remove the tertiary-butyl oxycarbonyl group that is the bock group. So, the bock group has removed and you have the NH-Me and OM-Me. So, only one thing is left that is selectively this carbonyl should be converted into CH2. To complete the total synthesis. So, what he did? So, he reduced with sodium borohydride. So, it was known earlier similar compounds when you reduce sodium borohydride, one of the carbonyl groups can be reduced to corresponding alcohol, alcohol in the sense CHOH which we can call it as amidol ok. But what he got was he got a mixture of both carbonyls get decreased in one is to one ratio, there is no selectivity. Nevertheless, he moved ahead and further treatment with phenyl selenine in the presence of catalytic amount of toluene sulfonic acid, para-toluene sulfonic acid, he could cleave this COH bond and replace with hydrogen. So, that means he got a mixture of the naturally occurring starosporine plus its other isomer in one is to one ratio. So, this is how he completed the total synthesis of starosporine and as I said he started with L-glucol for the glucoside fragment and the top fragment he started with dibromo N-protected melimide. Then he attached the two indole units through one-four addition followed by elimination. Then the next key reaction which he used was the electrocyclic ring closure followed by aromatization to construct the central aromatic ring. Overall, he took about 28 steps starting from L-glucol and yield was close to 0.5 percent. Nevertheless, this was one of the very good total synthesis on an alkaloid which is quite complex. However, as the number of steps were more there are many groups which were interested in the total synthesis of starosporine to improve as well as reduce the number of steps. So, one such report came from John Boott's group that was reported a year after Dainishevsky's report on the total synthesis of starosporine and here he took only 13 steps and he used few interesting domino reactions. So, his retro synthesis was basically the first retro synthesis was to remove the N-edge. So, that can be introduced by reductive ammunition and the second retro synthesis was the ring expansion reaction. That is, you start with the 5-ambered that is the sugar unit you start with the 5-ambered then you do a ring expansion to get the 6-ambered ring and this can be obtained by an acid-catalyzed cyclization of bisindole with this 5-ambered compound. And here this 5-ambered compound that 5-ambered highly substituted furonose was made from this diosat compound which is made from methyl acetoacetate. So, commercially available methyl acetoacetate which upon diosat transfer you get this compound and that is the starting material for making this 5-ambered and this was made from this glycinester. So, let us see how he has done the total synthesis. First the substituted furonose potion was prepared from this diosat compound on treatment with this chiral allylic alcohol and dirodium tetracity followed by treatment with Lewis acid like BF33. So, what happens as you know first it forms a rhodium carbonate and since you have allylic alcohol chiral allylic alcohol. So, that immediately attacks the rhodium carbonate carbon. So, it forms a negative charge. So, that undergoes you know a rearrangement to give this. So, I will leave it for few seconds to understand this mechanism. So, he could get this in 2 steps and yield is quite high 77% for such interesting rearrangement. Next he wasanalyzed the internal double bond to get aldehyde followed by treatment with para toluene sulphonic acid and methanol. So, what happens this is protonated then methanol attacks this carbon and this attacks this carbon. So, that is how he got this furonose compound. So, the furonose compound is easy then the other component that is bisyndolmite he started from the protected glycine and then treated with mono ester of malonic acid. So, he coupled this NH with this carboxylic acid using dicyclohexane carbodimide. So, once this amide was formed his next step was to treat with sodium ethoxide and ethanol. So, sodium ethoxide methanol will generate an anion here that will add to intramolecularly to the ester and this OET will come out okay. So, this is what you get after this sodium ethoxide ethanol treatment. Now, if you treat with acetonitrile and reflex it if you look at this ester. So, this is nothing but beta keto ester okay. So, that undergoes decarboxylation. So, that will give you a carbonyl group here and this enol. Then treatment with mesyl azide and base one can introduce this diosogru. So, standard method if you have a keto ester or keto amide or 1, 3 diketone you can introduce the diosogru by treating with tosyl or mesyl azide in the presence of base. So, once you have this take this compound and then treat with bisindo okay in the presence of diodium tetra acetate. So, that gives first you know from here it goes and then attacks here and then it forms an enol then that undergoes the electrocyclicization reaction and followed by elimination gives the corresponding that northern hemisphere bisindole moiety okay. So, this bisindole moiety is ready and the other side the glycoside that is the furonous portion also is ready now he has to connect this bisindole with this furonous moiety okay. So, what he did? He took both and then treated with camphor sulfonic acid. What he got was the five ombre ring once you treat with camphor sulfonic acid it protonates and then it comes out. So, that leads to the formation of auxonium ion okay. Now, since you have another lone pair on the oxygen at adjacent carbon. So, this can open so that will give you a methyl ketone and then aldehyde the nitrogen intermolecularly attacks to give this compound in the ratio 2 is to 1. Why 2 is to 1? You look at this carefully okay because both indoles can attack okay that is why you get this mixture. So, you take this compound and treat with again reflects it. So, then nitrogen can attack the carbonyl group okay nitrogen can attack the carbonyl group that OH can attack. So, you get the five ombre ring okay. So, again in the same ratio 2 is to 1. So, this is what you need if you look at this structure. So, this is what you need for the total synthesis of