So if you remember nothing else from this session today, remember that we are wired to feel before we think. We are wired to process something emotionally before our cognitive system can necessarily catch up. So let's think about how that system functions when we're somewhere where it serves us. So let's say you're in the jungle, and I know you don't spend a lot of time in the jungle, but go with me here because that's a good metaphor. You're in the jungle and a tiger jumps out at you. Within 85 milliseconds, your amygdalable sense that's right from the tiger and immediately cause a cascade of chemicals in your body, blood moves to the major muscle groups, your heart rate increases, your breathing shortens, you're ready for fight or flight.  It reduces your ability to think a complex thought. Have you ever heard yourself say, oh, I was so angry I couldn't think straight? Or have you ever had a difficult conversation with a partner, spouse, and 20 minutes later, thought of all the good comebacks? Darn right. Or apply that in a business setting. You're in a business setting. You're trying to influence. You're sharing an idea. Somebody's seeing you as challenging you. And after that, you think, oh, I wish I'd said this and I wish I'd said that. Why didn't I think of these things? Because you'd literally lost your ability to think complex thoughts, to use the best of your IQ and cognitive abilities. Why would the amygdala not want you thinking complex thoughts in that moment? It's fighting tigers. You don't have time to think, gee, how can I best collaborate with a tiger? What was that engagement strategy that I learned? No, it's going to react right away. When that happens, when the amygdala triggers, senses a threat, releases chemicals in our body and our brain, we start to move to a default behavior, whatever we've learned to survive.


The governorship candidate of the Liberal Party for Liberal State, Baddebaugh Rhodes-Viver says an agent of the party in the ongoing governorship poll in the state has been shot dead. The L.P. candidate who served the election process is fraught with voter intimidation and suppression, alleges that the Independent National Electric Commission, INEC, and the police accomplish it in the killing. Addressing negotiations in a video recorded at the party's situation room, Rhodes-Viver accused the electoral body and the security agencies of provoking the people. This is a state that houses 22 million people. Having that many people angry because of their disenfranchised is not something that Nigeria needs right now. So I call on the INEC rep and everybody involved in this election to make sure they do the right thing and create at least the perception and the actualcy of a free and fair election. Don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


I tend to walk a lot. I tend to wave my hands about, see if I can actually remember to breathe and talk slowly this time. So my name is Marcus. I'm an engineering manager at Retail Me Not in the United States. And I'm here today because I believe that this group, this population, has generally been left out of a very important conversation in software development. Let me just do a quick show of hands. How many of you know what analytics are? That is about four times as many hands than the first time I did this speech 18 months ago. That is a good sign. How many of you are involved in the analytics at your company? That's about 1,000 times more hands than I saw when I first did this talk 18 months ago because it was literally zero. So it's a good sign. It's a growing sign. For those of you who raised your hands, I'll be telling you things you already know. Maybe a few things you don't. For those of you who didn't raise your hands, it's not too mind blowing. I just want to let you in on the secret that everyone's been keeping from us, us being QA folk. So first, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to tell you. That is what it is and how it relates to AB testing, which is, of course, a big topic of conversation. I'll explain why it matters, why you care.  And then right at the very end, I'll give you the bonus of actually telling you why it's relevant to Selenium. So I'm the engineering manager for the CRM team at RetailMeNot. If you have ever used one of our properties, which, I don't know, has anyone heard of RetailMeNot? It's predominantly a United States company. We are trying to expand into other regions, other countries. If you have ever been there, if you ever go there, and if you receive an email or a push notification, you're welcome. It's my team that worked on it. But before that, I was the test automation architect for RetailMeNot. My last count, we ran over 90 million tests between 2012 and 2014. It's a fairly low number for a company like Salesforce, for a company of 200 strong like RetailMeNot. It's a pretty decent number. I once calculated that you would have been testing since the 19th century if you would actually run all the tests manually that we ran in an automated fashion. So I'm kind of proud. I've actually been using WebDriver since literally the day after Simon announced it at GTAC in 2007. So I've been a fan for a really long time. And I'd like to think that at least at one point, I knew what I was doing with it. It's been a while. Otherwise, I'm a musician. I play, that's me. I'm the sexy one. Playing at a charity concert a couple of weeks ago in Austin, Texas, quite proud of that. That is my oldest son. He plays bass like his old man. He's being clubbed by his drummer, which I think is a fairly commonplace thing. It's interesting, I think my choice of playing bass guitar, because to me, it's a little bit like being in quality assurance. You don't notice them if they're doing their job. You don't notice them until they're not there. And you really notice the hell out of them when they make a mistake. I don't know why I'm drawn to it. Both professions. So this is how analytics got started. Probably someone in cash register in 1858 saying, hey, this guy just bought bread. That's analytics. That's the first time. This guy was explaining what the user did and trying to track it and record it somehow. A guy shouting to someone in the back room saying, hey, someone bought bread. So primarily the target audience for this talk is B2C, business to, I guess, consumer. Is that right? So banking sites, shopping sites, that kind of thing. Certainly you can learn more from what, but usually I came from a world where we sold software to other software companies before I came to retail me not. And in that, you generally don't have too much of the big data analytics stuff. So that's essentially what we're targeting here with this talk. Hopefully it will be relevant to anyone else also. But the key thing is that it's starting to apply to all kinds of platforms. It used to be just web. Now it is apps, it's mobile web, responsive sites, APIs, anything you wanna do. And you can use it, believe it or not, in ways that are not creepy.  I believe that for a very long time until somebody in marketing explained to me that what we're trying to do is not show you crap you don't wanna see and show you good things that you do wanna see. And that is the whole point of analytics is to get to the point where you wanna have a conversation or you wouldn't be on my site. I wanna have a conversation so I can make money. Obviously there's a thing that we need to do and I wanna make sure that you are so low in the funnel that you only come to my site and you only see the things that you wanna see. And that's what the whole thing is. This data, these petabytes of data that we're gathering are trying to tell us stories. And this presentation is about how to make sure you're gathering the right story. This is what analytics looks like at a micro level. At the level you care about. There's a lot of data packed into there and those ellipses at the end, that means that it's not, I don't even think this is half of the entire URL. You go to any website, there's a decent chance that this stuff will happen. How many of you have ever tested that URL? Okay, that is eight more people than last time I gave this talk. I thought I was the only one. I'm getting some sort of notification I think that this clicker stopped working. The clicker stopped working and now I don't know what happened. You wanna pull some analytics to find out what behavior I displayed? Yeah, seriously, no idea what's going on. I'm trying not to watch while he does this. All right, so these are various companies that offer analytics, more or less who cares, but these are people you probably heard of. That had some words on it before. At the top of the funnel is a number of hits you've got. So if someone comes to your website, they've hit it. You may or may not care. Second down the funnel, I really don't know where the words went, is sessions. Somebody's on your site, they display some behavior, they click on a thing or two, that you start to wonder if there's a pattern. And then at the bottom of the funnel is where you really start to care, which is where users start to interact. And that's really what we're trying to figure out is, when does a random piece of traffic become a human being? When does it become a user that I care about? I was at a conference a little while back dealing with my actual job, the job of sending out emails and building relationships with customers. And somebody saw that I was from Retail Me Not. They said, hey, I enjoy going to Retail Me Not, but I don't feel like I'm your customer. This was a long time ago. And it just sort of like hit me right in the face, like how do we build relationships with people? How do we make them feel like customers? And the key is that every time you go to my site, no matter what you've done before, you're still seeing the same stuff. And so we started to ask this question, how can we make it? Well, I don't care about Ugg Boots. Marcus Merrill does not care about Ugg Boots. I do not care about lots of, I don't care about pencil skirts, I don't care about a lot of different things. I care about, I don't know, televisions.  