I'm Jay Fidel. This is Catching Up on Kaka Ako. Today we're going to talk about climate change and sea level rise in Kaka Ako, Mackay with Chip Fletcher of SOS that you ate. Thank you, Jay. It's good to be back. So, you know, Think Tech has been covering Kaka Ako since Think Tech began. We have had an enormous number of shows back in the old years. We had all these people come around and talk to us about what was appropriate in Kaka Ako. How critically important it was for planning and for dealing with the environment and so forth. And some of those shows we still have. And there was so much discussion about leaving it as a park. There's so much discussion about preserving it as a place of recreation and relief for people to get away from the madding city, so to speak. And now we are here again, where there's a bill in the legislature that would permit or reverse the limitation on residential construction in Kaka Ako, Mackay. So much blood through our minds and memories about all of that. But I thought it'd be great to talk to you because you have studied, you know, the, what do you want to call it, the topography, the sea level rise implications along that whole shore around the whole of Oahu, actually. And you can talk to us about how sea level rise and climate change will, in the next few years, affect any kind of construction there or, you know, in similar areas along the coast. So, can you talk about climate change, sea level rise in Kaka Ako, Mackay? What is likely to happen there? What effect is likely, what is going to be the effect of all of that on construction? Yeah, thank you. So there are two primary things we should be worrying about. One is sea level rise. The other is heat, H-E-A-T. And just to sort of touch on heat first, NOAA and the National Weather Service and some other agencies are starting to tell us that we can expect an El Mino, possibly, this coming summer. And over next year, the last significant El Mino we saw in Hawaii was in 2015, 2016, and we saw record setting heat waves. I remember in the summer of, I think it was 2018 or 2019, when we did not have an El Mino, but we had a marine heat wave, body of warm water settling around Oahu. We broke 300 temperature records in Honolulu that summer. So, if and when we see an El Mino, we may expect some extremely hot summertime and fall temperatures. And Kakaako Mackay and Kakaako writ large, in fact, all of urban Honolulu has not yet implemented shade or heat mitigation efforts in community design. So that's one thing we need to worry about. Now, with regard to sea level rise, of course, we get flooding and we get multiple types of flooding. We may have typical south shore summertime, high wave events, splashing up over the seawalls, running into the community, the first block, maybe the second block of the community, depending on where we're located. And as sea level goes up this seasonal non-storm, not a hurricane, this seasonal wave is going to be flooding further and further landward. What does seasonal mean? How often is this season? Is that once a year or more? Yeah, seasonal is once a year. And then when it comes to waves on the south shore of Oahu, we're talking summertime. That's when we see surf events, folks grab their boards, they go to Waikiki, they go body surfing at Point Panic off of Kakaako Mackay, etc. Then, of course, we do have the rising incidents of hurricanes. So science research has shown that tropical cyclones have been migrating away from the equator. And for Hawaii, that means that tropical cyclones or hurricanes that would previously pass south of the Big Island are now approaching at the same latitude as the Hawaiian islands. And so we may see more hurricanes as a result of this. In fact, although the statistics don't bear it out yet because it's been such a short time period, but over the last five to eight years, we've seen quite a few hurricanes come close or actually touch on to the islands. And hurricanes are... You talk about more hurricanes, but what about the extreme quality of the hurricane? That's what I was just going to mention, where hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly. You may recall hurricane, oh, I'm blanking on its name, but the hurricane that was barreling down towards Honolulu. It intensified from a hurricane intensity one to a hurricane intensity four literally overnight. And this is a new characteristic of hurricanes. But then we have other types of flooding. We have the storm drain system, the drainage system, which is designed to use gravity to drain off rainfall, to drain off runoff. That storm drain system is getting backfilled by rising sea level. And several times a year, typically during our king tides, our storm drain system fails. And that's because it is filled with saltwater. And should it rain at that time, that rain has nowhere to go. And we saw exactly this happen on December 5th and 6th in 2021 when a cone of storm, a cone of low hit the south shore of Oahu. It hit exactly when there was a king tide happening and we had standing water that was two to three feet deep in Waikiki and other areas on the south shore. So our storm drainage system really at high tide as a gravity designed engineering infrastructure is no longer effective. It doesn't work by gravity anymore. We need to start thinking about pumped drainage where the storm drain system removes rainfall at high tide by pumping. So those are the main forms of flooding that will take place. Storm drains backflowing on the streets, waves splashing up and running over the shoreline. And then actually, let me also mention groundwater flooding. The water table is very close to the land surface under Kakaako and Waikiki. And at high tide, there are places where the water table already is nearly breaking through the ground surface. And what is that called? It's called a wetland. And so at high tide, we get a temporary wetland for an hour or so, and then the tide goes down again. So I do have a map that shows some of these features. If you're interested, I could walk us through that. Oh, sure. But one of the things I want to ask you about is that Kakaako Makai is the product of a refuse station for many, many decades. And it has many tens of feet of garbage under the top soil that was put there to create the park. So there's not that much top soil, but there's an awful lot of garbage. And the garbage, of course, is, I don't know the right word for it, but from an engineering point of view, it's like porous. Water will, it's not the same as soil.   So any of these processes that you've been talking about exacerbated by the fact that this is not really land. This is, you know, an old transfer station. I think the primary issue there is the water quality will suffer wherever either the groundwater table or the overwashing waves come in contact with this refuse. So I don't know how this refuse is sort of wrapped or packaged. But I think that as we start getting towards four to six feet of sea level rise at the end of the century, we have to wonder how secure is this refuse. Even if it is wrapped, will it become buoyant? Will we see it become unstable? No doubt already the water table is in or around this pile of refuse. So exactly, you know, is the refuse leaching out toxins and pollutants into the coastal water area already? Will it leach into the groundwater table, Maoka of the park where the water table breaks through the land surface? These are all issues that need to be thought about. And we already know that the water table is already heavily polluted here. We refer to an aquifer under this area, but it's not drinking water. It's brackish and it's got toxins and pollutants that have filtered into the water table from all of the surrounding land uses. So we already know that the water table is unclean. What effect would construction of a high rise say, for example, a 40 story residential condo, a big one high rise, have on the process he's already underway? Well, I, so I'm not a construction engineer and I can't answer intelligently here, but I can. I think it's not hard to imagine deep piles going down to solid bedrock. There must be deep piles supporting already are large buildings. And so I think there must be a mechanism where they don't need to use the refuse area or even any of the land area as their primary foundation. I don't know if they're driving in deep piles or deep, deep footers, so to speak. Okay, why don't you show us your, your invitation map. Okay. So, Jay, this is a tool we have in my research team where we can simulate the flooding related to sea level rise to a limited extent. And the setup right here is two feet of sea level rise, which under some models may occur by 2060 or 2070. It may not be apparent to you that there's any flooding at all but if I zoom in, these green blobs that you see are areas of flood water coming out of individual storm drains. And there are a few of them already in existence at two feet of sea level rise. Let's take a look now at three feet of sea level rise. These areas expand. And we see more of them. Almost every block shows us flood water, salt water coming out of storm drains. And at four feet of sea level rise. This becomes very extensive. Now this is basically the failure of the drainage system for many hours a day. And if we zoom out, you can also see in blue areas where there's direct marine flooding of ocean water. So green represents water coming either from the groundwater table or out of the storm drains onto the streets and blue represents direct sea water flooding over the shoreline. This does not represent wave flooding, which we know this whole parking area. On the shores of Honolulu Harbor, we know this area gets subjected to severe wave flooding. Our models indicate wave flooding over next to Kuala Boat Basin. The park itself or the refuse is buried has higher elevation and isn't subject to as much wave flooding. So this is four feet of sea level rise, which is a good estimate of how high sea level will rise by the end of the century provide provided that we don't see catastrophic rates of melting in West Antarctica, primarily. So the area you're talking about the park is on that chart at the bottom bottom left of that map. We can see your cursor.  