The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillin. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. My guest here is Michelle Rajpal, general manager of IBM, NBU, Cloud Mobile Connectivity, BPM, big title, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, John. We were chatting earlier about all the cloud action. So what's your take of the show right now? Give a quick update on your views here at Impact. Well, I've been at Impact for the last 10, close to 10 years every year. And every year when I come here, it's exciting. But when I see what's happening this year, I think this is more than exciting. There are so many announcements, so many interesting innovations, so many organizations sharing their success stories about how they leverage cloud, mobile, big data. So a lot of things to learn from a attendance perspective, for the customers, for the various folks who are here. A lot of good things for the technologists in the field to learn from. So I would say now it's time well spent over here at the event. So talk about proficient in your company. What you guys do and how do you relate to what's going on in Impact? So proficient, we are a US based integrator. We help our customers in their technology initiatives, tied to BPM, tied to mobile, tied to cloud, big data. And how basically to get these technologies adopted in their organizations to address the business challenges they are seeing in their industry. And all the integrities which are involved, the best practices which are involved in building these solutions as you see them. You know a demo which you see on the stage today which takes about a few minutes to showcase really takes some smart minds in the background to build. So we are the smart minds at times helping our customers build these solutions. They're always saying the demo version always looks better than in real life.  Well, that was the demo version. You know, that's still the expression. But now things are getting fast. On an all serious note, it's like, talk about the business perspective, what's going on in the process improvements? Because with cloud, with big data and with mobile, these new user experiences and new business experiences are being enabled. So okay, that's disruptive. What's being disrupted from your perspective? When you go out in the field and talk to, rolling out solutions and customers, what are the key things that's being disrupted from a value creation standpoint? So it's an interesting question, right? So if you look at a typical business, right, today, as they are dealing, as they're working in their day to day, right? They have their lights to be on, they have their existing apps, they have their existing technology solutions, all need to be up and running. And all these disruptives, as we say, the nexus of technology, right? Cloud, mobile, big data, all these things coming to them from the outside and businesses going out to their technology teams and asking them about ways they could build new systems, new processes, new things inside their organization. And very quickly, so as they see all this request coming in, they're trying to figure out how do we adapt and they're trying to leverage the offerings which are coming out from these different technologies, changes in the market. And like leveraging cloud, for instance, as you were talking about earlier, cloud gives them a way to really put a platform in place and try something out from a new business perspective for a new area, a new technology solution which is targeting a new market segment, basically looking at what the customer wants to see from their organization. And building the rich user interfaces which are needed by today's generation as they use mobile devices to access every piece of information that you have to offer. So what are the customers focusing on? Obviously they get excited, they see the demo, they see the promised land, all the economic benefits of cloud, but they have this legacy environment. What do you find as a practitioner out there, how come they're customers, is the things that they go to first? What's the low hanging fruit that they focus on first? So, you know, in some ways, different industries are different, different organizations are different. But if you look at organizations who are leading the technology solution industry are more innovative, they are trying to see how they can leverage some of these technologies to reduce their costs. So, you know, which gives them more bang for their buck as from their IT budgets perspective. So, things like if they are starting a new venture, let's say in a certain geography today, you know, they could really latch on to cloud because that gives them a way to get into a new market without having a data center, without having an operation in that market. So, things which give them more ROI is what they are looking for, right? So, that's what they're leveraging on as low hanging fruit. And in some cases, let's say a retail customer, they are looking for a way to get to that segment of the customer, which is mobile. Right when they're walking across a mall, across a certain store, how do they get that customer in their store to buy some products which they want to sell? So, these are mobile and cloud are offering some mechanisms for organizations to grab this low hanging fruit, to increase their revenue, improve their profitability, which is what the ultimate goal for everybody says. So, when you talk to a customer, let's take efficiency is a big thing. Efficiency is huge on their plate right now. Okay, I got to do things better, faster, smarter. WebSphere has been out there for a while, you know a lot about that. And they build out their e-commerce, they build out their web presence there, they have some scale, they see some leverage in the investment. Now, they're saying, great, take this and put it on mobile. Sounds easy. Take us through the sausage factory, if you will, make the sausage. It's almost sounds easy, but that's the business outcome. Okay, I want to have agile, I want to have my business logic from the website in mobile, but there's different conditions in mobile, right? You have people on the go, there's personalization. What has to happen next? Take us through that. So, mobile is a- I don't mean to put you on the spot, but that's kind of what people think about. It's an interesting change, right? In most organizations, when they started looking at mobile, they would start looking at it as a smaller real state of browser and try to adapt their systems to fit that. So, mobile is a different ball game. You really have to use that piece of real state, which you get in a way that you get the maximum benefit, you get the best interface for your users. So, as I work with our customers who are trying to think about how to leverage mobile, I tell them, some of the recommendations we give them is try to find a trusted player who's been there, done that, and look at mobile first, which is what basically most of, the first challenge that most organizations deal with, they look at mobile as after the fact, right? They have their existing system. No, they want to put a mobile front end. The next thing they want to do is get a developer to make a mobile site out of it, and that's not how you do it. You really have to look at the experience, the user-centric design, on how you will build this experience so that your customers who spend some time on your mobile device, on your site, they stay on there. I think most of the challenges which we have seen at large retailers is they build this mobile site, and the experience, the user experience is not that great, which takes them off the site and they lose their traffic, which they could capitalize on. So, that whole finding the trusted partner who has experienced, who has been there, done that for multiple retailers, multiple customers in their industry, really helps them get that leverage that experience and put their best practices into their systems as they build it. I was talking with Kristin Lauria, who's a VP of marketing and mobile first, and she's awesome, she had a great conversation. But the real time is a huge deal with mobile. She was given an example of how IBM at Mobile World Congress was changing the content, and she's a marketing person, she's a marketing example of using data. They were changing the content on the billboards and the bus stops and changing the bus schedules based on what the behavior of the crowd was doing, which is a great example of tapping some big data, but using mobile as a vehicle to crowdsource some data and then change user experience. So, in a way, this is really a shining example of kind of this path of, okay, mobile first means something that might not have been possible with web. Web is more like, you know, bigger screen, you can do more, but mobile's got to be a little bit different. So, if that's the preferred mobile first environment, what's the culture have to be like at a company?  It sounds good on paper, but there has to be a cultural mindset we've heard from others today. What's your take on that and what is the cultural mindset of an executive that says, I want this on my iPad, I want this on my phones, go do it. Is it as easy as, is it hurting the cats? I mean, what's the big critical success factors, I guess? So, it's a very interesting question, right? A cultural mindset, you know, most organizations have a lot of inertia. The people who work in those organizations know to do things a certain way. And in some ways, when you start with, you know, area like mobile or any other new technology, innovative area, you've got to find people in the organization who look at that area and are ready to absorb, you know, embed themselves in that mindset, understand the experience of what goes on in the mind of a customer who's using the technology from an end user perspective. So, what we have seen is, as an organization starts an initiative in this area, bringing someone in who has gone through that exercise of, you know, changing their mindset a little from a traditional web-based user experience to a mobile user experience. What kind of things should they watch for and how should they really adapt their mindset and thinking to looking at a 20-year-old or a 25-year-old or maybe our kids who are, you know, my son, when he looks at a game on his tablet or on my phone. Playing Minecraft, by the way. Yeah, they're all Minecraft. Oh my God, you know, the amount of time they've spent on Minecraft. Especially programming training, basically, in my mind. So, if you look at it, that experience which Minecraft provides to them retains them on those devices and gets locks them in and that's the mindset which really keeps them. So, you've got to go on the other side, look at and understand how you can retain your customers, your users using the right things from a technology perspective, user experience perspective and adapt your businesses for them rather than adapt. And they're different too. I saw in a Todd Moore earlier, he's done the dev at Impact and other developer folks around open technologies and we were talking about the millennials were born on the web IBM. I guess the politically correct ones born on the web basically means you were born after 95. But that born on the web mentality, they're not loading Linux patches.  