Good to go. Awesome. I'm off stage. Bye-bye. Okay, so let's give another round of applause to Michelle for that really energetic talk, you know. I think it was really inspirational and, you know, she does really cool things and everything.  I am none of that. I'm just your average front-end developer and what I'm going to be talking to you about is also very average. The audience that I had in mind was web developers, so if you're not a web developer, it's great because this is a bar, there's free booze, there are free drinks, so you can just entertain yourself for the next 25 minutes and I'll be out of your hair, right? So, if you are a web developer and you have worked on the web before, I'm pretty sure you may have come across a lot of jokes about CSS that can be summarized in memes like these, right? People who work on the web would have heard complaints about CSS, about the cascade, about how CSS is ridiculous, CSS is so hard to manage, CSS is all of those things, but I personally disagree with that notion because I personally love CSS. I love CSS for what it is and what it can do. Now, when I say I work on the web, the web that I'm talking about is the World Wide Web, which was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. So think about it, the web is less than 30 years old. Now back then, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN, that nuclear research agency in Switzerland, and back then there was a problem that CERN had with regards to information access. So being the academician that he was, he wrote a paper, he wrote a 12-page proposal that eventually became what we know as the World Wide Web as a means to solve this problem. So when the web first began, there was no way to do layout. It's like the first image on the left, you just had a block of content because the web was never meant for doing all kinds of creative, design-y things that we see on the web today. No, the web was a way for people to share information, and that is still true today. It's just that the presentation has improved significantly. So this is just a summary of how web layouts has evolved over the years. Now, because the web was never meant to do a lot of the things that we use it for today, a lot of the methods that people used to design web layouts in the past were hacks. So people used things like HTML tables which, by rights, were meant for designing tables. But people realized that, you know, we can hack these HTML tables to create all sorts of more creative ways of presenting content on the web. And then people started to use CSS and use floats to make layouts. But again, floats were not meant for doing layout, and that's why it is so hard for people to get the layouts that they want using floats. And eventually it got so painful that we just seeded all this pain to frameworks. So everybody's website looks like it was built on Bootstrap or some other variant of Bootstrap. So CSS frameworks actually shielded us from a lot of the pain but also made websites look very similar. So what I'm talking about today is a new CSS property called CSS Grid that can potentially change all of that. So alongside Flexbox, which is also a relatively recent addition to CSS, we now have a means of doing layout on the web that we've never had before. And some people have asked the question, like, we already have Flexbox, why do we need Grid? Or is Grid meant to replace Flexbox? Wrong question. The fact is that Grid and Flexbox are meant to be complimentary. They're meant to be used together so that we can build layouts that are truly native to the web. The correct mindset we should be having is Grid and Flexbox because Grid and Flexbox are best friends. They are like kaya and butter. They are like nuts and bolts. They are like Jay-Z and Beyonce. They are good on their own but together they can achieve another level of awesome. So when we use Flexbox and if you are not a web developer, please continue to enjoy the free drinks at the bar. But if you are a web developer and you have to use Flexbox, remember that Flexbox operates on a single dimension. So there is no relationship between the rows and the columns of elements that you lay out using Flexbox. It is like a really long, daisy chain of Flex elements. When it comes to CSS Grid, things are a little bit different because CSS Grid operates on two dimensions. And because of this, CSS Grid and Flexbox can work together really well to achieve the layouts that we want to build. So here is just some basic terminology that I will be referring to throughout the talk. Basically what you have are grid lines that we use to specify exactly where we want our content to go. The spaces between these grid lines are known as grid tracks. So they can be grid rows or they can be grid columns depending on your direction. By default, a single grid item will take up one grid cell and a grid area is merely a collection of grid cells. But the most useful feature of grid, I feel, is the ability to define grid gaps because, again, if you've tried to design a layout with gutters between your grid elements, you would have realized that it's a very tedious endeavor. And if you've never done that before, trust me when I say that it could potentially be a very tedious endeavor. So both Flexbox and Grid operate on a container-child relationship whereby you apply the display property onto the parent and this makes all the children of that parent grid or Flex items. So Rachel Andrew, who worked on the specification for Grid, sums it up very nicely by saying that grid works from the container in whereas all the other layout methods that we've used before start with the item. So we can illustrate this with some examples. So say I have six items, as you can see, and I want to lay them out in a very boring three-column grid. What I would do is that I would have to define a width on each of the elements. So in this case, I'm using inline block and I have to make sure that each of my items are a third of the container. It's almost exactly the same if you use float. You also have to make sure that each item is a third of the container. Now, we can use Flexbox and the syntax is slightly different, but if you look closely, I am still trying to make the flex basis a third of the container so that everything lines up in three columns. For the three techniques that I just illustrated, the grid isn't real. It just looks as if there is a grid because we forced all the items to line up with each other. But with Grid, Grid is the only layout technique that establishes a relationship between the rows and columns. The grid is real. So the way we want to use CSS Grid in our layouts involves two steps. You first define your grid and then you place items in it either by yourself or you can choose to let the browser do it for you. So we'll first talk about some properties that apply onto the grid container and this is what defines the structure and sizing of the different tracks of your grid. So some people have said, some people who have been reluctant to pick up CSS Grid have often mentioned that, oh, CSS Grid, it seems so complicated. There are so many properties. Oh, I'll just use Bootstrap because Bootstrap is the best. Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't have to know all the properties to start using Grid. In fact, you only need to know two properties to start using Grid. And they are grid template columns and grid template rows. So with this, with these two lines, you've essentially created a grid and the code for CSS Grid is as visual as a layout should be because you can see from the code itself that you have three columns and you have two rows. And just to make things a little interesting, we will add a grid gap with just one line of text. Essentially, these three properties can get you started with using CSS Grid. But of course, that is not all that CSS Grid can do. So this is one of the suggestions that I have for everybody here tonight is that why don't we see control of your designs to the browsers that are supposed to render them? I mean, we've come from a time where we've always tried to micromanage every single pixel on the page. We've always tried to make everything fit exactly the way we want only to find that our designs are broken when it's viewed on a different viewport because nowadays, people use the web in all different kinds of contexts. I could be using a phone which is about 480 pixels wide. I could be viewing it on a... I don't know how much that is, a 70-inch television screen. So we do not control how our designs are being viewed. So why not see control of the designs to the browsers that render them? So what CSS Grid introduces are a number of new units and a number of new functions that allow us to see control of the sizing of your grid to the browser. And one of them is this thing called an FR unit which represents a fraction of free space in the grid container. So what it does is that after all the space has been allocated to the fixed units, for example, in here I'm using 150, the remaining space will be distributed according to the ratio that you define. In this case, item B and item C are sized in a ratio of 1 is to 2. So in a sense, if I'm viewing this particular piece of code on a phone or on a big screen, I don't actually know how big item B or C will be. I only know that they will be displayed in the ratio of 1 is to 2. And what we can achieve with such, and the type of effect we can achieve is something like this in the video. You can see here I'm actually asking the browser to give me repeated patterns of columns in the ratio of 3 is to 2. And because I'm using an FR unit, every single column will fill up the width of the entire viewport because I've told it to do that. Now, another function that CSS Grid defines is something called the minmax function which lets us do something that we've never been able to do before on the web that is to define a range of values. So now I can actually tell the browser that I want my column to be between the width of X and Y and the browser will figure out exactly what that width should be, not me. So here, you can also use a repeat function because let's say you're having a grid that is very complicated. Maybe it has, I don't know, 25 columns. We're not going to sit around and type 25 values into the grid template columns property. We can use the repeat function which allows us to repeat patterns of tracks. So in this particular case, I'm asking the browser to repeat the pattern of 75 pixels and 120 pixels four times. And that's why I have eight columns. And other than explicitly stating how many times I want a pattern to repeat, I can actually let the browser do that for me because at the end of the day, the browser is a piece of software and software can do math better than you. I don't care what you think. So rather than waste precious brain cells on doing calculations that the browser can do for you, just let the browser do the math. Come on, guys. So what we have is the keywords of autofit and autofill which allow the browser to determine how many tracks they need to create depending on the track size that you have told it. So the only difference between autofill and autofit is that autofit collapses empty tracks so we can see how this actually works. So in this example, I have a function that is supposed to repeat the pattern of 2.5 m columns, but if I have more space than 2.5 m, the browser is free to make the columns larger. So now that I'm using autofill, I only have six grid items and they've filled up the six columns accordingly, but there's more space to the right. The browser actually respects the fact that the space is there, but if I change this value to autofit, it will collapse the empty columns and fill up the remaining space instead. That's the only difference. And you can use this for a variety of designs if you so choose. So what this allows us to do is it allows us to create responsive grids without the need for media queries because in the past, when I used to work for an agency, I'd have designers give me designs for a standard grid layout. Maybe it could be for products, it could be more for images. You know, a standard grid of images or, you know, cart patterns are really popular and they would tell me, can you collapse it from four columns to three columns to two to one? I'm like, no, no, you cannot do that because before we had CSS grid, we could not do that without a slew of media queries. And personally, I don't like writing a thousand and one media queries, so I just look at my designer and say, hell no, I'm not doing that. But now, with only two lines, two lines of CSS, I literally can let my design go from five columns to four columns to three to two to one without writing a single media query by using the functions that I mentioned earlier of min max of repeat of autofill. And this is a big reason why I think CSS grid has the potential to revolutionize web design because it makes creating interesting layouts a lot easier. So another part of building layouts on the web involves aligning items. And aligning items can be very tricky because the properties sometimes tend to confuse people. So just a word of warning, you might get confused with what I'm going to say in this next section. So there are six properties that you can use to align stuff in your layout, and often people get mixed up with like, what does justify do? What does align do? What does content mean? What are items? So for me personally, the way I remember is that I've been justifying text in Microsoft Word since I was this tall, right? So if justify is for the direction that text flows, it goes, it's logically speaking, the other direction must be aligned. So we've got direction set. The next three values of content, self and items will make sense once you understand exactly what they do. So with justify or align content, what you can do is you can align all your columns and rows if there's extra space in the container. So you can use values like start, center or end to sort of distribute all your rows or columns. But you can also distribute the space between your grid tracks using values like space around or maybe space between. So this table will sum up essentially what you can potentially do with this. But just remember that content is for shifting entire blocks within its container. Now, justify and align self are self-alignment properties. So