And the walkway along the water that you can see that are running all the way. This the walkway along the water, the seaward edge of the park. These areas would be hit very hard by waves in the summertime when we have swell coming up out of the southern hemisphere and that is not shown here. Can we can we talk about what that means. In other words, if I'm, if I'm, I want to know in the park. If I'm walking along the walkway if I'm, you know, they are physically or if I build something there. What effect would that have on where I stand and where that structure stands, would I be able to continue to stand there. Well, I don't think that walkway itself will be very usable in four feet of sea level rise. As far as a structure. We design any sort of structure that we envision. So, a structure that is designed to live with water one that would allow waves to flow underneath it, or through the first floor for the half a dozen times in the summertime when large swell events arrive. That's completely possible to design and build. I don't think that building in an area exposed to four feet of sea level rise is the problem. I think the problem is designing a larger community where you can still drive to that building where you still have access to and from that building to the larger community because no building represents. A community of its own. You need to go out shopping you need to go to work, etc. So, you can see the large parts of the neighboring region are quite questionable so we shouldn't just be thinking about a single building. We should be thinking about the whole region it needs to entirely adapt to sea level rise and it can be done property by property parcel by parcel. We need to consider buried infrastructure we need to consider roads, open spaces as well as the building stock. When you say consider I think you mean that we have to take steps with regard to all all the structures all the walkways all the connections all the parking, all the buildings. They can, they can be reached, and that they can function as part of a what a community of buildings. And what it sounds like just listening to this discussion is that this is extraordinary steps that it will cost a ton of money to do any one of them and to do a whole community of them will be fantastic in terms of the cost. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying, which actually means the question that we're talking about is more than just the kakaako Mackay question. It is about all of kakaako and wiki key and in fact all of the Hawaiian shoreline. This must be done. And something I neglected to mention is that the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports that have been coming out since 2021. Make clear, in their terms in their words with high confidence that sea level is going to continue to rise for over 1000 years. This is not a temporary problem. This is a permanent new condition on the shoreline for all of our communities to take in to assimilate and to envision a new future it's actually if you want to, you know, look at the glass half full. This is a real opportunity for us, and we still have time before the worst of this is going to hit the worst of this will begin to become apparent by mid century and thereafter. We're talking about exponential sea level rise and so by mid century we start to see very rapid rates of sea level rise taking place. So we essentially have 20 years to do the planning to find the funding to implement the construction so that our communities can can continue to function with higher sea levels which are inevitable. You said on the city planning rather climate change commission right and she used to I used to. I stepped off last summer from the lens of that, you know, looking at it through that commission and the kinds of things they study and recommend and so forth. What can government do to make this this new new community you're talking about to put it in in in the right condition to prepare for sea level rise. I haven't seen it. Is there anything happening there and the other man part of my question is, can you do this on a societal basis. In other words, can you take steps to make the whole city of Honolulu better prepared, or must you go building by building past by past lot by lot. What the government can do is develop procedures policies, really permit requirements so that whenever an application for a project comes in whenever renovation or repair comes in for government permit that there are requirements. Among all the other requirements that are already in place, there are requirements to prepare for sea level rise and our Department of planning and permitting at the at the city is well aware of this problem. I began with the previous mayor Kirk Caldwell issuing a mayoral declaration to plan for sea level rise and the climate commission at that time, provided a guidance paper, and there has been an update to that guidance paper as of this past summer. So, guidance is in place from sort of the 30,000 foot level broad based guidance. We also have the long range planning folks at DPP, who have looked at other cities and how they have developed policies with regard to sea level rise, and sort of considered how they might apply to the primary urban core, and they've issued two reports which are available online on the DPP website so there's been strong movement. But I don't know that we yet have permitting requirements in place for independent developers to come in. I do know, lastly, that individual departments at the city and county are required to look at sea level rise in all of their activities and their budgets, and that the city department of the city program for climate change, sustainability and resiliency is really working very well integrating all the different city departments and bringing them under a sort of a single umbrella on the same plane of thinking in these areas. But it's not like building a city wall of building structures that would save us from sea level rise as a city project or a state project. It's a matter of getting up permitting requirements. In other words, if I want to build something, I have to meet these permitting requirements and it's on me. I have to find the money privately, as part of my project, to pay for these additional elements of infrastructure, and that changes the community in the sense that any construction now has another test for feasibility because of the additional expense. Have you talked about that? Yeah, well, that's exactly what I'm describing. So there are permitting requirements for flooding already. Unfortunately, they don't take sea level rise into account quite yet. The permitting requirements for your plumbing, for your electrical, I mean, everything has requirements. This now will be a new set of criteria that you need to meet. And fundamentally, it comes in the design phase. Like, are you going to go slab on grade on a low elevation parcel where floodwaters can come in and damage the first floor? No. We're going to need to do post-imperial or a large podium. And, you know, these, for a large building, these features can now become public gathering spaces. We want to build shade in there. We also want to be able to catch the rainfall for our parcel so that we aren't overburdening a drainage system that, as we've been talking about, no longer is capable of drainage under higher sea level. There's lots of news under the sort of rubric of sustainability and resiliency. That's what all this means. If we don't do that, what if the permitting requirements don't get adopted or don't get adopted in time or that they underestimate the threat, you know, and these natural processes you're talking about have their way with us? What happens to our community? What happens to Ako-Makai? I think we're looking at a community that becomes increasingly damaged by floodwaters, a community that really is not a new, renovated, vibrant community, a community that has been thoughtfully planned for the future. Instead, we'd be looking at a community that is on its way down into, you know, an urban location where people don't want to go. Because? Because you would have roads that are riddled with potholes, you would have the smell of the in-ground sewage lines coming up through the ground, all of the unconnected in-ground sewage disposal septic tanks and cesspools, they all need to be replaced. You would have sort of a growing mold from all the repeated flooding of surfaces that weren't designed for it. You'd have the randomness of people trying to go to an area and encountering floodwaters and having to turn around to go somewhere else for a movie or a restaurant or recreation and deciding, well, it's not worth taking the chance to go there anymore. That's just, you know, that's just a very short list of what is probably hundreds of reasons why people wouldn't be investing, they wouldn't be renovating, they wouldn't be redesigning. Really interesting. You spoke about, I hope I got this right, four foot by mid-century. No. What? By the end of the century. By the end of the century. Yes. By mid-century. One foot. One foot. Okay. And it doesn't, I have this absurd image in my mind that on January 1st of 2050, all of a sudden, boom, the water goes up a foot. No, that's not what happened. Right. It goes up gradually. And, you know, and by 2049, it's a good part of that, but it's already inundated. So the question I put to you is, you know, how accurate is that? And what kind of, you know, process do we have now? Like what's going to happen in five or 10 or 15 years? I guess it's going to be gradual, but as it is gradual, these things you're talking about happen. Yeah. So, so yesterday and today we had a huge wave event take place on the North Shore. We had the Eddie I. Cal surf take place. And all day I've been receiving photos from folks up on the North Shore showing where waves have run under their homes, where they've run onto the one main highway that runs through the area. One person sent me a measurement of 350 feet, which is how far the wave ran down a road going Malca the whole way. Now, when was the last time that surf was this big? It was maybe a decade or two ago. This, this, you know, the Eddie has been held more often, but we have particularly large surf happening yesterday and today. So that's sort of the 10 year, the decadal type of wave event. As sea level rises exactly what we saw yesterday and today will occur every nine years, every eight years, every five, every year. So these extraordinary extreme events are going to occur with greater and greater frequency. If that serves as an example of what the future looked like. On the South Shore. We could talk about King Tides. Now these King Tides people are used to them now we know that we've been seeing them for. We've actually been seeing them for a couple of decades, but there's been great press coverage in recent years. King Tides are already back flooding out of the storm drains coming up through the ground and driving waves up over the beach and into the into the back shore development. So those are instead of occurring twice a year, they're going to be occurring every month, then they're going to be occurring every week and finally every day. Wow. All that is by mid century under one foot of sea level rise the rare King tide that we see today is going to be occurring every day. How confident are you that it will not exceed one foot by mid century. I mean there are many factors working here. Yeah, I'm not confident that it won't exceed one foot by mid century. We do not understand the physics of the West Antarctic ice streams. And they are, they are the large uncertainty here, whether we see rapid acceleration of ice flow out of West Antarctica into the ocean, driving perhaps six feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Which is considered within the envelope of possibility. In fact, if, if you're going to be designing or planning a major urban