When I go to Retail Me Not, I want to see stuff like that. And that's what we're trying to, that's the kind of story we're trying to gather here. I'm really starting to think maybe my slides were not meant to be. See, if I could just use the slides as reference for myself, and I could actually do most of the talking without imagery, believe it or not, not the worst AV problem I've had in one of these things. I was going to be karaoke and I was going to win. I was going to sing Mac the Knife by Bobby Darin and I was going to win that karaoke contest. At about four o'clock in the afternoon, they came and said, there is a problem with the site. What happened was, we had shipped an algorithm change earlier in the day that changed the order in which offers are presented to you when you go to the store page. So normally we say, we take our top performing offers, we take the offers that are being paid for to be displayed as an advertisement. We have all these factors that go in in order to show you what order the offers are supposed to be in. They thought it was a good idea, they shipped it, went out to production and within about eight hours, they said we lost, I don't know, $150,000. Why? Well, there's an image here somewhere. I don't know if it's on there. Yeah, right there. The target offer, $5 off 50. That's the top offer, always top performer, really, really good offer. Suddenly started appearing 15th on the page instead of first and that was not just on that one offer, on that one page, it was everywhere across the whole site. Why did they do it? Because nobody said, let's think about this, let's study it, let's use data to tell us whether this is a good idea. They just pushed a button, they shipped it. I didn't get to go to the karaoke contest. We had to stay there until midnight and fix this thing. So, you know, my personal tragedy aside, this is sort of illustrating the importance of AB testing. Who is familiar with AB testing? I'm expecting to see a decent, little bit less than I thought. I actually thought that, I've always thought AB testing and analytics go hand in hand. The fact that they don't is probably good that I'm talking about it.  And I'm gonna make 10% of the people come in and see this other thing, a variant. Because I wanna see side by side comparison, what works, what doesn't. That way, I don't have to risk losing $150,000 in an eight hour period. I could lose $15,000 in an eight hour period and switch it off, nobody's the wiser. We had a 404 page once a long time ago that just said 404 page not found. Typical thing, sorry. Somebody had the bright idea, hey, that's a big, wide page that says 404 page not found. And then nothing. What if we put offers on that page? We might make money.  Like that was the question. We don't know whether or not it would drive down engagement while it drove up traffic and revenue. We knew it was gonna drive up revenue. If there are links there, people are going to click them. But does it also drive bad behavior? So we put offers on the page. A few days later, we saw these little things. The lines are moving kind of up, generally up. The thing we figured out though was that at no point was the red line below the blue line. And this is kind of a strange graphic but it's about offer ordering and stuff like that. Anyway, I don't wanna get into it. Essentially it told us that on every metric possible, engagement was a net lift. It was not declined. So we promoted that to the 404 page now.  Which is nice. Another thing that happened, this is just six weeks ago. This is me, 20 years in the QA profession. Two years as the engineering manager on the CRM team. I should know a thing or two about how this stuff works. But we shipped an AB test where the B variant had, there was a field that had not previously been nullable. Somehow we thought nullable was a good idea there. I don't know how we introduced that into the equation. And for the entire two days that we ran this test, the B slice which got 10% of the emails had nulls in the offer value somehow getting persisted to our analytics database which means that for the entire two day period, we don't know what people clicked on. We have no idea. The data was gone forever. The fact is that that happened in an email program because we haven't got our automation story set yet in email. On the desktop, this would not have happened because we've had our automation story set for a while. I'll talk more about that later. But the main thing is that what we used to have to go through is a period called the Inquisition where if you designed an AB test, the B variant had to go through a set of tests and you'd sit in a room with a vice president, two directors, several team leads, several QA people, and you would run down a checklist of did you test for this, did you test for this? Basically it's regression testing by committee including do the analytics work. We haven't been able to set this stuff up for email yet so we still make mistakes on that occasionally. So this is an example of how you can use analytics to tell more stories that you want. So shopping cart, frequently when you bought this we were gonna suggest that you buy that other thing. We've recently started personalizing our emails so that if you have shown an affinity towards shoes, we're gonna start sending you shoe offers. If you start showing infinity towards Walmart, we're gonna send you Walmart shoe offers if we get them, the convergence of those different things. And this is all stuff that we were able to gather via analytics. Finally I'm gonna get to the part where we fit in. Normally the way this works, in my experience, I would love it if anyone told me after the talk whether their experience has been better, maybe probably hasn't been worse but typically the way this works is that marketing will go to the business analytics team and they'll say, we wanna figure out our ROI, we wanna figure out how they add placements we're doing. We wanna add some strings, some tokens, some way to measure the clicks and the engagement on this thing. So the BA goes to the product manager. Product manager goes to the dev team lead, they create the user stories. QA is probably involved at the planning meeting the first time when these things come up. Truth is they probably start to glaze over when they start talking about this kind of thing. Maybe not, maybe I should give you more credit. I glazed over, I'll tell you that much. Typically in my company, at least at the beginning, not anymore, this assignment will be given to the newest person on the team. How do you onboard a developer? You give them the analytics stuff. Partially because it's boring and the more experienced developers don't wanna do it and partially because it is a pretty good way of learning how your business works and how all the code matches together and everything. And generally it gets tested, if at all, by the person who wrote it. So back to the interactive portion. Raise your hands if you've been given an analytics story to be tested along with a new feature. Okay, that's like five people. Do you know that this is going on in general? In general this is something, is it something that you believe you could be or have been involved with? That's the main thing, is let's start talking about this. I don't wanna spoil the last slide, actually it might not work anyway. This is my CEO's very favorite topic. You catch the CEO in the hallway and you start talking about analytics. He is going to listen to anything you have to say. And the real problem is that, like I explained earlier, sometimes we mess things up in the analytics. Sometimes we make gigantic decisions based on something that's been firing incorrectly for four months and nobody knew about it. This is the kind of thing that happens. I'm not gonna say it happens all the time, but when it happens it's like the base player, man. You know something is wrong. And the real problem is that for any given feature, for any given page on RetailMeNot, I'm betting we're gonna send 200 separate events based on your behavior. What did you do? What are you doing now? Can we predict what you will do? That kind of thing. So my pitch today is let's not get left behind in the big data conversation, in the analytics conversation. Let's make sure this stuff works functionally and let's get time on the calendar to work on it. That's really the main thing. Once again, all the stuff I'm saying is based on my experience over the last two years working at my company and talking to people who are involved, at least marginally, in the same conversations. If I'm wrong about this stuff, I wanna know about it, but I have yet to be told I'm wrong about any of it in terms of QA's involvement. Go to any website. You're gonna find these beacons being fired off everywhere. It's interesting to try to go in there and try to decode what's going on. Normally, if they're smart, they will actually start using UIDs, so they'll have key value pairs in their URLs that'll say B21 equals 74582, which really just means he typed his name or something like that.  