you use these to align the content within each grid item. And similarly, you use the values of start, center and end. And because my slide is cut off, you probably can't see, but item C is aligned to the end. The default value is stretch. So if you have a grid cell, by default if you don't do anything to it, the content is just going to fill up the entire grid cell. Justify and align items simply affects every single item in your grid. So think of it as a block setting. So for anybody who is confused by all this, trust me when I say that it gets easier with experience. So earlier I mentioned that grid and flex box play really well together, and this is an example of that in real life. So the image on the left is a very old school design from the Bauhaus school. And this particular design can be duplicated on the web. And what is striking about this design is those thick black borders you see. And the way that we can actually achieve such a design, because if you look closely, you'll notice that each grid cell contains a different type of content and they're aligned differently. And in order to make sure that everything is semantic, meaning none of this is an image other than the pictures themselves, the text is all text. You can highlight the text. And in order to achieve such an effect, grid alone is not sufficient. Because if you use yourself alignment properties on each grid item, the moment you try to align them, when you apply a border on the grid item, it will simply take up the width or height of the content. So this kind of screws up the design. This is not what I want. I want my borders to be along my grid lines. So in order to do that, we actually keep each grid item as it is and apply a display flex to each grid item, making them a flex container. So it's a nested effect. And with this nested effect, I can keep my thick black borders while still adjusting the content within each grid cell. Remember, awesome together. Now, the next thing we want to talk about is properties on the grid item, which allows us to position grid items in the grid. Think of it like you're placing pieces on a chess board, right? So you can actually place items based on the grid lines, which have a numerical index starting from 1, or you can also actually name your lines. And there's no limit to how many names you can give your lines. And this is useful because if you have a really complicated grid, you're not going to spend time counting which grid line you want to hit. You want to actually name your grid lines in a way that makes it easy for you to target them. So in this case, if I want content to go into the big main area, I could use the numerical values of 2 slash 3, but I could also use the named lines of content start and content end. So what you can do is you can apply these numerical values or names to the grid column or grid row properties. So in this example, you can see that everything by default takes up one grid cell. But of course, you don't have to have them. You can actually make them span multiple grid cells. And you can do things, because of this, you can actually do things like overlap. So you can also place items in your grid by naming the areas that they're supposed to go. So if you look at the code here, you have something called grid template areas, which essentially mirror what you see in your actual design. The code looks exactly like how it would appear on your design. And this makes it a lot more visual and easy to understand if you're writing CSS grid code. So when you use grid areas, what you can do is you can set where you want your grid item to be and just forget about it. So if you want to say you want to work a different design, you don't actually have to go into each individual grid item and change their sizing. What you can do is that you can directly just manipulate the grid template areas to sort of change how you want your items to be positioned. And this, I find, is a really convenient solution to a very common use case. So one of the things that we can achieve with CSS grid is vertical white space, which was something we couldn't do before. And using the grid areas property, we can do that. For example, here, I'm just going to skip forward so you can see the end result. The code is such that at each viewport width, I don't actually change the sizing of my grid item. I merely change the grid structure at each viewport. And you can also do overlap, like I mentioned before. And because overlap is something that we don't see often on the web because it's tricky. If you use something like absolute positioning, you have to do a lot of math to make sure everything fits just right. And you can't guarantee that when you change the viewport size, things will look the same. So grid actually helps in this regard. And when you start building using grid, you'll realize that pencil and paper is your best friend. With that, you can plan your grid beforehand and you can sort of figure out which tracks need to be flexible, which need to be fixed, and so on and so forth. And then you can actually layer on styles accordingly because, understandably, grid is not supported in every browser. So some people are going to ask, what about the old browsers? What about browsers that don't support grid? Well, if you don't remember anything about what I say today, please remember this, that websites do not need to look the same in every browser because the web is a dynamic medium. It is the only medium that allows you to present a different design depending on what context your user is viewing your design. And I think that is the coolest part about designing for the web because you actually don't design one static design. Your design can morph depending on where you view it on, whether you view it on a phone or whether you view it on a 70-inch television screen. So the end result of this is something like that, that you can see how the design changes across different viewport sizes, across different heights. And this is totally possible because of CSS Grid, something that we could never do before. So in order to support older browsers, we use something called feature queries, which use the syntax at supports. Basically what happens is that if a browser supports the value inside the parentheses, it will pick up the properties inside the block. But if it doesn't, the entire block is ignored, which makes it really easy to write fallback styles. And support for feature queries is really good. Even if IE doesn't support it now, you know that IE is going to be deprecated eventually. And it's something that you can work around because every single browser out there does support feature queries. So I want to wrap up by saying that CSS isn't a programming language. It requires a different mental model around it. So when you think of CSS, think of water, think of how water flows. And even though you cannot directly control the flow of rushing water, you can shape it to your benefit. So when you encounter CSS, shape it and just engage the flow, embrace the cascade, and see where it can take you. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Am I on? Awesome, thank you. Thank you, Weijing. So it's really important...