project, you really should be planning for six feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. And that, and that would affect the specifications in the permitting requirements. Very, very much. Yes, indeed. It would make those fulfilling those requirements all the more expensive. Yeah. You know, it strikes me that we really we as a community we as a state haven't really fell it up to this. We don't really recognize it. Perhaps there's been more than you're aware of for instance, you know will elevated rail be extended from Chinatown to Alamo on a center. That's a question right now, but it has already been redesigned with six feet of sea level rise in mind. It's, it's been redesigned so that the electronics at the rail stations are lifted above a six foot high flood level should roads be raised six feet to accommodate sea level rise. They have raised portions of the rail so there's still a federally allowable height clearance for trucks traveling passing under the rail. Transit oriented development around rail stations that where we're in an area subject or exposed to sea level rise has been redesigned with sea level rise in mind there's actually been quite a bit done. So raising the level of roads and other infrastructure. My goodness gracious if you wanted to protect the, the, the South shoreline of Oahu, you'd have a lot of roads to raise. This would be very expensive and it would, it would have a huge impact on anything near the shoreline, including especially why key key the engine of our account. So that's where it's important to think about, maybe not every single road is going to be raised. Maybe not every single parcel and every single building. Can we afford to adapt to sea level rise. These are extremely expensive problems. Are we going to raise these various features by filling the land with with Phil, or are we going to build a sort of a mechanical and engineered device where sort of you have a low fly over bridge for a road. If we make a whole series of levees of raised roads like, you know, like a series of rice paddies in between them the parcels are still going to flood from from groundwater flooding. And there'll be no communication between them. There'll be no flow of the water. These waters will become stagnant. They're already severely polluted as they rise up out of the ground. It's a huge problem. And, and really we need our design community professionals are professional design consulting community in Hawaii. I believe the legislature should should fund several million dollars to bring our professional design community together to form a task force or working group and to come up with a new plan for Waikiki kakaako. Evil a another low line critical parts of our of our urban community and put together a plan for us and then we need to start moving on that plan. Yeah, it has to be coordinated in a comprehensive way. You know, you can't just say well this building has to comply with these specs and that building has to comply. It has to be the whole area. So my question is, from what you've seen what you know, and from what the requirements would be, and what the speed of the climate change and feel of a rise would be. You know, what how soon can we do this. And in the interim, what should we be doing. Should we be building more 40 story condos near the water that doesn't seem that doesn't seem advisable. Well, so this is a, this is a timing issue. You can't just raise a road because when it rains you're going to cause more flooding on the adjacent parcels as the road sheds the water. This is a relationship issue. The public agencies and the private landowners and the developers and the hotel community, they, they need to build a relationship so the things are done together. This is a public comment issue because, you know, let's say a plan suggests that a set of parcels over there really don't fit in the general scheme. Let's say that an area where we currently have a lot of automobile traffic is proposed to become a walkable venue. All of this needs to be vetted and that process we know is a is a long multi opinionated process. Lots of people like to weigh in on their communities and they have the right to. So getting this plan together, I would say that we are so far sort of behind schedule. We need to move quickly on this because the process of planning itself before we even break ground on some of this stuff. That could easily be five years or more. Yeah, and unless we forget that people people speak out of self interest. They speak because they are property owners or will be property owners and they have a. So this politics involved. But let me ask this, say it's five years, that's 10 years before we can, you know, get a system going here, which, which works. I mean, we don't, you know, it's not like we know for sure that any of these systems will work. They may have to be tested and tuned before we know. And while we're testing and tuning, we may have surprises from Mother Nature. But that makes us change our minds about it. So in the five or 10 years or whatever it is, what do we do chip? What do we do about developing near the water? Well, I think one of the first things that needs to happen is DPP needs to act on the knowledge it already has and start putting in place some obvious low hanging fruit requirements with regard to flooding related to sea level rise. You know, we, there's no doubt that this is going to happen. So science is fully on the side of one foot of sea level rise by mid century and, you know, three to potentially six feet by the end of the century. There's some obvious things that we can do to prepare for this already. The drainage infrastructure picking a few primary roads. And then I think the legislature needs to consider the possibility of major investment in the local design community. So perhaps there are some planning tools where a situation like this has been encountered before where an entire community is an urgent almost a crisis situation and some sort of overlay authority is created where planning can go forward. Not with community input, but not with the endless back and forth and nimbyism and, and, you know, personal interests driving my opinion only stalling progress. I don't, you know, I don't know, but something along those lines. I would be right to say that this, this even the interim steps here, that primary steps, the step the first step are going to take a little while to organize them to make it real to fund it to get by, you know, various various objections of one kind or another. And in that period, you know, from a scientific point of view from a, you know, a development of the city point of view, shouldn't we hold up. Shouldn't we hold up. What do you mean. Well, if tpp doesn't know exactly what its rules are going to be. If the state doesn't have an organization bill, if it hasn't funded a comprehensive planning process, should we just, you know, keep on going. Should we just build as if none of this was a problem. Just, you know, do what we were doing before, or should we wait. I don't think, well, I don't know you're trying to pin me down on something that I'm very hesitant to take one side or the other I'm going to reject your black and white suggestion that we wait or we don't wait. And I think that the reality is more gray than that. I think responsible developers. I think most of our development community is very responsible. I think they're already aware of sea level rise. I know they are. I don't think that anybody wants to build a white elephant that, you know, in 20 to 40 years turns out to be impractical. I don't think that we can rely wholly on that as a coherent design for moving forward. I urge all of the agencies responsible for permitting and and design of our urban community. In fact, our entire shoreline community to to move quickly to realize that time is wasting and that there's no more information we're waiting for science has already all of the data points and future milestones in terms of how high and and at what time sea level will reach. There's already plenty of basis for planning what a new community will look like. Okay. I think you wanted to show us your chart one more time. I'm happy to. Here is five you can see that areas that were dominated by green which is flooding not related to direct overland saltwater flow. Now the area becomes subject to direct ocean flow and six feet certainly is within the realm of possibility before the end of the century. We're looking at a very problematic urban core. I greatly appreciate you coming on and engaging with me on this. And I look forward to our next discussion. Thanks so much. Thank you, Jay. I do as well. Thanks for the discussion. Donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.


The mandate of the Fed, if you really look into it, they have two jobs, right? Get inflation down, make sure unemployment is not too high. So you're right, it's still strong. But what happens if we suddenly see the surge of unemployment go up and they're not done yet? Maintaining rate hikes or even starting to increase rate hikes. So are we expecting them to start dropping really quickly because they know that they're in trouble now? Well, I would say so. You know, if we look back again, I like to look back at previous stories. They've reacted quite quickly when things have happened in 2018, for example, the market started to absolutely dump and then they had to react. I don't think there is sensitive to how the market intertwines with things. I think they've again, it comes back to unemployment. I think unemployment is the key driver for the Fed. But it's an interesting topic that you bring up there, you know, the relationship between inflation and unemployment, because Powell said at Jackson Hole, I think in 2020, that the relationship between the Phillips Curve, sorry, between unemployment and inflation, which is the Phillips Curve, held during the 1980s, but it hasn't really held more recently. So I think that kind of alludes to the problem or the conundrum, if you like, of why unemployment hasn't cracked yet, even though inflation is high. Maybe it's because US productivity is so high. Maybe it's because genuinely the US economy is that strong, which is a scary thought because the way I think of trading and trading opportunities risk to reward is what is the underlying theme that could cause a big reversion? And if it is the worker, then it's going to be a trouble in time. Now, that doesn't mean to short the hell out of the market because that's silly. This is positive expectancy to remain long equities, usually, right? But for underlying indices like the Russell, which I think it's 12 month trailing price to earnings ratio has been cut in half versus last year, that's a problem which shows underlying weakness in smaller caps. So again, it just feeds right back into unemployment for me and general global aggregate demand. And again, it's linked to China. You know, you can see the demands gone in China. That feed for effect is probably going to start happening. Germany as well, really, really troubling. Yeah.