But it's really interesting. You can at least tell when they're going on. You can sort of see what they're doing. Sometimes it comes in the form of an invisible pixel that'll get planted in the top left corner of a page. Nobody would ever see it, but you can see it via proxy or examining your network traffic. But yeah, and retell me not, we fire like three of them. We have an internal tool, we have Google Analytics. We used to have a tool called Omniture. We got rid of it, started doing our own stuff. I could do an entire session on how we structured the architecture behind how we gather the analytics. It's not Selenium related, so I didn't want to go into that stuff. Here's a really interesting example of something that happened. This is actually what introduced me to the topic of analytics. So if you look at that page, imagine that on the top offer is the 17th offer on the page. Second offer is the 18th offer on the page. So there's more up above, I just didn't include it. Then there's a break, unpopular coupons. We leave them on there because people still click on them. Sometimes they still work, sometimes they don't. They're less popular. We figured out that we lose a lot of money when we don't include them. We did that via an A-B test. We tried to remove them once, we lost a lot of money, put them back on, right? So we have a page break and then we say B-21, which is sending, which is trying to give you an idea what is the offer order that you clicked on? What's the offer you clicked on? If you click on that first offer under the break, we say you clicked on offer zero, which means it was the one up at the top. That's a bug, isn't it? That's the kind of thing that can get that offer promoted to the top of the page. Hey, everyone's clicking on this offer. They're clicking on the top offer on the page. We should put it at the top. That bug right there is the genesis of this entire talk because I figured out that QA has a role to play and is being left out. And we automated the ability to test this kind of thing through every single store page algorithm change that we make. So let's talk about that.  I cannot emphasize that enough. You open up the network traffic analyzer on Chrome. You have to find the URL of the thing that you clicked on. You have to figure out which one it was. You have to take it into pretty print from something. You break up the request into ampersand delimiters. You look at the key value pairs. It is awful. And we still have to do it to some extent. Then you get to the point where you have to say, well, sometimes stuff works differently on Chrome than Firefox. Sometimes it works differently on Safari. Sometimes it works differently from mobile Safari or mobile app or any of those things. And so multiply all the different ways you need to test these things and then usually you just want to bury your head in a pillow. So we use a proxy. How many of you use browser mob proxy or any other proxy to do your kind of testing? All right, so hopefully after this talk you'll go back to your place of work and you'll chase down the person who knows a thing or two about analytics and you'll say, how can I help you? Where have been your biggest problems in data loss with analytics? And then you'll go and you'll find Dave Heffner's notes on how to use proxies in testing with Selenium. What we do is this is the first order of testing. Then I'll tell you about the end to end process we've implemented later. And how am I doing on time? I'm all right. So what we will do is I had a code sample ready but I don't want to touch this thing. I'm not at all comfortable messing with the computer right now. So we have a line of code, we do Java. It says basically open up the proxy for reading. Then we perform our Selenium based actions. Open the browser, click on the page, click on an offer on the offer title. Stop recording, find in the proxy readout where the request was made that we're looking for. And then use Java libraries to break up the URL, find the, break it up into key value pairs in a map. Find the key that we're looking for and make sure that the value is what we predicted that it would be. If we clicked on the 17th offer on the page, make sure it says, well, 16 if you're doing off by one. So then you verify that. And so when we do this, we're able to test all of those analytics just by performing a single, page load, click, analyze the thing. Assert on all of those different. I've got a test with 30 different assertions. And it was sort of the first one we did. We figure out there's probably a way to do it a little bit more intelligently than just manually extrapolating all the assertions. But anyway, this was early iterations. Point is open a proxy, do the action, close a proxy, and analyze. It doesn't take much longer at all than running a normal Selenium test. And chances are, you could interlace this with your Selenium tests that you already have running. Because all you're doing is adding this extra. You could probably turn it into an annotation or some other event that happens. And say, while you're in there doing the thing you're already doing, start putting all these requests into buckets and break them up and see, let's set the screen saver, break them up and then see if all of your analytics appeared as you expected. Once again, the text is not showing up. This circle says what I just said. So here's the next piece that we did that I really would like to get released into open source, but I guess I've just been lazy. I don't know. Maybe we should do this part of a hackathon. It's a very simple system. We have a system that we call Panumbra, which, if you don't know, is the term for when you're looking at an eclipse of the sun, you see this corona around it. I believe that's called the Panumbra. It's everything outside, but just in the area of the thing you're interested in. It's a method that we use for black box testing analytics. So what we'll do is we will run our normal Selenium tests. We will compose a blob of JSON. That'll say, here's the event name. Here's the analytics thing. Here's what we expect. And then we'll say, within 30 minutes, otherwise, alert in merrill.rmin.com. And essentially what happens is we will perform an event and then we'll send that blob of JSON, the expected value to a web service, an endpoint, that says you should be expecting this JSON blob within 30 minutes. If you don't see it, send a pager to merrill.rmin.com. It's just that simple. The next phase along the process is the data goes through a series of munging. In our particular case, its web server receives it in the form of something we call the analytics redirector, which does exactly what it sounds like it does. It gathers the analytics, then redirects it to somewhere else. That then throws to an Amazon Kinesis stream, which then gathers everything up into some other bucket. There's some munging that happens along the way with S3, and this is at massive scale. And then it gets deposited into a final resting place we call the data lake. That you're able to query like a data store. I believe it is Mongo. I could be wrong. I'm sorry, Zach, if I'm wrong. So we're then able to query that. We have then an event listener at the end of this phase which is looking for the event that you were just threw up earlier in the notification service. And then it will try to do matchmaking on all the events that you tagged as penumbra events. It's almost like a di-trace when you're taking an x-ray.  And so these are events that you tag going in and then you have an SLA that says within 15 minutes or within 30 minutes, this piece of data should show up on the backend system. That way you know everything along the way is working fine. If it didn't work, you get an alert that says I clicked on this offer at this point. What happened? And so you can start to investigate all the logs along the way. And this is a system that we were able to put in place a while back because I'm sure you can all identify with this, the combinatorial explosion that we experienced when trying to figure out all the different ways that our analytics were being tossed made it to where, I mean we'd have to have the best machine learning in the world in order to be able to analyze all of this stuff. So we started to do sampling instead, we said. We're gonna, this time we're gonna try Chrome offer title, coupon offer versus code offer, all these different combinations and we would start to throw these events at the Penumbra system. And then we would see them out on the other end. I have a dashboard right there which is what you would get in the end. You'd say these are all the different ways, these are all the different events that we're throwing. The green means that they worked fine, the yellow means they took a little bit longer than they should have, the red, very few of them are the ones that actually did not show up. If you notice here, no, not there, here. That was a day that the system died, not the Penumbra system, the underlying system. This is an in-production, end-to-end test. And that's the day that we had an outage. That is also the day they told me to start throwing slightly less volume at the system if you'll notice the volume drops after that. So once again, this is a little bit of a hodgepodge way of saying you want to get involved in analytics. Your CEO wants you to get involved in analytics. I mean, it's hard to explain in words. I have so many stories of people who would come up after this system was put in place and they're like, wow, we have a QA department. I didn't know. And so it gets you on the map, but it also helps you help your business with the million dollar decisions they're making with A-B testing. And there's this shadow parallel software development thing around analytics that happens where we're kind of left out of the conversation. You're worried about whether the button is the right shade of green or whether it takes you to a 404. You're worried about whether or not if somebody enters their name incorrectly, it's gonna be validated properly. This is the stuff that we should be testing right here. If you're in B2C at all, this is where your company can make or break a lot of stuff in a lot of ways. And it just buggies any other kind of software. There's so many moving parts. So anyway, that is most of what I got. I think we're, a little time for Q and A. Any questions? Anyone? I wanna hear some stories too. Anand? I believe so. Yeah, it should. Browser Mob has, yeah.  