Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav, and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we're going across the sea to talk with broadcast journalist Emily Chang about her recently published bestseller, Brotopia, and maybe a few related topics. And I'm going to kind of switch the roles on Emily and ask her questions, and she's going to have to answer for a change. Emily is the anchor and executive producer of the television program Bloomberg Technology. She was born and raised on Oahu. Her mother, Sandy, was a teacher in Honolulu, and her dad was the local attorney, Laban Chang. Emily is in San Francisco right now, where she lives with her husband and three children. Aloha, Emily. Glad to see you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Well, my pleasure, and thank you for making time. I know you have another show coming up, so we're going to hit some questions right off the bat and get your answers. And my first question is really two questions in one. What is Brotopia? What's the meaning of Brotopia? And what is your book about? I have read your book and I've learned a few things about it, about Brotopia, but please tell us. In my mind, perfectly encapsulate this idea of Silicon Valley as a modern utopia where anyone can change the world, break the rules if you're a man.  And it shows in the numbers. I mean, Silicon Valley women hold 25% of jobs across the industry. They represent only about 7% of venture capital investors. And companies led by women in Silicon Valley only get 2% of funding. And I hardly believe that because women have only 2% of good ideas. And so, you know, the industry has been historically very male-dominated. And that's a problem for an industry that is so influential, that is changing the world in so many ways and changing the way we live, we need to have women better represented in this world. So, Brotopia, is that your words or that a word you came up with? Is that your invention? Yeah, the book was originally called The Valley of Opportunity in my original book proposal. And my publisher about a year in said, how about Brotopia? And, you know, at the time, I thought that maybe it was a little too strong. And I've been covering Silicon Valley for, you know, seven years, and I didn't want to be run out of this place. But, you know, I think the last year has really shown, you know, that it's not an exaggeration. We've seen a lot of investors exposed for bad behavior. We've seen, you know, a brighter light shine on systemic discrimination that exists not only in Silicon Valley, but in business in general. And so, you know, I know it makes a strong statement, but I think people get what we're talking about right away. And now I love the title, and I don't think it is so much of an exaggeration. And, well, you know, how long have you been, how long did you work on the book?   It's going to be a controversy. Yeah, even a half years ago now. So this was before Trump was elected, before me, too. And, you know, the representation of women in the industry has always been a problem. But it certainly could have been like a tree falling in the forest. This climate really changed over the course of my reporting. So I certainly benefited from that momentum. And I'm so grateful that the cultural conversation has made it pop like this to break through, because, you know, sexism exists everywhere. Sexual harassment exists everywhere. But in Silicon Valley, you know, this is a place where people talk about changing the world. And in many ways they have. But in this way, Silicon Valley is behind so many other industries. And I fully believe that the people who are, you know, taking us to Mars and building self-driving cars and connecting the world and hire women, pay them fairly, promote them, and fund their ideas. And the source of your information, was this your own investigation or your interviews? Or how did you, is this something that kind of played on you over time and these ideas came up? But a daily technology show where I get to interview influential people in Silicon Valley every single day. And as the years progressed, I became more bold about asking these questions. What are you doing to hire women? What are you doing to promote women? What are you doing to fund women? And sometimes the answer surprised me. In fact, there's one investor I quote in the book who said, while we're looking for more women to hire, but we're not prepared to lower our standards. And you know, there are a lot of people, a lot of companies out there that think they have to lower their standards to hire women that aren't. It was really the spark that was the fire under me to write this book. I realized this wasn't an issue that could be tackled on television that this was something that really had to be explored in greater depth. And I learned so much that surprised me that I think will surprise a lot of people about how and why we got here. And only once we understand how and why we got here can we figure out what we can do to change it. Okay. And the subtitle of your book is Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley. And you know, I have a question. You see billions of dollars, at least to us who look at Silicon Valley and the tech industry, billions of dollars come in. What do you need to break it up for? You know, what's the answer to that? I mean, is it broken? Because look at all of the great things Silicon Valley has created. Look at Facebook. Look at Apple. Look at Google. Now, you know, the women who never got a chance to start the next Facebook or the next Google or the next Apple and how different the world might be. You know, I interviewed Evan Williams, he's the co-founder of Twitter. And he told me that he thinks if there had been more women on the early Twitter team that maybe online harassment and trolling wouldn't be such a problem. They weren't thinking about this when they were building Twitter. They were thinking about wonderful and amazing things that could be done with Twitter, not how it could be used to send rape threats or death threats or propagate abuse. And so I wonder if the internet would be a friendlier place if women had had a seat at the table 30 years ago. If porn would be so ubiquitous, if video games would be so violent, if maybe we'd have better parental control on things like YouTube. There's no way to definitively answer that question, but we shouldn't have to wait another 30 years to do so. How have the brothers and the sisters in Silicon Valley, how have they reacted to Brotopia? You know, this book would make some people uncomfortable and no good change comes without some people feeling a little uncomfortable. I'd say there certainly is a minority voice out there that doesn't understand why this is a problem, doesn't think that anything needs to change. But the vast majority of people have been very supportive, have been very responsive. And I wrote this for the majority of people who may not understand how big the problem is, but want to help or know it's a problem but don't know what to do. And I really just wanted to start a meaningful conversation. And maybe not everyone will agree with what I have to say, but hopefully they're willing to listen. And I'm willing to listen to them as well. And it is about starting a conversation and having a healthy debate so we can get to a better place. And I've been very encouraged by companies like Amazon and Microsoft and LinkedIn and Google who have invited me to speak. And they could just as easily say, you wrote a book called Brotopia, no thank you. But in fact, they're actually open to having these conversations. And I think that's really important. You know, I learned a little bit, obviously, that I didn't know. I learned a lot actually. And a lot of background and it made me think, and I've talked to some folks about this, about the background of Brotopia and how we got there. I was wondering, do you have some words of advice? How about, I know you have three children, you have a family and you live in San Francisco. What words of advice would you give to the sister who wants to have both a family and a successful career based on what you've learned and what you've written? And finding your allies and finding people who will support you.  And so I do think there's a certain amount of leaning in and speaking up that, you know, all women have to do. But on the other hand, you can't lean in if the door is nailed shut. And so there are a lot of systemic changes that need to happen in the business world. And so if you have a company, if you run a company, change starts from the top. We need CEOs and prominent investors to make this, make building diverse teams a priority. We all need to listen to each other more. Men and women, we need to mentor. We need to advocate for others.  We can't always expect the victim to speak up for themselves in that moment. You know, there's a certain amount of advocation that needs to happen by everyone so that we can lift each other up. You know, I think if you're wanting to build a diverse company, this is not just about this being the right thing to do, which I believe it is. This is a smart thing to do. You know, diverse teams build better products, have better results, are more innovative, make more money. There is a business case to be had here. You don't want to miss something because there were no women in the room or no people of color. You don't want to have that blind spot. We all bring different perspectives to the table, no matter where, where we come from and those perspectives are really valuable. And that advice would go to the brothers too, right? I mean, that advice I hear you talking about, that applies to everybody, brothers and sisters, as we say here in Hawaii. Right. You know, the reality that I think that, you know, men need to go out of their way to find high potential women in their workplace and mentor them.  I think we all know where the line is and the lines that shouldn't be crossed. And so, you know, we need to be part of this conversation together, men and women. But, you know, I do think it is incumbent on men at this point to, you know, be, you know, a more active part of this conversation. Be aware too. I'm so encouraged by the Me Too movement and the women's marches and the women speaking up louder than ever before. We need men to listen. And be aware, I guess. I mean, I think it's easy for... Absolutely. I could bring 300 pages about the problem. We can no longer say we didn't know. Maybe you're into this point. Okay. Yeah. We have a few minutes left. I know you have to go to a new show that's coming on very soon. I guess you have to get prepared for that. You have any other words that you'd like to say? I mean, I know you attended the Mark Zuckerberg congressional hearings, and you've also spoken very highly of Cheryl Sandberg at Facebook. And is that a good example? Do you have something to say about that? Testifying before Congress. You know, unfortunately, I think some of the lawmakers didn't ask the toughest questions. And it was a bit of a missed opportunity. And I do think Zuckerberg performed fairly well. But they are asking themselves some tough questions as they should. You know, they have responded. Unfortunately, in some cases, it's a little too late. Cambridge Analytica has already happened. The Russians have already meddled in the election via Facebook's platform. But that's not to say that Facebook isn't now bringing into action. And Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg have an incredible partnership, which is very unique in Silicon Valley because very few women have cracked or shattered the glass ceiling as Cheryl Sandberg has. What's interesting about their partnership is that Mark made as much space for Cheryl as she made for him. And they really do bring different perspectives and different skill sets to the table. They both have some hard questions to answer right now about how Facebook is going to continue to leverage our personal information for monetary gains. And I think that Facebook, rightfully, has had a bit of a wake-up call. Not as a result of any bad intentions, but as a result of the evolution of technology. And I do think that Facebook is a perfect example of why we need different perspectives of people, men and women, people of color, people from around the world to be building these companies, because they are so incredibly powerful. And you mentioned I have three children. This matters because Silicon Valley is only changing our lives more every day. And facial recognition technology is already to a certain extent sexist and racist and doesn't recognize women and people of color as easily as it does white men. And these technologies are only going to become more influential. So this is an industry that needs change simply because of the power it has over our lives and over the next generation. And as I said earlier, I'm optimistic. I don't think I could have written this book if I didn't have hope. I'm optimistic that the industry will change and will improve. And that the products and services that we all use every day will be better as a result of it. Okay, Emily, I think we have one minute left. And I just would like to ask, is there anything about Hawaii that you brought to your business and your understanding and to your work that you'd like to tell us about? And the companies that I bring on to this show, and I think that's so important when you are a reporter and you are telling stories and sharing them with the world. And I'm sure part of that has to do with growing up in such a wonderful and inclusive place. And, you know, Hawaii is in a way, it's a great model of so many wonderful and colorful cultures coming together. And I think that's probably part of the reason that I've always been interested in this topic and why I believe diversity of thought is so important. Well, Emily, thank you very much for your time. Good to meet you. I look forward to you coming over back to Hawaii someday. And I also have to thank your auntie for getting us together. So, aloha. Still there. So thank you so much and aloha.