They're like, they're thinking, hey, if it's not in my fingertips, if I'm not making my meal with it, if I'm not cooking in oil, I'm not going to use it. I mean, that's the new reality for developers. Are you seeing that in the enterprises now? I mean, is that permeated where the enterprises have a lot of born on the web developers? Is that, I mean, obviously they want to hire them, but what's your take on that? I mean, in the enterprise, certainly in the consumer side, people want to be the next WhatsApp or the next Facebook. Yeah, so there's different, again, there's different organizations who have different ways to address that challenge, right? In some cases, you see organizations who have teams who are the 20 to 25-year-olds using them to understand how would they build a system? And there are some innovative experience folks who come from those millennial ages, which we talk about, where they have tried to adapt their thinking to how the newer generation would think about using technology. So it's a challenge leveraging the same team members as you have for building these new systems because there's a lot of background they have from their previous development environments which they bring to the table, and it's sometimes challenging to get them to adjust to the new one as a challenge. So what we see is if we have a mixed team of some experts who have come from those web era and some good experts who are coming from the mobile era to combine their forces together, combine their brains together, the culture, the knowledge sharing which happens really helps build the best systems which can be used and consumed by the users. So we get some commentary on the crowd chat and the question is, cloud gives way to a new markets without building a data center. That's somewhat true. The question is, what kind of examples are you seeing out there where new markets are being exploited because of the new capability? Can you share any examples of work you've worked on with customers where they had the aha moment where they had from web sphere, for instance, to mobile or an environment where they moved to mobile and generated new revenue streams or new business models? So I'll give an example of Blue Shield California where they leveraged pure app instance to pure app application to build their next generation portal. And we were actually nominated for the Innovation Award around Pure Systems yesterday and we wanted for the work which we did with them. Now, they were looking for a way to get, to expand their market share, provide a better reach user experience to their users, to the consumers for dealing with the health insurance information which they are looking at. So, you know, it's very interesting, right? A large organization trying to build something very quickly and trying to figure out how do you do this with the technologies which are available today? So they looked at pure app and they initially when they looked at it, they looked at it with a skeptical eye. They were like, well, it will just address our challenges. But as they understood the system more and they understood the ROI, the speed with which they could build this new system for them, they really adopted it and we helped them build that solution for them. And that's how they addressed their challenges in this area. So I got to ask you about being an IBM partner. What's it like being an IBM partner? Are they tied into the culture? And you can be honest now, because we're an IBM band, you can be critical a little bit. You can don't have to give them an A plus. You know, if they deserve an A plus, give them an A plus.  Are they really helping you drive the business? And what are some of the things that IBM is doing with the, to support the business partners? And what can they do better? So what, you know, the IBM relationship that you've had has really been something that has been built over the years. And the way I see it, right? When we started, it was, as IBM brings this new technology offerings to the market, they really get us involved. Like, for example, PR app, I'll go back to that instance again. When IBM came out with PR, they literally brought us in to, you know, what are the best features which you can put in this product? How would we market this product? How would it appeal to our customers? And can you use this product for some time and help us get the feedback which is needed to make this usable for the customers? And that's the big thing which has helped us. We understand this technology as they come in and we absorb the details needed and provide the feedback which we get from our customers to help these products get better. And this continuous feedback loop, which I'm talking about, really has helped this relationship get stronger and helped us build these solutions for customers faster. We're here at IBM Impact, we are the CUBE, our flagship program, we've got the Advanced Extracted System from the Noise. We are in the Social Impact Lounge on the ground floor talking to all these people that have the signal from the noise. We want to share that with you, executives, startups, partners, practitioners, Vishal is with me here. Just, I want you to just share a personal reflection to the folks out there, to the camera and share with the folks that are watching and explain to them in your own words, why is this point in time in history of the computer revolution so important? Why is this moment, what are the forces, why is the game changing so fast and then ever before? Right, so it's interesting, right? If I look at my history, there's been two or three interesting moments of time when I look at how things change in the IT industry. One was the mainframes to the web transition and the web to a SOAL, middle tier, three tier architecture. And now we are at this juncture where we have had, as I said, the three or four different nexuses of cloud, mobile, social, big data, all coming together and as an organization from a technology perspective, they are looking at all these changes and trying to absorb them and how to use them in their organizations. And as you see, so many technology challenges coming together, it's an interesting time and you probably will see, I don't know, we have seen too big, I've seen too big happening in my lifetime in this industry. So it's a very interesting time and it gives an organization to really leverage these technologies and move fast with their technology initiatives, which was not possible earlier. When was it possible to build an environment for, to be consumed in a matter of hours? I mean, I come from this, it used to take weeks to build such a system. Now, if you are trying to build it. Weeks was lucky. Yeah, weeks was lucky. You know, it was not repeatable. Now you have a way to take a pattern from pure app and in a repeatable way, have a system up and running in a matter of hours and really try to build that next innovative solution which will help you in your business in a matter of weeks. That repeatable message with Steve Mills really drilled home because you have essentially linear cost. They don't really go scale incrementally with the value you're creating. And repeatable is also a theme, Vishal, that we see in open source. And if you look at Linux as a generation point in time, and you can argue which point of generation of open source it was, we're certainly beyond that now into kind of the next generation. Open source now has permeated the enterprise and impacted big time. So it's not like it sneaks in and it's lower cost alternative. It's first class citizen. So openness has become a big thing. So my question for you is, from a practitioner on the field, how has open source changed the services business in the game of deploying solutions? Certainly repeatable, building on the shoulders of giants, modular composite applications. These are all the buzzwords. This is an action that we're seeing. Right, so open source has always been there in the market. But as we advise our customers, as our organizations who are looking to leverage these open source technologies, there's a good amount of things in there which help you build a solution pretty quickly. But then there are challenges to the adoption of the technology, right? There's finding the right talent in the market who has the skills in that space. Then making it scalable to be used by an organization of your size to the level of, to the load you anticipate from on your website. So I think the best way to leverage open source technologies is bring it in areas where you really see that as a good fit for your organization and mix it with other technologies which are available from the larger vendors which have been proven and trusted and combine the best of beat technologies from both sides to build solutions which you need for your organization. What success best practices can you share with the audience, folks out there? Could be a CIO, could be another practitioner that you've learned in swimming in this massive sea change. Right, so as leaders of an organization, right? One thing which I would suggest is to look at these technologies with an open mind. I mean, I used to be in situations in conversations with CIO, CDOs who used to look at cloud and say, oh my God, I couldn't bring cloud in my environment. I'm so worried about security. I'm so worried about how we would, how different parts of our organization would react. But looking at it with an open mind and trying to understand the technology, seeing where the technology can be applied in an organization. There's always the right fit for a technology and the wrong use of a technology. You've got to understand it. You've got to figure out have your leaders in the organization and look at it from an open mindset. And once you go behind the technology initiative, whether it's a large migration or innovation, you need to be an executive sponsor, support it right from the start to the finish. And try to see how you can get the hurdles out of the way for your team by bringing in people who have the experience in building such systems. How has collaboration changed your business, if any? Has it yet tapped into your business? Because we're talking about open stores. What we're really talking about is like the work environment's changing. So everyone's been buzzing about, oh, social collaboration. IBM talks about social business, which I think is a great pillar to build on, absolutely. But it's still early days and collaboration has always been web-based tools, right? So now you've got mobile collaboration. You have connected workforce. You have connected consumers. This is a huge, huge game changer. What's your take on that? And how has that affected your ability to do your job? So this has been definitely very helpful for our teams as I look at it, right? We have a pretty large organization, people working on various technologies in different parts of the country. And as we work on a technology initiative, as you run into a problem, we leverage this collaboration very effectively inside to deal with technology challenges. Let's say I have a person in California working on a project and dealing with a certain challenge. What we have is a system in place which lets them talk about their problem with all the employees in an organization in a matter of a minute. And we use a tool called Yammer over there for finding ways to reach out to everybody. And you will be surprised. Somebody in California having a problem and trying to resolve it in a matter of hours is now possible because somebody in DC has had the same problem and knows how to fix it. So this collaboration is really helping share our assets, share our knowledge, share our expertise across our organization and help deal with challenges in a much faster way. Bishal has been great talking to you. I want to get you to the final word here. And if the culture, as the culture evolves, what one, two, or three things that are you looking at and watching very closely from a trend perspective that's relevant? Well, I am very interested in seeing how organizations adapt to all these changes which are happening, right? Which is around cloud, around mobile, around social. And some of it has been going on for some time. But what's next over here? It's sometimes so interesting to look 10 years, 15 years down the path in the past and look at two years, three years in the future and see where we came from and where we have been and what this ultimate future is going to be. I mean, if you look at how much technology you use today, how much you rely on your smartphones or smart devices which you use for your day-to-day things, I mean, what is the next, what is the future in a whole for you? So that's the real thing which you've got to watch out for. And as I said, right? Look at technologies, keep an open mind and try to embrace it and adopt it and use it so that you're more efficient in your day-to-day operation. We shall Rajpal here inside theCUBE at the IBM Impact Social Impact Lounge. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest at this short break. Thanks for joining us and sharing your perspective. Social business, cloud mobile, it's transforming. We've got it all covered here at theCUBE. We'll be right back. Thank you, John.


