Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for another episode of Kondo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura and I'm your host today for this episode and we're going to be talking about Kondo documents and how you get them and what's the process and what are issues relating to getting the documents and I have with you as my guest today, Rellene Tenno, she's the treasurer of the White Council of Community Associations and their program director. Thank you for joining me Rellene. Well thank you for having me again here Jane. Yeah we're gonna have to make this a Rellene and Jane show. Okay let's talk about condominium documents. My favorite subject. Yeah I know that's why you're here. And you know so what is it with condo documents? I mean this just seems you know it seems like when I go to the legislature every year there's always a bill regarding condo documents and a few years ago Senator Ross Baker you know and she's the one who years all the condo she finally put together this statute and she put it and it's one it's 514b 154 and it talks about all of the documents throughout the chapter and so it's in one place. So if anybody wants to know what documents you you can get from your condominium and how you get them and what you have to do you go to 514b 154 and that's where she put them because she said she was really tired of having to deal with this in every year and there are different sections of the statute. Yeah all over the place and so now they are in all in one place. Yeah that's the only place you have you you have to go and you can tell you know it tells you about any document that you could possibly want. So I guess the issue is so what kind of documents can an owner get from the association? Almost essentially everything but there's some that take time to research and get so you're gonna have to pay the fees to for someone in the managing agent to get those fees and to get those documents for you or to look them up.  Well first thing I would go to is to the RICO website and pull up the older affidavit in order to get the docs because you have to get it notarized saying that you're not gonna you know use it for erroneous purposes you're using it just for yourself and get it notarized and then there's another document that they have also on the site that has kind of a list of common documents that you can get or that's available or that's used by the managing agents. You mentioned RICO. What is RICO? Regulated Industries Complaints. Complaint Office. Yeah. Complaint Office. And this is part of the state of Hawaii. Part of DCCA. Right. And so if anybody wanted to go you can just Google RICO, R-I-C-O. Correct.  Right. And then just go to the real estate condominium section and there's a lot of tutorials that they have there for condos a lot. They even have a little pamphlet regarding condominium documents that should be read first before you take that that task on. Right. And I guess the reason why this is such a you know a reoccurring topic is that you know there are owners who always want information things like you know and you know I guess the reason it comes up is you know they think that the board is spending too much money or they're hiding something you know and I always tell people you need to at least go to the board meetings every once in a while not just once a year not just to the annual meeting I mean go like once a quarter or every other month you know I know it takes a it's like about an hour two hours out of a month right but they should make an attempt to really go to some of the board meetings so they know what's going on and the minutes if there's a general manager or resident manager hopefully they have a copy of the of the approved minutes that's available for distribution or to be read because right now and you know I think with the technology you have a lot of associations with websites right right and the websites typically have your governing documents that's got your declaration and all the amendments and the bylaws and all those amendments those are the best websites right and then they have the house rules and if you have a building committee then they may have the specs for the right if you want to put in you know remove the windows in your lanai or move your lanai out right or enclosure lanai or you want to put in wood floors you you need to know what specs and what what are the requirements so there might be a website that might be one of the items that are on your website so yeah I guess for the for you know for people who are listening you know you know you need to see if your association's got a website and and a lot of the management companies they give it for free right but you just need the association just needs to designate somebody in the building who's going to be like the webmaster webmaster download the document it's really easy to upload documents into a website right easy and so so that would be the first and that would probably be the easiest because then you can do things that your leisure you don't have to pay a fee to get copies because you can look at them on your computer or your device right and you know so that would be the the best thing so the first thing you do is to see if your your association has a website and go on there and look for the documents but assume okay let's say your association doesn't have a website then you might want to go to your resident manager because a resident manager has certain documents like your declaration and the bylaws and the house rules and certain policies and they even might have a book a binder with all the minutes in it correct right and and so you can look at it for free right right you just have to you know go down and and make you know make nice with the site manager or the staff and you know ask for ask for but let's say you don't have a website and you don't have a site manager with stuff in his office now where do you go now you have to go the managing agents yeah the property manager or managing agent to request the documents that you want but you should probably be pretty pretty precise as to like which minutes you want to look at because again I mean it's going to take them time to pull it up hopefully it's current ones not like ten years ago stuff and if you want to copy there it's there's a charge to get a copy set to you right and and so so you know and and under the statute it says that you know if you designate that you want it email or fax to you they can do that and that way you don't pay the copying charges right right you might have to pay an administrative fee for the you know for the to pay for the time for the person on the other side right who's actually looking for the document taking it out of wherever it's stored walking it over to the fax machine or the computer or the scanner so they can scan it uploaded and send it off to you right you pay you have and and under the statute they have to the association has to tell you before you they send you the documents that you need to pay and they have to give you an estimate right and in other words it cannot be a surprise if they can't send you the documents and say oh by the way here's this bill for a million dollars right you know they can't do that yeah and it's besides the administrative if they sent you a printed copy it's a dollar per page but don't forget front and back is two dollars right so it's not just one single piece of paper printing double-sided would be two dollars and you know so that means you can you know you can get minutes you can get financials you can get your the accounts receivables payables you can get a list of delinquencies that are over 90 days and you know and the reason why they make you sign the declaration or the affidavit it's for some documents the statute says you have to sign an affidavit saying that you're asking for the information in good faith and and and not for and for purposes of supporting the association or the members and not to harm anyone and I guess talking about the delinquency list right that you know that is a concern for some board members and you know and I guess for some unit owners from some members I mean if you're delinquent you you really don't want you know anybody giving your name out yeah you don't want it to be public knowledge public shaming you know and so you know so that's why you're you're required to file me sir do the affidavit because you're basically told you know this is private you know this is information and yes if you're an owner you want to know who's not paying their maintenance fees that's fine but it once you get that information it's not you know you should not be running out and posting it on the bulletin board telling your neighbors that or scanning it sending it to you know half the people and I mean that that's that's really terrible I mean yeah yeah if you're concerned about you know who's not paying their maintenance fees I mean and then you could go to the meeting and say tell and ask the board what steps are you taking to collect these you know because if they're not doing their job to collect the maintenance fees that means you the owner are going to get your your maintenance fees may go up next year right right right right so that's why there's a legitimate reason why people want to see a delinquents delinquent list but you know by the same token you don't want to give it to people who are going to use it to shame people and to put this information out I mean because that's not the purpose of giving out the information right and you don't want to approach that person that's delinquent and make it known that you know that they're delinquent I mean that's that's really so so hurtful yeah so malicious right and that's the concern with providing this information but under the statute any delinquency that's over 90 days that can be given to unit owners who sign that affidavit who say they're asking for the information good faith and they're not going to use it to harm the association or the members and that and and and so that that's one of the reasons why and you know I guess another reason is and you know and I've heard that these things happen like somebody wants the managing the managing agents contract and and in fact request is made to me you know as board president from our managing agent and I said sure but make sure you you you'd redact any privacy information because we you know any private phone numbers or a home address or a private email because we do not want these employees harassed employees and even owners right the the mailing list if it has their emails and phone numbers they haven't given given consent they have to give consent to have that shared and so that needs to stay off the distribution right list you know you're only entitled to their name and address that and unit number that's it right and you know so you know we have to be really careful about and that's the reason for the affidavit it's not because we're trying to make it harder to you know we just want to make sure that people when they come and ask for information and yeah maybe they're mad at the at the site manager or maybe at the guy who does the the landscaping and wants to see what he's getting paid and then they're going to go out and say oh you're getting paid too much that's not the hope that's not the reason why this information is disclosed and and so you know though the board you know it has to take steps to make sure that when they give out the information that it's not used improperly right I mean if you if you're an owner and you know because you're you're paying maintenance fees you're entitled to this information but you know we don't want to give it to you if you're going to use it to somehow beat up on these people right because you