You have to know how you learn. About 10% of people can learn by listening. In fact, here's a real cheat code. They say there's three types of learning. Audio, visual, kinesthetic. Train yourself to be good at all three, but know your dominant form. 80% of people are kinesthetic.  I say to you, I build homes. Here's a hammer. Follow me around for a couple weeks. You're gonna get good.


The federal government may have begun moves to tackle the United Arab Emirates over its visa ban and flight restrictions against Nigeria. Central Bank of Nigeria governor Gadwin Amirfale yesterday expressed displeasure over the decision of the UAE to impose a visa ban on Nigerians as well as stop Emirates' airline from flying into the country. He said Nigeria is a big market for their business, adding that they should not continue to threaten the country over little disagreements. The CBN governor spoke at a meeting convened by the leadership of the House of Representatives to resolve the $700 million of trapped funds of foreign airlines operating in the country. Amirfale said the federal government was making efforts to ensure the money was repatriated to the various countries, adding that the measures adopted by the UAE were unnecessary.


Hello everybody, thanks for coming. I'm glad you could find a seat. But my name is Eli, and this is my associate Ty. We will be talking about what we did with OpenStack and Cloud Foundry a gap. We cut this presentation down from the one I uploaded, because we had less time to talk than I assumed we would. So any questions? We'll hang around after or out in the hall. Happy to answer anything. All right, let's get right into it. Platform choice. So this was a couple of years ago, and OpenStack was not one of the platforms that was referenced architecture. So we had to make a few choices. Luckily, we aligned pretty well with what everyone else aligned with. So our choice was between whether deploy on our OpenStack or on VMware. And when we originally created our private clouds, 2013, it was to combat basically the speed of deployment. VMware infrastructure and engineer would create your VM for you, and it might take a week. It might take a couple of weeks, depending how busy they were. And so we wanted that to be hours or minutes. So we deployed OpenStack. It worked great for us. So when we came to look at Cloud Foundry, it was kind of natural for us to decide to put it on OpenStack. So when it came to Cloud Foundry, there's a couple of questions we really kind of had when we were looking at the business and what we were trying to do. And we were really trying to create a new completely development ecosystem. We were using the old style where we did code. We had SVN. We would check things in and check them out. But they were still manual deployments. They're still manually packaging that software. Gap wrote its own revision management control system to handle configuration management. We were phasing that out and phasing in new ways of doing that kind of thing. So we really kind of came together and said, here's this whole ecosystem. We call it the rapid delivery platform. And Cloud Foundry was just the source of to get us to the hump of microservice-oriented architectures, 12-factor authentications. And we wanted a very opinionated platform because we wanted to prevent bad design decisions from developers and really guide them with guide rails to help us get to where we really needed to be. And so one of the things that when we look at Cloud Foundry versus other containers, either Docker or Jenkins, with Kubernetes, it was way too early and new in that timeline of that whole product. And what was happening, Docker had some of its own issues that came with that that really kind of excluded it. We also needed to be a robust prototype. So we were running a lot of e-com on this platform that's starting to take live orders, credit card payment data for all of our websites for Gapel, Navy, Banana Republic, and stuff like that. And so we needed something that we had good vendor support with that and help us with an ecosystem that was going to grow over time. And then finally we needed the traditional technical requirements, so balancing, scaling, self-healing, these kinds of things, right? And so the Cloud Foundry choice that we did has served us very well in that regard. It is very opinionated about how to do things. Regularly we go back to our developers and say, nope, don't do that. Platform doesn't let you do that for a reason. All right, so back to OpenStack. We needed to figure out how OpenStack should look. And we kind of combined the Cloud Foundry release with our new Next Generation Clouds. So these included object storage, block storage, a better SDN, and of course, Nova Compute. So as we're looking at deploying, one of the things, one of the arguments for VMware, obviously, is HA to all your compute instances. And also our OpenStack scheduler wasn't rack aware. It wasn't switch aware. And we didn't want to overload anywhere, right? Also, iSCSI, very heavy in Cloud Foundry, so we needed to make sure we weren't gonna have any network latency issues. And lastly, our Cloud Foundry instances needed a large memory footprint. And generally, we did not allow users to build large memory VMs in OpenStack. If they wanted some crazy 64 gig VM, they could go to VMware and they could do that. I didn't want it. So we created a dedicated non-routable storage network for iSCSI traffic. That was important to me. And it's worked out well for us, but we lost some use at the top of the rack, maybe a little less compute per rack. And we also needed to additional expenses in creating HA bonds across our network cards, adding an extra network card, making sure that our network cards did iSCSI offload and then for the SDN did VXLAN offload, which basically means you need two of the exact same card, right? But it's been great. Also, we decided to do 32 gig Diego cells, and then of course some of the smaller instances. So our CPU over subscription was really low, right? We're not CPU bound in Cloud Foundry, we're memory bound. And we never oversubscribe memory, just blanket rule. So we did up our CPU oversubscription six to one. We found that to be perfect for Cloud Foundry. But that mean we needed larger memory footprints on each of our compute hosts. So as you see, a 40 core hypervisor, we needed 512 gig of memory. So the great thing about Cloud Foundry and Vosh doing the deploys is I just picked two random hypervisors and they're really well balanced. I mean, they're within a few gig on disk space. They're using about the same amount of CPUs and about the same amount of memory. So it was not a problem doing it this way. Yes. So like I alluded to before, one of the planning of we go to this is we gotta provide guardrails for microservices. We wanted to prevent IaaS lift and shift. So in our organization, a lot of people when they transitioned into new platforms like when they went from hard host to VMware for virtualization, it was just pick it up and transfer it over and boom, we migrated and we got the new platform in and we're good to go. Whereas with PCF, you're gonna have to refactor your applications. The developers are gonna have to go back and rewrite those applications. And even now that we've been in this journey since 2014, 2015, they're still having issues where they're trying to violate microservice kind of thing. And it's just the nature of a developer mindset and depending upon the developer sets that you get. So we really wanted to prevent that lift and shift pattern. We wanted to prevent like file read write. So we have some people who by nature of how we designed everything, we use NFS file volumes to read off content for websites to dynamically build web pages, right? And they come to us and say, we have to have file IO for NFS, Malice and PCF. You have to enable this. Pivotal wrote something called file volume services for you to implement. Put that in, we have to have it. And we went with Pivotal and our senior management and Kyman came back and said, no, I'm not going to do that for you. That's a design pattern that we want to prevent. It causes all kinds of problems with latency. You're gonna start having problems talking to NFS shares. How is your container gonna talk to that networking to make that happen? All these kinds of problems that's gonna bring up. So it's an anti pattern we don't want to take care of. The other thing is it handles all the metrics and logging, right? It's a great thing about PCF. You don't have to manage your logging of how you do it. It's managed for you. It goes to Splunk, just how we're managing our log searching. It just, in that regard, they don't have to deal with it. We have a new relic agent that we use for capturing metrics and putting things out so that when you bind to your service to your auto scaler and new relic and then you get your logs, pushing your application is pretty simple, right?  That brings some challenges with it, but it's been a good design and planning process, right? Just taking care of that for them. And then, you know our requirements. We had a large team, like we had storage engineers and we had OpenStack cloud engineers and we had business management process people and we had the lead of the developers and we had multiple architects come together and put this together. And if we hadn't done that, there's no way it would succeed. Us as the OpenStack private cloud team, which is where I started, come and say, I want to bring PCF in and let's do this and transform the business. Nobody would listen to me. You must have senior management buy-in. You must have a multiple differentiating, multiple people come and put this thing in. And you need all that support later from when you go, hey, they're violating design principles and this is causing problems. You need that senior management buy-in to say, yep, you're right. Let's help steer that correctly and get that moving. So those are some of the challenges that we had with doing that. So, guardrails, like we've talked about this, maybe you probably know PCF is pretty opinionated, but in terms of like those guardrails, you know, microservice, 12-factor off is what we basically told people, hey, 12-factor is your model of what you want to use to redesign your applications, no state, right? Minimal scheduling, minimal file IO kind of things. You're linking from one to another to another, do one thing, do it well, pass off to the next, you know, that kind of thing. CI CD best practices, this has been a real challenge for us. In getting pipelines enabled, one of the things we find is we have a team who's implemented pipelines and the problem is, every developer shares those pipelines, but they don't know how they work. And so when their applications fail, they're not sure how to troubleshoot them, right? So that's one of the things. But having a generic pipeline, like pushing that out, doing cloud native, you know, blue-green deployments, hey, you can switch, you can deploy code without affecting direct production, multiple instance counts, you know, these kinds of things. Those are the guardrails that we kind of wanted for that kind of thing. And then, you know, the tools, the platform specification, the business process, it's all of those things together that really allows it to be a platform. It's not just PCF, which is just a component, right? It's all your other things that you're using for it as a back-end engine. So, like, how do we prevent bad design decisions, right? And how do we constantly do that? We have something called an ARB, it's an architectural