What's happening guys, so I'm super excited to make this video. This is not going to be another video about how to drive Uber, which has been shown to make about the same or even less than a minimum wage. Or delivering food or anything like that. The truth is most of the common options out there for making money on the side are just not that good.  But there is one thing that you do have time for and that is hitting the like button right below this video because it took forever to make and I really do appreciate it. No, but seriously, the feeling of making your first bit of money outside of a normal job is incredible. And as the biggest YouTuber in my city, wait. As the biggest YouTuber on my street, I know a thing or two about making money online. And this is a great way to make extra money on the side or even just a segue into starting your own business. So in today's video, I'm going to be going over what I consider to be the top eight side hustles to make money right now, although you probably can't do some of them because of the quarantine. But after that's over, you can make more money. So number eight on the list, my number eight suggestion is going to be getting paid to be somebody's friend. Yes, you heard that right. You can get paid to be somebody's friend on rentafriend.com and it pays around $10 to $50 an hour.  Think about the last time that you traveled somewhere. Let's say you went to Vegas, for instance.  Chances are you ended up going somewhere at the wrong time and getting stuck in traffic or just wasting a ton of time. Maybe you ended up having to wait in a really long line like those ridiculous people who wait outside of the Apple Store to get the newest iPhone. Now, for instance, I lived in Las Vegas for about three years while I was going to school and I consider myself basically a local because I did go out and explore it a lot and I can basically tell you the spots that are completely overrated and the ones that are really good. And with this site, you can basically just hire someone to show you around the city and it's kind of like having a personal travel guide. And if somebody's a local, they've been living there for years and they know all the best spots, they can pretty much show you which ones to avoid so you don't waste your time and your money and which ones are worth it. This way you don't have to spend as much time researching and the whole experience is just gonna be a lot smoother. And Las Vegas is a really good example because the big casino spends so much money marketing to people. They want you to think that their attractions are the best even though in reality a lot of the time the funnest things to do are the ones that have zero marketing. And a lot of the great spots in Las Vegas, for instance, are the ones that you would only know about if you're a local. And then a lot of the time with the spots that are really well known, there's certain times that are better to go to them than others. So for instance, I could tell you the best times to go to the Las Vegas sign in order to get a photo with it so that you don't have to stand in a long line. So if you're familiar with the city that you live in and it's a place that a lot of people like to travel to, you can sign up for this site and make a lot of money just by showing people around. Number seven on the list is going to be golf caddying. Now, golf caddies can earn up to $100 to $200 an hour and that doesn't include tips. And as a caddy, you basically just carry different clubs and bags around and then you just hand the goal for the right club at the time that they need it. Now it does help if you know which clubs are which and which clubs they would probably want to use in different situations and that way you just have it ready for them right off the bat. They don't even have to ask you for it. Now this is really great because you're going to get a awesome workout doing this. You have to carry the clubs around and so you're basically getting paid to work out. You also get really good networking opportunities because you're spending a lot of time around people who are probably successful. And believe it or not, there are caddies making well over a million dollars a year like Jordan Spieth's caddy. Now you can find work as a golf caddy by visiting your local country clubs or golf courses. And depending on where you live, this is more of a seasonal job so you're probably going to get most of your work in the spring and the summer. Number six on the list is going to be package delivery. So examples of this would be like Amazon Flex and they pay around $18 to $25 an hour. You can make really good money doing this and you do need a vehicle that has plenty of space so either a pickup truck or a van. Now one problem I do see with this is generally from what I've been hearing they limit the drivers to around 12 hours a week so it's not something that you can do full time just yet. And this is because they need extra drivers at certain times of the week where there's a lot of traffic or a lot of packages that need to be delivered and then they don't need them at other times. It's also a little bit seasonal in some ways because you're going to get way more hours if you're working during the last three months of the year known as Q4 just because there's so many more packages being delivered around that time. Number five on the list is going to be moving and hauling. Now this is one of my absolute favorite side hustles I've been doing this ever since I got my first vehicle when I was a teenager. So whenever somebody moves or they buy a new couch or they get a new washer or anything like that they need somebody that's going to move whatever they want moved from point A to point B and that somebody generally has to have either a truck or a van. And a lot of the time the big moving companies the ones that are in your city have minimum service charges or they will only help somebody out if they're moving them for like several hours. So if somebody just wants one object moved from point A to point B they generally can't hire one of these big companies either that or they do hire the big company they pay for three hours and it only takes like 45 minutes to do the job. So most people end up begging their friends who have trucks to help them or they end up overpaying or they try to find somebody on Craigslist or Facebook marketplace that will help them out for a lower price. And so this is where you can come in and profit you can buy an old used truck for just a few thousand dollars and you can start helping people out. It also helps if you have a trailer you can make even extra money if you have one of those. And then you want to go on Craigslist or Facebook and just post an ad for moving in the services section. Now when I did this I'd make somewhere around $50 to $80 an hour but I only had a small truck I didn't even have a trailer and I know a friend who had a much bigger truck and he'd make over $100 an hour. Now a similar side hustle to this which is number four on the list that also requires a truck is going to be snow plowing. Now this one generally does require a medium to large size truck just because you do have to have some power in order to plow the snow but you can make a ton of money doing this. This is some serious cash you can make on the side. I personally knew a guy who made over $40,000 one winter just in a three, four month period or so just from plowing snow. And if you don't believe me look on sites like plowsight.com where people who do this talk about how much they make. Now this is obviously a seasonal business so you can only do this a few months out of the year but you can make some serious cash on the side and you can even combine this one with number five on the list where eight or nine months out of the year you're doing moving and hauling and then three months out of the year you're plowing snow. And of course this is a business that probably won't work for you if you live in San Diego where it hasn't snowed since the 1960s. Now again, you'd use Craigslist or Facebook to post this service and you'd also get a lot of business by word of mouth just by doing a good job and then other people will tell their friends about you or if that's too much work for you you can always consider other sources of income. Just kidding. Number three on the list is going to be a seasonal house decorator slash personal shopper. A lot of wealthy people want their houses to be decorated but they don't wanna have to do it themselves. So one thing you might be noticing on this list is a lot of these jobs are seasonal and that's actually a good thing because that means big companies can't come in there and take over the entire market. It wouldn't make sense for a big company to start an entire business just for three months out of the year and so that's why there's so much opportunity for you especially in the last three months of the year.  