Sustainment operations are always complicated so this is just another opportunity for us as sustainers to refine what we do. It takes a lot of preparation prior to just to get on the road which I thought went great. There are always going to be issues on convoys right it's all about how you handle them. The mission out here is to execute a UBL Lodex for 41st field The convoy was pretty good it was long it was stressful had a couple hiccups but our drivers did well and we made it here safe and that's what matters. I'm really excited it's our first time doing a Lodex as far as the battalion and a brigade so it's a lot of moving pieces and a lot of different bodies here to support. My soldiers are even more excited they are just moving and moving and I'm really proud of them. We've loaded up 16 different systems with 133 pods. Our next is that we're going to receive more ammunition we're going to store it in and we're going to process it for the next battalion. Let's see how we can do better make continue to regularly train this Lodex as an operation and continue to make every convoy a tactical convoy to keep getting those reps in and the muscle memory so we maintain good communications and just overall good know-how.


Hi everybody, I'm Jen with opensource.com, have a brand new top five articles of the week for you for May 20th. At number five, building a bootstrapped business on open source. This article is about the project management tool Redmine and how it led one company to offer a hosted version and create a new viable business. At number four, open source from a recruiters perspective. Tech recruiter Lindsey Thorn gives us insight into why employers want open source contributors and thus why recruiters search for them themselves. At number three, the future of sharing, integrating Pydio and OnCloud. This article is about federated sharing, a new open standard supported by OpenCloud Mesh Project. At number two, three open source Python GUI frameworks. Weekly writer and staff editor Jason Baker tells us this week that Python is a great language for beginners, but when you want to give your application a graphical interface, you'll need to learn how to use a GUI framework. He gives us three open source options. And finally at number one, five rules for avoiding burnout. This month in her column Coffee Shop DevOps, Jen Krieger takes a look at ways to balance your workload, gracefully say no, and avoid burnout. That's it for the top five. Thanks so much for joining me and I hopefully will see you next week.


Anxiety, sometimes it's a build up of energy, build up of calories in the body. We've eaten too much and no moved enough. Yeah, we do that. Lots of eating, not moving, because we don't move a lot. So how about going for a run? Guaranteed to work. Don't tell me your anxiety doesn't go away with a good half an hour of extraneous exercise. No matter who you are, exercise will get rid of that, that will impact on that anxiety for sure. For sure, guaranteed. We have the data. Another kind of stress. We have the data. Yeah, but it's physical pressure. Physical pressure is good. Physical exertion is good. Connect with another human being. A 20 second hug. There's so many things we can do for stress. It's really, really useful. Intimate relationships are... We're talking about intimacy. Your relationship can be very good as a de-stress. It also brings you in contact with your partner.


A lot happens. This made a whole heck of a lot more sense. I don't get it. I did not like that movie. There is no bad book in the first love. I made it way better. Hey guys it's Leanna and I'm here today to talk about Red Country by Joe Abercrombie. Red Country. This book suffered in the re-read. This was never my favorite Abercrombie book. So with the heroes I originally that was like bottom of my tier ranking my least favorite in the first love and I bumped it up to a four stars on my reread. Red Country was originally at four stars the first time I read it but upon reread it is now down to a three. By no means is it a bad book. There is no bad book in the first love but this is now my least favorite. So Red Country. What is Red Country? This is the third of the standalone and it is a western. So the project each of the standalones is kind of its own unique project while still being set in the world of first love. So this book is taking characters and taking conflicts that exist in this world and setting them in a setting that is reminiscent of the American West. Obviously this doesn't take place in the American West but it has the trappings of a western. It has a barren kind of frontier landscape with settlers who are trying to carve out a new and better life because they are promised wealth and prosperity here in this far off country that is not yet civilized that doesn't really have the stamp of government yet. It is it is the frontier. We're following characters that I won't say any characters that are familiar because any character that we see in this book that is a known character in the first love it is a spoiler to know that they are in it. I won't say who we see but you do see familiar faces I'll say that much. That is one of the most amusing. Amusing isn't the right word but one of the I guess most fun things. I don't feel like those are the right words to use when talking about first love but it is great seeing familiar characters especially in newer settings and in newer roles because the roles that they take on in red country because of this new setting that they are in they are very different from how they are when you see them in other settings in earlier books where you first saw them. The idea I think part and parcel of the idea of the west and of going and going to the frontier a lot of it is to do with becoming a new person and finding a new life let the past die turning over a new leaf so I think part of that what goes with that is this opportunity for characters like these characters that you do recognize their opportunity to go beyond the reputations that they perhaps have earned go beyond any rivalries or feuds or relationships that might have been holding them back or at least if not holding them back but defining them like I feel like I know I've experienced this I think most people experience this that it doesn't matter how much you change how much you as a person try to change or have changed when you go back and you spend time with people that knew you when you were a different person they still think of you and treat you as that person and they will be less likely to recognize that you are different if that makes sense in particular this can come up with family like it doesn't matter if you're grown up and have a mortgage and have a job your parents your family you're still like their kid and they still kind of think of you that way they still kind of treat you that way and so to escape feeling like someone's kid you have to be somewhere else where you are not surrounded by people that think of you this way so similarly like characters from the first law that have a reputation it sometimes doesn't matter how much you yourself change or how much your behavior changes or anything if people still treat you like the person that you once were if that makes sense so all that to say seeing red characters that you saw before both seeing them be different is interesting and also seeing their opportunity to be different and what they do with that opportunity is interesting so yeah there's a lot about red country that I think is great I just don't like westerns very much and as westerns go I think this is pretty swell I just like compared to westerns I think this is great compared to first law I don't like it so much so it's like on the scale like westerns are here and first law is here and so red country is like here at top of the westerns bottom of first law but so what I did do and what also like bumps this up in my esteem as I mentioned before each of the standalones is not a retelling of but is in some way inspired by a particular film that is in some way a classic of its genre because the drama Cromby was kind is kind of a film buff and so I'd never seen although I had heard of the movie unforgiven which is what red country is again inspired by it is not a retelling of unforgiven although in some aspects it is so both times that I read it this second time as well I had not yet seen unforgiven so I mean I knew it was inspired by that I knew it was a western but I didn't know any particulars about what happens in unforgiven to free me to be like oh that's from this and oh that's like this however when I now went to watch unforgiven which I did not enjoy I did not like that movie but watching unforgiven it gave me a new appreciation for red country because all I kept thinking when I was watching unforgiven was yeah I mean I can see how some of this became what I saw in red country but red country is just so much better than this I guess I mean I I imagine that in order for that like one doesn't write a book inspired by film unless one likes that film I imagine that Joe Abercrombie likes the movie unforgiven and unforgiven is like a mega classic of the western genre I don't get it because there are westerns I like to be clear I do like some westerns I love tombstone I really enjoyed the new version of 310 de Yuma I like the new the Netflix for isn't Netflix they did Hatfields and McCoys I like that I like the wider movie with Kevin cosner I like the magnificent 7 I like I mean yeah I can I can like a western I don't absolutely hate every single western unforgiven I don't get it that movie was so long and boring and the absolute worst part of it was Clint Eastwood like hands down every other character was way more interesting so that said there were multiple times when I was watching unforgiven where I was like oh okay I can see how that became the thing that was in red country I see oh okay I actually thought I thought that was Joe Abercrombie's idea but I see now he kind of got that from unforgiven but made it way better even though it didn't bump up the star rating for red country it again rose in my steam because I was just like this isn't a pale limitation of a great classic unforgiven this is taking that is a classic for some reason and turning it into something much much better I was I'm glad I did it it was interesting because I'm I'm also glad I saw unforgiven because it's classic so I like to have seen it I'm never watching it again there's one thing in particular I'll talk about this at the end because I want this to be a non-spoiler review but I do want to mention it and it is there's no way to talk about it without being spoilery so I'll save that for the end and I'll let you know when I do it but yeah so red country is it does follow a fairly traditional kind of western vibe arc whatever like you have characters who are living out in the west in their frontier home and trying to make ends meet trying to survive in this barren land and then tragedy strikes and now we have to get revenge I guess it's not well not revenge so much as it is I don't think this is spoilery because it's kind of the inciting incident is it what can I tell you well the back of the book just says the past never stays buried which is so helpful remember what I said about letting the past die I mean unsurprisingly no matter how much they want the past to die it does come creeping back into their lives again unsurprising oh I never ever noticed this it's the dedication is for Teddy and Clint Eastwood but since Clint probably ain't that bothered mostly Teddy oh don't dedicate this to Clint Eastwood this is so much better than unforgettable the inciting incident is