somehow don't like them or you don't like what how they're doing their jobs and there's a whole process for that you know if you if you're unhappy about somebody you know you have to make your frustration or your unhappiness known to the management right you don't do it to the employees you can do it to the managing agent if it's Hawaiian or associate or touch tone you know you find out who your property manager is and you tell them but you don't go and ask for information with the intent that you're going to make this person miserable right and sometimes when it comes to the employees wanting to know what they get paid or what you know sometimes the the homeowner they come home but they never see anybody around but it doesn't mean that they were working from nine to five when you were gone right you know they're doing a bunch of other stuff so just because when you come home you don't see them doesn't mean that they're sitting in their their unit all day in their air conditioning and not doing anything so some people have to really think hard before they start getting on that bandwagon that the guy's not doing his job you know okay well you know why don't we just take a break now and then we'll talk more about the process and and and what you can do if somehow you can't get the documents or if the association stonewalls and ignore your request uh and you know so we'll get back and talk about those issues after the break thanks to our think-tech underwriters and grand tours the atherton family foundation carol monlie and the friends of think-tech the center for microbial oceanography research and education collateral analytics the cook foundation dwayne chorizo the hawaii community foundation the hawaii council of associations of apartment owners hawaii energy the hawaii energy policy forum hawaii an electric company integrated security technologies galen ho of b a e systems kamehameha schools m w group the schilder family foundation the sydney stern memorial trust volo foundation yuriko j suki mura thanks so much to you all okay welcome back to another episode of condo insider and we're talking to really internal today and we're talking about association documents and how you can get them and or the information that's all of them and so we were talking you know basically about you know the the various kinds of documents that you could get and uh that includes financials and general lechers and insurance policies and contracts and delinquent delinquencies and you can also get the election stuff right the ballots and the proxies and so if you're unhappy after the election you can ask the association you you need to make your request so within 30 days right of the election right and and so um so that means that if you think some something some hanky panky went on or some shenanigans i mean you can get the ballots you can get the um all the tallies all the tally sheets right all the certified of the sign-in sheets right of the people who showed up and the actual proxies and the actual proxies and and now with this uh there was a new law last year that extended the time for the associations uh to uh dispose of all these election documents right used to be 30 days and and if somebody made a request then you had to hold them for 60 days but now with the new statute you got to hold them for 90 days so that means that you have 90 days after an election to actually challenge right and then you can you have to make a request to the managing agent and you you uh then you go down and you know you can take a look at all these documents and you can get copies and the same rules apply if you know you you have to pay reasonable amount for the copies that you're getting and you have to pay for administrative services if somebody has to be there to kind of assist in providing you with the documents right right so and you know so basically how long does the uh does the association have once a request is made to turn over the documents to you they have 30 days to respond okay and what happens if they don't what if nothing happens what what do you do okay so if they don't respond to you after 30 days then you do a follow-up request and you really have to be patient through this process because getting mad and you know is not going to help so you really have to be patient and diligent so um you do a second request and then if that doesn't get a response you do a third request and that you look at the bottom of the RICO complaint form it also explained that you have to explain to them what efforts you made to get it resolved so the more efforts you show to get it resolved that's more power in on in your hat versus the other people that have never even responded so also every managing agent has to have a real estate license so there's a broker in charge or and a principal broker so if even after the third response or even on a third response i you know you could send one to the managing agent that you did and then send another one to the broker in charge and hopefully that will get a response because when you make a RICO complaint it's against the person's real estate license so hopefully they'll be able to respond and get the ball rolling okay and then so so RICO is a state agency and so do they do this for free or do you have to pay them it's part of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs so it's a it's kind of a free thing but you have to make you have to do a lot of work but RICO is kind of backlogged so so you have to really make use that time to make all these we create repeated requests you know if they don't comply within 30 days do another one or you know but you have to just keep your calendar mark your calendar with all the days okay and basically you're doing a paper trail right so that when you get to RICO you can show them that on this date I sent a letter and they never responded 30 days later here's my second letter and and then what does RICO do well then after you do the complaint then they will and you show the evidence and make sure you do that little green card the return receipt thing then they will start to do their investigation as to why it's never been responded to as per statute and so so does that usually end up with the association or the managing agent turning over the records hopefully so okay but let's say let's say in this scenario you've you know you've made three requests to the association and they've not responded you now make a RICO complaint and they asked for a response and then they don't respond what do you do you still don't have your records yeah what do you do now uh that's a good one I'm I really don't know I really don't know I mean what would you recommend right now I mean right now under the statute you can do mediation or yeah that's true yeah you can request for mediation so you would have to put the association on notice that you're going to request mediation and you want to do evative mediation okay because that's subsidized right yes the other one the facilitative mediation just tries to bring the two parties together right and but the evative mediation will actually give you a written opinion as to whether or not you're right or wrong it's is that binding it's it's not binding but if if you get a letter that says that the association is wrong then that would give you more support if you then because the final the final step is you'd have to follow a lawsuit right it becomes a civil suit right a lawsuit for failure to comply with the statute because that's what that's what you know it boils after this is part of the law the law says shall you will comply within 30 days and shall is that legal term yeah legal to yeah have to that you have to it's mandatory and and that means that you know after all the attempts that you and you made then uh and you know by the time you get to this the circuit court and you have this paper trail of all you went and made three requests to the association then you went and did the RICO complaint and then the RICO complaint was served on that and they still didn't comply and then you went and did evative mediation and you get an opinion that says uh the the the association is in violation of the statute so now you go to the court and say okay now I want an order I mean because I you know I I I've got this opinion and I you know the law says they have to do it and I want now on order and you know it's terrible that you would have to go all that to that to those lengths yeah and I hope you have good reserves to pay for attorney fees yeah because you know you're really you're really using money that you need to use for your repair and maintenance for attorney fees when it's not necessary right this is one of those times when you know you really shouldn't be spending legal fees to defend against claims of owners who want records but the statute where and they're very particular they're they're they're listed in 514 b154 they're listed they're listed in there it says minutes it says financial statements accounts payable accounts receivable contracts insurance policies delinquencies you know over 90 days ballots proxies a sign-in list I mean so we're talking about we're not talking about every yeah I mean all the documents associated with with a condo right you can get invoices right you know it's listed in the statute and that's why you know I think that's why the legislatures get very frustrated when people come and say we can't get documents from the association and answer is why not there's a statute that says you will turn over in 30 days and and and you know so that's why you know they kind of roll their eyes and and and they kind of yell at us I I I can recall Ros Baker yelling at us saying why why is this happening every year how come these I mean it's so easy to comply and we make a rule and it says shall and it says 30 days and it lists all the documents that have to be turned over and it says that you know the association can collect reasonable charges for copying and administrative existence we really make it so specific and it's like why isn't it happening you know it kind of after the board has to realize that it's an open forum I mean you're using everybody's money that goes into this pot and you're managing it so they're entitled to know you know just like husband and wife relationship and usually the sometimes the wife is the one paying all the bills if the husband asks a question I mean you know all she has to do is say hey it went for this this miss you know I mean in theory I would hope that she would say it's none of your business you know but you know everyone's entitled to see where their money is spent and I really think people need to really make sure that they keep their packet that they get at the end of every year that has all their coupons for the following year because that has your insurance it has your budget the reserves and all that kind of stuff so you need to keep that so you can look at it periodically not just throw it into a box or throw it into the file cabinet because that's your starting point of finding out certain things from there you can find out what the employees make you know how much money is sent for employees you know some people want to know how much they pay for the managing agent well it's on the financials you don't need to get a copy of the contract if you just want it for general purposes you know so you know look at your financials first before you start doing that kind of request sometimes it's easier to find it other means than having to go do that request you know and you know a lot of condominiums when they do their budgets I mean they have it open I mean the budget meetings are open for all owners right so anybody who's interested in the minutia that you know is discussed you know in these budget