starosporic. So, you take this compound then treat with lithium borohydrate. So, lithium borohydrate selectively reduces ester in the presence of lactam. So, you get primary alcohol without touching the lactam. Then you take this primary alcohol and carry out morphotoxidation. So, morphotoxidation is nothing but you take an alcohol and treat with DMSO and DCC. So, you oxidize the primary alcohol to aldehyde then you treat with BF3 ethyrate. So, BF3 ethyrate it triggers a rearrangement. What happens now the lone pair comes like this and this bond migrates okay. So, that is more nucleophilic is not it that bond migrates when that bond migrates you get this 6-mumbered and this hydroxyl originally here it becomes ketone that aldehyde becomes lactam. This highly stereo selective rearrangement gives the 6-mumbered that is the pyronose ring okay. So, what is to be done now you have to reduce the ketone not simply reduce the ketone you have to treat with nitrogen and then reduce it that means you have to do a reductive amination okay. So, that was done by treating with hydroxyl amine first you get aldehyde then the aldehyde was methylated then he did hydrogenation with Adams capitalist. So, you got correctly you got directly the amine then that amine was treated with this particular reagent here what happens this NH2 attacks this carbonyl and acetate goes out. So, basically you get NHCHO the NHCHO can be in situ reduced with borane dimethyl sulfide to form NHCH3 okay. So, that leaves only the removal of this dimethoxybenzyl group once you remove the dimethoxybenzyl group that will give starosporine. So, the dimethoxybenzyl group was removed by treating with trifluoroacetic acid. So, that gave that natural product starosporine. So, if you look at the total synthesis of starosporine reported by John Wood. So, he accomplished it in 13 steps with an overall yield of close to 10 percent which is significantly higher than the first total synthesis reported by Tanisher. And second thing is if you look at this synthesis it involved two times rearrangement first when you did the dirodium tetra acetate catalyzed rearrangement okay. The second rearrangement was when you had hydroxy aldehyde this upon treatment with Lewis acid the furonose ring was converted into the pyronose ring. So, this synthesis involved these two rearrangements as key reaction to complete the total synthesis okay. So, with this we completed the total synthesis of starosporine using two different strategies one reported by Tanisher ski the other one reported by John Wood okay. So, we will see you in the next class okay. Thank you.


Little five-year-olds bounce in the classroom door and within two to three weeks maximum, they're in an ability group where they're labelled and for the rest of their school life, pretty much, they remain in those ability groups. It sets them up for either achievement or failure right through schooling. The teacher expectation project was based around my research on high expectation teachers where I identified particular practices and beliefs of high expectation teachers that differed from those of other teachers. High expectation teachers are those who have high expectations for everybody in their class and they did things like not ability grouping, for example. They used flexible kinds of grouping. They created a very warm classroom climate so that it became like a little community where everyone worked together and they set very clear learning goals with their students and their children knew exactly where they were and where they were going next but they didn't make ability salient in the classroom day after day. Interestingly, New Zealand has the highest grouping rate of any OECD country and we also have the highest disparity between our highest and our lowest achievers. I don't think that's coincidence. I applied for a Marsden fast start grant and I was very fortunate to actually win it. We did an experimental study where we randomly assigned teachers to either the intervention group or the control group and then the intervention group were trained in the practices of high expectation teachers and they also learnt about verbal versus non-verbal behaviour. Why did you not bring your homework in? Why did you not bring your homework in? This one? He's really happy. He's probably praising. He's like, it's the morning. He's like, come on. You know better. Yeah, it's like that. He's clearly angry. He's cursing. He's telling off somebody. He's really angry. If a teacher expects you to do well, she pushes you and gives you work that's higher than your age. She doesn't do anything negative, nothing like that. It's everything positive to make you feel better. It definitely makes me feel more confident. She would let me do my best and she'll show me my gaps so I can work on it. Being part of the teacher expectation project was actually a real blessing. Lots of things just stuck with me. For example, the fact that about 30% of students are actually in the wrong group. They are not being assessed correctly or for whatever reason. Our grouping is entrenched in New Zealand, particularly in reading and interestingly, we got the largest effects in maths. The students in the intervention group gained 28% above what the control group gained over just one year. That's more than a whole-terms learning in one year. And it was mostly, I think, because teachers were more able to go away from ability grouping in maths because it's not quite as entrenched. Whereas in reading, they really struggled. Teachers in New Zealand just don't know how to teach reading without students being in ability groups. I've been developing a proposal for a project that I'm calling the HITE project which is high teacher expectation. We thought that we would train the mentor teachers rather than the teachers themselves because those are the management people who can then work with their teachers to embed the practices of high expectation teachers. When we had senior management people involved, their students did even better than in schools where management didn't really take an interest. The more that teachers engaged in the practices of high expectation teachers, the greater were the gains for their students.