Hello everybody and welcome back to another C++ and SDL programming tutorial. In the last tutorial we were looking at the SDL underscore image library version 2.0 and that allowed us to actually use more image types and file types anyway with our images that we load in SDL. We were able to use .png, .jpeg, .gif or .gif, however and more common file types than the typical bitmap because only by default SDL has I think load a bitmap but that is not going to work out for us because typically we see .png files that's really where we see most of the sprites come from in the real world. So we wanted that img underscore load. Now that library was kind of nice. It didn't have to be really initialized or anything it just had to be included and it would work with services or SDL services just like normal. Now continuing that idea of adding resources and new elements of multimedia into our code and into our software in this video we're going to get into sounds and music. So I'm going to go ahead and save this code. I'm going to create another copy of it called 10a and I'm going to call it I think adding sounds is what I'll call it 10a adding sounds .cpp. Okay cool now let's hop on over to the internet. I've got my internet browser open and I'm at Google and you'll notice that in the last tutorial we were looking at SDL underscore image and it seems like with SDL libraries and modules it always has this theme or this kind of naming convention where we use underscore and then the name of what it is that we want. Now the new library or the module that I want to introduce to you is called SDL underscore mixer and you'll see the first result here gives us a link to another projects page at libsdl.org and that's exactly what we want. Sorry libsdl underscore mixer 2.0 is available and all the things available here do give us the windows binaries the linux and mac stuff that we need. Again probably on linux I'm just going to install this by the command line and I'll show you how to do that very very soon. This description anyway is that SDL mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16-bit stereo audio plus a single channel of music mixed by the popular flak, mic mod, mod, timidity, midi, augbore, and other stuff that I don't know anything about and that's really all that we need to know. Documentation is shown right up at the top here and let's see I think we can just go to one page html and that'll tell us how to use all this stuff. Alright we don't have to install it this way because it'll kind of go ahead and install that when we install it on our own and actually let's let's get to that. Let's go ahead and install this. I'm on linux so I'm just going to go ahead and use the regular command sudo apt get install sudo to run a super user apt get as their package manager and install and the library is called lib sdl2 just like we've seen before. Now the hyphen is going to denote the name of the module of the library in this case it's mixer and of course we want the development libraries so we use again hyphen and dev. I'm going to get enter I want to enter my password and uh for me this is already installed but it'll just ask you yes do you want to do this and you'll type in y for yes you do want to do this. Okay now in our software in our actual code we'll go ahead and include this just like we included sdl image we're going to use include sdl mixer and you'll see in the documentation this is exactly what it advises us to do. Compiling the way that we can do this uh is anyway pretty similar to the way that we included it with sdl image we use dash l um sdl2 in this case and then underscore mixer. Okay now here it it shows some of the functions that we can use um I believe initialize will initialize it I don't know if that's actually necessary from what I know initialize this mix quit open audio is what I've seen used most often so I'll show you how to use that and uh and here it displays the information for all the arguments that we'll be using and that sort of thing. Anyway let's get down to our code um we're going to end up using all of these probably after our sprite classes and uh and that sort of thing um I'm going to create a little code block for us probably let's see where do I want this we'll do it after we update the window and I'll do the nice little comment initialize the mixer okay now this first function that we're going to run is mix underscore open audio mix is the kind of precursor like or at least the beginning like we've been seeing with img for image and sdl for this for actual the sdl library now we're just going to use a mix with uh only a capital m rather than capitalize everything and open audio is what we want to use here and that'll kind of initialize things for us the frequency is by default 22050 you'll notice there is a constant for that mix default frequency I'm just going to copy and paste that because I'm the lazy and um format I believe is output sample format and I have been using the same argument for that actually now it asks for the number of channels set to for stereo one for mono this doesn't really have anything to do with mixing channels uh for what I've seen we just use two for stereo and uh chunk size bytes per output sample now I don't know anything about this this is just kind of a magic number for me um I I know to type in 4096 and uh hopefully you'll trust me on that it seems to work pretty okay all right now that we have that initialized and we're kind of double checking our uh our documentation notice that it does actually ask us to close audio and that's kind of like the cleanup function like we've been using with sdl quit and sdl destroy window and that sort of thing so before we forget let's go ahead and add that down at the bottom here mix close audio and don't forget your semicolon okay now we'll get into actually loading these sounds um the sounds I I'm hoping that yeah okay good now I'm sure somebody uses this function um mix underscore load wave is what will allow us to load a wave file and all of these sound bytes or sounds are stored in objects called mixed chunks now after our initialization function I'm gonna go ahead and create a new line and just say mix chunk for the type and this is going to be a pointer this will return obviously a pointer and uh I'll just call mine sound by default it can equal null because we're just going to override this but it's generally a good idea to keep uh all pointers to be a null pointer before you start to use them and then we'll go ahead and reset it sound can equal mix underscore the function we're looking at is remember load wave you'll see this in the documentation it loads a file for use as a sample sound it actually uses something in the back end and it can load uh wave files uh aug files and anything else you have to call uh mix open audio before this I know it says stl here but it did say over at the top that there may be some conflicts and confusions you should use a mix open audio rather than stl open audio okay now let's get back down to where the heck I just was hopefully I can find it okay here we go null is returned on errors and you can of course use the mix underscore get error if you're having some trouble with your program and your code okay so that loads the sound for us uh the file name that I'm going to use I do just have a small sound over here uh scratch dot wav wave and uh I think I just had those from lazy foods tutorials or whatever the case may be but yeah try and find a good wave sound online and you can use that as often as you'd like now um the way that we actually play this sound is with a whole new function and that's called mix play channel these channels or the functions allow us to use channels will really play anything that we would that we need to so here this playing or this this this kind of header here it allows us to look at the functions that are associated with this and play channel is exactly what we need we need it on one channel or the channel to play it on negative one will be the first free unreserved channel so that's what the argument that we'll use the chunk is the actual sound or simple to play and loops is whether or not we want to loop negative one is infinite loop one will play the sample twice for one loop so we'll just use it zero so it'll play just once okay now in that code mix underscore play channel negative one for the free channel sound for the mix chunk that we want to use in zero for no repeats awesome now because we have created this chunk because we have created this sound file remember with uh some of the surfaces that we use in uh in sdl we have to free them and that sort of thing uh we have to do the same with um the the chunks and the sound effects that we actually use so down at the bottom here where we're closing the audio for the um open and and initialized mix mixer in that library we actually have also free chunk and uh that is going to free the pointer or free the memory that we used to actually keep track of that sound it's obviously a bad idea to free a chunk that's still being played so and we can reset the pointer just to just go back to be no let's do that over here in our code and mix underscore free chunk sound and sound can equal no okay awesome i'm going to go ahead and compile this just to see how we're doing um g plus plus 10 a adding sounds we're going to use package config in our back ticks and you guys know the drill here remember we're going to be including image and we'll be including uh the mixer and remember to use sdl 2 right here okay compile this no errors thank you thank you thank you run it and i didn't hear it i wasn't able to hear the sound but maybe you were on your machine let's try it again i'm not getting it i'm not getting the sound okay uh after some reviewing now i see the problem i had set up the uh initial argument to the mix open audio function to be mix default frequency and that's exactly what it should be and i told you the wrong information that the second argument should be mixed default frequency but no it should actually be uh something else an entirely different constant it should be mix default uh format and uh this is the suggested default sign 16 bit samples in the host byte order and when we actually use open audio that's kind of what we should be passing in for the format the output sample format so rather than mix default frequency being the second argument as well as the first mix default frequency should be the first and mix default format should be the second sorry about that guys uh i hope you can forgive me on that one but anyway moving on now we should be able to play our sound um actually i'm just going to change this back to uh the sprites too because i don't want i don't want to see a whole lot of that happening around here all right let's go let's run this code compile it no errors now we can run this and oh i hear that sound i hear that scratching sound and i know that all right cool i'm i'm actually playing sounds and that's the function and that's how you can load and and play sound obviously you can look more at what this documentation can do for you but let's go ahead and move on the next thing that we're going to want to do or look at anyway is how we can mix music because i remember the description of the sdl underscore mixer library was able to play music as well and that's stored net and not mixed chunks because those are mixed chunks are just sound samples and sound bytes right no it's instead uh stored in mix music uh objects so let's look for a few more of these the way that we load one of those is by the mix underscore load mus or mus function and uh this just uses another string or a constant character array for the the file name and this can load wave midi aug mp3 any any file that you really kind of use a command to play and um this uses again a pointer so it's very similar to the mixed chunk and um we can kind of keep checking out more of these let's check it out mix music asterisk music by default that's a pointer so it can be null and we'll reset it to that new function we were looking at mix underscore load mus or mus the file name in my case is a beat dot wav or beat dot wave and again that's just something that i found online probably from like lazy food tutorials and um just a sample sound file to test out what we're doing now uh now we actually want to play this music and if we look at our c also we've got a few options here mix underscore play music that will probably do exactly what we need and uh exactly that does what we need um we pass in the mix music objects for the music file to play and whether or not we actually want to loop number of times to play through the music zero plays the music zero times so okay and uh negative one will play the music forever or as close as it can get to forever um this will return zero on success or negative one for errors let's go ahead and run this mix play music music and negative one cool now if i compile this if i run it oh i don't know if you can hear that but man there's plenty of noise going on on my computer okay we'll shut that up and i'll show you a few more functions that you can that you can use here um i notice you can see there are some also's or see also some documentation you can use fade in music to um fade in for a certain amount of time and that's kind of nifty uh i would recommend you just check these out and play with them in your code there are a few others like you can fade into a specific position in the music with this mix fade in music that's kind of nice um you can set the music position really just at any position uh it'll set the position of the currently playing music you should just really be checking out some of these functions see what they can do and um i know there are of course others halt music this will halt the playback of music this interrupts the music fader options and uh it'll always return zero it should just stop the music like you press the final stop button there is of course fade out music uh hook music finished i would check out some more of these playing music mix underscore playing music uh will kind of return uh an integer which is essentially a boolean value because it tells you whether or not music is actively playing it's kind of a yes or no question it will return zero if the music is not playing or one if it is playing like false for not and true for for yes so that's a good kind of thing to know there is of course pause music as to whether or not the music is paused um that's a little weird but there are functions to pause music that's right here and uh resume music and notice it doesn't take any arguments it's what's going to it's going to do these things to the currently playing music because only one piece of music can play at a time there are 16 channels for sounds but only one channel for music and uh rewind music will go back to the starts there are plenty of things to look at here and i won't demonstrate all of these for you but i want you to know that these functions exist and uh it's good to be able to use them so okay thank you for watching everybody hope you enjoyed this tutorial i know it took quite a while but we are looking at two different things here music and sound effects and a whole new freaking library that has its own documentation and nifty things to do and work with c++ and sdl with okay uh i think i'm going to end off here again i want to thank you for watching it'd be nice if you could like the video if you did like the video maybe leave me a comment let me know what you think maybe subscribe if you like what i do and you like the stuff that you see i'll see you in the next tutorial


We're going to look at the effect of pressure on the vapor pressure due to water. Remember a vacuum pump is an instrument that will remove gases. Here you have the O-ring that's going to make a seal. We have water with a thermometer. We're going to make a closed system. And when we turn the vacuum pump on what's going to happen, it's going to take gas molecules out of the container through this tube right here. I'd like you to observe what happens to the liquid and also what happens to the temperature when we change the pressure in the container. So you should see that water boils and it's still only about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.