meetings you know is pretty much welcome to attend and you know so you know to me you know people you know who are concerned and they want transparency and they want to know where their money is going they should start going like you said they should start going to the board meetings and the budgets are usually starting in September September October and it should be definitely done by November so you know start going to those meetings if you're really concerned about where the money is going because that's where the planning starts right and and I know in in our condo when we have our budget meaning we have owners there and it's we basically have this big table and everybody's got chairs and so it's not like the board sits in one place and the owners sit and we're kind of like all together and everybody's chiming in but what about this what about that how do you calculate this and that and you know so this is good the the dialogue is good because a lot of times you know I mean I've been on the board for many many years and you know sometimes you just don't think of things right that that people will raise we're talking about the budget right and or they'll say well why don't we do it this way or and or how come you're spending this much money here what if we do it this and you know so it you know so for having owners participate in the budget meeting is very useful to the board because there's they can because they're I want to say they're kind of like the outside looking in so sometimes they can see what we don't see you know or what we missed and so it it becomes productive when they're included and they they're allowed to participate in those discussions and and another good thing too is yeah and another good thing is having and there is they basically listen to the dialogue and so that they don't come and they figure well geez how come you spent all that money on those repairs and you know but they weren't there when we were talking about why we had to do it and you know the the contractors that we interviewed and you know and so you know when you come to the budget meeting and you hear all the the discussion and we this last time we were talking about a reserve study half the people in the room didn't know what a reserve study was right so so they learned right and and they asked good questions when you know when we talked about what you know who you know who what goes into a reserve study and how does the board get involved and how does affect the owners and how does it determine you know what you collect you know from the owners and maintenance fees and what do you set aside for reserves and how do you do that and you know so they you know so I think they they really appreciated the fact that we went into that discussion because typically your condos are typically first-time homeowners you know so they don't know that budgeting I mean they're really still even learning that budgeting process because you know now that they have a mortgage they really have to watch their financials their own personal financials so you know we we run out of time and so yeah we were having so much fun so you know we're going to have to come back and and and we can continue this discussion but thank you all for joining us today talking about condo documents and how you get them and what you can do if you can't get them and please join us again next week for another episode of condo insider about condominium living and people who are affected by that thank you very much mahalo and goodbye thank you


What is going on everybody this is 1920 mosaic sell a pack number? 69 random teams sold out in jockeys case breaks.com member first thing we're gonna do is a randomizer the roll roll the dice for the randomizer of The pack break then at the sep then totally separate randomizer at the end of the break will be the 10 spots a new arm so to be a new dice roll new randomizer at the end this one five times for the pack No two three four and five Five times on the teams one two three four Pistons down to the Pacers Pistons Pacers Pistons Pacers There is list we got the pelicans Robert did Grizzlies did Robert get a sweep of the Grizzlies no Joshua did Yeah, top loaders are very hard to come by China Obviously have haven't been producing a lot since they got hit with COVID pretty bad And a lot of them now are just yeah kind of in limbo, but mainly COVID that's the main reason All right, we got a CJ McCollum Lamarcus Aldridge and Deandre Hunter Pankham. Oh, it's a nice one for the Hawks there Robert Anthony Davis Jim master Oscar Robertson Forget who the Cincinnati Royals go to they go to somebody though. I feel like maybe the Kings and MVP's the honest all right now for the main reason everybody join this break the top 10 names win spots in noir Basketball top 10 good luck everybody 10 times 4 and a 6 top 10 After 10 times There we go, but on the 10 horse If there is 10 horses running 7 8 9 10th and final time bang So we got Robert got one two three four five six seven spots Pretty good draw for you Robert Joshua K snuck in there Steven P and Joshua W Sorry, Joseph K not Joshua K Joseph K Steven P and Joshua. So there you go. Sorry to everybody else, but appreciate you giving a shot. Jasper's case breaks down


Hey, what's up? It's the Wing Chun Kid here. We're going to show you the top nine exercises that Bruce Lee did to develop his chest and back muscles. You see them in the movies with the huge back muscles? All right. Well, this is the exercises he did to get those. Here we go. Dumbbell Press Lie back on a flat bench so that your shoulders are pressed firmly on it. Bring the dumbbells to the chest, then press it overhead to arm's length, ensuring that they are kept fairly high up over the chest, and not allowed to come too far towards the abdomen when lowered. Take a deep breath as you lower the dumbbells to the chest, and exhale as the press to arm's length is completed. Reps 8-12 Note, can be done with barbell or dumbbells. If this is your first time here, make sure you click the subscribe button and get the latest workout, martial arts, fitness, and self-defense and fighting tips. All right, so we see you in the next video.


Good morning and welcome to today's products in focus. Most global markets got smashed overnight with the Dow and the SPX 500 and few other European indices down one and a half, 1.6% as well. Japan 55 also took a little bit of a tumble and things are looking a little bit more bearish now. Retreating pretty much bang-on, a potential support level at 16.738, next potential support at 16.598 and looking at these kind of chart formations right now. Undoubtedly, there are technical pressures in play right now and we'll just have to wait and see how the current fundamentals pan out. Matt, DJ's crossed a zero line. There's still room to move on the RSI and the slowest podcastic right here. We've tried to have a little mini rally this morning, but it does not look like it's got a whole lot of confidence. Looking on to the UK 100, equally looking a bit rough, had a bit of a bigger bounce this morning. Already drifting, you just see by the tip of the candle right there. 64, 63 is a potential support, next potential support, 6390. So moving on to that Japan 225, also had a bit of a negative day. Bounced perfectly this time of 15488. Bounced a little bit higher cap at 55 period SMA and with a dollar yen, dollar yen managed to go back up to one away, but I think the US dollar is still going to be moving in the right direction. We do have some data out today from the Fed regarding the split between the doves and the hawks for interest rates. So a lot of people will be waiting to see what happens there, but certainly people are getting more comfortable with the fact that we might be raising rates in the US sooner rather than later, coupled with a renewed talk from the Eurozone that we could be looking for stimulus to help support the Eurozone countries. So your dollar will be an interesting one to have a look at, though it's still going to be about $126. So looking at that dollar yen position, the fact is that we did have a quasi potential support on about 108. We dipped below it yesterday, but closed bang on the level. We dipped below it again today in the rightest of the level, but that 21 period SMA is still acting as a cap. So if I actually just go ahead and highlight this level is for us to see it that level more clearly. This could be relatively strategic in the short term. The technicals are looking a little bit negative right now, but the fundamentals behind the US dollar store remains quite strong, but you have to remember now that we did have the the Prime Minister of Japan and the and the Governor of the Bank of Japan both mentioning about they don't want to have too weak a Japanese yen currency, and we didn't get any additional stimulus flow. So we mentioned before 1 or 10 could be a bit of a stretch at this point, but the fundamentals behind the US dollar are going to remain strong, certainly stronger than Japanese yen. But after this big move right here, maybe enough is enough. Crude oil getting absolutely smashed as ever, you know, raising rates. People are still worried about potential global demand trading below potential support at 89. The next potential support level there on crude oil is down around about 85 spot 58. So this should be actually good for the global economies longer term. A cheaper oil is, you know, as less tax on progress, but certainly the technical patterns that we're seeing here, this downtrend is firmly in focus and we had that strong breakout and also in the backdrop of rising rates and stronger US dollar. Fundamentals aren't in the favor of West Texas and gold's having a little bit of resurgence as people are beginning to pick up some safe haven opportunities as equity markets begin to take a bit of a tumble. So we are re-challenging 1218. That is the next potential resistance. It's also the 21 period SMA. So this is this is kind of interesting actually. Gold's been on the back foot for quite a while, but now we are the fundamentals are kind of more coming into a limit there. Gold's been cheap, US dollars obviously going against this. Rising rates ain't great, but as I say, haven short-term kind of spikes in the price action are looking quite good. But there's probably limited upside right here due to all the factors that I just mentioned. So this is a very interesting level. If we break and close above 1218, that would be a very strong technical signal, but I'm not sure that we're going to go ahead and get that. So moving on to your dollar, your dollar, one-spot 2661 is a potential resistance. You can see very clearly here from a technical analysis perspective, this is acting as a cap. I'm breaking close above that, bringing us up to one-spot 2746, but I'm not sure we're going to go ahead and get that. We had another kind of hammer formation right here on the candlesticks, a close bang on the level, but without any through bay to break up higher. So your dollar, very interesting at these levels, especially with the Eurozone PMI figures in Germany coming out so bad.  Coming back down to one-spot 0009. Certainly again, you have dollar quite strong here. GBP figures coming out have not been that great. It's not as weak as the Eurodollar, but we've got a couple layers of potential support. So one-spot is 6109 to one-spot 5917. So economic data-wise today we do have crude oil inventories at 330, and if we fast-forward on to tomorrow, we should have US jobs claimed as well. We should be quite keenly looked at by a number of traders out there. Make sure you make chart 4 and part of your let going forward. Make an inside part of your screen and join me again tomorrow to find out what happened next.


