But Rich Kilmer there was also one of the co-founders of Ruby Central, along with David Allen Black and Dave Thomas, who aren't here, just wanted to include that for completeness. I wanted to show you this site real quick. This is life is too short for meetings.com, just one second. I made that site just as a reminder. We're getting old. I haven't been here in like six years, I think. And by here, I mean RubyConf, because RubyConf is just a location that floats around through space. And it's true. I haven't ever keynoted it. In fact, the only talk I ever gave at RubyConf was in 2005 in San Diego, was anybody there? Matt's Rich, Jeremy, yeah, Eric. And it was a, Takahashi. It was a continuations tutorial with Jim Wyrick, who has since left us. Because I haven't been here for a while, it's the first time I'm coming here, and Jim's not here.  Matt's even retweeted this for me, thank you. Coming back to the Ruby community after a while, I just wanted to see what did people think, even outside the Ruby community, that we needed to be aware of. I'm not going to put the answers up, because it's not really worth it, there were a lot of answers to this. It was useful. I'm not saying the answers weren't good. But what I saw was a lot of stuff that sort of verified that Ruby is getting old. It was stuff like some of the libraries are getting old and decrepit and don't work very well or the documentation is out of sync with the code. Things are slow. It's not all about Rails, that was a pretty constant theme. And then there were a whole bunch of feature requests for the language that we've been hearing since 1999. I mean a lot of them. It used to be a thing when we started with Ruby as English speakers on the Ruby Lang mailing list, pretty much every new person that joined would request the same set of features to make it be more like Java. Now I think they all want it to be like TypeScript. Here we are. I wrote this blog series back in 2006 after what I thought was a pretty full career already of being what I like to call a systems euthanizer. So I just go from euthanasia for those who are speaking English as a second language means killing something for mercy because the thing needs to die. And so system after system I have been part of projects to painfully kill those systems. They're sick. They're slow. They're legacy systems. They're dying. They're unhealthy. And so we painfully put them out of their misery. And in the process of doing it, we usually create new systems of course. We don't just kill it and leave a dead carcass of a system behind. I realize though because I work too hard when I work. I put so much of myself into this work. As I'm killing these systems, I realize that I'm also crushing the last remnants of the hopes and dreams of the developers that created the systems that I'm killing. So it's a pretty miserable job really either both the job of a euthanizer and the job of someone who creates systems because they tend to die so frequently. If you don't know this, this is sort of a non sequitur, but you'll see that it kind of matters. I came to the software world originally as a musician. This is me doing a recent jazz show in Little Rock. And it changed the way I thought about how software development should be done. And really just how I assumed it would be done. And there was one major thing that stuck out. It is this word. I said it a minute ago. When I said legacy systems, how many of you thought, oh yes, legacy systems. I love legacy systems. Thank you. One person. We've created this negative feeling around this word, but I'm a musician. I still think of myself as a musician who just happens to be programming because it pays better. And as a musician, I came in with a different assumption of what legacy meant. So people would say legacy, and I would think, okay, something that someone leaves behind like an inheritance, a bequest, a gift from a past generation. Legacy is a really nice thing when you think about it from that perspective. But in our world here, we think of it as a negative thing. It's a nasty old messy pile of junk that is left behind by someone else whose name we usually curse in our everyday work. And that's kind of strange, you know? As a musician, like right now we're listening to the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony. This is a picture of Beethoven. Beethoven left behind such a legacy of his music that even we Americans can pronounce his name properly. Beethoven, by the way, this piece, seventh symphony, everyone knows the fifth. This is the best one. Go listen to it. I'm a saxophone player. This is John Coltrane. How many of you have heard of John Coltrane? Most people have heard of John Coltrane. Every saxophone player obsessively tries to imitate John Coltrane, even today. Even like 15-year-old kids in New York City are playing and you can hear Coltrane in their sound. And jazz is irrelevant at this point. And still they're doing it because he left behind this legacy. The same is true in the world of literature. One of my heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, for example, left behind words that I have read, even after he died, that have shaped the way I think. And probably the way that I'm speaking to you now are heavily influenced by having read Kurt Vonnegut's work. Architecture, same thing. This is Gaudi. Walk through Barcelona and you see his legacy and his imprint on the city. Even the world of fashion. This is a piece by the Japanese group, Tom de Garcones, which is my favorite fashion house. I'm not sure what your favorite is, but mine is Tom de Garcones. Not just because I want to impress months, but they are Japanese. But they create these pieces that not only will live theoretically forever if they can be preserved, but change the course of fashion. They have rippling effects. Same thing with art. This is Juan Miro. I like Juan Miro so much that I have basically matching tattoos on my arm for this painting. Juan Miro left behind a massive body of work that we can all still enjoy, still be influenced by, and also pioneered the idea of visual poetry. So he actually created, most people don't realize this, but he created a visual language of symbols and his paintings at certain periods in his career were poems, so this is a poem. But we have a problem in the software world. Like I said, we use this word legacy negatively. We also have a really hard time shipping software. So you're not going to be able to read this, but you'll get the gist of it. This is some data that is kind of questionable by a group called the Standish Chaos Group, and I say it's kind of questionable, meaning you might challenge the scientific merits. However, you will probably agree with the directionality of the data. So what they do is they go around and they inventory projects. They survey projects across the world, and they categorize them into successes and failures. And what we have here is the green row at the bottom, the bottom most part, is successful projects. The top, the red are failed projects that just got completely scrapped. And then in the middle are challenged, and for challenged, they call that significantly over time or over