Hi everybody, it's Sam at Mixed Up Craft. Thank you for watching today. So I wanted to show you the brand new collection by Dovecraft. This is called Paper Poses. It's beautiful and I have already started making some things with it. So there will be a tutorial coming later today, which I think you're going to love. And then there's a really, I'm so pleased with Monday's tutorial. You're going to just absolutely love it. So this I was sent by Trimcraft, but I have topped up a few pieces myself. And it's the whole collections available on Craft Stache. And this weekend they have free delivery. So it's great if you're in the UK, but also if you're outside of the UK because it's a worldwide free delivery. So I'm going to talk you through each piece because I know a lot of you like to see this, especially if you you're unable to get to stores or actually get to see it yourself. It's nice to be able to see exactly what you get. Now the one thing that I don't have because I don't use it is the washi tape. So there is a set of three washi rolls, I believe that also come with this as well, but you'll see all that in the links below. But let me get into this and show you just how lovely it is. Okay. So first of all, you've got your wooden frames. They always do wooden frames. Now most of the time they've been squares or rectangles. It's really nice that this time we've got these heart shape. So you get 12. I'll just show you what they look like. So you have three in, oh no, sorry four. Oh yeah. So you get four of each. There we go. So you get four in this colour here and that pattern really nice. Then you get four in this pattern here. And these are great for layering up on the front of cards. Also for adding onto scrapbook layouts and actually putting a photo behind it. They look really, really lovely. There's some great inspiration already up on the trim craft blog or the craft blog. And then you've got that one there with that very subtle kind of gingham print coming through. It's really nice. So that's those three there. To keep them with the wooden theme, you also get these ones here, which are your six wooden shapes. I have two packs because I did get one myself. These are beautiful. And the reason I've doubled up on it is because I knew I'm going to go to these a lot. And again, just to bring them up a bit closer there. Really solid, lovely decorations. Now, you know, depending on what kind of crafting you're into, it might not be paper craft. You could very easily attach, you know, with a small hole through there, if you've got those very, very thin drill bits and you could make that into a necklace. You could also make it into some earrings. You know, so think of, you know, other ways of using these. It doesn't just have to be on your paper crafting. And I think they would make lovely embellishments, put a pin on the back, have a pin badge, you know, a brooch, all that kind of thing. So you can certainly, you know, use these to make really nice gifts and then use the papers to make the packaging to put it in. So I just love them. I think they're absolutely beautiful. Love the colors throughout this. And also the prices are really good. Dovecraft, the price points are always really good for your embellishments and stuff like the paper pads. It's just really good prices to have a little look online because some of them, you know, are like £1.50 and things like that. So it is good. And then they've spoilt us because we also get these, which are 16 wooden shapes. And these ones, do they just say with love? Let's have a look. That's really nice. I've not seen that before. So we've actually got three with with love. Oh no. So these are all with love on this side. Okay, I get it. They're just all that front. Right, there we go. So you get half with with love. Okay. And then it looks like the other half is plain. So these here, and I've done this before, but you can add a few stamp furser mark over it and then sprinkle your embossing powders. Heat set, you'll make really nice, you know, metallic looking embellishments. And yeah, they look great. You can also use your alcohol markers on them, you know, ink them up, paint them, all that kind of stuff. So that's, yeah, that's nice that they've done, you know, half and half. So you've got the option to actually be able to do what you want on them as well. Then we get wooden pegs. So you get 35 mini pegs, but you've got two different sizes. You've got the slightly larger one there. And then you've got these smaller ones and a great, they're just nice to add onto the front of cards or to use on scrapbook layouts. Or if you're making some home decor, you might have like a shadow box frame, you can have pegs hanging and then photos hanging from the pegs. There's some really nice ideas. It's gone to Pinterest and pop in, you know, peg DIY and you'd get loads of ideas. But again, really nice addition to add with the collection here. Then I picked up two of the bunting packs. I always use the bunting all the time. It's on everything. I used it with the, oh, what was the garden one that we, we done last year with the little, I'm looking up at it now, my bird box and my little she shed, all those kind of things. I just love the bunting.  And all of the prints will be the prints from the paper pad as well. So I love those. Then these ones here. So you've got your 16 paper flowers. I didn't need to get more of this because I have a lot of these paper flowers and I've got other colors that would work well with this collection as well. But they're always a nice addition to have. And then also the adhesive pearls, you get 91 and you'll get all your colors there to complement the collection. So again, really nice. Love those. Then I've got these again, doubled up because I will use them a lot and they are the puffy stickers. They're really lovely. Then once, when I show you the Decapage kit, it's basically the Decapage kit but in puffy stickers. So all the toppers that you get in the kit, they've done in puffy stickers and I love them. Really, really nice. And again, just give some nice dimension to your projects. Love the, you know, the designs and, you know, the little something there and for a special friend, lots of love, you know, you can put happy birthday and then it will have lots of love inside or something. So yeah, really nice. And also, I forgot to mention, this is another collection that's supporting the Mind Charity. So I can't see the sticker on the front, but I know in the past they would donate a minimum of £10,000. So I imagine that there's going to be some form of donation, you know, that comes from the sales of this collection will be going to that charity. So that's really nice. And I've got some ribbons here. So this is five cotton ribbons. I've got a few of these from the other collections and they are nice. It's nice to have that real fabric ribbon just for you. That one just says you're lovely. And then you've got the hearts and prints and some flowers there. So it's nice. Some more mini bows.  You don't always like to do the bows yourself, especially when they're this small. It's just, it's just handy to have. But I love that, it's, you know, that orangey red, really, really nice in that colour there. And then you've got the, the lighter blue there as well. So you get 20 mini bows. These I love. Oh gosh, these were just so nice. These are your flower sequins. It's 20 grand bag. And they, you can sew with them as well. So they are proper, proper sequins, but I just love the colour.  It's just like, it's not rose gold. It's more of a pinky gold. It's just gorgeous. Absolutely love these. I can't wait to use those. And we've got the buttons. We always get buttons in Duffcraft collections. You've got 16 wooden ones here. And again, you can see probably that side's better for you to get an idea of all the prints. Again, they're the same prints that were in the paper pad. So they're going to match and work really nicely. And I picked up the stamp set. Really liked this one. I was drawn to this cute little gift tag, which is going to work perfectly on the back of, you know, tags. But also, I like this one here, which is like your Polaroid. And then you just have this lovely one with the, again, it's taken all from the toppers and the decapage and stuff. Nice love one there. And I like this little like banner on the side. Just thought they were really nice. So yeah, and I think they're going to look really nice heat embossed. I can see a lot of this, you know, with my silver embossing powders. So I think silver is going to work really well with this collection. Oh, I'm wrong. There's another wooden embellishment. So this is, I didn't, yeah, definitely not showing this one. This is your light little tags. So you can put some ribbon or twine through there. And then you probably could stamp with the stamp. Let's have a little look. Yeah, you could, there's no reason why you can't stamp that on the back of this tag. So what a lovely tag to have on a gift, a nice wooden one. And yeah, I just think they're, again, very cute. They're all the same design, just with that with love. So I like those a lot. I picked up two. Well, I had one of these and I got an additional one and these are your sentiment toppers. There's foam on the back of them, and you've just got a variety of sentiments there. But I just thought, again, very cute and something that I will use, you know, a lot. So it's always worth getting the extras. And because they're such good value for money, you know, I don't mind. Then I got these ones. I adored the ones from the fairy tales collection last year. So I'm glad that they've done them again. And these are your six shaker stickers. And they've got lovely little silver hearts in the middle. And the top one's just a plain heart. And then the next one says lots of love. And then the bottom one is that rose. I think out of the whole collection, it's this rose image. That's my favourite. It's just, yeah, really, really lovely. And then we move on to probably my most favourite thing in the collection. And that's the Decoupage pads. I rave about these every time they bring one out. I just love them. I've loved the Christmas ones in the past and just all the other ones that they've done. So this one was, yeah, just, oh, it's just so, so nice. Sometimes there's like maybe the odd page that I'm not drawn to so much, but this one, I just love them all. And I show you them all in one of the tutorials coming, but I will flick through the pages so you can see. But like I said, you'll see them made up in the next few days. So you get this one here. And for anybody that doesn't know about Decoupage, Decoupage just means to layer. So there's a few forms of Decoupage. There's Decoupage where you rip paper and you just decorate like different objects and furnitures and things like that. And then there's this Decoupage where you punch, well punch, you kind of cut these out. They're pre-cuts. You just pop them out, sorry, on foam pads and you layer them up on top of each other and they make beautiful toppers. And they've numbered them. You always start with the largest first and then you put the second one, second largest and so on until you're down to the tiniest ones. So it would be number five. They would be the last ones to stick down. It's really, really nice. Love doing these.  