like someone is kidnapped and now we have to go get him back and so a lot happens a lot of other characters come into it and join in the quest I guess chaos ensues violence ensues backs are stabbed and etc etc so it's an Abercrombie book and a lot of first law-e type things happen there's a lot of dark humor which is fantastic there is almost no humor in Unforgiven it is such a slog to watch there are a few standout characters in Unforgiven that I find extremely amusing and they were like the best parts of the movie they did not save the movie yes red country it's great I think you should read all of the first law books you can't skip any of them there are things in red country that you need to know about in order to go on and read sharp ends and the new trilogy like you cannot skip any of them and if you like westerns which a lot of people do I know that it is maybe not unusual but I know it's specific to me that I just don't care for westerns if you like westerns then you'll probably love this I feel like a lot of people that I know that do really really like westerns this is like borderline if not their favorite one of their favorite books in the first law which is fine like if you like westerns he delivers on western in this book which is a it's it's fun to observe him successfully execute this relatively unique project within the fantasy space like there's not a ton of westerns around so like yay I see you did the thing you did the thing well that's just not my thing so it's it's well executed and well done and it is still fun to read even for me who doesn't love westerns I guess that that's really all I can say without spoilers is it's just a very westerny western that is made better by being in the first law I am going to dip into my spoilery section now which is it's just this one brief thing I want to mention but it is extremely spoilery so yeah if you haven't read Red Country then click away now so in the movie Unforgiven this is again like to to refresh you this is me watching Unforgiven and this is the thing that most more than anything else made me go oh my god Red Country is just like way better than Unforgiven because because because because in Unforgiven when I was watching it and the Richard Harris character they make a kind of big deal about this Richard Harris character about him coming into town about him whether he is or isn't an excellent sharpshooter and him kind of having a vendetta against the Clint Eastwood character Clint Eastwood's character spots him at one point and he's kind of out of it and but he says that he's seen him and I just kept thinking well that's shivers having read Red Country then that's shivers and at some point at the end once you think everything is already all said and done once you think everything is resolved we're gonna see this character come back because they've made a big deal appoint this character out and then we never see that character again nothing comes of that it was like Chekhov's character where you need like you showed me this character you have to make them be somehow relevant to this story and they were not ever at all and Richard Harris I was glad he was in it because he was far more interesting than Clint Eastwood I enjoyed the parts he was in but just from like the plot perspective there was no point to him being there other than him being more interesting than Clint Eastwood so I just I feel like when I watched that I was like did I don't have a problem watch this and go why did that character just like never come back into it let me fix it in Red Country because you have shivers show up and you have people saying there's somebody looking for you somebody that has like a vendetta against you and then it's not like nothing comes of that at the end shivers does pop up and have a confrontation with Logan and I just I kept waiting for that to happen and when the movie seemed to be wrapping up I was like oh no but it's not wrapping up I'm so smart I know we're still gonna see Richard and the credits were rolling and I was like but what what what about that guy what happened with that why did we see him why did that happen yeah this just this made a whole heck of a lot more sense and also Logan way more interesting than Clint Eastwood's character I don't know what was Clint Eastwood's character's name I they said it I'm sure they said it multiple times but he was just Clint Eastwood is how it felt so yeah the bloody nine turned into lamb it's just way more interesting as a character study than Clint Eastwood's character which what what he even was his character he doesn't drink anymore that's I guess he used to be a killer or whatever I don't know boring as shit so yeah uh I definitely like Red Country way better than Unforgiven let me know in the comments down below presumably everyone left here has read Red Country and has hopefully seen Unforgiven so let me know your thoughts and feelings about Red Country whatever you want let me know I post videos on Saturdays other random times as well but nothing Saturdays so like and subscribe join my patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you bye


Welcome to the 2019 World Cup of Foot Golf. Okay, this is very, very serious business. You don't know what foot golf is. Basically, we've got a football and we've got a par four. We're making football and golf. So, you've got four goes to get this into the hole over there. Across here, they've got to go and into our and last hole, which is just there. Well, we've got Patrick Dudeck ready to roll. So, let's see what he's got in store. Now, for the time. Well, the pressure amounts for Robert Lambert as Patrick Dudeck's just done it in four. Let's see what Robert's got in store. Hey! Can I move the deadbring? Just a little chip. Yeah, something like this. No! Well, Patrick Dudeck and Robert Lambert have both done it in four. But can Emil Saifudinoff also do it in four? Let's see. I try it like this. Well, there you have it. The 2019 foot golf world championships draws to a close. And we finish on a draw. Patrick Dudeck and Robert Lambert both got par fours. Emil Saifudinoff may just need to quit.


Hi there, welcome to another.net.con talk. My name is Dimitri Lailand and I'm really glad you're joining me today. Today, I'm going to do a session on XAML tools for WPF and UWP developers. We're going to go take a tour through XAML tools. I'm going to do a lot of demos. Hopefully, everything will work. We're going to look at existing features you can use today, features that are coming. We're going to do some roadmap and we're even going to look further out if we get time to say this is what's really coming on the pike in the future and we want your feedback on it as well. So let's get going. Before I jump into the details of my talk, I'm just going to mention that three days of content and desktop talks have been spread out across all three days. So desktop development is something you're interested in. I hope you can check out one of the other sessions. So there they are. They are also in the agenda. The agenda link is down below and everything will be available on demand if you missed it or we'll miss it in the future. All right, so my session. So we're going to start off by looking at XAML tools. XAML tools, I'm a PM of XAML tools for WPF and UWP applications and I work closely with Xamarin forums. So all the XAML teams work closely together and in my talk, I'm going to cover what's new in tooling around hard reload designer and the code editor. I'm going to talk a little bit at the end around modernization of applications using XAML islands and just touch and roadmap just a little bit and hopefully that'll be a good talk. All right, let's jump in. So this demo was going to be a code demo. I'm going to apologize and do some screenshots, but it's a cool demo. So I hope you enjoy it. Unfortunately, my VM kind of died this morning, thanks VM. But let's talk about a new feature we're working on in the XAML designer. So if you're a WPF or UWP developer and you use the XAML designer, we're adding features to that capability, right, to that space. We have been thinking for a long time what feature would be a good way to increase developer productivity. So something we're going to ship in a future Visual Studio update release as a preview flag feature, so you'll have to turn it on, is XAML suggested actions. Think about it as a light bulb on top of controls. So we're starting off with a well-defined set of controls that we're going to enable this on. And a light bulb is going to make all the common properties of those controls available. So here's stack panel, here's a label. We even have nice color pickers we're going to build into that. Here's the image control, things like source, visibility, very much common properties. So as they kind of go down this list of controls, you see that these properties are probably the ones you often have to go set. And today, if you go into the properties panel, it's kind of hard to find the most common properties. This is hopefully going to alleviate that. In the future, it will even expand to other capabilities as well. So it's a cool feature we're working on. It's going to ship in a future preview. 16.4, one of the update trains, one of the preview trains. We'll put it into release notes when it's available. It's going to support the controls up on the screen right now that are listed, but it is going to be extendable. We are going to add it to more controls in the future. And we're looking at actions, because sometimes you have a control that has properties you want to change, and that's great. Other times you have a control like a tab view. You need to add another tab. So instead of having to know how to do that XAML or have some other paradigm in the UI that lets you enable to add a new tab easily, we're going to try to see if these quick suggested actions work well for you. So check it out when we make it available. Just wanted to show you one future-facing thing and that, fortunately, my demo failed. All right. So from here on in, it's demo time. So I'm going to jump right in and talk about a story that could have been a little bit better than one, but such as life. So today, this week, yesterday, WPF Core shipped. That means WPF Core as a framework is GA. And if you install Visual Studio 16.3, that means you have the tooling. Unfortunately, the designer is off by default.  We made a little mistake. So I'll show you how to enable it.  If you enable Use Preview of the .NET Core SDK and you restart it, I will do that just to kind of prove the point. So let's restart the application real quick. And I should have my little demo app. Let's get this thing open. All right. So you can see designer is loading. Totally our fault. Sorry about that. But designer is there, and we're going to service this release to make it available. But I just showed you how to enable it right away and start using it. Now, the one thing I do want to point out is that, and let's make sure I have the right, I have so many of these little applications. Sorry, just make sure that I'm looking at the right one. All right. This is the right one. All right. So we have multiple designers that my team works on. So some of our designers, one of them is for .NET Framework, WPF, one of the .NET Core, and one is for UWP. So if you really pay attention, each between those three, you're going to see some slight differences. Those are not bugs. Those are differences that we sort of made decisions on. We're here to hear your feedback on it. But for the most part, most of the features of the designer work the same across all of them. So everything you would expect in this designer to work works here. So if I go to Toolbox, and I go ahead and I drag a button, that works. And if I resize the button, that works as well. XAML is changing. One tip lots of people don't realize there's an edit template feature in here that can create a copy of a style. This is accessible through right clicking and control on the design surface or in the document outline. So it's really available anywhere.  