review board. And anytime somebody wants to push something out, and probably the most recent one that I can use is an example of people wanting to start using Node.js, right, and we had not used Node.js up until this point in Cloud Foundry. We were only using Java Build Pack. We had a couple teams doing PHP, believe it or not. But when they came to Node.js, we're like, wait a minute. There's a lot of things you can do in Node.js, and we're going to restrict what you're going to do with that and hear the things that are approved and hear things or not. And then the other one was IngenX, right? They want to push IngenX to PCF. That seems like a really bad design pattern problem. When we use IngenX as a proxy inside PCF, yeah, no, I don't want you to do that. There's all kinds of problems that are going to happen with that just by nature of the routing that's inside PCF, right? And now you're going to start proxying things for it and you're going to create a spaghetti mess and nobody can figure out, right? And that's the real issue here, right? It's just maintenance, maintaining and performance. So it really kind of come down to that whole, yes you can, right? It's kind of like when we were having the argument with about file volume services, our lead architect development made a really good point. I can implement a web browser in an assembler language and run it on Commodore 64. Should I do that for business? No, because nobody can debug it. Nobody can maintain it. It's your own code. Nobody will know what's wrong with it and it will fail eventually and you will have to fix it. And the chances of it costing you millions of dollars is a real risk, right? And so that's why I say yes you can, but should you like, you know, Ian Malcolm famously in Jurassic Park asked the same question. Your scientists didn't think about just because they could and they didn't think should they, right? It's a bit of a generic quote, but that's really kind of what we're talking about. And then your service offerings, right? How do we deal with what all services are we offering and what's correct? We have New Relic, we have Autoscaler, we have Splunktile service that we actually use to, you know, throw all the things over it and some of those services are good, but the other problems that we've ran into is with service offerings, if you're in a constrained resource environment for the services within PCF, such as Rabbit and Redis and MySQL, they all take up their own instances that run inside the foundation. They all have their own resource requirements depending upon how many people are using them. And then the other issue we run into is everybody wants to customize their rabbit usage for their queue sizes or how many replicate queues they have or they wanna customize Redis to their cache sizing and how they do that. And initially when we rolled out services in PCF, it was just shared service. Everybody gets the same. You can't customize it. I'm sorry, you can't do that because you're sharing it with everyone else in the foundation, right? And so we kind of made the generic. And the real issue was resource constraint and then some bugs within the actual services, right? With RabbitMQ, there's quite a bit of challenges for some things that it doesn't handle well like sudden service outage. You disconnect applications running in RabbitMQ and you have queue messages. If you disconnect and restart that service, you lose the queue messages, right? That's kind of a big deal when we have sourcing things that are feeding into this, they're feeding into Rabbit and then consuming how many product they need to deliver out to different data or distribution centers. It's a bit of a problem, right? So that's one of the reasons why with service offerings for us has been a challenge on private cloud. Now when public cloud, that's completely different. We don't have resource constraints, right? It's just how much we wanna pay for. It's not how much physical hardware we have to run the capacity on, right? So and things are changing. And then also with PCF 2.0, things are really changing with services and their architectures and that you can have customized service instances that are your own, right? Versus a shared service and that makes a big difference, yeah? All right. So some lessons we have learned in our journey. Some of them will be pretty obvious or should have been, but so in OpenStack we had a problem where CPU soft lock errors were happening in VMs that had large memory footprints and what the heck, right? It turned out to be on the hypervisor, KSM, you've gotta turn that off, right? Because when pages are read and de-duplication is done, nobody can access their memory for that microsecond or however long it takes. So disabling KSM, huge performance gain. So have enough memory on your hypervisors, don't oversubscribe memory and don't let any de-duplication of memory occur. Also our object storage while we really wanted to do Ceph was not something we could fully implement at the time. So we went with Swift, which works great for blob storage but not great for Cloud Foundry, not quite enough S3 support. So we considered Ceph, we ended up going with RIAC for our blob storage. And then the block storage is a critical piece of architecture for Cloud Foundry. So your block storage has to be available and it has to be accessible and it has to be accessible long term, right? Because Cloud Foundry might not talk to that block storage for a month, but when it needs to talk to that block storage, it needs to talk to that block storage. So tweaking multi-path D is critical, tweaking your iSCSI subsystems is critical. We found that some of our hypervisors for no particular reason just weren't multi-path. There was one path. And we ended up working a lot with the storage vendors and the storage team to tweak our configs on each hypervisor. So it's an important consideration. Yeah, we actually spent some time with between RAC Space, Rcells and EMC for the Extreme IO. And there's actually problems with the Extreme IO with the OpenStack drivers to talk for the multi-path D where they can actually get to where they're only consuming a single path and then also they can overload the Extreme IO queue size. And so we had to tune out on just on the Extreme IO side to handle our iSCSI requests. So it's just one example of how that's critical and how it relates to PCF is, okay, so you do a Bosch deployment for your Diego cells, right? And you're gonna update all your stem cell updates and it's been a couple months since you've done that when it goes to disconnect the block storage from the Diego cells, it times out, right? Well, when that happens, then the Bosch deployment fails, right? And all it basically says is, I can't talk to the block storage. Well, you can go into OpenStack and you can force those things to happen but they do prevent deployments until you resolve the issue, right? And it's that it's lost the multi-path handle to talk to that block storage. So it's one of the issues you gotta manage. From the cloud foundry side, so one of the biggest headaches that I really get and it's indicative of how often I get headaches, our object store is a critical piece, right? So the React, React generally works pretty well. We use React and React CS, we're not migrated to the new React KBE yet. So the React CS is the cluster services, it's the REST API that you can use to talk to your buckets and then the React is the federated storage cluster itself. So what we come to find in our React stores is occasionally our React nodes die and it's an out-of-memory process, it's a memory leak is what it is, okay? The problem is the React CS nodes, we have a VIP offloading that, we have an F5 hardware load balancer, we've got five React nodes, we should be able to tolerate two failures and so be okay. But the React CS cluster service talks to the local host React store. So if you lose the local host React store, then you lost that React CS cluster node as well, right? And it's in a round robin from the F5 because there's no great health check to figure out if React itself has died. And so while I have a load balancer to talk to and balance traffic load across the F5, I don't have a way to intelligently look and say, is it healthy or not?  What you're really blocking is your deployments, right? They can't talk to the object store to upload things. You can't talk to a build pack to download it, right? If you have foundation-based build packs, if you're trying to push up new things or you're trying to create new containers, it has to talk to the object store. So it doesn't affect your running production cluster, but it does affect people's ability to push new things, right? That's why the object store is kind of a critical. The second thing was the services, and I mentioned with React and, I'm sorry, Redis and Rabbit, we had some issues with those. Our thing is we have a constant business problem where nobody wants to take any downtime, everybody wants to be up 24-7, the teams don't want to babysit their applications, right? And those are all common demands and it's really about how you handle them. The real issue that we kind of ran into is people were complaining quite a bit when we would do maintenance and the only effect would be is that we restarted the services within PCF. Well, the problem is like for Rabbit, for example, if you don't have special reconnect code, and Pivotal provides on their website, if you don't have reconnect code for your Rabbit instances, when we restart the Rabbit service, your application crashes. It loses its binding, like it's gone, right? And you have to restart it, right? Well, that seems like such a simple thing to restart, but when you're doing it 2 a.m. in the morning and nobody's awake until 10 a.m. the next day, it's a big deal, right? And so it's really just communicating with your customers in that regard is one of the biggest lessons we learned and providing best practice. Hey, you need this reconnect code. If you're using Rabbit in PCF, you must have this in you as part of your application. It will allow that service to restart and you can reconnect and move on, right? The other one was like, with scalability, we have a lot of people when we would do maintenance and their applications restart and they'd be upset and be like, you know, you can manage this if you would deploy more than one instance of your application. It's a best practice for PCF. Okay, well, let's go take a look. I have approximately 500 unique applications deployed in my production PCF and I did a query real quick against the REST API and I found 380 of them more single instance deployments. Guys, you have to deploy multiple instances to get scalability if something dies and breaks. The platform has self-healing if you follow the rules, right? So these are some, and then the other is we have build packs, right? We had to take down a build pack from public. We had to fork it and then we had to put in all of our custom CAs. So we're our own certificate CA, right? We issue all of our own for all our internal stuff if it's not public facing. Well, there's no simple way to inject that into a cloud foundry app that gets deployed unless it's part of the build pack, right? So now we have a build pack that's at 3.8 Java version, which is really old and there's problems with it. It has memory management problems. We get a lot of out of memory management. You can set the XRSS size to something a little bit higher than the memory you're actually giving it. If you set it to four gig and your app is at four gig, you will get it out of memory problem in 3.8 Java, right? If you move up to the forex build pack, you don't have a problem anymore. The memory management is a different algorithm. It's handled differently. It knows how to pad in addition to the size you set. It handles it better, but getting people migrated, right? Well, if we just suddenly pull it out of the foundation, what happens? People can't deploy anymore because they're packing in as part of their Gradle scripts, the CI CD, the actual build pack column manifest when they push it. Which is not a best practice, but if you're pulling things down and you're maintaining them yourself, this is one of the ramifications you have to deal with that, right? So it's really just end user communication and really talking to your developers and having a two-way conversation. Now just here's your foundation, go deploy your thing and when it fails, let me know. It's really more of a, what are you doing? What is it you're trying to accomplish? Okay, here's what's going on. Here's some best practices. Here's how you consume this platform. That's really what we learned. And there's no, it's not magic, right? Like everybody knows you have to talk to people. You have to communicate. You have to have two-way communication with your systems and your developer people. That's really what kind of stood out as we set back and we take a look at the thing. Sounds so easy, doesn't it? Yeah, it does.  