Now this is good for Halloween as well as Christmas. You can also be a personal shopper and buy gifts for people and if you're one of the three people in the world that's actually good at wrapping gifts you can do that as well. No, but seriously like how do people actually get good at that whenever I try to wrap a gift it looks like a drunk teenager tried to do it. It's bad. Next on the list is going to be garage sale hopping and thrifting. So a great quote by one of our modern philosophers Macklemore is one man's trash is another man's come up. Wait, what? Anyways, you can find amazing items at garage sales for pennies on the dollar. Antiques and collectibles are great for making money. Furniture is really great for making money if you have the room to store it.  And the best place to look for things to sell is to go on eBay and then look at the completed listing section and this will give you an idea of what something is buying and selling for on the market. And all you need for this is a phone and a laptop. Now this is what I've been doing since I was in my early teens. I didn't even wait until I had a truck or a car to do this. Now a slightly different approach if you live in a college town is to wait until the end of the semester and inevitably so many of the students will end up just getting rid of all their furniture. A lot of the times they're TVs and different possessions and they'll just leave it on their lawn or leave it right next to the dumpster. And I know this sounds gross, you know, dumpster diving and stuff but I found a fully functional flat screen TV one time that was worth $800 brand new and it pretty much looked brand new that some frat guy left outside of his frat house when he moved for the semester.  And that is flipping items online. This can be an amazing side hustle if you have enough cash to buy and sell things. This is another one that I've been doing since I was very young and this one's a little bit more passive so you don't have to spend as much time doing it. You kind of just wait until a good deal falls into your lap. So I still do this one to this day but I just don't spend that much time doing it. I just kind of wait until I see something that's worth pursuing. And one really good trick here is if you are gonna use Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace where you actually meet up with people in real life, make sure they always come to you. That way you don't waste that much time driving all the way out in the middle of nowhere and then you find out they already sold it or they want a much higher price than what you planned on buying it for or something like that. So tell them to meet at a convenience store that's like around the block from where you live so it's very easy for you. The only time you'd go to meet them is if it's something really big that they'd have to move or if it's just such a good deal that you have to go. Now I've also sold a ton of different items on eBay. One I had some pretty good success with was colognes as well as perfumes. Another one I've heard of is buying different keyboards for laptops like an old broken MacBook Pro. You buy the keyboard and then you sell the individual keys for sometimes $3 or even up to $10 for each individual key. So you might buy the entire broken laptop for $30 and then you sell all the parts for somewhere around $300 to $500. I've had a lot of success with phones, iPads, different accessories, laptops, game consoles, bikes. The trick here is to just be creative, keep an eye out in the market and just think of different things that people might be looking to buy. People do this with cars all the time as well. They'll buy a broken down car and then sell each individual part for sometimes three to four times what the car would be worth. And you always wanna avoid any item that's in a competitive niche. So something that big companies can manufacture like for instance covers for phones, you probably don't wanna buy and sell those just because you're gonna be competing with big companies. All right, I worked super hard on these videos and I made these right here just for you.  Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.


Hopefully you guys are affirming each other verbally. When I mean verbal affirmations, for me, particularly compliments, any time that someone tells me how much they value me or they, you know, they're basically verbalizing how they feel about me rather than letting it show through the way that they interact with me, the amount of time that we spend together, all of those other metrics. I don't necessarily, as an autistic person, assume anything. So until it is said directly to me, it's verbalized directly to me, I don't necessarily assume that if that makes sense. In an autistic-autistic relationship, both people giving each other verbal affirmations and liking that, and liking the whole emotional explanation aspect of it rather than emotional expression, I feel like can be very, very good.


Welcome back, everyone, CUBE coverage here at Cisco Live Day Two. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, industry analyst, breaking down all the action. We've been here for three days, counting the preview day, and what a great change to see a platform focused, unified across all of Cisco, building a bridge to the future, and our next guest was on stage for both keynotes, Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president, general manager of Cisco Networking, core part of the business, good friend of theCUBE. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Big week. Thanks for having me here. It's a big week. One of the biggest and really excited to talk to you about it. The bar is really high now. The story's so good. Yeah, the sizzle, the steak better be good. Let's see, this is a great event. I think you guys really nailed it.  And now it seems like we're at an inflection point for Cisco as a company. Not to move up the stack, everyone talks about it, to have a platform and your theme was unification, unified experiences, building a bridge, but the networking is powering everything. The connectivity is the core data and networking of the hottest areas that we're talking about in theCUBE. At every event we go to, and that powers machine learning, cloud computing, the way we work. This is your wheelhouse. This is like you're in charge. I think Cisco has always been the epic company for networking and now security and networking go together. You can't think of one without the other. And obviously we want to make sure we've got that simplified experience, but you talk about the sizzle, where's the steak? You know, we were really careful to make sure that we actually had products that were out of the market already so that we could show proof points towards this unification. And we started hinting at it last year. We started talking about cloud monitoring for Catalyst, but we knew we wanted to talk about the broader platform. We knew that we wanted to talk about this broader Cisco networking cloud, but we held it, which was hard for a whole year, so that we could have more proof points showing people that, hey, we are going to simplify the experience for you whether you're on-prem or whether you're in the cloud. And a lot of it came out of an organizational focus too. It's tight right now. You got networking. You get the groups highly focused. And then everything else goes into this new group to call this new non-new group. They renamed it OutShift, which is the emerging technology. So I call that the test kitchen, but they're working on new businesses. So you have the core businesses all platforming up, networking security, and then they can differentiate on their own, and then the other group. How does customers reacting to this kind of change? Because it's multi-year. Absolutely. And what's their response been? The response has been phenomenal. And we have met with a lot of customers starting with our global customer advisory board. And we've gone from there to lots, we talk to lots of customers every single day. And we've been putting this message out there for months now. And the feedback has been, okay, this is great. I want my team to meet with your team because I want us to align so that we can start moving aggressively with you. And that was exactly, we couldn't have hoped for any better feedback. And the reason for that is because if we go through and we drive this unified experience, but we get there, our customers aren't with us, there was no point in the journey. So we really want to make sure that we make this journey seamless, simple, and as easy as possible for them to move along with us. I'd like to explore that a little bit and sort of what's under the covers. Cause you're going from this sort of product mindset to a platform, you guys talked a lot about features to outcomes, okay.  