So designers are here. Quite a powerful feature. Some of the features that we also get asked, would you add the feature? And we say it's there, and it's our fault. You don't know about it. So we're working to fix that. But one of the cool features is regions. So I'm going to show that feature right now, region button style. So this came in through surveys. People were asking me, Dimitri, can you please add this feature? And I wanted to show that it's there. So we can add a region, and then we can collapse the region. So region begin, make sure it's right. And region, am I having my first demo fail of the day? Jesus. You know, when something just works every single time? Well, I can assure you this feature does work. I've tested it so many times. Not sure why this is misbehaving. But there you go. Sooner or later, one of your demos will fail. But basically, regions are in there. Give it a shot. If you hit a bug like this, please let us know we're here to make it better. So I just wanted to show the designers there. We have region support in XAML Editor, and we have the ability to edit default styles or templates. So from there, I'm going to jump into the meat of the demo. And we're going to talk about an application. We're going to use this application for the rest of the talk that I've been building. Using some newer bits than what you would have access to, but for the most part, all the things they show will work with some minor exceptions that I will point those out as we go. So here's my project. It's here for demonstrative purposes. There's really not a lot of code to it. It's just a basic WPF core app. I have a view model with some dummy data. It's like a fake email client that we're building. It's really, really poor. And there's an object called email, and I'm going to do some binding to it in build time. So with this application, I'm going to just reset it back to the original state and just run the app and show you that it's really bare bones. There's absolutely no code in here right now. And then we'll begin coding. And I'll talk about some of the features.  The first tool is the in-app toolbar. This is the toolbar that appears in the application itself at the top. It's collapsible. One of the new features we added is we made it movable left and right because sometimes we'll block UI. If you collapse it, it's pretty small, but still there wasn't sufficient in all scenarios. We also added this right-hand side Hot Wheel that are available because developers were not aware of this feature was working or not. There's some scenarios where the feature doesn't work. So we added the message that says unavailable or available so that it's very clear of how the reload is on. And you can collapse that away if that's not helpful to you. Clicking on the link will take you to documentation. Both the documentation says how to use the feature, in this case, or if it's unavailable, how to resolve that as well. So it's a really important tool and hopefully you find it useful. One of the things that a lot of people don't realize also is there's a button in the live visual tree that if you click the button, it completely goes away from the application. So it really doesn't have to be there if that's not something you want. In our case, we're gonna put it back in. And I wanna show how to reload. And how to reload is a feature that changes the app as the app is running. This app is running right now. I've cheated a little bit, you know, I've created a view model and I created all the placeholders because when you're running with how to reload, Visual Studio will block you from adding a new control or changing the structure of the project, right? So you're gonna have to make all that available. And while I can edit C-sharp using C-sharp edit and continue, view models don't respond very well just because of how it's architected. So I put all that in place and now I wanna show you how hard reload and some other features make this really good experience. So with that, I'm gonna show you the first feature which I'm just gonna add a button just for the sake of demonstration purposes. So I'm gonna add a button in here. The button will be 100 by 50. All right, there's the button. And if I go back to application, I see the button, it just appeared magically because of hard reload. Now this window, I'd actually love for it to be visible at all times. So I'm gonna go in here and say top most and I'm gonna say true. And now the applications will be visible all the time. These are changes that are happening to XAML and being reflected in real time. So what if let's say I wanted to learn more about the button and see the C-sharp code behind it and I didn't know where the button was in source. In this case, it's easy and most more complex applications really complicated. We have a button called enable selection. You click on that, click on the control and in our live visual tree, you can see the button. And this is where I wanna highlight a new feature that's coming soon, it's not yet available but this feature is coming soon. It's called just my XAML.  We show you everything in a live visual tree and that's useful sometimes. But by default, we find that only the XAML that you've written is useful. So we're adding a feature called just my XAML. It'll be on by default. There'll be a setting to turn it off by default in case you want the old behavior. So that's pretty cool. And this is basically giving you all the flexibility here to build your app as app runs. Now actually, let's start building the app for real. I'm gonna go ahead and kill this temporary button and show you a feature that we've gotten kind of by default because other teams are doing work called IntelliCode. With IntelliCode, you get stars in IntelliSense of the most likely actions that our AI analysis shows that you might take, so RML. That means we've looked at GitHub. We looked at open source projects and we've made some decisions based on that data for XAML, C-Shop and other languages. So here it's saying to me, there's a really high type of ability that you wanna add grid column definition, grid row definition, in fact I do. So as I do that, it says, hey, there's a really good chance that now you wanna add a column definition, yes I do. And as I'm doing that, it makes writing code just so much easier. So here I am doing row definition, row definition. I'm like tap completing through this, like no tomorrow. So it's really, really performant and how do we load making all these changes come alive for us in the app itself. So as we go through, I was gonna write all the code but as they realize how little time I have, I'm just gonna cheat a little bit and cut and paste a few times. You don't really need to watch me type, that's fine, right? All right, so first of all, let's add some meat to this application. So I'm gonna paste this thing right here. All right, and as soon as I do that, my app comes alive. I just created a list box. I created, sorry, a list view and if I click on the list view, there's an area here where the details of the email should be coming up. I've also created some references to some styles that should be in my resource dictionary. Now I have a resource dictionary, so I'm gonna go ahead and create that.  So here's my merged in resource dictionary.  All of a sudden, my application slightly changed. So as you can see, it's actually working in real time. Hey, let's take it out. The application changed, put it back in. Application changed. Again, very powerful feature in that sense. We also have a cool feature in, available as part of the in-app toolbar, which lets you see exactly the alignments of things. So as you select, you can see how that selection is aligned to other things. So we draw grid lines based on enable selection. So you say enable selection, you click on something and then it enables you to show the grid lines around it and across. Very useful feature, more complex applications. Right there, you can see exactly where we remind their baby shopping ends and you can see how that aligns with those useful. So a cool little feature, display adorners available. And then with the selection, I'm able to once again click on here and then see exactly where's this border defined and click on define view, see where this thing is available in my source code. So it's very powerful in that sense. Now let's keep building this application up. I'm gonna add some more of the code that I wrote before. So I'm gonna add another piece here, which is a text block. And think about this, my app has been running the whole time. I am not having to switch around. So as soon as I added another one, let's in fact collapse this. This is where collapsing is useful. As I'm switching, it's working, right? It's displaying the kinds of the email. Now behind the scenes, this is just all in VVM. I've got bindings happening and the bindings are, you know, let's lower this so I can show you. We've got bindings to an emails collection, observable collection of email objects and we have a selected item binding two way to the selected item. And then we have the text block binding to the selected item.body. Everything just works and you can go ahead and say title so you can really change this in real time. Body works. If you misspell something, it's just not going to work until you fix it but you're getting errors inside of your output. So if you're watching that, you can see if you just have spelling errors that are coming in there. All right, so there you go. The application is being built up but that's not all this thing can do. Let's go a little bit deeper.  So right now, no status bar. If we were building a real client, we'd have a status bar. So I'm going to add the status bar in and now we have a status bar. It's just connected. Works great. But in reality, a lot of the way that you compose a real WPF or UWP application is by using controls to move some of the logic out. So in this case, I want to move my status bar into a control. Now, I've cheated a little bit. I've already put a control in here. So I have the status bar placeholder. If you didn't have this, you would have to stop right now and go ahead and make that happen. So in here, I will select this and I will say, well, I'm going to cut this out because I don't need that. And I am going to first add a reference to the control. So all these normal XAML things, MLNS says, oh, I did this before. I should have cleaned it up, but it's OK. We'll do it again just because I want to show that everything you basically need to do is really available in real time. So here I am and I'm typing control and I'm getting IntelliSense. IntelliSense showing me this is probably the control that I want to highlight. So I'm doing that. And as they go down, I can now put the control in here.  I'm going to put it's grid row, grid column span, close that out. And right now it looks a little bit messed up because now my status bar lost the grid row and column span. So I'm going to remove it.  