It should all, yeah, yeah, it should be. So, yeah. Sorry, the test cell, the usual age. How long your AB goes? Oh, we do AB testing. We used to do it for a week. Now we do it for, depends on what kind of test it is. If it's for an email, we do it for two weeks. If it's for a web desktop, we do it for several days. The problem is that in general, we get better offers on Tuesday because people are trying to get people into the stores on Tuesdays. People are already shopping on Saturdays. So it varies the nature of the test as well as the nature of it. So it's very specific to the business, but it can be a few days, it can be a few weeks. Because it adds overhead to the test time. Yeah. Until it is active, you need to make sure that it's working fine. Yeah, right. And how about taking it out? So once you decide that this was working and you want to make this as a control cell, you need to take out some of the condition that you would have put in the code. Probably, in my experience, what we did was when we were introducing a new B variant, we wouldn't generally, 90% of the time, we would not change the analytics. We were just trying to make sure that the analytics weren't broken. So we would run the A-B test through the same test automation analytics process. And if it broke, then we knew that we had to change something. But we didn't, we've never spent a whole lot of time trying to write automated tests against a variant before it won. Mostly we just do regression testing against it. Okay, thanks. I mean, sometimes the variant is going to break your automated test. Just happens, but in general, it's not, it wasn't too big a deal for the analytics portion. Yeah? Use what? Throttles? Yes, yes, we have a, it's in-house made, it's called Vegematic. It's something that actually diverts traffic at a very measured, metered fashion. And we make sure that we know exactly who's going in who's not. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. We use a combination of analytics. So the question was, do we use a tool to measure the success or failure of the A-B test? And we have a whole team of people who do that. They're measuring, the whole process I explained with the Kinesis stream, there's like six different kinds of data that go across the same kind of pipelines called Overlord. And we watch all of that and all of that kind of stuff tells us whether or not we had Lyft. We can measure it to the point of last night there was an email that said, this test gave us 3,880 clicks. The control was 3,860 clicks. So, like, we know exactly where that is. It's not a third party tool, the stuff we built in-house. No, it doesn't. It's only metal. Yeah, we have a whole team of people who are sort of switching, turning on and turning off things all the time. We run six, seven tests at once usually and we're just sort of slicing in and they somehow keep all of it straight. I don't quite know how. But yeah, Google Analytics. Have you automated Google Analytics? We have implemented it, yes. We have Google Analytics. In fact, a lot of our automated tests even test to make sure that we're sending the right information to Google Analytics. Our problem as a company, and this is sort of outside of this scope, but scope of this talk, but our problem as a company was that Google Analytics is sampling. They don't give you 100% of all the events every time. They give you some of them, a sample. It makes sense, but yeah. Sometimes the data layer, we need to check the data layer variable in the console. So whether the correct data is passing to the variable so that GA will pick that one. So have you ever tested that object, the data layer, have you automated how to test that data layer variable by using Selenium? Some of them. So some of those are not predictable. So some of them you have to just basically say, I just wanna know if that one was there. Was it null, was it populated, was it gone? But sometimes if you can predict it, we would try to predict it and say, we know exactly what this value should be, and we would break up the URL and compare it and make sure. We had a whole abstraction library built around the Google Analytics request.  Basically, so our whole, it's a whole different topic, but our whole drive with our automated testing is to try to make it to where two or three people on the core automation team have to do the hard work, but the testers writing the tests have it easy.  You know, that way they didn't have to do anything at all complicated or know what they were trying to ask. Just wanna know if it's there or not. Any other questions? Yeah. Grid, this is running in not only Selenium Grid, but our own special auto scaling Amazon web services grid. The question was, are we running in Selenium Grid? The answer is yes we are. We run 1,300 tests in 24 minutes. Awesome. So I could do a whole other talk on that. Do you see any, Invalid results when you run in the parallel sequential order? I don't understand, sorry. So when you run in the grid, parallel testing, parallel run rate, so do you see any difference between when you run in sequential order or when you run in the parallel? If I understand the question correctly, do we see any difference between running in parallel versus running singular? No, no difference whatsoever. They all run in separate threads. They each browser instance has its own browser mob port dedicated to it. So when you're running in the grid, when it reserves a browser mob proxy, it says start the proxy, it just underneath the covers, it will say reserve this port and for the rest of this test, until I shut it down, that's my proxy. Nothing else still will go through it. So we've never had any trouble with cross-traffic, cross-pollination, anything like that. Hi, how do you test external tracking? For example, if you have your pixel of retellme.not on Google page and someone search for like Pizzahut offer and it clicks on it and how do you do A, B testing there that that user is not logged into retellme.not but actually sees the same offer when it comes back again. How do you track users? How do you test that? I'd have to... I'm not sure how to... That would be an interesting conversation to have. I know that what we've tested in the past is we've just tested to make sure analytics are flowing in and we sort of watch for an amount of traffic and if it drops a lot, we would say it's bad but I haven't gotten too much into the weeds on that one. That's interesting though. It's an interesting question. Thank you. That's the kind of thing that hasn't cost us millions of dollars in the past. So it's not been quite so pressing. So yeah. Well, for our normal automation, so the question was, analytics sometimes causes performance issues. True story. What we do in our selenium testing, it's considered a best practice by the browser mob folks, is if we see a request that's going to Omniture, we cancel it. When we're doing normal selenium testing, because during normal selenium testing, we're trying to test the functionality of the site. We don't care about that stuff and we don't want our tests to be slowed down so we just kill those requests. So in terms of our testing, yes, it slows us down. In terms of our users, the reason we got rid of Omniture is because it slows them down. We used to have a share on Facebook, share on Twitter for every single offer on the page. We stopped doing that because it was killing our Google rankings because of page performance. So we have a very small amount of patience for that kind of synchronous request. Everything you do on Retail Me Not is asynchronous. When I first got there, the process we were going through was you would click on an offer and it would make a request to a service to make sure it recorded it and then it would make sure it came back with a proper yes we recorded it and then we would load the rest of the page. No, no more. Send it to RabbitMQ, forget about it. It's no longer the page's responsibility. And so for all these analytics things, I think the primary reason we designed our own system around this stuff was so that we could send it to RabbitMQ and never have to think about it again. We have very limited patience for anything else that our business thrives on performance. We die without it. So, yeah. In the midnight, they will be popping up different offers and different data in the website, right? So from the QA perspective, they don't know what will happen tomorrow. Right. So a lot of offers, a lot of different pop-ups will be coming up based on the metrics that the business team got it and they will be pushing a lot of offers, right? How do we ensure from QSI that, okay, this will become, we don't know what percentage of traffic enabled for that offer? Well, we don't try to get that much into the weeds. We just try to make sure that this analytic is trying to tell us something about what the user did. We're only trying to make sure it got recorded correctly. If something gets messed up, I think along the lines of what you're saying, it would just sort of fail and we'd say, you know, we can't automate this right now. We can't, I'm not sure I'm answering the right question, but it's most of it. Thank you. Yeah. What other open source tools have we used? So mainly we are a Java stack. We are also starting to introduce JavaScript, Node, Nightwatch. We do a lot of stuff with Amazon, so not open source, but AWS. We're Maven, we're Spring, we're kind of the typical old school Java stack that Brett Pitycourt hates. What else? Proxy, browser mob proxy. Trying to think of anything else. Most of the stuff we have done around analytics itself, it's homegrown, the idea was always to make these tools available open source, but then I got a different job and I didn't do it. So I would love help. Anything anyone wants to do. So I think we're at time, but I want to thank everyone for coming out. I'm glad we were able to talk about this stuff.