It's not just multi-clouds, maybe what multi-clouds should have been. So what's the enabler there? My understanding is you're creating a consistent experience. You just said that on-prem, within any cloud, across cloud, potentially out to the edge at some point in time. What's the enabler there that technically allows you to create that experience? Well, if there was one enabler, I would have waved that magic wand a long time ago, but it is a whole set of things. So for example, getting a consistent experience means that you have to have a consistent way of developing your products. You need a common UI-UX framework. And so GSTOOS team and my team and Liz's team, the engineering teams all came together and defined this. We have an internal name for it. I'm not going to share it with you, because it's not relevant. And we're all, we're all snapping to that framework. And we're product by product going and bringing that framework in so you can have consistency of experience across each and every single one of our platforms. And that was kind of step one. And we've been going at that for a couple of years now. That's a software framework, right? That is a software UI-UX framework, exactly. So that's number one. But then it's also how do your customers perceive the platform? So we know SSO. We had five different SSOs. But that's not really what our customers want. You need to have a single sign-on. I always like to joke. It's in the name, single sign-on. Why do we need five? So getting convergence around that is really important. So I log in once, I'm logged in everywhere. And guess what? Even if I'm switching applications, it doesn't feel like I'm switching applications. Then it comes down to branding. Like we've made our branding very confusing over time. And we've been simplifying it. But for example, like Catalyst SD Win, formerly known as Viptella. It's going to be Catalyst SD Win from now on. So there's Meraki SD Win. There's Catalyst SD Win. But we want to unify those experiences well. So think of it, if you want really fancy and tint-driven SD Win, we have Catalyst SD Win. If you want a simplified SD Win, you can do that. But if you want to do security with it, it's the exact same UI to add security to the Catalyst SD Win as it is to add it to the Meraki SD Win today, right now. And so it's a whole combination of all these things coming together. And it's just great collaboration between the teams. I was commenting yesterday on our keynote wrap up and review that after sitting through the keynote, you and G2 and Liz and Chuck kind of kicking it off, I kind of felt like that Steve Jobs video when he first took over Apple. We have too many products. We're going to simplify. We're going to go back to Chayate Day. He's very famous on YouTube. But that really was of a structural change where he went into Apple and said, we're just going to simplify and focus on our core. That's what it feels like here. And even the announcements, it's got a little AWS vibe to a lot of flow of news, but product excellence, but not a feature speeds. Even though you guys liked that, as Chuck said, it was very much Apple-esque vibe. And I mean that as a complimentary way in the sense that it seems like simplification. This is by design. Do you take us through how you think about that? What's going on internally? I'm sure pulling people through that change is a management task. What's your, take us through some of that experience. Well, if you go back to even, let's say, 15 years ago, we would be happy if we built a feature, we won the deal, and they didn't deploy it. We're like, oh, it's great. They don't deploy it. They're not going to call us for support. Fantastic. We literally, no one thinks that way anymore. No one talks that way anymore. That would be considered a waste of time. And what you have all equally amongst us is we all have the same amount of hours every day. And so how do we go and make sure that we're actually building to our customer outcomes and start from that way in? And this is why we've started with what's working already. We've been using it for years on the Maraki side. It's this double diamond development approach, right? Which is you go through and you make sure you start with the outcome the customer needs, and then you go through design and development process. And that can take three, six months for stuff you already know. We know how to do routing. But if you're going to build something unique or some new outcome that the customer wants, it still might take three to six months to figure out what that MVP is going to look like, what the experience is going to be. And then you start writing code. And then you actually go and trial it a few times. You build a few prototypes. You go back, see, is this what you're trying to solve for? And then you actually go and build the product out. And so it's a very iterative. But what happens is when you ship the product, it can be adopted that same day versus shipping the product and then having to wait 12 months or 18 months until you get to real MVP. So we don't celebrate FCS. We celebrate adoption. Talk about the impact of networking. Honestly, it does affect the experience of people's, whatever application they're using or workload that they're running, or chips that they've bought in their devices. As network got more complex and diverse with the internet, you mentioned that on your keynote that the internet, people now use internet for backing through a routing. I talked about it yesterday. What should people know about right now that you guys are doing networking that's different than just five years ago or a few years ago? Yeah, well, there's so much that's changed in the last five years. I mean, we have been looking to simplify the portfolio. We have been looking to get more consistency about how we approach our customers and their demands. And the, well, first of all, networking is exciting again. I'll just put it that way. And the reason why it's exciting is I think is one of the benefits, the silver linings of the pandemic is that everyone realized the criticality of infrastructure and they realized this is something, hey, you have to invest in or they will slow down my movement towards digitalization. And every business is a digital business. Pizza chains are digital businesses now. Now, their product is not internet, but if you don't have a great experience for your customers, it doesn't work. And you heard it directly from this morning talking about to the NFL's head of security, like football is not a Sunday event or a Monday event or a Thursday event. You need to have constant integration and collaboration and bringing your customers in all the time. And the only way to do that is through a compelling digital experience. And that requires you to really go and focus on all of that infrastructure. And by the way, I liked her comment. She was great by great interview by the way on stage. You guys did a good job. What jumped out at me was that comment she said physical and cyber security is completely converged for her. And I think that's a new normal. What's your