I'm going to paste it in there and everything is back to normal. Very powerful. You can literally be sitting here building your app, especially if you again get your view model and everything working correctly. So let's dive a little bit deeper on the tools that are available because this isn't everything. So let's say I want to play around with the status bar but now I'm shifting scenarios a little bit. I want to make changes that I don't want to commit. Right now hot reload is all about like you're changing XAML and as long as you don't delete the XAML you changed, don't undo the XAML you've changed, it's going to wind up in your application sooner or later. Now what if you want to just really try something crazy or experimental and you just want to focus on the session that you're working in now. So we have a tool for you as well and I want to explain one confusion that I've heard customers say, they're like, well, there's already a properties panel. Wouldn't they use a properties panel to change properties? You would if you want them to be again, be committed to the source code. But if you just want to play with the application as it's running and just have it be temporary, we have another tool for you. Let me go ahead and show that right now. So I'm going to select the status bar control. I'm going to open it up and I'm going to go to the status item. In fact, I'm going to go all the way down to the text block inside of it. The one that says connected. And I'm going to click this button right here called show properties. Now this will show something called the live property explorer. This is another window. It's not the properties window. It's the live properties window. So it's the one that lets you make changes that are temporary. So let's go ahead and make some temporary changes just for fun. First of all, I don't know if connected is the word I want to say because I'm like, well, connected works both connected live, right? Will that work? Will that sort of fit? So hit enter. Okay, yeah, that's fitting. The status bar is not breaking. Okay, that's good. I actually want to change font. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to say font size. What if the font was 24? That's not going to work. Font 24 is definitely going to be too much. How about font 18? Still cuts off a little bit, right? Not really great. It's 14, 14, oh, 14 is good. So now I know which font I want to make. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to say font size 14.  So it's very much safe to go ahead in there and make lots of changes that you want to try. So this is hard reload. I've gone through and I've built like a little application that sort of feels like a real application, right? We've got everything working and we can see clearly what our tree looks like. So some of the other features that I want to point out that might not be familiar to everybody is some of the work we've done. So I'm going to minimize the app because I want to focus on the XAML window right now. So some of the work we've done in the XAML itself. One of the things that you might want to get help on because it's not clear where something is, is for example, static resources, like Lizbox email style. Where is the Lizbox email style located? I'm not sure where the XAML is. If you right click on it and you say pig definition, you can actually look at the definition and you can see the file that it's in. And it's one of these temporary files that you can pin up. It's just like pig definition in other languages and that works. It works in a lot of places. Give it a try. If it's not working somewhere for you, let me know. If there's a scenario we didn't think of, we'd love to hear from you, but that's a cool feature. You can also right click and say, or use of 12, you can say go to definition. So you can actually just jump straight to the file and make changes there. So if I wanted to go in here and I wanted to make the fonts even bigger, there you go, the font became even bigger. Again, hard reload is still working as we're doing all of these things. Another feature that I've talked to people, they're not familiar, we have it, but it's actually really useful for really complicated applications. They might have like, let's say, a lot of resources at the top and you wanna look at something, we're looking at XAML at the bottom. We have the splitter right here. If you drag the splitter, just like in other places, you can stay at the top and the top one. You can scroll down to the bottom one and you can make changes, cut and paste values, things like that. Very useful feature and definitely worth knowing all of these little tips and tricks to make it easier for you to build your XAML application. So I'm gonna go ahead and actually move this back up so that it works and now it's back into being one single window. All right, let me make sure that I've shown you everything that I wanted to. All right, I think I did in this case. So let's look at one more feature here. So I'm gonna stop debugging. This is a feature that's available and it's best to look at it when your application gets a bit more complicated. That's why I kind of kept it today. And this is a document outline, really undervalued window in this XAML tool space. We're in fact thinking of maybe doing more with this in the future and we'll see how that goes. But basically this window enables you to see all the controls that you've written inside of your application. And you can go ahead and look at the designer and you can make things visible or hidden. So it has that ability. In my case, I don't have much to show in that sense but you get the idea. So these are temporary changes that don't apply to your running app. It's design time properties that you're changing. You can also right click on a control in here and you can edit a style and create a copy just like we saw. You can click on view source and it'll select where in the source this is. So think about document outline as the control that you can use when you're using the designer and the XAML editor, the app is not running. And then when you switch to hot reload as your app is running, that's where the live visual treat LVT as we call it is available for you and lets you do everything you need to do there. All right, I also want to point out a couple of things like we're constantly making this better. So I'll give you some examples. There was a deadlock error like we messed up. We had an error where if you said in WPF application go to definition we actually froze visual studio. Really sorry about that, we did not mean to do that. We fixed it, it's in one of the recent updates. There was also a bug where as you're typing intelligence for example in the code editor you would get static resources for let's say a list view. And we would in theory only show you the styles that apply to target of type list view. But we had a bug where we're showing everything. So things like that are being fixed. We're not making a lot of noise about it but we know these are behaviors nobody wanted to have. And if you find behaviors that you're like why is this working kind of strange? Let us know, we could miss something too but we really want to make it better. So these are investments that are going in for WPF and UWP developers. We're doing everything for every type of customer that we have. All right, in the last couple of minutes I wanna show you one more demo. So one thing I will point out is that we're switching gears quite a bit here but it's really worth knowing about. So I'm gonna switch over so these are just the hard reload docs I had open just to demonstrate like we have hard reload documentation. That's where the link goes if you click on the link but let's switch to another doc completely XAML Islands. XAML Islands is a technology that's been being worked on for a while. It's a technology that enables you as a WPF or WinForm developer to host UWP controls inside of your application. So let's jump back into my slides for just a couple of minutes here. And just an interest of time I'm gonna go quickly through it and just explain that XAML Islands think about it as if you have if you think about UWP as a whole there's a lot to it. There's an app model, there's MSAX all of these things but one of the biggest parts of it is the controls and if you want the controls in your application XAML Islands is the way we've enabled this just wasn't possible without XAML Islands. The work that my team is doing for a future release probably sometime in a 16-4 timeframe is we're making it so that implementing XAML Islands will not require you to do manual steps. Today there's some manual steps that you would need to do we're making it so you don't need to do manual steps. And the way XAML Islands work today is requires 1903 version of Windows they are looking to back port XAML Islands to older versions of Windows but for now that's the thing and it allows you to host inside of a C++ app as you know, Win32 app, WinForms or the BPF application and then you host your controls in there and there's all these wrappers that we've built I would say just look at the documentation that's the best place to get all the information but there's lots of wrapper controls that the teams built it's open source and it's pretty easy to implement it's kind of basic, there's not a lot of tooling support it doesn't give you all the niceness of hardware load designers but it does work in your application so if you block this would unblock you and just a quick demo of what that can look like I will show you something that's super simple this application literally has three list boxes but it's very significant the first list box on the very left is the one that comes with WPF this is a WPF core app with a WPF list box nothing to see here this next one is XAML Island it's a natively used, I'm doing data binding using C-sharps, I'm doing it in C-sharp just to kind of demonstrate that that's possible and then we have a third one which I've styled so it's even possible to style it as well because I'm hosting it in a custom control so I have full control over style it can feel and I'll have the sample available as part of the link so that's kind of my demo all of this is here for you I wish I had more time and I'll be back on we have community stand-ups and other things we're doing via steel box to talk more about this and thank you so much for joining me if you have questions please tweet at me or email me thanks a lot


The long-awaited Samsung Galaxy S8 has arrived at Appalachian Wireless. Get yours for the introductory price of just $149.99 with a two-year service agreement, better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless, an East Kentucky network company. During last night's Pikeville City Commission meeting, Pikeville Assistant Chief of Police Chris Edmonds was officially appointed as Chief. Chief Edmonds not only brings years of experience to the position, but one could say it's in his blood. We lost our former Chief to another job in the City of Commission of Public Safety, which was Chief Reed. A whole line of law enforcement and my family, you know, my father was a law enforcement officer. I came into his footsteps in the same position here in Pikeville. He was the Chief of Police here for a long time. Chief Edmonds plans to expand on much of the work of former Chief Reed. Maybe some new ideals that we hadn't looked at prior. You know, we take a big honor in bringing our community into what we do. Chief Reed has done that well as good as anybody could do with the children. I'm going to try to implement maybe bringing our people just to live here, our elderly people into some things and get them involved in what we do. That's one of my big focal points for the first part of my tenure. Chief Edmonds went on to say that it's the patrolmen that deserve all the credit and recognition for what the department has been able to do over the past few years. Reporting from Pikeville, I'm Shawn Allen for EKB News.