But then the final, I have up there, apps restarts versus downtime. When I'm in the change review boards, like when we have all of our changes up about what we want to do and do we have approval for management to do that. And they're like, is there any downtime?  Now you could have an app restart. Like, well, that's downtime. No, it's not. It's an app restart, it's container. This happens all the time. They're throw away. That's not a monolithic application. So that education is also the people in business and management who've been used to managing IT systems but are not in the weeds and understanding the tech details. If they communicate and educate them, hey, it's a bit different. Here's how it works. Remember we did this? Well, this is like this now. And they have to believe you, right? You have to crest that whole trust issue with them and say, hey, I understand the job you're trying to do as a change management process. And here's what I'm trying to achieve with mine. When we work together, we get there faster, right? And so that's really the user education piece. And it can be really challenging, especially depending upon if you have a hostile environment or not, right? All right, so he reminded me, one of the slides we pulled out was a little diagram of how, you know, he was talking about single deployments, how we managed our HA and that's by separating resources, physical resources on the aggregate level, which is part of the reference architecture, but also separating it across the data center. So this rack, which is part of the first PC, or Cloud Foundry aggregate, has this power, this end of row switch, this core switch, while this rack all completely different. And this rack might share a few because you only have so many core switches, but the idea is if you lose a UPS, if you lose a switch, if you lose a rack, you stay up. So something to consider if you're laying an open stack for it. And I believe that brings us to the summary, which you've heard 10 times, but plan ahead and design for failure and partner with people and educate everyone, including yourself. I don't like that part. So we are pretty much at time, but any questions? Happy to answer. All right, thank you for coming.


YouTube-NoCookie.com is official! YouTube created this new way to embed videos on third-party sites like your blog in an enhanced privacy mode that is documented right here on YouTube Help. They show you what to do before and after to add the dash-NoCookie.com. You can also see it on the official YouTube video watch page when you click share and click embed. There's a new option and I'll hide myself so you can see it that lets you choose enable privacy enhanced mode. Doing so will give you the dash-NoCookie domain instead of if it's not enabled without the dash-NoCookie domain and I always recommend you to enable it. Big sites like Khan Academy are doing it in all of their videos. Here you can see one tutorial in Khan Academy if you inspect the element. It also uses the YouTube dash-NoCookie.com embed to enhance privacy. How to do it is very simple. Just go to your database and run a query that replaces all of your regular embed codes with the new YouTube.com dash-NoCookie embed code and also add the HTTPS if you haven't already. I hope this helps keep your visitors private information private and it also helps you comply with the GDPR the General Data Protection Regulation which is actually why YouTube implemented this new dash-NoCookie domain to comply with the EU's GDPR. How many of you embed YouTube videos on your personal website or blog? Tell me down there in the comments below and send me links to where you embed your videos. For me, I embed my videos on community.tm on the forums right here. There's a section that lets you promote yourself and I promote myself there and I encourage you to do the same. For example, my latest video, YouTube stories like TikTok on YouTube is embedded on this forum. The link is down there in the description below if you want to check it out and the links to all the articles I described in this video are down there in the description below and I encourage you to go to community.tm and promote yourself. Before you do, if you haven't already, go to the Introduce Yourself forum which is right here and tell us about yourself. Introduce what's cool about your channel and many people will watch it and read your posts. See look, these posts have been read 104 times, 26 times, 149 times, 164 times. This is maybe more views than you get on your videos. So of course you should introduce yourself to get more views and grow your channel. Now let's read your deserving comments, Freedom Family. Starting with Gara Player One who wrote, To be fair, I wouldn't mind hosting the George show but I'm not ready to reveal myself as of yet. Why not? YouTube is a public platform. We all reveal ourselves sooner or later. Don't be shy. Let's make a video together. Rammies should wrote, Halfway to 10K. I will work my best though and maybe I can reach the 10K. Thank you George Sir. Let's take a look at your channel Rammies. You're at 5K. No, you're at 1K. You're not halfway there. You're at 10% of the way there. But that's great. You're on your way and I'm really happy to see that you are uploading regularly. 37 seconds ago. All right, let's be your first view. You have no views. Now you have one view. Skip ads. Roll it. You include a paid promotion, okay? Da Vinci Resolve Studio. Actually, this is the product I want to use for making all my videos because it's the best in class free video editor I've been told. So what kind of video is this? Today, I'll be working on short but not much of episode. I want to show what kind of animation of Sonic RS and the revolution of chaos. I think this is your animation here. To be honest, I'm a little confused at the purpose of your channel. Let's take a look at your about page and maybe I can understand it better, Rammies. Hi everyone, welcome to my animation channel. This is a new kind of 2D animation for Sonic the Hedgehog. It was created 33 years in my career. And if you're looking for the latest in video, okay, so you are an animation channel and you have a deviant art channel. Pretty cool. To check out Rammies should click the link down there in the description below.  What's unique about this comment is it's on my YouTube story. Click that eye to see the video where I talk about YouTube stories and how you can use them to grow your channel in a new short form content way like TikTok, but on YouTube. And you can see I'm already getting comments from my stories. I've only made two so far. Shadow Frost Haven wrote a long comment about YouTube stories. He said it is a negative because YouTube requires 10k subscribers. Remember, it's in beta and right now, yes, 10k subs is the minimum, but I imagine YouTube will lower the minimum to 1000 subscribers or so as they get closer to the final version where YouTube stories will be available for everyone. Let's take a look at your channel, Shadow Frost Haven. So you have only two subscribers and you do upload videos regularly, but you're getting almost no views. Let's have a look at your latest, your video about the Elder Schools online. Elder Scrolls. Roll it. So it looks like a yet, let's play. So one thing I'll immediately suggest, add your voice. If you just have gameplay, this is why people aren't so excited about subscribing to your channel and watching your videos. They'll just go watch a channel that talks to them about the gameplay that they're watching. Do add your commentary and even your face as a webcam, ideally with a green screen so people can see the video as more personal. That's how you will grow your audience faster in my opinion. CephasRed wrote a similar comment. Black, I'm nowhere near 10k subs. I won't get YouTube stories for a long time yet. Again, never give up. Always grow and let's help each other grow together as a family by giving you a shout out. CephasRed, let's check out your channel. So you have almost 5k subscribers. That's awesome. And let's have a look at your videos. Look, you put yourself in your videos. See you guys. You should put yourself in your own videos just like CephasRed and I do. Let's have a look at your latest video. Roll it. Hey everybody, this is CephasRed. Welcome back. So if you noticed, I moved the camera around a little bit. So now- You have a black screen. There's nothing in the background here except for my light. Trying to maneuver some things around. Let's skip ahead. You have chapters. That's great. Quick update on life and job. Make a quick little update about how things are going. It's not going to be a long video. I'm actually- So a few comments. I love how you're using chapters. All of you should be using YouTube chapters in your videos. How? By adding timestamps like this into your video description. Click that I to see the video I made about YouTube chapters if you want to know more details. But great job on the chapters. But Cephas, why do you have a black screen? And is that supposed to just cover your wall, but you're not supposed to remove the background like I do? So for example, here is my green screen with the filter removed. This is how my wall looks. And it's kind of boring, of course, but that's why we have the green screen. I'm curious why you don't have a green screen, Cephas. Click that I to see my settings in OBS to give me this green screen effect that I think is pretty good. And I would love to see your green screen settings if you use OBS or some other tool. Share down there in the comments below so we can all help each other grow together. Smile wrote, Hey, so when are you accepting new channels to freedom? I was with you guys and I would like to join again. That's awesome. Smile. Just email support at freedom.tm and we'll hook you up ASAP. Let's have a look at your channel. Smile. You have 157k subs. That's awesome. And you're verified even better. And you are uploading regularly, but it looks like you had a long break of about three months here. I'm curious why is that? Let's take a look at one of your videos. This one looks interesting. Funny things to do when you're bored at work. Okay.  