Hi guys, I'm almost like a morning. It is definitely 3 39 p.m. It is Friday So welcome to a week and no a weekend in my life log this weekend is Oh, so festive as always been using my festive not pods right now. Here we go I just say myself a coffee. Hope you guys are having a great day Remember Brevin and Housewife merch is on sale 10% off until the 20th Anyways, this weekend is a very festive weekend of my life log tonight We are actually road-tripping to East Texas three of my closest friends and I booked Like a train ride on the polar Express. We're in our 20s. It's okay. It's fine And it's two hours away So we decided we might as well just like road-trip and get a cute little Airbnb in East Texas So we're driving there in a few hours also look at my mug tomorrow. My friends are doing a white elephant I have an extra love sack. So I'm bringing a love sack to the white elephant Selfishly I like want one of them to have it at their houses So I'm like hoping that they win it my my odds are honestly pretty good. It's a little festive Christmas weekend in my life I'm finishing up the week in my life vlog as we speak if you guys haven't been catching up on the vlogs Listen, I'm giving you something great to do. We have like hour-long vlogs, okay? 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It is absolutely incredible The packaging is discreet when you get it delivered to your house The simple health doctors can prescribe over 100 versions of the pill as well as the patch or ring They're personalizing this based on your preferences and health profile. It's very reliable They have licensed doctors that help review the product and review every patient So if you guys want you can use code Kenzie for either $20 off or a free Consultations you literally have nothing to lose use code Kenzie 20 This is really really incredible and so important and I love that they're doing this and I love that they sponsored today's video I'm very grateful to share this with you guys. So again code Kenzie 20 for either a free consultation or $20 off Okay, anyways, I need to pack. I need to finish this vlog We've got a few things that we need to do before we're out the door. I am driving a little bit of a road trip It's only two hours away, but I also need to like get ready to my hair all that stuff Car is packed Jess is on her way and they're picking up Presley. I normally don't vlog I mean I vlog with Jess because I went to college with her I don't leave long with my Dallas girlfriends really often Presley and I have been friends since Like fourth grade we were besties in elementary school. So we just grew up together. We're about to go I'm really excited. I'm really hungry. I probably should have eaten dinner before leaving I don't know for grout. I feel like we're gonna grab food speaking of it This is my Facebook memory from 11 years ago Presley was on crutches and we made this the miss me jeans. I mean wow guys. We're matching and going into CVS right now for our road trip snacks, I either want white cheddar cheez-its or Muddy buddies, but like they have to have more than this aisle Like checks mix the chocolate one checks mix Maybe it's like a really popular road trip Yeah, the way you said toaster I just thought morning toes. Wait s'mores. I'm shocked.  It's your first time. This is a really big deal. This is very exciting It's also the fact that we're wearing matching red running housewife. So it's Just like you really have to understand buckys to get it like the kids Don literally has a hoodie. That's what he's like. She saw it. She came and she saw she conquered Wow, I'm sure this is gonna taste better just cuz it's up from Bucky's, you know, I Just know that it's true It's really an exciting time they have me Christmas because you're playing at Bucky's you don't understand before it was a hum alone soundtrack I Would know now, you know Oh White elephant get party tomorrow. So Presley is like literally buying up Bucky's. This is the hoodie that Dom has. Oh Oh my god, we show up wearing those wait. That's actually kind of funny. I wish it was actually ugly sweater and themed That is so funny. Oh my god. That's not real Next time they tell us this Jersey themed Yeah, literally Wow I mean you're buying at the store Presley Wait, what is it? Guys, which one should we get for Dom's? Texas mama, you know what the thing about that too that so much stuff is that she would wear it All the Texas memorabilia like this like why would I actually use that? You know, like I need this I just think that things are so funny. I have those but I broke them actually Oh Yeah, I don't I don't know where it is. I know I've had one before Don't mess with Texas you're feeling the Texas vibes guys Presley literally just bought out Bucky's. I'm not kidding like white elephant is really extreme. Oh My god, it's so cute No, it's so cute. Oh my gosh, I Just got one of those installed in my house today actually Oh, thanks Happy holiday Wow, they're the curing Wow a guest book. Oh my god. Oh my god. There's stairs. No way here It's so cute Treat like that. There's yeah, there's a lot of beds. Oh wait. This is so fun. This is actually so fun I love this place. Honestly. I would like to live here. I Always when I was in L. I really wanted to like score some random like wealthy families gas house. They never did but it was always a dream of mine Oh a nice clothing rack They think of everything here the enchanted calling good morning guys, and we're gonna make some coffee This Kira again for some reason reminds me of college, but I have no idea because I never had at college Presley that Christmas my I rinse it. Don't worry. No, I'm not that prepared Stop Look at it. That's a big swatch Yes I've never had a mad happy so I have you such it's not crazy. Did you give me one for Christmas? I really should I really about watching shows maybe in 2022 I'll make my book goal only 50 and then I'll read I'll watch three shows you should probably like be like more like a docu-series gal because I know I love Educational TV like a that's like your life. You know, I'm like love documentaries. Oh, I'm living I watch every documentary like with filthy rich.  Oh, this is my version of an ice roller today No, but I see you doing a lot In hotels, I've had to do this before she was doing my face down. Yeah, I've done like a bowl of ice water I'm about to start taking like three minute cold ice showers not ice showers cold showers Wait for what if there's just so many health benefits my brother's like so into them It like my brother used to have Really bad or is Asia and all of his redness has gone away all of his acne has gone away I mean, I don't have those I used to have like like redness more Here's a little water. Don't worry guys, but there's a lot of health benefits to it interesting Yeah, and it's like I think if you do something you don't want to do in the morning Something good. There's something good about it. Yeah, I think I don't do things that they don't want to do this generation It's too soft Yeah, it is people. Oh Just what happened I Had anxiety yesterday, so I peeled off one whole hand of nails before you left No, no, no like that. Yes. I do something no yesterday morning. I don't know.   I Bit my regular nails down to this like my regular nails were long. I haven't had an anxiety there. I was like in So I get acrylics. Yeah, I don't that's actually an anxiety that I don't have with nails, right? I don't do I don't like I don't know this thing hates me by the way. Did you? It's the back of our Airbnb It's so cute. There's this beautiful pool This Airbnb is so cute if you're ever coming to East Texas I Leaving the Airbnb It's really just perfect. I feel like I'm in Gilmore girls Yeah This is good enough for me So cute we found this restaurant online. This is where we're going. It smells incredible Very I really trust them I'm feeling good about it I am like living a nice like cute little hole in the wall restaurant. They're always the best Tacos are two dollars. Everyone Guys be honest, do I look out of place in my leather coat? Yeah Yeah, I know Okay, I'm deciding between this bean and egg plate. I've never been happier to have tacos. What? I'm deciding between this bean and egg plate This looks so good Perfect. All right 1391. Thank you. Thank you. All right guys. We just got Starbucks. We stopped at Walgreens Oh my gosh, we're about to head to the Polar Express Which is what we've been looking forward to four weeks. It's Preston's idea. I'm Preston. I think that we are Mrs. Claus. Yeah, that's the name. Yeah, when we have kids It's gonna be on all squared.  