Pink and Keith Urban with one too many on BBC Radio Gloucestershire, with John it's coming up to 25 minutes past six days, music on the way from the Happy Mound days. And yeah the new one from Demi Lovato coming up for you as well. But now it is time to catch up with my co-host at home tonight and it's Jeff. Hello, I'm Jeff and I'm your co-host from Cheltenham this evening. A fun fact that you might not know about me is that I've always been able to control my hiccups so I only ever get one and then I can stop them. But will Jeff be able to share the knowledge with us tonight? Useful tips on the evening show. Hiya, Jeff. Hey John, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm good thank you, how are you? I'm really good. How's your Wednesday been? What have you been getting up to? It's just another Wednesday really isn't it? They all sort of blend into it. You have to look at the clock, don't you, to see what day it is. Oh yeah. They're all pretty much the same these days but not pretty good. That's good. Look at the clock, look at the calendar, you know the year. I think it's all the same blending into one. Thanks so much for joining us on the show. Let's go straight in with your introduction then. You are incredible at controlling your hiccups. It's a talent that I'm very proud of and very grateful for but one that I haven't been able to pass on to anyone that I care about. Unfortunately they still suffer. Oh I thought we were all going to learn something tonight with you, Jeff. That would be a money maker I reckon. If I could bottle it and teach it then I think that everyone would like to be able to learn that skill but I haven't been able to so far. Okay so talk me through your technique then. There must be something when you get some hiccups do you think this is what I've got to do to get rid of them? Well the only way that I can explain it is that I genuinely just think about stopping them. I breathe in as much as I can and then I swallow and then hold my breath and then they're gone. Wow there we go. It's simple isn't it? It's just that simple. When did you discover that you had this incredible talent? I've always been able to do it. I can't remember not being able to do it to be honest. So this is the thing. I bet people do ask you to try and share it. So have there been moments where you've tried to pass this on and it hasn't gone so well? No it's just the family and they don't really ask me to anymore. I just laugh at them and tell them they should just stop and they get a bit angry so I stop now. Well there you go. I mean it's quite a niche skill isn't it Geoff? How often would you say use this talent of yours? At least weekly. Do you think? Wow. You're quite afflicted when it comes to hiccups aren't you? Once a week. Wow that's amazing. Okay so let's talk a little bit about you and the podcast. Or should I say the pubcast which we might hear a little bit of earlier on but later on. Just tell me a bit about this then for those who maybe didn't hear me talk about it a little bit earlier on in the show. Yeah so I'm an agile coach and so that means I go from company to company trying to help them basically change the way that they work. And I've got a few allies that I work with now and again one in particular a guy called Paul Goddard who I've worked with for close on 20 years now. We often get together after work often in London or different places and just sort of debrief the day really even if we've been at different places or the same place. And as sad as we are no matter what we talk about the conversation always seems to somehow come back to work. And we just thought after a while why not just stick a recording device on the table in front of us and just record our conversations. Just for no other reason than for our benefit just to play them back at some point. And Paul had the idea of putting it out online and apparently people seem to enjoy our not drunken ramblings but certainly ramblings over a pint. Now this is I think it's a great idea and also what a fantastic opportunity to just go to various different places. I was looking at some of your episodes a little bit earlier on. Do you know how many you've got now Jeff? Well we've got up to about 115 that are actually live and we've done a few more sort of special that aren't out on the actual pubcast stream as it were. We've done for sort of private audiences if you like so we're getting on for about 125 I reckon. Okay so you know we'll come on to talk about the last 12 months and how that's maybe changed what you've had to do but actually 115 episodes. Are they always in a different location? We have gone back to a couple so the first episode we did was at the Tavern in Chelten which a lot of your listeners will know. And shortly after that there was a fire which closed it. Now that wasn't anything to do with us but not long after that we went to another place that had a fire after we'd been there. So we started to wonder but when it reopened we thought we should really go back so we've done two there. And we have a sort of local haunt in Bristol where Paul and I and a couple of other friends used to work just around the corner which we've been to a few times because it's nice in the middle of us. Paul lives in Wiltshire and I live in Chelten obviously so Bristol is quite a nice place in between. So we have been to a couple of places more than once but generally speaking we try and find somewhere different every time. But you know when we're talking about different places every time. Apart from the old Fugeth that's an awful lot of drinking establishments isn't it you've visited now for this. All for work John, all for work. Well yeah obviously all for work but actually what a fantastic opportunity to go out and find new places and kind of just absorb them and record stuff while you're there as well. Yeah and a lot of these places they've got a history you know we've been to Britain's most haunted pub and all sorts of different things. So yeah you pick up a little bit of history and then somehow that weaves into what we do for a living. Yeah that's great and then generally then when you started putting these out there what was the reaction like to begin with? Well we were genuinely surprised. We thought what's the worst that could happen because basically we're not inflicting this on anybody. They have to actually go out and search for it. So you know if you come across agile and beer and that's in your search terms then generally you're going to like this kind of stuff. So the comments we got were actually one surprise we had was tell us more about what you're drinking. So we had people who were interested in what we were talking about but also wanted to tasting notes. Now neither Paul nor myself have what you call a sort of distinguished palate. So we've had to learn to develop our descriptions of what we're drinking a little bit more over the years. But yeah generally speaking it was just interesting conversation. It was a lot less because we don't script any of it obviously we just have to genuinely talk about whatever is on our mind and see where it goes. And so that kind of real thing with the pub noise in the background people felt like they were there. They were eavesdropping on a conversation between two professionals who were friends. And you know that's the thing isn't it when you're there and having those conversations. It must have been lovely to then you know something which said we started out kind of for ourselves and then to get this sort of reaction. When you started to see some of that coming in and asking you for your tasting notes and various other things what was that like when you got that sort of positive reinforcement as to what you were doing. Yeah it was cool. I mean we probably wouldn't have stopped anyway because we like going to the pub and chatting but what we then ended up doing was we started doing live episodes. So we're streaming on YouTube and we have people sort of calling in and asking us questions and joining in the conversation. We have people posting us questions in advance and things like that. We did live episodes in pubs with audiences where people would turn up and sit around and watch us talk which was a little bit strange but pretty cool. So yeah it really grew. So we'll come and talk a little bit more later on about being an agile coach because I'm really interested in this. Let's briefly touch on the last sort of 12 months or so before we break for a bit of music Geoff because I imagine this has seriously affected getting out to pubs to put the podcast together and to get you recording. So when the first lockdown hit last year what did you do when it came to the podcast? So obviously we couldn't go out which was a little bit of a dent but what we did was we set up what we called the social distance in where we invited people who regular listeners just they could just join us on a Friday or a Wednesday after work for just a chat and a few drinks that probably not as much. Work conversation more a bit of just staying in contact really and just keeping each other going through what was pretty difficult time for lots of people. So it was good for us to stay in touch with people. I think it was good for everybody else to stay in touch. So yeah it was different from your shed or from the garden or whatever. But it was changed as good as rest so it was quite cool. I love the idea was it the social distance in did you say? Yeah. What a great name inviting people in and so you literally did it from sheds and various you know wherever you could get to to make it sound a little bit different Geoff? Well my shed is my office basically. Yeah we had a baby two years ago and my office next when I worked from home I couldn't really have that next to the baby's office. The baby's room sorry. So I basically converted one of my shed in my garden into where I that was my office. So that was my bar if you like and Paul had his downstairs office in his home in Wiltshire and people were just calling in from all over the world to join in and have a drink with us. Brilliant. I love the idea of this bringing people together which is what we've needed. We'll come on to talk about you know it could be exciting as you could be sitting outside a pub again from next Monday potentially. So we're just going to break for a bit of music and we'll come back and we'll keep chatting Geoff in a few minutes time alright? Cool. It's Happy Mondays with Step On on BBC Radio Gloucestershire with John. Hello. Music coming up from Demi Lovato some tire crews on the way for you as well now though. And it's time to return to my co-host at home tonight is Geoff who's in Cheltenham. Hey Geoff. Hey there. Hey so look before that song we were funny a lot about the agile pub cast then which is you and your friend and you said you know what we're just going to go out. We have chats and we ended up recording them and people really liked what we did. Now it's called the agile pub cast because you said you're an agile coach is that right? Yeah. So what does that mean? So it's nothing to do with flexibility for a start. Okay. So the other confusion that you get is that I'm also so scrum is a form of agile and I often get confused with rugby coach but it's nothing to do with rugby either. Right. So it's to do with how organisations get their work done basically. So traditionally your organisation is very much hierarchically focused so your leaders at the top tell people what needs to be done those people go away and do it. Your customers tell you what they need. You build something that they hopefully want and everything works out lovely. But over the last 20 years or so that's been less of a reality because things become a lot more complex, a lot more digital, a lot more fast changing. And so we need to do a lot more of what we call inspecting and adapting and actually empowering the people who are at the front