reaction to that? What would you say to the folks watching that haven't gotten there yet, that that converged cyber and physical security, whether it's your device or your office or whatever? Well, it's not only physical and virtual coming together. I would say that when you look at that from a sustainability perspective as well, so the ability to look holistically about making the office somewhere where you want to go to instead of somewhere where you have to go to and also with what we're having with all of the power costs increasing so dramatically around the world, moving to PoE-based lighting can save you up to 50% of your power costs. And so when you're rethinking about how you can build out your infrastructure in the office, you can create a better experience. You can base it more holistic experience. You can enable where you can actually if you're in a new office, if you're a traveling salesperson, how do I find the open office? And instead of wandering out the old days where you open the door, oh, close door, open the door, close door, right? It can be frustrating for all of these mobile offices and you need to create that seamless experience and that is what she was talking about. How do you embrace this and create the experiences but make sure you also know that increases the attack threat surface. So I think she mentioned 2,500 plus screens in just one of the stadiums and if any one of them get hacked, I mean that would be a very bad day. So networking's getting more exciting and it's just going to get more exciting going forward. You're talking about the double diamond approach and the time it takes to get to MVP. Do you think AI will compress that time to MVP if you started sort of applying it for that specific purpose? Yeah, I think there's a couple ways that AI could help. First of all, if you look at the developer experience, so being able to go and get enhanced tooling that can, you put in the comment of what you want to do and it actually proposes the line of code that you need and it's actually pretty accurate for kind of non-C, non-C++ type of types of things but it's going to get better over time especially as you're seeing this. So the ability to, I've talked to a, I'll just say a top Fortune 50 company and one of their engineering directors and they said that their staff was 70% more productive over the past several months because of those, put in what you want, it proposes it, you hit return and you get to go to the next line of what you're trying to accomplish or it could even give you a whole set of code not just one line. So engineering efficiency can go up and that can increase velocity and hopefully decrease errors and so that's one part of it. And then the products themselves, as we move forward we think G2 was talking a lot about prompt-based interfaces. So visually you want to be able to see what's happening across your infrastructure but if you can ask something, a question and then kind of narrow things down which switch has the most errors on it in my network today? Okay, here you go, here's it. Okay, take me to that switch. What do you think the problem is with that switch? You could actually work through these types of scenarios where today that would be a bit of a daunting task if you've got 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 switches or even 20, right? It could be a daunting task. You could probably get to the point maybe you're even there today where you can prioritize the severity of those issues and triage. So many opportunities. And so I think there, I think UI is here, is this because I think some of us are visual learners, I'm more of a visual learner. And so I think being able to see things is always going to be important but having that as an augmentation I think is going to help a lot. I love how you guys put networking plus security as kind of like the pillars. As we know, security is a data problem too. Not a lot of data conversations here. I mean, I know how it's cleaner with security because it's tighter. I like that. I'm not disagreeing with it at all but we all know data is underlying both those categories. And then each group has differentiation on their products. I love that's a platform feature. What's your view of the data? It's what's going on under the covers. How are you thinking about data? Obviously AI is going to help. How are our customers thinking about how they leverage their data? 100%. So this is a, just like it's a, it's a war for talent, always. And if you have the best talent, you can usually build the best products. So we're always focused on making sure that we've got the best talent so that we can go and build the greatest products. What you just shared is it's also a data-oriented business. Networking is a data-oriented business. But if you look at simple facts, like we block more attacks in a day than Google searches, right? That's, there's a pretty, and this is a number that we've shared for years, right? And there's numbers. You can tune that model up. I mean, that's a new product. You can tune that up for, that's your SOC assistant, is that? This is actually through the OpenDNS product umbrella. And the ability to go and do that. But that's just one piece of it. There's a lot of other things that we're doing and blocking on a regular basis. Look at what thousand is. Thousand eyes is great at what it does because it consumes so much data from how else do you know what's happening in real time across BGP of the whole internet unless you are taking in multiple feeds from all over the world of the internet in real time and able to actually understand what's happening. So you can see that IP addresses or entire ASs are being stolen. So you can actually understand is that real? Is that not real? You can send alerts. But then on top of that, now being able to feed an application level data into that view means that you can have more of a digital experience monitoring. So app D, the full stack observability, that is a data-driven business. You know, and that's just very nuanced. I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to bring this up. What you said on day one on your keynote ties to exactly that point. It's very nuanced. I want to make sure we get it out on the camera. You said network at AI scale. I was thinking AI at scale. Why is AI in there? Oh, data scale. But what you're getting at there is the way the network is with thousand eyes and even just the breached numbers you tossed around. It's just an example of many other data points. There's so much data at scale. That's AI available. So it's almost AI, that's what you're talking about AI at scale. Is that kind of what you mean network at AI scale means the network is scaled up and now a new set of circumstances is coming to the table in AI opportunity. So I think there's two things there. One is we are helping hyperscalers with the largest types of AI infrastructures to build out those infrastructures. So that's the physical infrastructure at AI. The second part of that is around you need the data sets. And if you go back to Cisco's business model 20 years ago, we built a router switch. We kind of threw it over the wall. Someone would install it. And then we would never hear from that router again. The old prodigal son analogy. They only came back if something broke and they would call tech support and we'd find out, oh router, here's the configuration. Here's how you fix it. And then, nice business. They disappear again. But what we really need to be able to do is we need to be able to get real-time data. And if the customer's willing to share that real-time data with us, then we can do a whole host of amazing things. I can tell you when your optic is going to fail. I can tell you that if those boxes are overheated, that the mean time to failure just actually decrease so that the box's likelihood of failure because you had a data center cooling thing that went out and for some reason the box didn't shut down like it was supposed to. And we could see that, we could know it, and we could let you know that, hey, we should pay this kind of attention to these platforms over time. That's all data-driven. And that's because you know what happened, you know what went wrong and you can predict the probability of it happening again, is that