If you will be ten times worse by the time we get to the age of 40 Yeah, literally. Yes, like if you guys saw the Kardashian Christmas party basically that we went to last weekend That was actually Preston's mother and it was the most insane thing I've ever been to and I've been to like really insane Events and I'm talking like brand events like yeah, it was just yeah No, it was like a whole other divan we like everyone every day. It's been brought up It was just like talking about it for the past week. Yeah Never so what was your Starbucks order today? I got My grande vanilla sugar cold brew with peppermint my normal winter order. Yeah, just got a cold brew. She's stronger than us I'm just like I'm a different, you know, and then press. So what did you get? Well, I got a shake of espresso made with oat milk and it tasted so bad But yeah, so I threw mine away. So mine is no longer. Why do you want to stop by again here in spirit? No, it's okay sure Today We're going to the Polar Express now guys, so it's exciting for us. We've made it to the Polar Express Yes, we are the only people I'm sure here everyone like they're all children We've only adults here without kids But can you blame us? Okay? Like this is Yeah, only once we walked on and they're playing In music, it's so cute. We have our little seats here. I've been having a good time Jessica.  Oh my god. Thank you. This is wow.  Oh my god, so cold Okay, that was so fun Ten out of ten, I've never laughed so hard. We saw Santa We were the only adults without children, but it was worth it. It was so fun I know what the biggest perk was what the hot dad. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we're so hot dad Just like wouldn't talk to me. Let's try to crush His son He just sent me a photo like my right after I was born Through baby photos. He's sending really cute photos and like the various sweet messages. That's how I like I'm actually welcome to the world. This is my first time to hold you and I will never let go. That's so sweet That's really he's really feeling sentimental today, but the photo I could have done without yeah, he misses me guys clearly That's really cute What the road trip back we have this on the background It was such a fun drive. We listened to country music the whole way. It was a really good time came back changed really quickly We're going to a white elephant party tonight I'm bringing a love sack as the one elephant gift I actually forced them to throw the white elephant party because I needed Somewhere to put this because I got sent to you basically and long story short. Anyways, here's my outfit We're just going to our friend's house, but Who knows honestly, this is one of those nights where like I could be really chill come home at midnight or The opposite could happen and you really don't know me. So we'll see I'm obviously not gonna vlog tonight I'll get some clips. I'm sure Whatever it's called They would probably love it a little bit too much The land I know is in all my videos, you know, we like many sit-down videos You know He's been in many huge ogee, so I force the land into those parties what we're getting at No, it's so funny and it's like when he was like so much shorter. He was at least a foot shorter. Yeah All right, well we're off guys I brought a love sack to white elephant and ruined friendships at 10 plus years Happy Sunday guys What a great weekend. Let me tell you last night was so much fun So I brought the love sack to white elephant I actually like made them have a white elephant party because I wanted to bring that as my way out That gift to the boys house because I knew it would be great there and then I can use it there It's honestly very selfish. It was just so fun I know I say this all the time and honestly, maybe this is encouraging for you guys I obviously like chose to move back to Dallas I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas and I was actually talking to some people last night at the bars And they were like so crazy like I never thought I would move back here And it was the best decision I've ever made like I think people think view moving home Like moving home. I didn't I did move home, but like I didn't grow up in Dallas I grew up like 45 minutes north as like a failure of some sort and while like I chose to I just wanted to live in Dallas I think that's a really common thing of like looking at moving home It's like a failure or whatever And there's so many people who have had to move home just in the past year the pandemic and they're like, oh my god I ended up having so much fun in the first like six months They're like I was miserable because lately my house and I wasn't even like reading out people hanging out making new friendships Whatever and now that I'm like out with people It's so much fun And then it got me thinking and this is something Dom said too and it's like where you're at It's like where you're at just like invest in it on it just like leaning into the culture if you will it's fine I'd like wherever you're at even like an organization job. It always teaches that in our Internship if you guys are in a phase in your life. It doesn't matter where you live It doesn't matter what you're doing that you don't love I would I feel like oftentimes I'm like talking about like how to get out of it How to change it whatever but honestly like maybe lean into it a little bit more and give it more of a chance Like give it a little bit more of a shot You never know what will happen if you would tell my 18 year old self that I would end up living in Dallas I would have honestly never believed you I never plan on moving back and over time We did realizing how much I love taxes and had a life here And then ultimately ended up wanting to move here my 18 year old self If she knew that would probably be miserable and they kept hated my life and now that I'm here Obviously it was the best decision.  You never know I'm sure like a year from now. I'll be like, oh my god. My life was so different. We have my Starbucks We went and grabbed some Starbucks this morning. I actually have my groceries delivered There is a quick little grocery haul. This is not from the grocery store, but I did get a label maker More stuff you have to look forward to when you're 24, okay? I want to make homemade chicken noodle soup, chili and then a few other things this week So I got chicken, ground pork, ground beef, salmon, bread, celery, carrots, smart sweets, peppers, broccoli, egg noodles, chicken stock, eggplant, cheese, avocados, onions I think that's actually it. Lots of cooking this week. I really want to get back into it I'm feeling good about it. I'm feeling good about working out, cooking at home It's just my favorite thing. Also this morning I watched the first episode of In Just Like That. First off, the name was weird Second off, why did they do that? Have we not suffered enough? Like, oh my god, I won't spoil it for you guys, but like What was that? No, absolutely not.  I thank you guys so much, and I will see you tomorrow. Bye Unfortunately, when you're an entrepreneur in these early days, like it's seven days a week, you know It doesn't turn off. I'm hoping I can get to a place where I can have some days off and have more of a Quote-unquote balance, but I don't know for my personality. I don't know if I'll ever get there


Hello everybody, welcome back to another AI video. In this one, we're in mid journey and I'm gonna show you how to take an image or a piece of art generated in mid journey and turn it into vector art. And we're gonna do it in just a couple of minutes. And not only that, it's going to be incredible and we're gonna do it for free. It's crazy and we don't even have to use Adobe Illustrator. We're gonna use another AI program. So big claim, let's back it up. Here's an example of the image that I created a nice simple logo type bulldog. If I go into Illustrator, you'll see here that I've got that exact same image. Look at this, the exact same image but it is completely vectorized. You can see here when I'm in the layers panel, I drop it down and all these paths are there. You can see the little blue dots so you know that all these handles are all there. And if I pull one, yes, it's vectorized. So how the heck did I do it? Well, and how did I do it for free? All right, let's go. It should only take about two minutes for me to show you. First step, let's go ahead and create an image. All you need to do is go forward slash imagine and then copy in a prompt that you want to use. In this case, I'm gonna use an English bulldog in a vector art cartoon style, comma, flat color, dash dash, no outline. I don't want any outlines around it or anything like that. You can use whatever you want to create. This is just an example that works for me. So here's an example of a bulldog that I created earlier. Let's go ahead and vectorize this little wolf. Okay, I'm gonna click on his image. I'm gonna right click and then I'm going to save that image right onto the desktop. Presto, done. I've already done it, but I'm gonna replace it. So we've saved the image to the desktop. Now, next step, go to your Finder or your Explorer and grab that little image of yours. So I'm gonna use this bulldog as an example. I'm gonna go to Google Chrome and there's a website called vectorizer.ai. I'll put a link in the description below. But very simple, it's in beta. It's currently free as of April 2nd, 2023. And you can drop your image in and it will turn it into a vector. So let's go ahead and do it. Grab the image, which is this little bulldog, drag and drop it here and then let it do its thing. It's very, very quick and it does an incredible job.  