line to figure things out rather than try and analyse them in advance. So I help organisations change their leadership models so that the people who are actually doing the work make a lot more of the decisions and manage themselves rather than expect to be managed by a manager if that makes sense. How does it work then? You brought in to kind of look at stuff and go, right, this is a suggestion I would like to make and I imagine sometimes maybe those suggestions might not go down that well if you've got the leaders at the top who think actually I quite like being the leader at the top here. Well, so you're right there, it is a bit on the face of it is quite threatening for people of traditional positions of leadership because they got to where they are by being the expert and making decisions. And now we're talking about opening up decision making responsibilities and empowering teams and a lot of these leaders are asking themselves, OK, so what about me? Where do I add value? But those people are absolutely ideally placed and have the skills to shape culture, to change organisational processes. So these self-organising teams aren't fighting against the system because the processes that we've got in place in our organisations are all geared up to actually help us work the way that we always have done rather than the way that we need to now. So these leaders need to change those processes, they need to enable, they need to support, they need to encourage, they need to coach. So what we mean by that is helping those teams and the individuals within the teams be a lot more confident in solving their own problems. Because we've got a lot of muscle memory, right? If I've got someone who's historically told me what to do when I face with a problem, the natural response for me is to go and ask them what I should do. We haven't got time in our organisations to basically push things up the chain of command and back down again. The people at the front, the customer face, need to be able to make decisions there and then and they need the confidence to be able to do that. How did this all come about, Geoff? What did you do before or how did you get into this? Because it sounds quite niche but actually quite clever really when you say it like that. Well, I mean it used to be quite niche. So I was a project manager at, should we say, a national telecoms company. Right. And what we call our cycle time. So the amount of time it takes for us to actually deliver something that our customers asked for was on average about two years. And what typically happened at the end of two years was we would deliver something that was asked for in the contract. But by the time we delivered it, two years had passed and actually our customers didn't actually want that anymore. Or they hadn't really very well understood what they did need in the first place because they didn't know what was possible. But they spent two years worth of money and time with us. They didn't end up with anything that was really what they wanted. So it was kind of added a necessity really that in order for us to be able to compete as a big institution against a lot of these small nimble start-ups, we needed to be able to shorten our cycle. So ask our customer what they want. Find out they don't know what they want. Give them what they don't want quickly and cheaply. And then work out how we can then change that to what they do actually want. Okay. Yeah, really interesting. I've never heard of anything like this before, Geoff. I've never met someone who does what you do. So I think it's fascinating. You're going to be with us throughout the show tonight. So we'll chat again a little bit later and we'll talk more about the podcast. We'll talk a bit more about the job as well. We had the last 12 months as maybe affected what you do when it comes to work as well. So we'll just have a bit more music and we'll be back with you again a bit later on in the show, Geoff. All right. Nice one. Tonight it's Geoff who's co-hosting the show from home in Cheltenham. Hi, Geoff. Hey, John. How are you doing? Yeah, fine. Thanks. Are you okay? Yeah, brilliant. Good, good. So where are you co-hosting from tonight? You mentioned your office being in a shed earlier on.  Yeah, I'm just in a shed in my garden, Geoff. Have you still got the dregs of the sunshine tonight? Probably not. No, I mean it's not dark yet. But no, it's a pretty cloudy sky. Go on then. Give us a little virtual tour of the shed. Well, it's quite nice to be honest. When people join me on a Zoom call, they describe it as a log cabin, which is a bit grand. But I have got a heater in here, a wood burner, which is nice. Oh, yeah. So yeah, it's a sort of pine building with a couple of windows facing onto my neighbour's shed. Oh, lovely. Imagine in, like, do you remember that TV show Christmas lights? Who's got the better shed? You're the neighbour. It's like a little competition at the end of the garden. Do you think you've got the better shed? I think, yeah. You've got a log burner, Geoff. Have you used the log burner recently? It's been quite cold. I have, yeah. I have to come out here early in the morning, stick a few logs on and then get back in for a cup of tea while it warms up. Because, yeah, it's icy, isn't it? Mine is still something. It's crazy. Yeah, I know. Especially after all that warm weather we had. Now, look, you mentioned the shed earlier on because we were talking about the agile pubcast, which has been going. So how long is it since you started this now, Geoff? Oh, you see now Paul's the one with all the dates and the stats, but I'm going to say about four years. Okay, so we're looking at about four years and you mentioned you've got more than a hundred episodes. And, you know, things have had to change. You mentioned recording still, but obviously not in the pub over the last 12 months. But, you know, Monday, this could be quite exciting. Have you got any plans to get out to an outdoor venue at any point soon? Well, we were going to, I was going to go and travel to see Paul because I still haven't given him his birthday present. So we were going to do something from his garden, basically, before the pub's opened. But he's taking the time off. So, you know, he's on holiday. So the next pubcast, I think, is going to be a couple of weeks time. Right. Yeah, where we're going to go to Bristol. Paul's on the hunt for a beer garden in Bristol that we can use. Oh, that's nice. And you mentioned, you know, some of the places you've been, you live in Cheltenham, you mentioned the Tavern was one of the first in Cheltenham. So various other places across Gloucestershire as well, which you've enjoyed recording in? Well, we've been at, see, I always refer to them as the old places. I have to think the Butler source is what it's called now. Oh, yeah. It used to be when I used to go there. I was just thinking when you were talking about the sun just got me remembering. You know, one of our first early episodes, we were on the riverbank in Porto. And it was just glorious, absolutely glorious sunshine. And yeah, now I'm stuck in my shed. We did the wild beer Tavern before it went. Try to think some other places we've done here. That's all right. I mean, it's just good. You know, it's just interesting to hear because you must have such a great time. We talked about some of the history and, you know, getting out to see various places by the end of the podcast. Does it start quite well? And then the sort of four hours later is a little bit less coherent. Well, again, Paul's amazing at keeping me on track. As you know, you've got to break things up for the listeners. So people can, they can listen to us ramble for a little bit, but we don't have the option of putting in songs every now and again. So Paul, so we've got to keep it to 30, 40 minutes, Jeff. Then always we're going to lose people. So yeah, we'll do a good 30, 40 minutes and then we have to wrap it up. And that's that's usually pretty good. That's that's about the time it takes us to drink a pint and then we'll go and get another one. So that's good to me. Well, look, you're going to be back with us again a little bit later on in the show. So we'll catch up. Thanks for introducing some of the tracks as well. I appreciate that. It was good fun. All right, cool. We'll catch you later. Yes. Tonight is Jeff who's been with us throughout the show tonight co-hosting from the shed in the garden in Cheltenham. Hi, Jeff. Hey, John. Hi. Is the log burner going at the moment or is it sort of tailed off now? No, it's tailed off now. It's the residue of the heat has just left it a nice ambient temperature for this evening. Oh, nice. Look, thank you for joining us on the show tonight. We found out what it means to be an agile coach, which is something you started. And you said there are other people doing this now, but also the agile pubcast. We heard a very short snippet of this earlier on. Would you mind if we perhaps hear a little bit more about what you get up to? OK. Great, here we go then. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of the agile pubcast. This time Paul Goddard, Nigel Baker and myself, Jeff Watts, got together in Bristol. And we found an interesting new place called the Bristol and Bath Room Distillery.  See, this sounds quite dangerous to be honest. Making their own rum, you've got stills, you're there with some microphones. It does sound like an awful lot of fun, but I imagine there's quite a lot of work to get it all together as well, Jeff. Well, we try and keep it low-fi to be honest. Genuinely speaking, we just put a dictaphone in the middle of the table. I mean, we have sort of upgraded the equipment over the years, but we've found that actually the simple stuff is generally the best. So, yeah, there's a little bit, to be honest, there's more effort in the remote pubcast when we're not in the same place than when we're in a pub together. So we've put a little bit of pub ambiance in the background, stitched that in and trying to get the two audio levels to sync when we're in different places. That's a lot harder than when we're just sitting around the table. Also, a distinct lack of stills and various equipment, I imagine, as well around you when you're in the shed, unless you've got your own little brewing empire going on. Not that I could admit to you on live. Now, look, if people want to go and find out a little bit more about the podcast, perhaps here's some more of what you've been getting up to. Jeff, where is the best place to do that? Well, my website's inspectandadapt.com, and you can pretty much find anything from there to do with me. Or if you put Agile and pubcast into any kind of podcast provider, then you won't really be confused by lots of different options. We're pretty unique in that regard. Brilliant. And like you say, people might want to find out more about being an Agile coach and some of the work you do as well. They might have thought, I like the sound of that. So the website's the best place for that as well, Jeff. Yeah. And do you know what? There's quite a few of these free meetup groups, which hopefully will be starting up again in person soon as restrictions ease. But there's a couple even in Cheltenham. There's one called Magic, the most agile group in Cheltenham. And they meet up at Pub's as well. And it's this sort of networking after work thing where people can share what's going on at work, hear some speakers, basically find out other people in the local area who are doing the same kind of job with them. It's pretty cool. Great. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us on the show. And we'll have to stay in touch. Let us know if things go with the podcast, and we'll catch up again very soon, Jeff. Yeah. Maybe we'll do a live one. That'd be great. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. And yeah, we'll get something in the working. All right. Cheers, John.