When actually all you've done is pop them out and put some foam on the back. So it's great. So you've got that one there. You get three of each design. Then you get this one here. I've used this one. It's beautiful. Really, really like it for a special friend. You always get extras as well. So they're great to you know put in cards or inside the cards and things like that. Then this one here, happy birthday. Love the colours of that one. This one here. So it's a tag, a little something. And again these are all extras. So you know that you put them all on a card or put them on the gift box and then there's your tag to match. So you know it's all going to tie together really well. Another tag. This one here is my favourite. Just love it. Absolutely love it. You get two extra toppers there. So you get the hello or lots of love. This one. You can make two from this. So here's one here and then two and three and then you've got one and two and three. So really nice gift tag. So you actually can make, you get six of those in this pad. And then we've got this one here. Really like the heart. And again you'll see all of those made up in the coming days. And then finally the paper pads. So I've got the 12x12 and then I also went and got the 6x6. I will show you the 6x6 closer because it's the same as the 12x12. They're just blown up. In case you always get an overview on the top. Also keep this because it's you know you can use like the strip there that makes a nice decorative kind of edge on a card or something. So you'll see there we go. It's this one. Then we have this one here. These are great background ones really are with those toppers on top. It just honestly when you see the the projects that I've started doing I just it's just so easy to create with. Then we've got this one here with the blue background and the hearts. This one. And this is on Monday's project. Oh my gosh I am so in love with it. I want this as like a wallpaper. Oh gosh yeah amazing. And then we've got the one it just says love all over. So great for Valentine's. Get that one used now. Then we've got that blue rose. Then we've got this similar kind of print. It's just smaller more individual flowers there. Gingham just brilliant. I actually have a like a little kind of file just full of gingham papers because they work with just so many projects and I find I use them a lot with like my Daisy May stamps. That one. And then this one I really like. Again this is featuring on Monday's tutorial. You've got the like a yeah again it's like a wallpaper effect really. And then this one here really nice. Again love that style. And then finally on the back this one. Again we've got a real kind of vintage look to it. So yeah very drawn to that one. So that is the 6x6 but like I said it's exactly the same for this in the 12x12. And because it's paper it makes beautiful envelopes as well so it's perfect to you've made you a lovely card and then you can have them matching envelope as well if you need to custom them. So those are the papers. Okay so there is the full collection like I said the only thing that isn't here is the washi tape and I think I have got everything so if there is something I'm missing then let me know because I want to get it. But I adore it really do. You know I'm a huge fan of Dovecraft. I will only share with you product that I really enjoy and I think you will enjoy as well.  I know that the range also stock Dovecraft but I went into my local range the other day and I didn't see this in there so that's why I purchased mine additional pieces from Craftsdash and they do have the whole collection on there. So again I will link all of that below and they also have it on Amazon as well so if anybody prefers to shop on Amazon I'll share those links as well. But I hope you like it. I really hope you enjoy the two back to back kind of tutorials using this collection because I think it really shows it off well as well. So thank you as always to Trimcraft for sending me this product. I love you all and I'll be back again soon with another tutorial. See you later. Bye.


A lot of people look at Detroit as something that's constantly making a comeback. When the automotive industry was removed as a focal point, small businesses had to band together. There's this thread of resilience that speaks to the city and all of the small business owners. They really are small giants. When you think of Detroit, you think of not only the motor city, but you think of the food, the people, the music. When there's a lot of money being poured in from the outside, from outside investors, the communities forgotten, the people are forgotten. 13% of the state of Michigan is black. 82% of Detroit is black. So the communities are used to an uphill climb. I think the evolution of Detroit is going to be put on the backs and carried by the small businesses and entrepreneurs that continue to pour into the people that they serve. You're going to experience a certain level of grit, a certain level of hospitality. You're going to experience a certain level of swag. Detroiters know, small business owners know. There is no making a comeback. We've been here and we're here to stay. This is Icons of Detroit.


This is a huge stage. Only halfway there. OK, so this is my first slide, and it kind of tripped out the tech people because it looked broken. But I want to talk about big design troubles in open source. Oh, yeah, here, big. This is the biggest word I put on a screen, by the way, ever. Design troubles open source. All right, and that's the face I make a lot when I'm designing. And I wanted to talk about why and how we can improve that. I'm Michael R. Stead. I work at Automatic. And most of the projects I work on happen to be open source, and I've contributed quite a bit to open source projects throughout the years. So I love it. It's a great community. There's great people. And I've learned a ton of things on all sorts of subjects across the years.  I was one slide behind on my screen. And then I started getting into some bigger projects. I jumped into WordPress a little bit. And it wasn't necessarily out of passion, which I'll talk about later, but it then evolved into a passion. And now I work on Jetpack and Calypso, which is the React-based interface for WordPress.com. And let's see. I have just a little bit of experience behind me on this. Let's see here. So I want to talk about onboarding designers to start. That's where open source projects usually have a rough time. It starts when a designer gets a little curious. They have an itch. And they discover a project that helps them with that. But they find they have the skills necessary to improve the project for other people. But it's usually a project built by developers, by developers, and just four developers hoping to solve a project or a problem. So if they join the project finally, they have to get past these preconceived notions. And I want to talk about those first. First of all, open source is code. This is usually what my screen happens to look like. And a lot of the time, open source projects are really code-based. But they could all use design in any sense on tickets, sketches, wireframes, any level of design. So it doesn't have to be just code. Another preconception is that open source projects are very difficult. That's not true. There's a lot of really, really cool projects, really new projects, that if you're jumping in early, it's really easy to get started. They have no rules. The world's your oyster on those projects. But some of the more established projects have just tons of commits. And even this Gutenberg, which we've been talking about all week, it's already at 1,700 commits with 32 contributors. It's already kind of a pretty popular established project. So it may be a little intimidating to start. Fortunately, this one's rather easy. And that open source is slow. And that is largely driven by the fact that it's hard for people to convince developers out of the blue to switch what they're doing and work on their cool design thing. But open source is actually really fast. This is just a bunch of active tickets from the last couple of days. And they tend to open and close really quickly. People are solving things so quickly. It's just a matter of convincing people to work on your project. So it can move pretty quickly with the right group and after making a few friends. And some of the rougher parts of the project are caused directly because they're developer-led. The tools are for the developers. And I want to start with, basically, the tools allow the developers to have control over the project. They're really comfortable with these tools, and they use them all the time. These aren't tools people outside of the developer realm are used to. So terminal is a scary thing. And it's the primary tool for building projects. There are some GUIs for building SAS and some other things like that. CodeKit's a good one. But most of the tools, you've got to open up terminal and understand some basic terminal language. Then there's the communication tools. These are pretty rough in some communities. They tend to be like IRC track. Chromium uses some crazy bug tracker that I've never seen before, but it's really kind of scary-looking. And then there's collaboration tools like, again, Slack and IRC are really pretty good. IRC has a bunch of web portals. Slack is very friendly and has emoji support, which I love. But my recommendation is to use modern tools with wider reach. So instead of sticking to your old tools because you like them, look at where designers are. Or look where other people are collaborating that aren't developers and find something that's a little more useful. GitHub isn't ideal. It's not perfect. But that's where a lot of people, a lot of designers, are contributing because they've done a good job working with the interface to help collaboration along. With WordPress specifically, we do almost all of our feature projects on GitHub now. And I think that's a good telling sign. When we're on GitHub, they get all these contributors out of nowhere. They move really quickly. People are creating and busting through issues really quickly. It may not scale for WordPress, but it's working really well for our projects themselves. Then once we merge those projects back in, we see a huge drop-off in those contributors continuing to work on those projects. And partially, the projects are moved in, but there's usually a lot of issues remaining. My next recommendation for onboarding is to make the projects really accessible. So again, I'm going to promote GitHub because that's where a lot of people are. That's where a lot of code is happening. But there's also new, cooler ones, like Glitch is this app sort of collaboration project that all sorts of really experimental things are popping up from artists, from developers, from just all sorts of cool ends of the job spectrum. And provide design tools. We do an OK job of that. We've got templates. We've got some wireframing tools, prototyping. We could do a little bit better with, but we're working on it. And testing. This is a really big one. It's so easy to test. And we've now got a testing group. They're leading the way. They're helping out in any way they can to get these new projects tested, which makes just better design. And then design docs. As you just saw in the last talk, design docs are really important. And I think a project having a pretty comprehensive set showing that there's design thinking is important for recruiting, especially design talent, because they'll see that there's design thinking. They're focused on improving the project. They've got some idea of where they're going. And they're providing tools for the designers across the board to be on the same page. This, we have some really rough starts to it, but nothing comprehensive. But I'd like to move on to retention a little bit. Retention is where our biggest problem is. It's not necessarily recruiting, especially with designers. The biggest reason, I think, is time commitment. It's a huge amount of time to contribute to design on a project of