I think it really helped sort of my decision making this offseason, you know, having those couple months in New York. You know, just focus on doing the job, focus on the baseball, and the next one might be good for you, but it'll be alright.


Okay, I'm not sure if we are live or not live. Yeah, I think so real life. So it's always tricky when the streams take some time before. Hello, everyone. I need to do one important thing what I'm talking. You can enjoy the nice view behind me. I need to share something with my guest, the link to connect. Okay, so let me do that right now. And then, yeah, all our things, people. Say hello on the chat, be chatty. This is, you know, a relaxed show.  Okay. No, no, by the way, that's not Star Wars. That's breaking that, James. But anyway, I think my guest joined. So I will be able to bring him on stage in a few minutes. I see him there. I will bring you to stage in a few minutes. Anyway, welcome everyone for the show number. I stopped counting. Anyway, I'm really happy. I'm streaming again from my garden. Why is that? Not only because it's cool, but also because I'm streaming with my phone. My connection is my phone, my 4G connection. And I realized I get the best connection when I'm streaming, when I'm outside. Okay, it's double, more than double down and double up my speed. And yeah, and I didn't ask if you can hear me well, but I assume you can hear me well. Otherwise, people will complain. James is there. So rest of the people say hello in the chat. Okay, don't be shy. Please don't be shy. I'm really happy to bring about our guest today. I will bring him on stage in a few seconds. His name is Nicky. And well, great thing. We won't only speak about that, but he works at Lego, which I find so, so cool. We will speak about that. But he's also a passionate developer. And yeah, I have a lot of questions for him. And yeah, that's it. So let me go to my studio and let me see if I can bring Nicky on stage. Hello. Hello, Sebastian. Hello. Yeah, well, I can see you well. I can hear you well. That is awesome. So our things. Oh, things are great. Yeah, good weather too. Like you have apparently. So everything is cool. I'm standing here in the new campus from Lego. So the new headquarter in Denmark, super cool. Super cool. Okay, I want to know everything about it. But before that, I usually, well, my first question is just, who are you present yourself in a few seconds? Take the time you want. Okay, yeah. So my name is Nicky Milheim. I'm a developer that works for Lego. And I've been in the industry since the beginning of the 2000s. So, so I've some of the beginning of my career was in IBM. So I've been there also, probably one of them more, more noticeable companies you would know about. And then of course, Lego too. And I've been in other places, small companies and so on have had a lot of different roles, you know, Java developer, Java instructor, no predicate developer, so other languages than that. So that is what I'm doing lately here in Lego, working a lot with cloud and so on. And I'm very active on Twitter. So, which is also why I guess you I told you are interested to be with you. Yeah, I've been following you for a long time. I don't remember when I started following you. I think we never met, right? No, no, no, no, I've been to Denmark a lot of time for grill comf, you know, grills, you know, super cool conference. All of those are great technologies. Yeah, yeah, organized by Soran. That's how I entered the open source community. And actually in Denmark, great one was my second conference ever. And yeah, I have really good memories there. But yeah, I think we never met. But yeah, you you treat a lot. And you also treat some open positions sometimes at Lego. And let me be honest, I'm, I'm really happy at red. But every time I click, I say, Oh, and my son, he says, Hey, look at that, because my imagine my son is completely crazy about about Lego. But you're, yeah, so you, your favorite, you are Java, you consider yourself as Java developer? I don't, I don't, I don't like to use that predicate anymore, because I think actually it's an anti pattern we have in the industry that we like to put people into a specific language and so on. So for example, I'm doing hiring as you also say now, what I'm looking at is not I'm not looking for a Java developer, I'm looking for a sharp mind that can, that can show that they have, you know, programmed before and they are able to solve solutions. So I don't really care what language they come with. You know, there are of course extremes where I say it's too alienated to what we're doing. But if you are wonderful JavaScript developer, wonderful TypeScript developer or scaler developer and so on, then you can very well then this position too. So so that's how I feel. I think I've moved a bit myself there in the last five, six years. I've traditionally always focused a lot on Java because there's been so much in the ecosystem, you know, in surprise edition and so on spring was was an aspect still. So of course, I'm the kind of type that likes to specialize a lot in stuff. And now I'm specializing more in cloud. So probably you can see that on my tweets, it's AWS, everything right. So this is where I put in my love now. I still have the background, a lot of heavy Java stuff, but I'm doing a lot more non Java today. So a lot of JavaScript and TypeScript, that is my everyday now. It doesn't mean that I don't do Java anymore. And I don't like it. It just means that the situation is different. I actually think that the because I've landed, you know, a position in my services, the situation changes a little bit from having a big investment in in one type of language in comedy to actually accommodating different types of languages. And you see that a lot here in Lego. So we don't only use Java. There's a lot of that, of course, but there's also a lot of other languages like Scala, Python, and so on. So you will find everything here. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And so what is, what are you doing exactly as Lego? Well, I imagine Lego is huge. Even the IT department must be huge. Are you managing the retail stuff or managing the factory? I don't know. I can enlighten you then. So I'm working actively as a developer doing backend development, you know, databases, mostly no SQL at the moment, DynamoDB, because we are in AWS to infrastructure code, because we build the entire solution ourselves and operate it and so on. So we don't throw it over the fence as we did in the old days. So you can say that is some of the technologies that I'm broadening myself with right now. And the product is the B2B web shop. So the web shop shop not used by you, but a company's Walmart and so on, that buys Lego and sell it in the stores and so on. So I'm doing that and this is all AWS. We have serverless Fargate containers, right? So yeah. I want to talk about cloud. We will talk about cloud. And just curious, you said your move to the new headquarters. Is it close to Lego land? Oh, it's super close, actually. I also, I think I tweeted it recently that you're back to the office, right? So it's super fun. And I still, even though I've been in Lego, so if I count everything together, it's, I guess, five years almost, if I round up and try to break with it, right? So I'm still fascinated by the spirit and the things that you see when you see Lego land and the people and the joy and excitement there. And that's, that's how it can be for some of us in Lego. I'm sure, right? It's very close. So it's a new, very shiny big campus. It's still being built, actually. And some of us moved in already now. And it's very close to Lego land, yes. Okay, cool. Yeah. I went actually, when I was young with my parents, we were traveling through Norway because I have family there. And we stopped at Lego land. And yeah, I was 10, something like that. And four years ago, I went to Lego land in Frankfurt. Yeah, I think it's Frankfurt. There's another location in Germany, which was, yeah, my son was completely crazy because he was a huge fan of Ninjago, you know, and you have a whole area just for Ninjago. And also the nice thing that I remember, and then we will move over class, was you have a sample factory or like a real part of the factory, how does it make the blocks? And that was so, so interesting.  Anyway, so super cool. So yeah, Lego and the cloud. And you and the cloud. Yeah, let's see. Is is Lego a cloud company? Well, did you did the shift entirely to the cloud? So we still have on premise solutions in Lego, but there's no doubt about that we are moving more and more into the cloud. We have been doing that for years, and it's continuing to rhyme. I don't know if we are going to not have on premise solutions, but we have a lot in AWS, which is our primary strategic cloud partner that we have. We also have stuff in Azure, but it's when we develop on my team and the teams around me, it's in AWS. Okay, you also have Azure. Okay, interesting. And when you say AWS, are you deploying on pure on VMs or on Kubernetes? Yeah, so it's very different depending on where you are in Lego. Some we are very, you can say, autonomous teams here and there. So we are not working entirely on the same products. It's very heterogeneous, the products that we make. Some have developed and invested in Kubernetes setups, and others have not. So in my area, it's, you will find mostly serverless technologies, but you'll also find something that is a bit similar to Kubernetes, which is AWS Bargate. So before they offer this managed version of Kubernetes, EKS, we, there was also Bargate, which is a companion technology where you don't have to reason only the EC2 service and so on. And that made sense for us originally to invest in those kind of technology because it allows us to move fast. So that is one of the biggest selling points of serverless technologies and so on.  