right? But we can predict it like things fail. Like hardware fails. We know what the MTBF is for every single component on every single device. We know which batch of silicon every single component went into. And so if there was a bad batch of 100 components, we know if they're telemetry connected, we know where they are, we know what they've done. And we can say, hey, that bad batch is running in this network and we can replace it or there's a 5% higher probability that that device will fail than a normal device. What do you want to do about it, Mr. or Mrs. Customer? And is that AI or just good statistics? That's, well, I think a lot of people confuse ML, stats, and AI pretty often. So I think everyone just calls all of that AI now, which if you want to have a wholly separate conversation about that, I would be happy to. But I think everyone just calls it AI, which is not technically accurate, but we can argue about that or we can just talk about what it does. So let's call it AI. So by the way, my follow up question is you talked earlier about being a visual learner. And it seems to me that so AI is a visual learner as well, it will be. So the more of, and networking is visual, the more of visual props and you can give to the AI to learn, I would think it's going to make it more powerful. Does that make sense? And is that sort of in the plan or? The way I think about it is this. These models, they love structured data and networks are nothing more than graphs. If you think about it from that perspective, like mapping out graphs and if you're able to map out very large graph data models and then apply the right heuristics to each one of them, you can do amazing things with that. And the neural network side is coming online too. It's an amazing thing that we are going to be able to do. So this all requires data. So having that data through a large number of our customers now, enable us to see what's happening in real time. When they do, we actually can be a lot more proactive with helping them understand how to keep their networks up and running to the highest potential of that infrastructure. Is there a data corollary there in terms of like a graph database or a graph data corollary? I think we're looking at how all these technologies can come together. I think it's the way to think about it. Foundation models are hot. Certainly you guys have a lot of action there. One of the things that we talked about a lot with you in the past few cube interviews you've been on is chips, silicon. And silicon and networking was another bullet you mentioned. Network at scale, AI scale, silicon and networking and then AI-enabled networking and screen solutions. Silicon, big advantage, Francisco. We were there when you launched the initiative. How's it going? What's the update? Dave and I were speculating that you should be in the chip business, sell to other people, but... Well, well, we are, we kind of are, already are. Right, you're an asset in San Francisco. You went on one to that. Three and a half years ago. How's that going? Pre-COVID, right, it's like two years ago before we all had to go home. Two COVID years. How about long COVID? That's why I say I got long COVID. Right, you guys announced that. We announced it. Three and a half years ago, it's going very well. We certainly have a number of wins, predominantly amongst the hyperscaler space. Because really, when you think about it, if we take a piece of silicon, we put it on a system, we put software on it, we ship it. Happy to have a business that way, but if customers want to go and take the silicon and put it on their own system, they build themselves, they're kind of shifting the OPEX burden from us to them. And you have to be able to amortize that cost over in number of devices. And so hyperscalers have a lot of devices. And so they're very willing to go down that path of billets. Some of them are, not all of them. Now that flexibility of take it your way, how would you like your burger has gone over very well with customers. Even customers who don't want to go down that path, the fact that they know that they can buy silicon from us, systems with no software, software with no systems, put it on a white box, it makes us very open. And I think that that three and a half years ago is very good. The one data point I will share with you, we launched one ship three and a half years ago. And traditionally what we've seen in this market is people are putting out a new chip every 18 to 24 months. Some even slower than that. In the last three and a half years, we now have 14 chips in that family. So our pace of innovation is unparalleled in the industry and we continue to push very aggressively to get higher, faster speeds and actually go down market with those chips as well. All the actions of the physics right now, the physics is key, the physical layer, my say the old OSI model, Dave, remember the old OSI model? Nailed the physical, kind of getting into the stack there. You guys do great work, props to you guys. Final question I have, and then we got to maybe look at breaking and maybe get one more for you in. As you said, if it's connected, it's protected. Okay, nice tagline. Talk about security. Is Cisco a security company? I mean I tweeted this morning, it's not about point solutions because that's kind of what you were kind of saying today.  It's a huge market by the category we're briefing today. Security, big part of Cisco. Explain, take a minute, explain what is the position of the security market that Cisco play in? Is it embedded in other devices? Is it standalone, point solution, platform? Well, the way I like to think about it is this. So we are absolutely a security player. Security is, as we have said and Chuck has said, is our highest priority. Like we need to make sure that our customers feel like we are doing and building phenomenal products in security space. And I think G2 and Tom and Raj and team have been doing an absolute phenomenal job. Now there's different markets and I don't want to overcomplicate everything. So if somebody wants a firewall, we want to win that business. We want to have the absolute best and we do have the absolute best firewall in the market. If somebody wants an outcome, hey, help me with my branch. You need connectivity. You need security. You might need cameras. You need SD-WAN. You need all these things. Hey, we want to help you with that outcome. But if somebody wants a switch, we're going to have the best darn switch in the entire world and we want you to buy our switch. So we don't want to overcomplicate if somebody's just going to be a switch and then we're just like, well let's talk about what outcomes you want with that switch. It's like if they want a switch, we're going to sell you a switch. But if they're going, hey, I have a challenge here with my branch office or I'm trying to re-envision what this campus looks like on Fifth Avenue, New York. Hey, let's reimagine together and we have all the pieces that you need to have a delightful outcome for the users inside of your business. Final word, bring us home with the interview. What do you want people to walk away with this week? What's your, from your perspective, your keynote? What's the bumper sticker? What's the core message? All right, so a few. Ready? I got about 20 minutes. All right, so. 30 seconds. Unified experiences are critically important. Security and networking are coming together like no one else on the planet can do. And top of that, you've got observability where we have more data than anyone else on the planet and we were able to help you understand what's happening across your infrastructure better than anyone else. And if you haven't taken a look at our full stack of observability with ThousandEyes and App, do you truly, truly, truly are missing out? ThousandEyes looking good. I love the data story. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your time. I know you're super busy with customers. It's great to be here. Thank you so much. That was a tough thank you month. Okay, it's theCUBE coverage. Day two here at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Analyzing all the action, bringing it to you no matter what. This is our pop-up queue. We're happy to be here. We'll be right back with more after this short break.