any scale. You've got to do a little bit of research to understand the problem. You've got to come up with a solution to that problem. You've got to test out that solution a couple of times, wireframe, whatever it is, work with people to convince them to implement that problem. And that's if everything goes perfectly. We need to do a much better job respecting people's time in this. With development, it appears easy to jump in, fix a bug, and jump out. With design, that's not really so clear. You might jump in to fix something and spend a week in a rabbit hole of bugs to just fix one border. So I don't have a great suggestion for this, other than more companies could donate some time, some designer time, whether that's partially funding a designer to work on a project, or just fully fund. Like, we've got several full-time developers. We've got several full-time committers paid for by other companies to work on core, work on the community. And it shows their leaders in the community, they're always around. They've accomplished some of the hard tasks that aren't accomplishable in a short amount of time. Right now, there are, I think, the most designers we've ever had on core. We've got two or three people, no, I think four now working full-time on specific projects. But they're all focused on their corner of the woods. Two of them are working on Gutenberg. One is working on a customization, Mel, and I don't know where the other one is. Another thing that scares people away is community pushback. This happens in every open-source community. Some are worse than others. Some communities are not very welcome to newcomers. They expect you to know the rules. They expect you to know history you may not know. And quite often, read the manual, RTFM, is the response you'll get when you post something unexpectedly. Even when you post a design that's really complete or fully thought out, you'll still get a lot of pushback. We often encourage our designers, when we're first onboarding them to do a smaller bug, like fix a button color or something like that. Now, one of the problems with that is that it's really easy for anyone that's not a designer to also understand that problem. And that ends up in everyone chiming in because they all have their own ideas, how that button color should be. That's called bike shedding. And it's a huge time sink. Basically, there's no clear winner on that one. If you're new to a project, who's to say you have the right answer over all these strangers or people that may have been around telling you you're wrong or that their idea might be better, that's a really quick way to chase someone away. Now, these are my favorite ones. These are where I get caught up on. And just about every ticket I do. And I've got a good idea of why. It's partially because WordPress is 14 years old, which is awesome. I've never worked on a project that's old because it keeps getting older. So the technical limitations involve technical debt, design debt. They've been designed over 14 years. And a lot of stuff has been forgotten, not iterated on. Whoever implement them is no longer around. And it's hard to always know the history of that. So you get these unexpected requirements that no one even mentions even before something's merged in. For example, if you change this button at all, you would never know that if you made the color slightly different that you would have to meet accessibility guidelines. You would have to understand the implications of how it might look in another language or at a different size, how it wraps. Even if it's just a color change and you commit it, which I've done, you might get a ping a week later that says, well, hey, you did this here. But what about the color schemes? So you go, OK, well, where's the CSS for the color schemes? Turns out it's SAS. There's a build process involved. You have to figure out what grunt and terminal and all that stuff is, and you're gone. That's one of the faces I make when I run into this.  And I think that's one of the most brilliant insights I've heard when it comes to contributing. We need contributors to stay around. Even if they're submitting imperfect things, let's help them, let's grow them, let's keep them excited and involved. They're there for a really, really good reason. And we want to keep them. So provide loads of feedback, but make sure it's encouraging. Be patient with them. Don't tell them to read the manual. Tell them, hey, we do this for this reason. What do you think about trying this? Here's more information on it. That kind of thing. Don't just link them and dump them. And constructive feedback is really important. Give them feedback right away. And this goes to not just design. Anyone who's commenting, if something sits too long, it's really kind of demotivating. So someone posts a proposal. They've got some code in there. Let's get in as quick as possible. Core is really good about that. Very few tickets sit for too long, unless they're super difficult or way out of scope. For example, if I posted a ticket like WorkPress should have an editor like Medium, that may not stick around for very long. But someone could be really nice about it and say, hey, we're working on this other thing called Gutenberg. It's really nice. Please come on over and check it out. It's not Medium. It's going to be way better than Medium. That kind of thing. And there's no one to make decisions for you. You've got to help them make the decision and understand when decisions are kind of handed down from team leads for historical reasons or something. Like, don't just say no. Say, we can't do this because the API limits us from doing it right now and we're working on it. That kind of a thing. And constantly do your part to keep them involved. If they've disappeared off the face of the planet, and this goes for any contributor, ping them, say hi. You don't have to convince them to contribute. But just the fact that you're seeing how they're doing, they might have a life thing come up. They may really want to get back on the project. This happens all the time. And most of all, be a mentor. So when someone new comes in and they see talent or excitement, like we have young people all the time come in. I think there was a 12-year-old who was helping Adam last year fix the REST API, which was pretty cool. But they helped mentor this person just along, even though this person was correcting their code. I think that's how Nason got pretty far as he had a lot of help when he learned quick. But these are just like recruiting and on-boarding, recruiting and retention problems. Those, I think, can boost our numbers and help distribute design a little more evenly across WordPress. But there's a few more pretty big design troubles. And I think the biggest elephant that came up over the last few days is design leadership. Right now, we have kind of a big gap there. We've got leadership on specific focuses and projects. But there's no one guiding where WordPress could go. There's no one organizing style guides or how components can work together across the board, thinking holistically about the product. We are doing better with this as we've gotten more designers, more people are communicating with each other. But currently, there's no team leads that are just telling people what we should be doing or where we're going. But that's not a problem. That means that's a huge opportunity for new designers to come in, new talent, and help guide the process themselves. Like, it's a democracy, essentially. The longer you're around, the more you're familiar with the project, and the more weight your words will have when you try to swing one direction or another or convince us that maybe we don't need menu groups or that widgets shouldn't exist because they should just be in something like Gutenberg, that kind of stuff. And I will just cover that. Design vision, because there's no one with this super clear vision of where things are going, which I think is kind of a myth most of the time. It just comes from whoever's working on a project. This can be really good and sometimes it's really clear. Like Gutenberg, you can already see the vision in that video of where it could go, how it can influence themes and plugins. But it's not always super clear, like what happens with custom post types, that kind of thing. And design consistency. This is a pretty big problem on old projects because they're often designed by like 100 people over 10 years, and it shows. So the comments section might be super different than how you manage pages, that kind of stuff. There's no one really heading a project to rearrange that or fix that. So I think that's a common open source project or open source problem that kind of plagues some projects. A lot of bits get left behind as they are no longer the new thing. They no longer have developers who are interested in working on it. And it's hard for designers with limited amount of time to go and redesign 10 sections that work on mobile. They've tested them. They dramatically changed users' experiences. That's a big deal, and it's very difficult to do. So that's why over time, things get a little rough. And our design process is slowly improving. Right now, it's a little open-ended, but I think Gutenberg again is a really good example of how the design process can be in the open. They're showing their steps. They're keeping people along for the ride. They're not just showing up at the end going, here's, I hope you like this. They're asking for opinions and they're showing every step of the way how they can make a great product. Now, I'm pretty optimistic about the future of open source and about WordPress itself, specifically WordPress because we have a huge year right now. We have Gutenberg working pretty amazingly for how quickly it's been put together. We have a customizer focus, a customization focus, I'm sorry. We have folks like John Mehta spreading the open source word on his networks. We have the REST APIs now in, so we can do all sorts of really cool design stuff this year. And we even have a developer and design co-lead on some stuff. Now, I wanna make it even more design-y for everyone. So I want you all, if you're a designer or not, to start thinking about design, getting to design thinking. And I think some of the other speakers talked about this a little bit, but it has nothing to do with form. It's not how pretty things look. I don't care if you use blue or green, that kind of stuff. It's entirely about function. It's the product itself. It's how a thing works. That's what we're trying to get at. We're trying to make something that works really well for the people that use it. And so that starts with some empathy. You have to talk to a lot of people. You have to use the product yourself. You have to try all these things. If you're building a blogging platform, blog, build sites, try to break it, do all sorts of things with it, and not just one site, like 10 sites. And that, again, takes time, but it's worth it. It's how you build empathy. Just the other day, I was trying out a product that's established. And running through a flow, it was actually Jetpack. I was running through a sign-up flow. And I think on the 10th different variation I did, I ran into something that was kind of frustrating for me as a designer. Could be frustrating for users because they don't really know what it means. But it wasn't really a huge blocker, but it was something that we immediately made an effort to make better, because we caught it. That's super important that we do that. And again, don't think in features. That's an old mindset. That's how you accumulate settings. It's also how weird things like menu grouping happens when someone comes along and says, well, we wanna use this menu over here and over here. Instead of just saying, okay, let's do that. Let's do this and make this feature a thing. You gotta stop and say why. Who's this helping? Is this gonna be more confusing in the end of the day? That kind of stuff. And that's all in flows. That's thinking about how to, a user needs to have a menu in three places. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to have a group that uses the same thing in a confusing context. They could just mirror some things or add some quick flows that work really well, which simplifies as menus. It makes it so that newer users, newer site creators, businesses can work with this without building a menu and getting confused as to why it's not showing up somewhere. So I'm just reaching out, help us design some stuff. It doesn't have to be WordPress, though I recommend it, but there's lots of projects out there. A lot of them are beginning and the earlier you get in, the more exciting it is. You have some sway, you'll learn a lot. You'll learn some code even. You'll learn terminal. It won't be super scary after a while and you'll be able to improve yourself as a designer because you'll get really, really familiar with the medium. So thank you. Now, ask me whatever you want. I don't know how much time we have. We've got a bit of time. We've got a bit of time. This is your chance to quiz one of the core team, any questions you have about design, about the process that gets us to design. Please take your chance now. We've got the usual situation with the lights down at the front. Do we have any questions? Who's got first? We have a question coming in from Don Bellow. I'm Matt. I'm from Poland and I have a question. How did you start? Like, how did you get involved with working for automatic? Did you get... I got really mad at WordPress one day. Yeah, and how did you get already like a portfolio or ready-made projects? How did it work? So I'd already done some playing on GitHub and some open source or web projects. I'd done a lot of web work and freelance work which is why I got mad at WordPress. I found a really blatant bug, got really mad at it and was like, I'm gonna fix WordPress. And it turns out that's harder than I thought. How's that going? But I jumped in, I had lots of opinions and then the leads and the core developers dropped in and said, hey, you know, I mean I wasn't cursing or anything but they were like, calm down. I mean, we know you're excited. Why don't we tackle this one issue at a time? Let's break this up into manageable things. It's okay. So that's how I got started in WordPress. I jumped in on a project called CEUX which was content editor, user experience or something like that. Essentially it was Gutenberg way ahead of its time. It was a blocks interface that let us do a lot of cool things that I was mad about. So I listened, I learned a lot. Mel happened to be leading that project which was kind of a good and a bad thing. Like I was like, is there anything I could do to help? And she's like so on it with design. She was like, nah, I got this. So I just kind of sat back and did some helpful mockups, made some smaller decisions along with it. And then when we realized it maybe wasn't gonna work or wasn't ready to work in scope of technical limitations, it was kind of pushed aside. But there is a cool plugin out there that you can still mess with it a little bit. Mike, can I ask, you kind of wear two hats then. So you have a role in the open source.org side. You also have a role on the Jetpack side. How do those two roles differ if at all? Okay, so I think the type of open source projects dramatically differ. So WordPress.org is entirely run by the community. Like it's built by the community. It's a very community-centric project. Jetpack is built primarily by Automatic. It's paying a lot of people to work and improve it. That said, we get plenty of community contributions. And we listen and work with the community on many things. We're often adding nifty secret tools and things to help out people in the community on specific sites. We have great support. So it's still a community project and anyone can contribute to it, but it's guided by a specific entity mostly. We have a question down below again. Thank you. Can we try again down here? Yes. Hi, Michael. I'd like you to know what you think about the current usage data and user data that we have on WordPress. And I'd like to know if, do you think, sorry, do you think we have enough to take well-informed decision about design and even more with such new projects coming up? Shouldn't we invest time and energy to build better usage data? Yeah, so to answer, those are two questions. One, do we have enough data to make informed design decisions? And two, can we have better data, right? Okay, so the first one, yeah, we do have enough user feedback or usability feedback to make design decisions. Some of it is coming from places like WordPress.com. Some of it are coming from other sources. We do a lot of research, but a lot of it just comes from talking with users, documenting the problems they have, figuring out who's using our stuff. We still don't have, like, like I don't know who's using WordPress. Like it's the top 20, it was top 25 million sites for 28% or something like that. I have no idea how many sites there are that are WordPress and active. I think that's the best guess we have is probably in the plugin directory or somewhere in one of those stats. We do have pretty good stats on active plugins and what plugins are used so we can make some deductions there. For example, I believe the top 100 plugins on the plugin directory, topmost active, are account for about 90 plus percent of plugins installed. We know that on average, people have six plugins installed in active. The top, I think, six of the plugins in the plugin directory account for a pretty large portion of that percentage as well. So we can make some good deductions as to who's using it, as for why and what they're looking for. So we can make some pretty good design decisions for things like where we put a button or a publishing flow. That's harder to do because we don't have a beta program or anything quite like that. We've made steps towards that. Like we do have a beta channel. You can be in them plugins if you're on a developer version. We have made projects a little more visible but we do a lot of usability tests early and often. So with Gutenberg, we're already testing it. We've tested the prototypes. We're testing how it is right now and every time we test it, it only takes a couple of people to figure out where things are broken or inform our design decisions as to where we can maybe even prove. So I think we have a lot of data. It could definitely improve. I think it's a matter of exposing that data in a better way is primarily the problem. It takes a lot of legwork currently. Mike, there has been some discussion about having WordPress sites phone home to deliver clearer, more granular data. What's your position on that? What's the core team's position on that? I don't know what the core team's position on. I'm not speaking for the core team. I think it's a kind of controversial topic and I don't know enough. I think it potentially, I think it scares a lot of people for privacy concern reasons. It could definitely be something that we opt people into or give them the option for, kind of like when you're signing up for a browser and asks you, hey, can I gather usability data?  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the best answer to that is because it's a complicated technological question. It could expose a lot of data publicly on accident if it's all going to WordPress.org or one of those servers. So I don't know enough about it. I would love to have that data for sure. I'll let you off the hook for now. We have another question down here. Hi. What inspires you to improve design or what places do you look for and trends? Are you looking at, in terms of publishing platforms like Squarespace is, I know Gutenberg's coming in. So I guess that's a two-part question and one is what actually inspires you to do the design in a good way and also trends. Okay, so that's a good question. Where do I find inspiration and am I looking at trends? So yes, I'm looking at trends to help. I'm looking at a lot of places for trends. Like when we look at editors for Gutenberg, for example, we looked at like a gazillion editors and where they're going. But then we were like, well, how are the editors supposed to look if we had like the perfect editor in five years from now? And I think those are kind of influenced by sci-fi movies a little bit, books. Like I read a lot of books and I think that's the best place you can get inspiration. Like how would this work an ideal situation and how can we get there? You don't have to design and build something at that endpoint right away. You can iterate towards that. So I think I was watching somebody use like a tablet. Oh, it was the latest Apple, whatever, developer conference or something where he was like swiping around and doing all this minority report stuff. I think that was probably influenced by a minority report indirectly, but it was very, very futuristic, very cool. And I think what we're trying to do is look to the future as opposed to what's trending now. So if flat design was really, really trending, we didn't decide, oh, we need to do flat design because it's trending. We decided we needed to improve our interface, design language across the board. Here's the best we can do for now. We think it's a little bit more future proof than some of the stuff we were doing before, that kind of thing. We also think about the future in almost every decision rather than making this cooler for now. Like how is this gonna last? How is this gonna hold up over time? So that's a lot of what we take into consideration, yeah. Cool. And I'm gonna take one more question and this is the last question of World Camp Europe 2017. Make it a good one. Okay. Thank you, Michael. As a designer, I'm interested in the tools you usually use. I would like to know specifically what you use for wire framing, prototyping, designing, and then testing. Okay, so this is a really ephemeral question. Okay, cool, yeah. I can list them off, but it's a very ephemeral question because they change all the time, right? There's different tool every day. So let's start at the beginning, wire framing. I still use a lot of sketches. It might be on a device, might be on a sketchbook, might be in the app sketch. I use the app sketch for quite a lot of things. We use all sorts of different sets of software for prototyping right now in Visions, one of the most used ones at the company. But we can also do things like, we also do keynote lockups and things like that that are a little faster to build sometimes. Let's see, what was the testing? Oh, I mean, testing could be as simple as just sitting down with a buddy who's not super familiar with what you're working on and just having them do a couple of things. You'll find out really quickly whether your design patterns are messed up. And sometimes you're designing something that's living within something else that might be a blocker. But we also use, I think we've used usability tests, testing in the past. We used various screen recorders, quick time even. We'll record people and their actions. When we are doing usability tests, we often have a very clear script so it's repeatable and we have people read their thoughts out loud, which is really helpful. When they're confused or looking for something, we know exactly what they're trying to do. Fantastic. Folks, can we give it up please? One last time for Mike Astad.