You find the similar technology in other cloud providers, but I'll say that it depends a lot on the setting. So if you have a lot of developers working on a platform like hardening the Kubernetes setup, then of course, that's a bit different. And you will also find that in Lego, actually. Okay, interesting. Really, yeah, yeah, you have, looks like, that reminds me, I remember I visited campus of Facebook, where you have so many different teams doing almost everything and they can choose almost what they want. And when I hear you, almost this feeling of that you have a lot of flexibility inside your teams. So it's the best. And that is also something we are talking about now. As you have also seen, we are going through a very impressive digital transformation in Lego. And I know that there is some awareness about this complete autonomy that we have had and enjoyed for a long time, and then getting a bit control over that. And that is a work in progress for sure. So of course, I know that there are talks about the Kubernetes and so on. And I'm also thinking about it. Is that the right approach? Because you can argue that it's the right approach if you have the setup and the investment in the platform team. So one of my colleagues comes from Salerno. I think he's online now actually. He's on the chat, if you want. They have actually invested a lot in that, right? So you'll see them dominating a lot in Kubernetes' landscape also. And who knows, one day maybe we'll get there, right? Yeah, sure. Sebastian, I can tell you, I'm very fascinated about both worlds. So you can say the choices about going serverless in our area has been dominated by. So what is wise, given that we don't have the platform team, is it wise that I and my colleagues start to work on that only and don't get to deliver business features? Or should we use the cloud that we have and simply take off the shelf, which is highly available stuff, the hardened security, all that that you will get for almost free there. For me, it has been a no brainer to go down that road to get the same approach with Kubernetes. You need a very mature team that can do the same, right? Especially if you're going to persistent technologies like databases and Q-Systems. And it's not fun anymore. So the compute power is the easiest part, right? So everybody can do that. It's the other part that I'm more skeptical about. Yeah, I understand. You say you're moving fast. Did you go up into production? I'm just asking you. So it's very different according to where you are and they go also, of course, because we are so autonomous in the end there. But on my team, it has been for the last year a focus to be able to do this with a great confidence that we can do it. And we have no problem deploying on a Friday, but we do consider it before we do it, right? And we are not that competent. My team is not the one that can go and claim we release 100 times a day because that's simply not where we are. But it is something I'm thinking a lot about because as I see it going, you know, making frequent deployments to production, that means they are smaller, hopefully, right? So it means less risk and so on. So I think it's the right approach. I totally buy into that idea. And it also means if you're fast to production, it also means that you can undo it fast. So you deploy something, it's rotten, you need to, you know, release a patch fast, right? So I think it's super important and my team is we have been discussing that, you know, for the last years, right? Yeah, it's not just about going faster to production. It has so many benefits. Sebastian, so it's not only about, so if you want to go fast to production, it also means that you need to have control over your quality. You cannot do it if you have no well-tested system. That is why we totally buy into testing our stuff and we do it because we think it's the right thing to do. It's not because you want to check off something. It's because if I have it under control, I know it will catch something, right? If there is an obvious error and if it doesn't, and we find there is a bug, we add a test to the test suite so that it's, you know, called by regression test the next time. So I can tell you that everything we do on our team is to harden that go live process. We are talking a lot about it. We could use a lot of main power, but we are trying to do the best we can. Best you can, yeah, yeah. Be efficient. Build the best set. I'm just making the analogy with Nico. Are you using any methodology in your teams? Are you agile, scrum? I don't know. I guess. Yeah. So I think you can easily call us agile, right? And if we are following scrum, yes, we have been there and done that and we have been the process a bit. And I know as soon as you start to bend that process, you may not be doing scrum anymore, right? But here, there is the best way we have evaluated. Is it the right thing to do to have the daily stand-ups every day? And it's not necessarily the right thing to do every day for our team, but you may find other teams where it's super important to do that. But we have been discussing all that. You can say a process that is in scrum, whether it makes sense for us. So it's something we work on. And I don't have the solution for every team. I actually truly believe that it's very team-specific. How much binds that process, right? So you are pragmatic. I like that. I hope so. I think you are too hard on some methodologies. And I'm unlucky, but I have been in a lot of teams. I never really saw it working perfectly. More in teams where we are organic agile by nature and deep mathematics. And Sebastian, that's also what I believe in. It's the right approach. So you start with that rigid model, because this is the book. You have to follow it in order to learn it and get it under your skin, right? And then at some point you step up and say, hey, this really doesn't seem to provide the value that we feel it should provide, right? And that is we have been there for several areas in the process. And one of the biggest wins of scrum is to have those retrospectives, because that is super important to stop up and breathe and find out. So can we improve it somehow, right? And then I cannot remember if it was on a retrospective. We decided to tune the process along the way. But I still think it's super valuable. I think having some process is valuable. You may argue that on certain teams, you don't need all the bells and whistles in scrum, let's say. Yeah, it all depends on the team itself. If you are a lot of seniors or a lot of remote, they're so much moving forward. And that's where you see good team leader or manager that can adapt the right approach. Serverless. Let's talk a bit about serverless. First thing, because I think there are still people not agreeing. What is serverless for you? Okay. Yeah, so of course, there are extremes. One technology that I get to think of is, of course, AWS Lambda. I have some piece of code I deployed. It's a zip file. And you know, that's super serverless to me. I don't get to think about what is behind the scenes. I may know that there is a Linux runtime there, but it's not something I have nightmares about in which, right? So that's one extreme. Also, I think having DynamoDB is serverless enabling technology, right? You point a click. I only, my abstraction layer is a table and index is on that level.  You know, I think it's, and then, of course, there's this gray scale, right? So it's Fargate, serverless technology. And I would argue that it's almost, this is right, because I get to provision my tasks, probably relate to it as parts or something, right? And this is my abstraction level there. But still, when I do work with containers, I still need to find the point at which it scales out, for example. So I need to find out, should I scale out on CPU usage or should it be Merian's one? When I work on AWS Lambda, the scale out model is so simple that I don't get to think about it. I know that if I send a request into my Lambda function, and another one comes in, they will pop up a new container next to it and another one, and another one.  