I think my biggest complaint would probably be the lack of pest control. What's up, Smilers? And welcome back to Smile with Fee. All right. Thank you, Smile. To check out her channel, click the link down there in the description below along with all the other channels I've given a shout out to as I do in every episode of The George Show. TechDunk wrote, I would love to make a video for The George Show. I have lots of experience with SEO, so can help with that. I'd love to see a video about SEO. We haven't had one lately on the Freedom channel. We've made videos in the past, but please teach us all the latest tips and tricks on SEO. And I'd love for you to host The George Show TechDunk. Now, you noticed I haven't been featuring all the channels I've been reading comments of because everyone who has been featured in the past, I don't feature again. It's not fair to feature you more than once, I think. Now, maybe in the future when we've gone through a lot of channels, I will reset and start featuring every channel again. But for now, I'm focusing on featuring only channels. I've never given a shout out before. TechDunk also wrote idea for a tool, automatically upload YouTube videos to Facebook. Now, sadly, Facebook has made it impossible to automate uploading from YouTube to Facebook. It must be a manual process, and it's actually a good thing. Because Facebook is a different platform, they have different fields that you enter and a different user experience for watching videos, so you should be manually uploading to Facebook like I do for every video I make. And it gives me almost double my views on Facebook. It's a very useful use of your time. And if you've spent hours making a video, spend another five minutes to upload it to Facebook, guys. It's really not that much effort. And remember, Facebook is about as big as YouTube. Like two billion users. And there's only seven billion people on this planet are on Facebook. So I don't recommend you upload to YouTube, Facebook, and like five other platforms, just YouTube and just Facebook. That's all you need. And you're covering four billion people, roughly half the world population by doing so. Click that I to see the video I made about how to upload on Facebook and why you should do it. I hope it'll help you get more views too. Let's stop there. And I hope you enjoyed this episode about the new YouTube dash no cookie.com domain. When I first saw that, I thought it was a phishing site. I thought someone was trying to steal my YouTube login. But of course it is actually official. This is a YouTube created domain to improve privacy, which is great. Who am I? I am your Papa George, your George Sunpai, your Obi-Wan George Nobi, and many other names you the beautiful freedom family has given me. I would love to get more ideas for episodes of the George show. But oh, I am the CEO and founder of freedom for freedom and the freedom family where we all help each other grow together as a family. And I would like more ideas from you for what to make on the George show. Tell me down there in the comments below. I have a lot of suggestions, a lot of my own ideas, but this about engaging with you, about making videos together, collaborating with you. So collaborate with me. What would you like to see videos about? Should I make videos about different software like OBS, Da Vinci Resolve? Should we learn that video editor together? Should I talk about different websites that you can use to help your channel grow? I'd love to know what your preference is. Until then, freedom family, I went on another five kilometer jog today. Did you get any exercise? I hope you got out of that chair and sweat as you should every single day for one hour. Start with 30 minutes. It doesn't have to be very long at the beginning, but get into a habit of sweating every single day for at least 30 minutes. Your body will thank you for it, especially when you get older as I am getting older now. I'm 44 years old guys. I don't feel 44. And I know when I shave, I look even younger, which is partly why I shave. I like looking younger, but I do feel so much younger after exercise. I feel more energetic and I feel happier. And I'm going to try to exercise five kilometer jog every day or every other day together with swimming and weight training. And slowly I want my weight to get down to 75 kilograms. I'm now 85 kilograms. So I'd like to lose 10 kg. But after exercise, I'm 82 kilograms or even 81 point something kilograms because I lose a lot of water from sweating. Do you also lose a lot of weight? Try weighing yourself before your exercise session and after. What's the difference on your scale? For me, as I said, it goes from 85 down to 82. I can lose three kilograms in one hour of exercise of water. It's pretty amazing. I didn't expect to lose so much water actually. But then I'd get most of it back by drinking after it's all done because I'm really thirsty after that. All right, Freedom Family. If you like this video, click the like button and subscribe to my channel, Freedom Central. Gong that notification bell so you don't miss an upload. I am George. Keep safe and you've been watching. Oh, you dreaming but love here. Click that I to partner with Freedom and join the Freedom Family so we can all grow together. You get many perks like position music. You also get epidemic sound, a lot of other access to royalty free videos, sponsorships, and many things to help you grow. Just click the links down there in the description below to get involved in our community, our forums, our Discord chat servers, Meet Our Graphics team, Meet Our Community team, all of that on Discord and the forums. What are you waiting for? Get started. And we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom Family. You are part of it. We are all part of it. And we're all growing together. To get more George, click that big F that will subscribe you to Freedom Central, home of the George Show. And PewDiePie gave one of you, Freedom Family, a big shout out. Click that video to see the shout out and to see our new 3D sets for you. And click that video to see what YouTube recommends you watch next.


I didn't think until I started this that everybody driving by on the street at night can see what I'm doing. Wow. This thing's two sizes too small and super hot. Wow. I ought to put some sound effects on in the background like Star Trek sound effects or does that sound stupid? Whatever. I'll fix it in editing. All right. As far as what's coming up in September, wow I'm hot. I think you can tell. I had to turn off all the air conditioning units in here to get the sound down. You can still hear all the cars. They're right out there. I can hear kids yelling too. And I will see you then. Bye.


Dear students, now we will look at a software that can be used to perform fold recognition or threading. So the threading process involved passing the sequence, the primary sequence of a protein through the various folds that you have from the fold databases, thereby arriving at the best collection of folds and bringing those folds into a single structure to create a tertiary structure for the protein. Now the best match was scored using Z-scores and you finalized your prediction. iTesser is a tool that can be used to perform all of this work for you in a very easy and seamless manner. So let's start looking at what were the inputs yet again. So the inputs were the folds from libraries, the amino acid sequences and the scoring function. This was input to a software which output the predicted structure. So now we are going to use iTesser. So this software is going to be iTesser. This scoring function will be the one that is developed by the iTesser team at the young lab and you will just have to input the amino acid sequence. The four libraries are of course public and are available. Okay, iTesser will output the predicted structure, the tertiary structure for the sequence that you have here. So let's take a look at a step by step for what iTesser stands for and what it does. So iTesser is simply iterative threading assembly refinement server. So as is obvious from its name iTesser iteratively assembles various folds by threading sequences against those folds and builds a tertiary structure. So it's a software which does this for you in an automated way and predicts the structure and function as well. So it starts by the input of an amino acid sequence. So sequence will be input by you. So this will be the sequence for which you want to predict the structure. So iTesser will go and generate all 3D atomic models for multiple threading alignments. So this it will do automatically at the server end and create iterative structural assemblies. So these iteratively constructed assemblies will be simulated and evaluated. So then the function will be inferred by structurally matching the 3D model that has been created by iTesser with other known proteins whose function is known. So the function of these proteins is known and the function of this protein will be predicted by looking at these proteins. So iTesser outputs full length secondary and tertiary structures. So secondary structures involve the alpha helices and beta sheets etc and the tertiary structure it involves the combination of all of these secondary structures. Next the estimate of accuracy is also output and this is represented by the confidence score of the modeling. So let's take a look at the software itself. Here I have provided the link for this software on the top. You can simply click on this link or copy paste this or just type it in and you will be taken to the young lab server which runs the iTesser software. So this is being developed at University of Michigan and it is a fantastic tool to predict the protein structures. Okay so let's take a look at what it says. So iTesser is the protein structure and function predictor tool. The server completed predictions for 275,000 over 275,000 proteins submitted by over 68,000 users. So this is a lot of people using this software and you can use it as well. So let me take you to the portion where you need to. So here you can simply click on the sequence if you scroll down. So you can copy paste your sequence here. So you can simply paste your sequence here in this text box and this sequence has to be in the faster format that is so that it can understand your sequence. Next if you don't have that and if you have a faster file then you can also upload it by using the choose file button and importantly afterwards you have to input your email address and password alongside because the iTesser server is being used by many people and the structure prediction takes a lot of time. So they will simply take your sequence your username that is the email and password and get back to you once the server is finished computing your structure. So it will not give you your structure immediately. Please remember that it will send you an email and you can open the link in the email to find your structure. So to run the software you simply click on the run iTesser button and you can start predicting your structure using iTesser. So it is a very simple tool of course if you are an advanced user then you can assign additional restraints and templates to help iTesser modify the modeling process. Okay so iTesser is this simple to use and all you have to do is input your amino acid sequence to iTesser, provide your email address and a password and you will get an email from iTesser maybe after one day with the predicted structure. So besides the structure iTesser will also give you the function or the probable function of the protein that you have the structure for.