This is absolutely mind-blowing. Look at this. This is the original image on the left and this is the vectorized bulldog on the right. It is almost exact like this is crazy. All right, it's done a good job. All you gotta do now is click on download and there it is and you'll see here that it says SVG, which means scalable vector graphic. I'm gonna show it in my finder and there it is. There's my image of my bulldog in the vector format. I'm gonna go now into Adobe Illustrator and this is not a necessary step, but I just wanna show you that this is how we can prove that it's a SVG or a vector graphic. Drag and drop it in and drop it. Bang, there it is. And to check, just go ahead and switch to the direct selection tool and then select everything. And when you do, look at that. You can now see all of the path and you can grab any one of these handles and go nuts just like I'm gonna do here. So if I wanted this to be way out here, it's all vector graphic. This is unbelievable. That is all there is to it. One final step I recommend is you wanna go to file and then you may wanna save this as a AI file or an Adobe Illustrator file. SVGs are good, but it's nice to have a backup as a Adobe Illustrator only file. Not necessary, but there you go guys. That's all there is to it. We went from mid-journey to scalable vector graphic to incredible vector art in seconds. Thanks for watching.


If there's anything more surprising than how much we let landlords get away with in this country, earning half of people's wages for doing very little, it's how they justify it to themselves. Landlords don't tend to think they are parasitic on other people's work. They tend to think they're doing a good thing. There was a video of a landlord who lacked self-awareness, which went viral on Twitter this week. We're going to show it and we're going to talk about it. Let's take a look. I work in London. I live in Buckinghamshire, but I invest up north. Right now we're in Huddersfield. This is Huddersfield. You buy a house here for like £80,000. You're going to rent it for £600. In London, you'll buy a house for £800,000. You're not going to rent it for 10 times the price. So you want to buy low rent high with a property manager nearby. People say, oh, but Samuel, I have to buy close to where I live so that I can keep an eye on it if there's any problems. That's not financial freedom.  You want to buy properties in cheap areas. You want to rent them high and you want to have systems in place and property managers that can make it passive income so that you can have financial freedom. That's called property investing the smart way. Sorry, I said that was a Twitter video. It was originally a TikTok video, but it then went viral on Twitter. It's had over half a million views. Darlia, I want your take on this guy. I think the thing that I suppose really shocked people is this idea that he's a weird guy, but for any landlord, they are expecting passive income. They're expecting that you buy this asset and then you just get to slowly collect money and then own the house at the end of it. Basically, you've had someone who works for a living pay your mortgage. Even if he's describing it in a particularly vulgar way, what he's talking about there is how landlordism works. Yeah, I mean, those of us who grew up in working class, black and brown neighborhoods in London, we know this story of gentrification extremely well. It was in our communities that the tools of gentrification, this model of wealth building and hoarding that is based on essentially displacement and breaking communities up was developed. In my years of renting in London, I don't think I've ever had a landlord that's lived in my neighborhood. My current landlord and my last landlord both didn't even live in the same country as me. We have seen our neighborhoods destroyed our local businesses, our communities displaced, and generally just treated like dirt that needs to be cleaned out, literally socially cleansed in order to make way for profitable or productive use of the land. When my contract is up where I'm living now, I'll probably be priced out of the area that I grew up in in London. That matters. It's where my family is. It's where my community is. It's also one of the few places that I really can call my home. It's really heartbreaking actually and really annoying to see people who 10 years ago wouldn't have stepped foot in my neighborhood who took the piss out of me for where I grew up. Now being able to live there when I myself and people that I grew up with no longer can. These kinds of parasitic rent seeking practices are practiced on racialized working class communities and across the country and then exported to the rest of the population. As you mentioned, this video causes a lot of shock and disgust because he just says it in such plain terms, but it's not an aberration. It's the norm. It's not a bug. It's the function of our economy right now. I think that we've really failed with the exception of renting movements like Acorn. We've really failed to make a political movement out of opposition to this parasitic rents here kind of capitalism.  It's being sold as an acceptable way of making money in what is a very dysfunctional economy. That's only going to entrench inequality even further. I mean, it is feudalism, isn't it? That's why you had Adam Smith, Karl Marx, all the classic economists. They thought it shouldn't exist even in a functional capitalist system because these people aren't producing anything. Basically, you have enough capital to buy a buy to let home, then someone who has to go and do productive work has to pay you for no reason a third to a half of their income. You don't do anything. People say, oh, I can't lower the rent because then I wouldn't be able to pay the mortgage. Why should you be able to pay a mortgage of someone else's work? It doesn't make any sense. You're not adding anything. This is why people say landlordism is parasitic.  That's such a horrible thing to say. There are good people who are landlords who just want some financial security. That's true. I'm not saying everyone who's a landlord is evil, but I'm saying that there is no justification to have landlords in any society because they don't add anything. If there weren't landlords, people say, oh, then how would you rent if there weren't landlords? The house would still be there. It would just be the case that there wouldn't be someone who demands half of your income just so you can sleep there while they still own it. It doesn't make any sense. We should only have social housing and then affordable housing. There's no reason whatsoever to have exploitative private landlords. It doesn't add anything. There's nothing I resent more than paying half of my income to someone who doesn't do any work. I don't know if they do any work because I don't have any idea who they are, but they're definitely not doing any work to justify me paying them half of my income. It makes no sense. This guy, while we're outraged at him, yes, most landlords probably don't speak like that shouting in the middle of the street, but he is just explaining a reality which is the reality of the private rental market, which is people buy properties for as lower prices they can, rent them for as high as they can.  