And I really enjoy that. I can tell you, I recently had to work again on our Fargate setup. There's a lot of things I love about that. But it was very apparent to me that it was another abstraction level. I was closer to the metal, and it sounds insane, because of course, it's all virtual, and it's in the cloud and so on. But that's for me a big difference there when you compare, let's say, function as an abstraction. And I know you have similar technologies if you go Kubernetes and so on. So you can get the same and I'm flexible. And I don't argue that one is the perfect the way that I think about it is, how do I ensure that I can sleep well at night? So I go on weekends, right? Then I would love to not have nightmares and choosing some of those serverless technologies like Lambda and DynamoDB. They're good examples of that. S3, an enormous fantastic technology. When you use those technologies, I'm not thinking about those technologies causing trouble. What I'm talking about is the data that I put into them are tripping up other scenarios in the system. That's where the problem is. So it has shifted from being technical problems because I couldn't operate a Kubernetes setup. So that's how, given that we are the size we are in our team and the teams around me, then serverless is super fantastic as I see it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It removes a lot of friction and yeah, yeah. So I'm more on the Kubernetes side these last days and I'm using Knative for the serverless solution. You've probably heard about it. And yeah, what I like about it is that instead of writing three different long YAML files, I just say I want a serverless service and I want to run this container image and maybe I want some health probes and that's it. And I send it and all the magic happened for me. Skill zero if I want. Skill two, I don't know. I don't have to care about that. And yeah, and it's native to Kubernetes. So if I am running Kubernetes on my Amazon, but I also have some Azure, well, I will be able to deploy the same resources on all these clusters. I totally appreciate that, Sebastien. I would also consider that as a serverless technology, given that the hosting platform is under control and so on. And I totally appreciate that. So I think you will also find the situation here is because of the staff that we have. And as I also told you, LEGO is in a very huge transformation right now, IT-wise. So who knows where we'll go in the years. But I have this major point that is if we go away from all the truly serverless technologies hosted by AWS, or it could be some other cloud trainer, then we better do it at least, you know, almost as good ourselves, right? Because otherwise I'll get troubled. My job is down. Our job is down. So this colleague that put around and the other colleague, we will go to that, let's say platform team. And that will not be of course fun because, hey, there's no income while it's down, right? So that is how I see it. If we go that way, it has to be robust and stable. And I know we have it somewhere in LEGO also, but we have been very isolated here and there. So some teams has it under control, like perhaps you have experienced also, and others have chosen serverless to get the work done and move fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you said you are in a global, the IT is getting, is involving a lot lately at LEGO. Does it also involve a cultural change between, you know, dev ops, dev ops, breaking the silos? Is that something that you also have in mind? Yeah. So I think that is implicit. And I think that journey actually started for a lot of the teams out here years back, varying degrees all over the company. What we are doing right now is something that is bigger than that. We're trying to shape the organization in a way that is more product oriented. And as you know, it can reflect how the software products also kind of end up, right? So we are trying to organizationally, you know, make a perfect, not perfect, but a good and, you know, streamlined setup. And that is the big change we are experiencing right now. And in addition to that, we are changing a little bit how the engineering teams are up put together, at least somewhere, some of the places in LEGO, right? So I think that's in many ways even bigger than if you just operate it and, you know, yeah, but we have been doing that for years. Okay. Um, whoa, I'm attacked by a bee, but it's gone away. That's the risk of doing that in the garden. About AWS, I see you treat a lot about certification. So you, yeah, can you tell a bit about this certification process? It's, there are a lot of certification. I remember I saw someone on Twitter that managed to do them all, which is crazy. But what is your, why do you do certification and how much time does it take? And yeah. Okay. So in the old days, before I threw my love on AWS and cloud and stuff like that, when I was developing Java code for the application servers, it was the application servers I was trying to get to learn so that I could recognize the errors and why did it perform that it did. So I've always been like that, that if I put my code somewhere, I want to know where it's running and how it works. So that's, that's my, you know, starting point for all this. So the reason for me investing a lot of energy right now in all the AWS stuff here is because I'm using it a lot. We are losing using it a lot. So when there's trouble, I want to know why I want to be the, I'll try to be the go-to person if there is some, you know, I am problem to some permissions that doesn't work. I want to tell people how it works with the locks and how to enable metrics and so on. So I want to know the runtime where my code, the code is just one point. And it also, it depends also of course on the translation that we operated to, right? And that's, I don't just develop the code. I have to operate it effectively too.  Right. So for me, it's an operator that if I want to do my best, I need to learn the platform. If I was in a Kubernetes setup, you would find we bring the same, but with Kubernetes, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, totally makes sense. And this takes you a lot of time. Is, are these certification hard? I guess so, but yeah. So Sebastian, it depends very much on your mileage. So if you have had exposure for AWS for years, which I actually had before I started this, it went nuts last year, I guess, right? I guess around December it culminated with me, you know, putting, you know, the the pedal to the metal, right? And so I'm spending more and more time on it. And during that journey, it also became apparent that if I wanted to take more than one certification, it was a good time to do it once I just took the other one because some of the things I learned I actually could use in the next certification. So there's no point in waiting a year for taking the next one. That's why you have seen me super intense in the last months too. But I can tell you that I think once I've, right now, I'm focusing on the professional, you know, the Big Brother certification to the solutions architect associate and trying to look at that now, right? So I'm getting up early trying to study, you know, following video content and so on, and looking at FAQs, playing around and so on. So I'm doing that now and that is also because I don't want to delay it a year because then I know it would be a much bigger task. So it's very practical and that I do it. Then there is another point to it also. I can also see that it inspires other people, not only here in legal, but also outside legal. So it inspires me that I want to do it even more. But I can also tell I'm a bit tired now as business and I've been doing it very much for the last month, right? I think and I still have some family and so on. I want to keep it. Exactly. Yeah.  And that's the same, Sebastian. I have been forced to move my laptop around to show what's under the table, what's next to me and so on. I have to show my wrist, right? Because I have a smart watch on your wrist, right? So I think it's actually also okay, because there's nothing worse than a dishonest achievement of certification. I can tell you that I'm trying to keep my focus on why am I doing this? I'm doing this so I can move so I can use it in discussions with my colleagues next to me. I like to say that I'm not doing it just to get the certifications. But of course, there's also, it becomes more fun when you get them. So I guess it's just enforcing it a little bit, right? Especially, I think one thing is you can go around and tell yourself that you know all this. But the real test is, can you actually, if you go down the study path to one of those certifications to really understand, I learned a lot. So even though I had years of exposure and eight years before I started this, I have learned so much, right? And I think a lot of the people out here that say they don't really need it because they're better than that, of course, right? I think they would learn a lot. It's like taking a, you know, I took all the Java certifications when I started in the industry. That was super hard back then, right? And I wanted to have the perfect score there, right? I gave it all I could, right? And I couldn't really do it here in AWS. But the last month, it's the same again, right? So it's difficult to combine that, you know, intensity with also having a family. So I'm getting some, I'm being beaten up a little bit there, right? Because I'm apparently not always there present in the mind. But you know, that's how it is. But yeah, I like the fact which said it's also just about learning. We must keep learning new stuff. The thing is, there are very skilled people here, solutions architect in AWS that has curated a start, you know, some points that they want to have people proven that they can master, right? Because if they master those points, it means that they have awareness of different situations in AWS. Who am I to question that to begin with? Maybe I can do it, you know, in a few years. But I think it's really a good, you know, approach to master an ecosystem in, right? And I hope it's the same when you do clinical certifications or whatnot. Yeah, I was just checking the chat. Well, people are making fun about name delay, how you write Lego, right? Because someone write Legos. Let me see. Collect an AWS certification like the rest of us collects Lego sets. Okay. I've seen