Hello and welcome to Monet Café. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. One of the most common questions I get from budding artist is how do you get more color vibrancy in your paintings? Well if you've ever asked that question you'll be excited about this lesson. Let's get started. I often like to paint different color palette schemes with a variation on a similar theme, as in these five paintings of a little trail carving its way into the background of trees. And we're going to learn about a creative way and a neat tool that can help you to get very creative with new color palettes that you may have never tried. So here we go with a very fun, colorful and educational lesson. Okay so here's just a few examples of some paintings that I've done. I'm calling it color palette roulette and you'll see why when I show you the little tool that I'm going to use, but it's a great way to loosen up and get inspired perhaps to use color palettes you've never used before. And it's also a neat way just to break out of patterns and habits that we typically get into. So it's a lot of fun but these are some of the different ones that I use based on this little tool called Paletton. It's a, I'll show you on the screen, but it's a website that you can go to. Now unfortunately I have had some some of my European subscribers and patreon members say that they they couldn't get it where they were. Some of them said they could so hopefully you can get it where you are. But I'm going to show you a quick little demonstration of how to use it and then why it's really neat to just play this color wheel roulette and have fun. Here we go. Here's a quick little tutorial on Paletton and how it works, but stay tuned I do have painting demos coming next. Here we are on the paletton.com website. Keep in mind that if you don't have access to this and whatever country you may be living with you can literally follow along with us and sort of do the same thing on the color wheel. This main big wheel of color you see over here is very similar in layout to a regular color wheel so the concepts are the same regardless. But if you have access to this I'm going to show you some really neat things. What is the most basic color palette? That's how it begins. It's called a monochromatic or one color palette and let me introduce you to this little section up here above the color wheel with some color palette choices. So in the monochromatic it comes on to this by default or automatically when you enter this website and it's got a one color palette selection kind of right here in this red area, the primary color. Now we can change this by clicking this little bubble here and dragging it around to whatever monochromatic color we would like to use. Over to the right side of the screen you will see the value display and we basically have five values. Pardon the little numbers that keep popping up. They're the color numbers I'm assuming. We've got a basic middle value for the background here and up here and then we have four different values ranging from light to dark. That's all that value means anyway is the lightness or darkness of that particular color. So we have it displayed this way up here and then in the box we've got four larger swatches, two lighter values here and two a little bit darker values here. We have a reversed image of it in the corner. These are basically different ways for you to view it. All right so and once again we can just spin this around to whatever color we want to choose. Now I would go on to the next selection which is right next to the monochromatic one which is called adjacent colors. You see these three adjacent colors but before I do that there's actually another choice that's kind of right between these two. Let me show you what I mean. We're going to go back to the monochromatic and I'm going to click something. If you can see where I'm wiggling my mouse up here I'm going to click. I wish I could figure out how to make my mouse big all that. There it goes. We're going to click add complementary. Click. What did it just do? It basically took that red color that's here and it added the complement. All that means is the color that's on the opposite side of the color wheel. So the complement to red is green and we can also once again spin this around for any monochromatic color with its complement and notice the complement is the one that's the smaller example right down here. All right so that is a complementary color palette. Now we'll move on to the next one which is adjacent colors and in this example there are three colors. Adjacent colors is also called analogous colors often on a color wheel. We can once again spin this middle one around to make our own adjacent color selections and we can also click add complementary to see the complement to the adjacent colors. So once again adjacent colors are just colors that are next to kind of in close proximity to each other on the color wheel. All right let's take that complementary color away again and let's go to the next color palette choice which is a triad. Now we still have three colors in this one but notice they are in the shape of a triangle. I'll show you later how we can actually control how wide this triangle is and really customize this if you would like to. Again here we go. We can spin this around to whatever triadic color palette you'd like to use. Now let's go to the next one which is a tetrad. It's four. This one's more of a rectangle. We could also make it like a square. I'll show you again in a minute how you can customize this and again we can spin this around with our tetrad color selection. Now notice this one does not have a complementary option because the choices are already compliments to each other. I think it's the same with this one. Oh no with the I'm sorry with the triad one we can add a complementary color to it. All right so the other option we've got four options here. This last option is like a settings. It looks like little gears and cogs and wheels and what we can do here is we can do freestyle. Okay so that means you can control this. You can hold the shift key and move the colors individually. This is how I said you can customize it. Let's say I want to make this tetrad arrangement a little wider not so adjacent colors here so I can hold my shift key and I can move my colors a little wider. Whoops and when you see that it goes across to the value side. You just hold your uh I'll show you how to control that in a minute. This has to do with value but when you go right outside the wheel it'll pop right back. Now I'm going to make this one a little wider more like a square color palette. Okay and when I let go of the shift key it will once again let me go to this main one and choose it with them all bound together. All right so that's pretty interesting. So now that's how you can do a lot of the selecting. However there's some other interesting options right up here. First of all we've got a reset button which is really kind of nice. If you've played around for a long time and you're like oh my gosh I've made a mess of things I want to just start over. You can click reset. It'll take you right back to that monochromatic beginning selection. Now here's what I think is the fun part. Is to truly play color palette roulette is to let the computer decide. It's this randomize button up here. All right so if we click randomize it gives you four options. Now I'm not going to go into what all of these are but you can click them and have the computer play around with some color palettes. Now that one I definitely wouldn't do. That's just dark. Now look at that one. Isn't that interesting? If you wanted to just play around pull out those colors and values. You can have a lot of fun. I'm going to show you in a minute how to control value a little bit too. Let's click this one and click more and just keep playing around with it. It's really really a lot of fun. Oh that's kind of neat. Kind of this one's kind of like a high key color palette. Notice there's not a lot of dark values. That is a nice segue into another thing that we can control and view in this color palette picker on Paletton which is value. Value again simply means lightness to darkness. Let me close this out. So right now we can see there's no dark values in here. Now notice this middle section. Once again it will change if you go to the middle area. Notice how all of the value selections are all scrunched up here together in a lighter side of value. Now you can see here the lighter values are over here on this left side and the darker values are more over in this area. This side has to I don't want to get too deep here. This side has more to do with chroma. This is more a neutrality over here. But let's go back. Let's reset it again and I'm going to show you. But it's a high key color palette because these are all on the light side. I actually think that's kind of pretty. I'd like to try to create a painting with that. All right so let's reset it. Once we reset it we see the values have a nice even distribution here. We've got the middle value right here which is this value in the main big square. We've got the two lighter values which are these two to the top part here kind of to the upper left and then we which would be these two here. And we've got the two darker values down in the bottom area here which would be these over here. I hope your computer screens or phones are big enough to see where I'm moving my mouse. All right now if you want to adjust that it's set automatically by default to go to this kind of really nice distribution of value. But let's say you know I want to do triad color palette. Let's click it here. I want to customize it and make these not so tight not so adjacent. So I'm going to hold the shift key and I'm going to go a little wider with my triad. Yeah that's what I want right there. Now I really want to do this more high key which means lighter values. I don't want there to be many dark values in this and that usually happens when it's a bright bright sunshiny day and it drowns out all the darker values. So what I'm going to do I'm going to hold my shift key and I'm going to move my values. Notice now watch the lightest value in the right hand side. It's going to get super white. You see that? Now the next one is the one that's right next to it on the left side of it. It's getting brighter too. You see that? Now this is the middle value one. You watch the big red square. I'm using the red just to give you guys something to relate to. Notice how light that gotten value. Now you see we're still left with these two darker values over here. I'm still holding the shift key. I'm going to go back to the middle. It'll change back to this and I'm going to move them to make that lighter. Now we've still got that little dark guy right there. Let's move him. Move him up here and now we've got a really nice high key painting. Isn't that nice? And you could do the same thing on the opposite side. I could take everything over further to the darker side. Say it's a really dark. You want to create some mood. It's a dark street scene or something like that and that's a nice low key painting. So let me take it back over here to the high key just because I liked that one. It was kind of cool. And then I am going to spin it around a little bit. Okay so that's kind of fun. Okay so we've got a nice high key. I'll make that one a little bit darker. Nice high key painting. Now if I go back to the main color wheel all you have to do is move your cursor or your mouse from here to the middle to change these and back to the color wheel. So we're going to take this main one and I'm going to spin it around. I can choose or let it by default or kind of glued together choose the ones that I have already set. So I'm seeing a lot that oh that I really like. I just really like that. That's so pretty. All right so now that you know a little bit more about how to use paletton and hopefully if you didn't have this option you followed along somewhat to your color wheel with your color wheel. By the way the color wheel the pocket color wheel I use has so many definitions on it and information. It's really really a great tool.  