It's not a market which works in any of the ways that a capitalist market is supposed to work. There are no price signals. It's not that if you're a bad landlord, then you don't get any money, so you have to become a better landlord. No, there's no competition in this market. It's terrible and people should join. As Dalia said, Acorn, if you want to help end this scam, now talking of scams, I thought when I saw this video and we were going to do this section, it was just going to be a react to an exploitative landlord, but it turns out that actually, I mean he is an exploitative parasitic landlord, but there's also more going on here because this man who is called Samuel Leeds is also a con man, which might be why the numbers he mentioned in that video didn't quite add up. He runs training courses for how to get rich quick buying properties under his company, Property Investors. Now, in semi-religious training sessions, they've been described as cult-like. He encourages people to sign up for courses that cost thousands of pounds. He's saying, look, I got rich quick. You can get rich quick, but you can only get rich quick if you buy access to my courses and the personal tailored advice that I will give you. He's basically saying, that's why that video looks like that. He's saying, this is super easy. You can get rich like me. The problem is that many people don't get rich. Many people end up disappointed and looking up this guy, I found this really tragic article actually, the BBC wrote about Samuel Leeds after someone who paid for his training committed suicide. So the person who tragically committed suicide was called Danny Butcher. He was 37. He'd paid £13,000, sorry, for courses run by Samuel Leeds, which promised to make attendees financially free. You heard him say that in that video, as well. That's his point. You become financially free by essentially getting someone else's income paid into your bank account, which is how landlordism works. Now, the article describes the work of Samuel Leeds in the following way. So they write, Property Investors, which is the company, puts on free two-day crash courses offering people the option to sign up to a training academy where they will learn how to become financially free by investing in property. The company described Mr. Leeds as having found his own success after attending training courses with his wealth coming primarily from his property investment activity. So there, you can be like me. You can get rich, easy and not have to work and just withdraw the income of people who work for a living. So Mr. Leeds posts videos on YouTube nearly every day promoting his methods in one he joked that he would punch people in the throat unless they subscribe to his YouTube channel. In one clip, he promises to work one-on-one with his customers to provide a custom tailored bespoke plan and hold your hand, make it happen. So that's the really important part. There you say, you don't even have to, you don't have to be smart. You don't have to know about property investing. You don't have to have loads of capital. All you need to do is follow these easy steps and I will hold your hand through the process. You can't fail. You will get rich. Unfortunately, many of the people who paid money for this course didn't get rich. I'd assume the majority of the people who paid for this course didn't get rich and one of them tragically was Danny Butcher, the person who committed suicide after handing over 13 grand of Butcher. The BBC article writes, Mr. Butcher attended a free course in March with his brother-in-law, Glyn Jones. Mr. Jones said, it felt like brainwashing, like a religious cult kind of thing, but done on a much smaller scale. What he's offering never appears. I don't see how it can. According to his wife, Mr. Butcher's gut instinct told him not to sign up for the academy and he held out for two days before changing his mind, swayed by the promise of exclusive mentorship and one-to-one training. Mr. Butcher's family said he did not get the support he had been promised. And as we've said, after failing to make any money, Danny Butcher took his own life in October 2019. He's not the only person who's had severe problems with his courses. There are currently at least 78 people trying to claim back more than 200,000 pounds between them from the company property investors. This guy seems to be one of the most evil people, I suppose. I don't really like using the language of good and evil. But I mean, this guy who is actively encouraging people to parasitically invest in poor communities so that they can charge them extortionate rent also happens to be someone who is exploiting people who want to become financially free, who doesn't want to be financially free. They get on these courses, they get sold down or led down the garden path. And there are some really tragic results from all of this. I mean, I was blown away when I found this out after seeing that Twitter video. I mean, this actually really reminded me of Donald Trump's university and all of that, and that thing about the promising one-to-one tailored business advice. And it reminded me a lot as well of the multi-level marketing, what many would say is what many call basically similar to a pyramid scheme. The reason that these kinds of models cause so much mental health stress and mental anguish is not only because the disappointment or the fact that for a lot of people who turn to these kind of schemes, it's because there's a desperation for income, especially as formal employment is shrinking and most in-work poverty is rising. Even people who are in employment, they don't feel stable, they don't feel secure from that source of employment. And they turn to these kinds of things, whether it's selling little bottles of moisturizers to your friends or it's this horrible parasitic model of becoming a landlord so that you don't have to have a landlord. It's not just because of the money loss, it's also because the way that a lot, and they describe it as like a religious cult. It's also because a lot of these kinds of cult-like money-making schemes rest on this idea that if you don't make money out of it, if you don't get rich quick, it's because of a personal failing in you. And it's this kind of self-help entrepreneur kind of positive thinking movement that's really, really popular in the US, but it's also becoming much more popular in the UK as well. And it just this kind of part and parcel of this whole package that is structured. Obviously, this guy is kind of like a sort of example of this, but it's a model of money-making of wealth building based on exploitation, based on extraction, based on deception, on parasitic behavior that is directly encouraged by our economy. So whilst obviously he is accountable for the disgusting things he has done, it's also important to see that he's not the only one. But this is actually a kind of behavior and a kind of wealth building that increasingly making money through being able to provide for yourself and for your family and for people that you love through just a regular nine to five is increasingly becoming impossible. So people are turning to exploiting one another in order to try and have that sense of security. So that's really being encouraged not only by the conditions of our economy, but also by the fact that people who are valorized, people like Donald Trump are examples of this kind of, you know, cult style, economic entrepreneur, you know, cult of the entrepreneur model that is becoming increasingly appealing to a lot of people. I mean, it's also important to say, I mean, based on the reports that we've presented to you here and what I've read about in the past couple of days, it seems in my opinion that this guy is a con man, right? But it is important also to say why I think he's a con man, right? Based on these reports. And that's not because he's telling people they can have passive income and become financially free by becoming landlords, because you actually can do that. The lie or how he seems to be misleading people from these reports is by telling people you can do that even if you're not rich. The con isn't to say you can become financially free by buying houses and renting them out for high prices when you bought the house for a low price. No, the con is saying you can do that without already having a huge store of assets to your name, without already having lumps of money that you've inherited or other houses, which you can remortgage, right? So even though this is a pyramid, well, this is a scheme where you can actually get rich quick, but you can only get rich quick. If you're already rich, you can get richer quick. Let's put it like that. I thought that video was incredibly instructive both about our housing market as it stands and then investigating him after seeing it from these reports. I mean, he does just seem symbolic, in my opinion, of so many things that are wrong in this country right now.


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