that, Sebastian. Of course, that's the thing is, once you take, let's say the practitioner certification, take the first associate level solutions architect, it's so much easier to take the next associate and the next associate. So that's why it can make sense, even though I can see it seems intense and weird. But that's actually why for me it was an operator to continue it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, we are almost at the end already. Just, just the last question. Let's talk a little bit about Java again, because in the Twitter trend, you mentioned, oh, I will maybe be mentioning Spring Boot. Well, you just mentioned it's one, but I love Spring Boot as well. Have you ever tried or played with Quarkus? Do you know Quarkus? Yeah. So, Sebastian, my knowledge of Quarkus is what I've seen in presentation. I've never actually used it on the job. I cannot even remember if I put it down the shelf and actually tried it out, because my mind has been all sorts of other places. You will find me, when I go back and I'm not thinking about so much AWS, you'll find me as Spring Boot fanboy. And when I say Spring Boot, I'm actually referring to also Spring Framework. Maybe if you followed me for years, you will see that I was a bit like this for Spring Framework at some point. And it's still there, but I also find a lot of other technologies, you know, super amazing. I like to work also in JavaScript and TypeScript. I'm amazed about what you can do with TypeScript and it's so powerful compared to what I can do with Java. And so, I think I like to say I'm a bit more open now than I was. Let's say six years back, right? Then my world was very specialized and I don't think it's the answer anymore. It's not for me at least. Okay. Well, that's it for me. I really, really, really enjoyed the discussion. It was really interesting to understand a bit how things are working at Ligo, but also your approach and yeah, ending up with the certification. I really enjoyed the discussion. I'm going to do now some live coding for the rest of the people and maybe play a game. You can hang out here or stay on the chat. But I would like to thank you so much for joining and yeah, hopefully one day we will be able to meet. Hopefully. And thank you for inviting me. As you know, I don't like to position myself as a rock star. What you know me from is from being active on Twitter, right? I find it amazing that you want to listen to me. I hope it makes sense. It was a well, not a well guess, but yeah, I was following you for a long time and yeah, I tried to find interesting guests every two weeks and on different profiles and yeah. And you are present on my time, so I say yeah. So thank you so much, Niki. And well, hopefully see you next time and enjoy the rest of your day. Okay. Yes, have an awesome day, it's a blessing. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. Bye bye. So everyone, are you still letting me double check here? I'm just with one screen. It's a bit tricky, but oh yeah, there's some delay. I still see on the feet. I still see Niki. But yeah, it was great. It was really great to have Niki. Really interesting point of views as well. I like to share to hear other points of view like he's on the cloud, for instance, heavily, but he isn't using still Kubernetes. I think almost all my guests I had previously speaking about the clouds, they were all speaking in fact about Kubernetes. Anyway, let me see how many people are there. Yeah, well, we are still a lot of people here. I haven't prepared any game, but I can deploy a game at any moment. But before we deploy a game, I would like to show you some fun stuff. It's been a long time that I didn't do programming. I will be just live demoing one pretty cool stuff. Okay. I'm checking here on the chat. Okay. Let me share my screen. I share my screen here. And yeah, so here we are in inception mode. You can still see Niki there in black and white. He's hanging out. But what I want to show you is this, oh, not web, not WhatsApp, but web captioner. Let me put that in the chat, by the way. It's a simple service to go there. It's a really simple service where you can do captioning of your voice. Okay. It's really important. I still must think about it how I could include that in my stream to make it more inclusive. But yeah, my English is not that good and so real things are there. But let me just show you how it works. You go just on with this website and you can say hello. My name is Sebastian Blanc. Blanc. Blanc. Okay. Sebastian Blanc. Okay. Oh, maybe I'm the brother of Josh. No, I'm joking. Anyway, I'm living in France and you can see here it's capturing my voice and turning that into a text, okay, to a transcript. So that is pretty nice. I'm not sure which mic it's using. But yeah, let me stop captioning and let me show you something. This is a cool site. Okay. But there's something even cooler. You can add, let me go to channels here. You can put channel, you can integrate this web service because it's a web service to third parties. You can add it to Dropbox. Not sure what it will do, but to OBS, that's the streaming platform. Okay. To Zoom, if you want to have live transcript of your Zoom meetings, you can add it there. But you can also add a web hook. Okay. And a web hook, actually, you can point to any service that is running. Okay. Let me go. Oh, still has my old one. That's not a problem. Documentation. Okay. Let me increase that a bit. There we go. You can point to a URL and for each word that is said, you will receive this payload as a post request. Okay. Containing this transcript with the word you are saying and the sequence, if you need to order that, et cetera. Okay. So I say, hey, that's funny. I want to play with that. Okay. So that's what I did. Okay. So let me show you a small application that I did. Let me just double check here first that everything is going well. Hi, people there. Okay. People still are there. Awesome. Oh, yeah. You can see. Let me see. Okay. So all you need to do is to configure this and point to a web address. And look at this, I can point to my local address. Okay. So what I have here is a simple application, version in Quarkus, of course. And let me see. This is my rest. End point here, listening on transcript. Okay. That's my end point. And then I have here, well, post method, maybe we'll see that later. We have this post method. Okay. And here I receive because, yeah, they don't send it as content type as JSON, though I cannot march on it directly to an object. I receive that as a string, but that's not a big deal because I can easily with a JSON object extract from that, the word that I'm saying. Okay. And here you can see my awesome programming skills with a lot of if and else because I have no knowledge about how to manipulate transcripts and stuff like that. So I've just been playing, but it starts there. Okay. Here I get the transcript. If the word that I say is get called skill. Okay. So here I do a system print out. Yeah. I don't do a log. I set this variable to true. Okay. And then the second time that I arrive in this, in this, in this method for the second word, I check here if I'm in skill mode. So in the second state of my recognition state. Okay. If I say, okay. I'm now in deployment mode. And I capture a second word and this second word I stored in a string called deployment. Okay. Finally, I have a when I come the third time in my method, I listen for the third word that I will be saying. Okay. And if it's up here, I'm using a Kubernetes client. And I pick the name. I search for the name of the deployment that I said before. And I skate it up. Otherwise, I should say here, if it's down, I scale it down. And the idea here is to be able to scale up or scale down my pause just with my voice. Okay. And well, we can try to make it run. Okay. I think I just need to do two things before. Let me say I need to run. Yeah. I need to start. I need to start a Kafka cluster but this is because of another stuff that I will maybe show you. But anyway, let me run that. Let me run Minikube. Minikube, remember, is having a Kubernetes cluster running on your own machine. Let me increase the font because it's the quality stuff. Start. Let me do that. Okay. Let me double check the chat. What language is this? It's asking AJ. So, good question. I was making too much assumptions. This is Java. This is Java code and I'm using a Java stack which is called Quarkus. I can show you that. If you go to Quarkus, hopefully, yeah. If you go to Quarkus.io, okay. I will put it in the chat. Quarkus.io. Let me see that. Quarkus.io. And I'm just making sure, yeah. You will see that there's a Java stack and it makes you able to build really powerful cloud-native applications. Okay. You can compile it to native as well as you want. It integrates really well with a lot of existing frameworks like Hibernate, Infinity Span, Neo4j. And yeah. I love it. I felt really in love with this platform and there's also a great developer experience. Okay. Meaning that you can, let me see. Everything started here. Yeah. Java app. So, I can start it like a Maven project. Let me say Quarkus.dev. Okay. And that will start my application in development mode. Okay. So, build my project. Run it. If everything goes right, let me see if I didn't miss anything. Okay. Yeah. It's good. It's running. And now I can make any change to my code and, well, it will still running. Okay. That are some of the great stuff. But look, my application is