And now the fun begins. In this lesson I'm using mixed media paper but you can really use whatever you have. This is not a medium specific lesson. You could do this with watercolor. I actually will be doing an 8 by 10 format on this mixed media paper and I'll be doing a watercolor underpainting a complementary underpainting and then applying pastel. Okay so here is my 8 by 10 format. Here is my triad color wheel palette scheme that I'm going to be using and again I've got the same idea or theme as some of these other paintings I'm doing. It's just some trees a road. The trees are on different levels. Some more trees in the background and a further distant either field or mountains or trees or something back there. Okay so same idea a little bit different format and we're going to just kind of go with the general rule of thirds here which you know you want your horizon line up here and you don't always have to use this composition strategy but it's a good one to use. All right I know I've got a tree that I'm going to have my bigger tree. I'm going to try to exaggerate some of these trees here. Okay then I'm going to have another tree that's a little further away from that tree. Let's make this one kind of a little further. He's going to be a little bigger than that. Okay so you see how loose these can be. I'll make this one even a little bigger. Okay and now we've got our road which is basically just a road that kind of comes in. I'm going to make it kind of wide this time. It comes in goes back in the distance and that's pretty much all you need there. Okay now we're going to have I might curve it around a little bit more this way. Now we're going to have our distant trees back here. Some sort of basic tree shape and then we'll have kind of some mountains or something back there. So that's it. That's pretty easy right? All right so I'm not doing a wet under color. I mean a wash you know because if I add too much water to this this paper is probably going to buckle quite a bit and your trees you know you can keep them very very loose and energetic. As a matter of fact that kind of helps with it. I wanted my tree to feel rather loose and free. Okay so I'm even going to do let me have a little dark down in here. This one I'm going to make it just a tad lighter back here. Some of this is going to get covered up but it doesn't matter. This is really kind of to set the mood and have some fun. Okay so this tree is going to be a little more back here like this. A little higher. Probably need to get this one lower and adjust my road a little bit. Okay and then I'm going to have these background trees won't be quite as dark as this and so I'm going to gradually come down and lighten it up a little bit. Maybe like right in here somewhere. So here we got these background trees or mountains or whatever they are and I do like to make my trees kind of go up on the edges rather than slope off. It's just kind of more interesting like that. And these things even though I draw in my basic shape they kind of evolve as they go along. All right let's go ahead and get in. Well I'm going to wait on this to dry. I'm going to go ahead and get in whatever color I'm going to use for the the grasses.  So because things that are flat are typically lighter in value because the sun's shining directly on them. I'm actually going to use a bigger brush for this. Also use the biggest brush you can get away with. It's going to force you force your strokes to be really nice and loose and fun because this is the underpainting. You know we can tighten things up later if we need to if we even want to and it's okay if I kind of blend those together there. So I'm just kind of stroking this along back here having some fun maybe gradually darkening it up as I get closer to the foreground. Get a little more water and by the way I'm just dipping this brush in water and then if it's too wet I dab it in the on the paper towel I've got beneath me. Let me grab some of this color back here again where it's light. See that's already kind of dry and see this mixed media paper you know it really works pretty good. It's fun. This is fun and that's part of the goal of this is to have some fun. Loosen up oh my gosh I have to tell myself that enough finally over all these years started to learn to play and just have a good time. It's okay if we add some of this other orange kind of in these trees here. All right now since that other part's kind of probably dry I think I may add these this magenta and red color here maybe for some trees that are a little bit well they'd probably be larger back in here and just another third row of trees and then these lighter ones be pushed back behind there it gives the composition a little bit more interest. All right so now for the for the sky I think I'll make a nice drippy sky I'm just gonna make kind of a maybe this might be too dark in value I want it light and I can control the lightness with water color by how much water I put in it however if I put too much water in it it's going to get too runny and it's going to make that paper warp. Okay so I'm just getting some of this yellow in here and I'm gonna let it just drip down in between these again you might notice I've been kind of strategically planning where my paints would go based on got a little orange in there but that's okay I kind of like it based on the drying time. I think I do I'm gonna add a a little bit more of that orange up in there like that and then work my way down I know this one's dry but this right here is not quite dry that's why I'm being careful about where to put it okay maybe a little more orange up in here little in here those are dry okay all right so now let's get in a color for that road uh let's see how about you know I really like this magenta color but it's a little bit too dark um let me see here I think I'll do this yellow for the road because the road is this is going to be a road in this case in some of these you can make them a river you know or a waterway and that would be fun too now I'm getting a little heavy-handed with the water so it is getting a little bit buckly with a regular watercolor paper if your paper starts to warp or gets buckled um you can flip it over and um and do water on the back of the paper paint some water on the back and it will um flatten it right out it's like a little magic trick actually all right we got a nice little watercolor underpainting going here with some complementary colors we're going to let that dry or blow dry it and then we're going to apply the clear gesso so that we can add some pesto here we go all right so the surface is dry now and once again just mixed media paper these are for exercises and I think it really does help us to loosen up when we know the surface is not that expensive we're just kind of playing you know so that's fun all right now this is the technique I share often with the clear gesso um by liquid text there's other brands but um there are other ways to turn this into a surface that will receive pastel this is just one of the least expensive ways um and by the way I share this all the time you could totally just put past soft pastels on top of this but it's going to be very limited in how many layers you can get down and thus your colors won't be as rich and um it's it's really much better when you're using watercolor paper or regular paper um to get more layers down so you can either use the clear gesso like we talked about which be sure to get the clear for one it's clear you can see through your underpainting you've just done and it's got a little bit of grit to it little sand in it and that's what all of these have I have a video by the way it's called eight ways to make your own pastel surface I'll put a little link up here in case you want to reference it after you see this video um but also I have other ways of making your own pastel paper and all of these are part of that video one is by using this fine pumice gel also by or by golden I love the golden company they have so many good products and you can tint this it's kind of a gray color um but it's also got the sand in it you can tint it with an acrylic paint um acrylic ink various things you can do if you want to tint it or you can just apply it and go for it this is another product by golden it's called pastel ground I also like this this product it comes in a jar I just got some samples from the company here um and then there's another product called um art spectrum color fix primer this is a really good product and you paint it on your paper or your board I like to use matte board um or you can use gator board that way you have a sturdy surface and it's not going to do this but um but anyway this is another great product that makes it very much like a pastel paper it's fine too and again why would we do this because it's a lot less expensive and I know there's a lot of people just trying to um get a handle on pastels and you know some of us can't don't have the means when I first got started and even now I'm careful about the products I buy because they are so pricey and um I have to be uh I have to be cautious of that since both my husband and I lost our jobs due to COVID-19 so maybe that's why I'm always sharing these um inexpensive ways to paint all right so I'm shaking up my liquid gesso right now I'm going to use a little foam brush right here I've been using a foam roller that's really good when I have it flat I can press it down really good but um because I've got two my husband's coming home and I've got to get some dinner ready I better just get to this here all right so I'm just putting it on here and I'm going to rub it on sometimes I would put it in a jar but here lately I've just been rubbing it on here now it is picking up some of the watercolor but that's okay again this is an under painting and it's okay if it all kind of bleeds together a little bit not that worried about it but you may want to be cautious about not going back over light areas once you've gone over a dark area and this will buckle up a little bit too but that's all right you see it kind of made it nice and moody and impressionistic just gonna see if I've got a good clear or even code on this and for one of the paintings I did recently I used a really stiff brush which gave it a textured look for the grasses I was using in the scene all right so there's our nice loose liquid gesso application okay so now I have it dry it is a little bit buckled but we're just gonna work around it and have a good old time all right so here's my color palette here and I'm gonna once again I know I'm wearing this set out but I'm gonna use the 120 half stick set of unisons it's a great teaching set for me because I don't have to spend a lot of time going to my workshop palette and choosing colors this has such a great assortment of colors I can usually pull them out so I might not even have to use anything else so let's see all right I'm gonna first look at some of these colors up here and determine what I'm gonna do I'm gonna use some of the darkest dark somebody's this dark blue that I had attempted to use before I realized I needed to do watercolor painting so I'm gonna use that and what I do typically if I'm using a set like this and I don't want to have to pull each color out when I use a color I just set it up like that that way I know I'm that's one that I'm in the process of using so in case you're working from a set like that that's kind of a neat idea all right so I'm gonna pull up some of the colors that I'm gonna use mostly of course you see it's in this blue family with some different values and even though it's a triad color palette you see the square it's really three main colors because it it shows the blue one twice so it's it's these it's green blue and magenta so and within each square it shows the different values that we're using and I purposely chose the ones with a little bit of punch like I can show you on the video how to do that all right so I've got some blues chosen I'm gonna get some of these nice greens some really nice lime greens that are kind of nice I may have to pull some from my other set because there's some but I don't quite have that color all right here's some of the magentas and pinks that I have pulled that I'll use all right so I'm gonna get started now first I'm