running. Okay. And you remember I exposed here in my code something called transcript. Okay. So, let's go back to my web captioner, which is running here. And let me do this. Update channel. Okay. And now if everything, if the demo goes are with me, I will start captioning and it will capture the words. Let's just make sure if that is working. First step. Start captioning. Hello. This is me speaking to my application. Okay. So, let me stop here. You could see here in the lock, it's capturing my words. So, each time that we are here, we are in a POST request. Okay. That's cool. But I didn't set the word skill. Okay. Because if I say the word skill, then it will trigger. It will enter the other if statement. Okay. And that's what we are going to do now. Okay. So, I got here a cluster running locally. If I do a Qubectl. Let me do a watch. Qubectl get pods. So, here we will see the pods that are running in my cluster here. You can see I have two pods called banana and I have one pod called, two pods called apple and one pod called banana. Okay. And what I'm trying to do now, what I will try to do is to scale down my apple to one pod. Okay. So, let me see. Okay. Let me start the captioning again. Okay. And we will try it. Start captioning. Scale. Scale. Apple. Down. Down. Okay. Let's take a look here. And look at this. It's terminating my pod. Okay. So, it's working. Let's try to scale up banana. Okay. Scale. Banana. Let's take a quick look. Luke is creating for me a new banana. Awesome. Isn't this? It's really funny. Let me show you something else. Let's deploy another pod here in our cluster. Let's, here I have banana. Let's make it. What can I give it as name? Let's call it orange. Orange. Orange here. Orange. Orange. Let me deploy that. Okay. So, here I make a new deployment. And if I do my watch, you can see I've got my orange pod running. Okay. So, I can prove you I'm not saying you anything wrong. Let me double check on the chat if everything goes right. Okay. Everything goes right. Okay. There we go.  Let me try that. Oh, I'm lost. Let me go back here. Let's try to scale up orange. Orange up. Okay. You saw, because I mentioned the word, I am not going to say this.  He didn't understand up, but he understand down or don't remember what I say. Hmm. Okay. Can I try it again? Scale. Orange. Orange. Orange. Down. So, look at this. I don't know if you see it. Okay. Yeah. And there we got an exception. In the suit French instead of orange, which makes me, which is really funny. Okay. Let me stop this app. Let me try to show you the other stuff that I did. Okay. Because I had a lot of fun with this application. I mixed that. You wonder why I, maybe I started a Kafka cluster because I said, well, since I can capture my words, maybe I can send each word as a Kafka record to a Kafka cluster. Okay. And then I can do some manipulation with the words I'm saying. Okay. Still following. So, let me show you what I did. Still in the same code here. I got here another method, which is called, which has a sub path record. Okay. And what I do here, I have an emitter. Okay. That will send some load to a Kafka topic. Okay. So, I don't go too much into details. It goes to a topic called Craig event because I've been playing with Craig as well. So, I'm just reusing some stuff, but I'm sending that to a topic. Okay. And then I have a second application that will read this topic. Okay. And it will make some aggregation. It will count how much time I say the same word. Okay. So, for that, I need to start a second application. If I remember well, I put it there, backman, no, not backman, record it. That is something else I'm playing with. Word aggregator. Word aggregator. Let me start it. Let me start this. And let's see if it's working. Okay. So, let me start this app as well. And let me update now the captioning here. Stop captioning. Oh, yeah. The web hook is failing, but that's not a problem. Here I say record. Okay. I update the channel. So, it will go to my other point now. Let's still check that everything is working correctly. Yeah. My aggregator is there. Okay. Let me see. Let me open this page here, localhost 8081. Okay. Word counts. Oh, I forgot to... Yeah. I forgot to delete my previous stuff, but it should still work. Okay. You can see that is a test I did before. But let me try it. Let me start the captioning. If... Look, and now it's updated. You saw? I say if two more times. So, it updated to 18. Okay. And now 19 because I said it before. If I say if again, it will update to 20.  Elephant. Tiger. Tiger. Somewhere here. If I say tiger, tiger, tiger, tiger. There he is. I lost my tiger. Where's tiger? Tiger. Two times. Okay. Oh, and now three times because I said it. Tiger. Six times. Okay. So, that's just to show you how we can do crazy stuff quite easily. Okay. So, I will share all the stuff for you. I'm sorry today we didn't play a game, but I really wanted to show you some live coding. Well, some live demo. It's been a while that I didn't do that. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me go back to the chat to see if there are some questions. Yeah. We have Andy say, hey, Kors say nice. Andy, that is sweet. Yeah. Son, hey, son, hey. Sorry, I don't understand anything you're saying. Maybe French. Exactly. Orange. French. I'm just curious. Let's see again if the orange. Orange. Oh, now French. Orange. Orange. Okay. So, please play with that. Okay. I will try to share the code that I did on my Quark. As you can see, it's really simple. Really simple. And for sure we can make this better. I need to make some kind of state object, you know, that can, every time that you enter this method, the state object change. So, it goes from instead of all these if skills, but I haven't yet think of all what we can do. Maybe a Pac-Man that I can play with my voice like up, up, right, right, right. But yeah, we can imagine some crazy stuff. Okay. Thank you everyone so much for attending the show. So, we will start, we will, oh yeah, and now we will be back in two weeks. Okay. I will let you know what the guest is. Okay. We'll be really nice guests again. Next week, it's tech talk. Okay. Just let me remind you how you can follow everything that is happening. If you go to dn.dev slash upcoming, and I will paste that in the chat as well. Okay. You can see everything, all the upcoming events that we are doing. So, right now, it's a show. It's now. Okay. So, next week, we have a definition talk, building streaming application using a managed Kafka service. Hmm. That sounds interesting. Okay. And by the way, remember, next week is also Red Hat Summit. Okay. On Tuesday and Wednesday, will be some great announcements, some crazy live demos and keynote demos. I'm also part of one of the demo on day one. So, be sure to be there. But did I paste the link? No, I didn't paste it. Let me paste that. There we go. Okay. So, hang on there. And yeah, enjoy the rest of your day or your evening. And please stay safe. I know we are going through difficult times, but yeah, that's also the reason of the show, to have some good time all together. And yeah, love you all and see you next time. Bye-bye.


All right, lady. What is this? This is a 2.1 inch 40 by 40 Display we've showed this off with our qualia ESP 32 RGB 666 driver because this is a raw TTL display But what's new is that we now have a driver for the capacitive touch. Yay Thank you, Melissa for writing the driver normally these displays use a focal tack chip But this one actually uses like a CST who knows some other Manufacturer for the capacitive touch, but she did a great job doing Arduino and circuit Python libraries Next up we're going to get the capacitive touch working for big birthday here. This is the 4 inch diagonal screen a really beautiful large Covered with fingerprints Bezzled capacitive touch this one has a separate little tail for the cap touch But we'll make a little break out for it and hopefully get this one up and running soon. So lots of round touches You


to start a business to your point before about accessing capital or even certain, I guess, limitations when it comes to how seriously people could take you in certain countries. It certainly is in Venezuela, you know, we're two young women at the time, you know, at some point during our journey, we were both pregnant too, which could also, you know, seem like a limitation or sort of like a deterrent for some people to invest. So I certainly felt like this was a great place to innovate, to be creative, and I felt like, you know, really the sky's the limit. Shows like this also helped us a lot. We listen to a lot of entrepreneurship podcasts where you can listen to stories of a lot of really inspirational people.


The ACC Commission voted to restart a stalled eviction prevention program that helped 425 families avoid eviction last year. It might even save taxpayers money, according to school board member Tim Denson. The rental assistance stabilizes both tenants and landlords, preserves neighborhoods, and protects government budgets over the long term. The conclusion that the estimated benefits of rental assistance eclipse the estimated costs of providing the funds by three or four times suggests that rental assistance should supplant non-payment eviction as the social remedy for the inability to pay rent. Family Promise and the ARC will run the program with $900,000 of leftover funds, with a preference to serving households at risk of eviction at or below 50% of the area median income.