gonna use my darkest darks for this tree I know these vertical things are going to be taller now I'm keeping a light touch here and my tree is going to be not a tree that has like a single trunk with nothing around it it's kind of a bushy tree I like bushy trees and it's uh it's a pretty big tree so it's kind of going off the page here and I can you hear that scratchy sound that's the the gesso I'm gonna go ahead and give some um depth to these grasses right in here because they're always in the foreground they're a little bit darker and you can see down into the depths of where some of the grasses are if they're tall grasses like that all right so there's some of our little tree ideas and I'm gonna go ahead even though um I'm gonna lighten these up and I go ahead and get in those ones that I said I was gonna add another layer of trees kind of back here let's make this one a little bit wider here okay maybe just so I'll kick my camera a little something over here maybe so that gives a little dimension to it all right so there's that darkest blue now I want to take my dark magenta right here and I want to add some of that richness in here to this tree that's kind of like this color over there and it really does make some color fun happen once again this is just a theme you come up with a little theme you can do you can do mine or you can um come up with one that's your own that's just a pretty simple theme that you can do with multiple paintings maybe a little bit of that again I'm gonna lighten these up these two trees look too much the same I think I'll shorten that one when I add the sky or something all right and I didn't want samey samey over here so I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep that there or not all right so let's see now let me get some of that burgundy I got a little bit down here but I I didn't get it over here now let's go ahead and get some of those um background trees and then we've got a layer of like mountains or something behind there so what I'll do with those let's look here I want to keep my warmer colors in the foreground the greens in the foreground so let me go ahead and get in a little bit of this magenta back there and then I'll add some blue on top of it so here's my next value of these pinks and um do I have any warmer or no I gotta stick with this color palette um I'm gonna put these in here for that other row of some trees that are happening back in here behind these kind of peeking in see I'm just turning the pastel kind of over on its side and um maybe keep in mind these would probably be a little shorter back there maybe not could be some tall trees back there okay so now we've got our next level um back in here and they're going to be quite a bit lighter so I think this one's still a little too dark but I might add a little a hint of that just for some color interest you know what maybe I won't add that third layer I'm getting a little too complicated or muddy but I'm going to take some of this color here this is just oh such a pretty color here and I'm going to just give me some grassy feelings here give me a little bit of this um kind of working its way up in here now because we're getting to a little bit of a lighter value and I got some definite bumps going on but I'm going to kind of press it out here all right now we're going to lighten up the background and I got this lightest pink here I will start using some greens in a minute oh that's so pretty isn't that a pretty color all right so we know that these are going to get lighter as they go back work it on see I'm just I'm using the side but sometimes the side is too wide right here I can use the whole side okay the width of it but like in here I kind of have to lift up a little bit on the back if you ever wonder well how are you doing that you get a little bit more finesse the more you do this stuff about how to use these these tools and usually things get more horizontal in the background and gradually they get a little more vertical as you move forward still got a little horizontal going on back here and I would say try to keep these two um I don't know 20 minutes or so so that um you're not overworking these you know because it's supposed to be fun all right so there's that pink in there and let me think about this road here I got a little bit of a lighter pink here it might not be a lot lighter actually it's a little darker in value but it's a nice color isn't it I think I'll get some of that in here working in the road in these grasses and trying to keep where you don't have a strict division from the road in the grass you want it to be kind of a broken edge to that keep it very painterly all right getting some of that in there I think I would like to get a little bit more of this nice color in here for look how that color changes it almost turns to a purple isn't that cool love that oh my gosh that looks just gorgeous how fun is that whee man it almost gets a little bluish color in there and I know I'm gonna have some shadowy sides I think I'm gonna keep I have my light coming from this way um I can lighten up some of these grasses a little but that means that this side of the the road or the grasses is going to be a little darker and I'd probably be getting a little more light here but I don't want to darken up that curve so much if the sunlight was coming down here okay so let's play around I've got some of this color back in there oh yeah that looks really nice down closer to the base of those trees down there again it almost makes that purple so don't don't say you can't blend pastels because sometimes colors do make interesting combinations and um and really change the color okay so this one would be nice really for these trees back here remember I said I wanted them darker than some of this background stuff but I'm not as dark as these are going to be and I think I'll keep this one shorter maybe this one a little bit taller how about that and work it in like that and then back here same thing I might have a tree kind of smaller further away maybe a little bit of that happening in here peeking behind these and everything is just very suggestive now that's a nice color too here for some of the shadows and these grassy side if our light source is coming from here it's going to gradually get lighter in value as it goes back and you know I think I think I'm going to add a little bit more of the dark blue value in here is that a blue or a green yeah that's the one I used it's not as blue as the one in the um in here it's a little more blue green than here but that's kind of all I had I wish I had a one that was more blue I think I'll go try to find one before I muddy this up too much yeah that's a that's a little more of a it looks black here because it's so dark but that's okay so much is about value to establish that mood and sense of believability now let's go on to this next one that's a little bit of a again it's not quite as bright as this one but that's okay I'm going to make this kind of some of these trees that we're a little getting a little further away behind these there's another row that's and what that coolness and lighter value is going to do is it's just going to press things back into the distance it makes them look further away all right so there's that now I've got my next blue here I haven't even gotten to the sky and I'm going to just peek in some of this in places I'll work on sky holes later the spaces between the trees notice some I'm letting that pink show through I've gotten to the green and look how interesting it is already um so I think I'm just going to go with one of these light blues for the sky kind of like the pink though hmm let's take a look at this if I could do a combo I would need a lighter pink like in here so let me try um let me try kind of this pink here I want to keep it light down at the horizon so I'll take this pink and just kind of scumble and do like a a fractured sky oops I'm getting some of that um other color in there see how this is a quite a bit of a darker value so I think I want something a little lighter to mix in with that um and I'm gonna leave a little bit of light um down like right here because I want that little glow over the trees now let me get that lightest blue and let's see how this behaves oh yeah see that it's the same value basically kind of close and what it does we had a lesson on this um the patreon album or patreon homework assignment or story time or something about um fractured skies and how to achieve that when you can use different colors of the same value in the sky all right I'm going to have a little more finesse with some of that this is a pretty dark green whoop that is a dark green but I think I'm going to go ahead and oh this is a softy I think this is a great American and beware if you're using great American on prepared paper you've made your own or really any any of them because they are so soft that you really can't get a lot of layering after you use it so just be careful um all right I'm going to get a little bit of this in for grasses I'm keeping a super super light touch here these greens in I'm working with warped paper but I don't care it's okay might make it look really cool all right so here's the next screen um and I know we're gradually getting some light on this tree like it's just working its way around hitting some of these branches that are kind of sticking out here and up here we might be getting some light on this tree these trees are pretty close in proximity which is why the values haven't decreased a lot in going back because they're like one right after another pretty close all right now I'm going to work some of this green just up around this tree here like big masses of grasses I didn't mean to rhyme but hey why not I'm gonna need to spend some attention on this road here too okay we got that green now I'm gonna gradually lighten my greens up quite a bit lighter so maybe I'll use this one here this is oh what a pretty bright green that is you see that we'll just play sound like Bob Ross let's play with the grasses now here's where we can come in here and just add some hints where the the sun might be hitting some of this work some sky holes in later we want to try to what I want to try to do is sometimes I end up with a pattern even with the um the highlights that I add so I want to be careful with that all right now these I'm gonna make these quite a bit lighter kind of growing up over the trail I'll speed up the last portion of this video but you can see I've already used all three of the color selections of my triad color palette that I chose from palaton and once again you can do this with the color wheel if you are in an area where you can't access palaton but it's very I would say enlightening to play around with these and it really will cause you perhaps to use colors you wouldn't use before often we wouldn't even think of using some of the pinks and maybe even these super bold or or bright greens that I'm using here or maybe some of the brilliant blues that I've used so I continue to work I worked on the road a little bit added a little bit more light or some of the lighter pink to the road I also carved in did some tree hole carving I added more of that beautiful blue to the shadowy side of the road remember that left side of the road was in shadow and just kind of connected things together by incorporating the blue in various places I often share in my videos that try to use some of the similar colors in other places so your painting doesn't feel disjointed and you can create a sense of harmony so this was a lot of fun I even actually decided I wanted to bring back some of that bright pink that I had in my underpainting so I brought it back into the road a little bit and I think it gave it more life and energy so this was really a lot of fun I recommend you give it a try I think you will discover things new ways to create art with bright color palettes that you never would have tried before here's the final painting I really enjoyed this I did a total of five of them so if you're a patron of mine this will actually be your homework assignment and if you're not a patron please become one at this link right here thanks guys happy painting and happy color explorations