budget, which to me is also a failure. So look at how bad we are at making software. And this is just for creating software in the first place. Once we create it, I made up the statistic, but I think it's kind of right. I travel around the world and I kill these things, and it seems like they only live about five years in business systems especially. So unfortunately, software when it is initially birth, like most things that are creative, is not immediately perfect. So if you create something, it may live for five years on average. Well, it may take longer than that to even have it be good. So this is a bad situation. Software might only live five years, and it takes 10 years for it to even get good. It takes that long to iterate it and actually meet the user's needs and perfect the UX and make it perform. So we have a problem of software. How do we turn this around? Well, this has become my quest. Some of you, very few I would guess, have seen me do a talk like this before. This has different slides and different content, but I've been talking about this for the last seven years or so. And much of my work has been really influenced by the quest, figure out how to create software that doesn't have to be killed by people like me. So I initially went to what I thought was a perfect source of information, which is Mike Feathers. Mike Feathers wrote this book, and if you work in legacy code, which you all do in the bad definition of it, you all work in code that already exists that needs to be modified, you should read this book. You'll have to hold your nose and read through the C++ and Java stuff, but it's worth it. So I asked Mike, I actually went on a video chat with him a few years ago, and I said, how do we create legacy code? And I was incredibly disappointed by his answer. He said, well, let's see. People need to be afraid of it. It needs to be not dynamic, basically, in stasis and very difficult to change. So I don't think he understood the question, want to ask him this. But I'm pretty sure we could all do this. So I turned to Twitter as I like to do, and I did this again recently. I got very similar answers, but what are the characteristics that make software that we still use that's old still use? And I also got the same negative by it because people think of old software as being bad. Fear of awesome, sunk cost fallacy, old still in use manager. That was one of my favorites. But I got some good ones too. It works, it's stable, it's valuable, it provides value to users, et cetera. So I was sort of encouraged by that, and I got a lot of things that got me thinking. But back to around the time that I wrote that big rewrite article series, which is sort of relevant timing-wise, there was this post by DHH on the Basecamp blog, or the Signal vs. Noise blog from 37 Signals. And it was joking that enterprise is going to be the new legacy. And he really ran this propaganda campaign against the word enterprise, if any of you were doing rails or watching back then. We went from enterprise being a good word that was often used for negative purposes to being something that you would chuckle about and make fun of. But the sad thing about this is David's way of panning the word enterprise and making us all hate it was comparing it to legacy and saying it's going to be like legacy, which is obviously bad. So I found this comment to be really well written. I'll read it to you. Careful, legacy isn't a bad word. Legacy usually means tried, true, and of enough value that it lasted long enough to be old and outdated. True, right? To mock legacy is to look at the successes of the past and to declare that they aren't to be revered or respected. Most of what runs our economies is like a signal. In the future, I hope the software I'm creating now was highly regarded enough that it's still around and being referred to as legacy. I thought that was really inspiring as I typed those words into the comment box. Unfortunately though, the software I was creating at that time was not highly regarded enough. In fact, it was one of those red boxes on the Standish Chaos Report.  And I mean that literally. It's one of the only periods that I regret in my career. And it was dismal. I still look at it as like, I died a year early in 2005 and I can't get it back. Miserable. Before that, on a more positive note, toward the beginning of my career, I worked for General Electric, which at GE Appliances, we had this system that was running on a Honeywell Bull mainframe. Who has a Honeywell Bull mainframe? Nobody has one anymore, it's amazing. The funny thing about this is, I think it was 25 years old at the time. It had a custom TCP IP stack, it had a custom RDBMS. We had created this RPC mechanism that we could use to talk to it. It was terrifying. The hardware was so old that you could not get replacement parts from the manufacturer because it wasn't being manufactured anymore. So we had a team of people who knew how to manufacture hardware replacement parts with Honeywell Bull. But we could not get rid of it because what it did was both so valuable and performed so well that every attempt to replace it failed because the users would reject it. There was also just too much information in this thing. But I left that unexpectedly, I think, because when I came in, I thought, well, this is gonna be terrible. But I left that job feeling a great deal of respect for what the Honeywell team had created at GE. There was even a team called the Bull Exit Team that had been in existence at that point longer than my software career had been. And when I left, still existed. And then eventually was disbanded. And I have heard recently that this thing's still running. It's amazing and terrifying, but amazing. So I had that influence. At that time, I think the system was my age, actually. I was 25 or so when I started it. Speaking of which, I'm 43 now and I don't deserve to be alive because I take really bad care of the system. Refactoring and maintenance, and you may have seen me before, I've looked a lot better in the past and it also looked worse, but how do we create systems that survive? Well, the first step, like the Standish thing, the system has to be born. When Twitter first got launched, did you know that it was a database-backed web app written in Rails? Everyone knew it at the time in our community, but a lot of people don't realize that now.  A database-backed web app or Twitter? Because Twitter is a messaging system. It's this massive, asynchronous parallel thing. It has all these crazy optimizations because you've got Justin Bieber with millions of fans. You've got Trump. You've got all these different things that require high volume to do this in a database.  Like we used to see these failures all the time and for a while we would make fun of it. There was the fail whale you would see. But if they hadn't created it like this, we wouldn't have Twitter today because it never would have amounted to anything. Because they'd still, they would have run out of money while trying to build the distributed message queuing system that Twitter needed to be. And thank God they didn't realize that's what it was going to need to be. They just made this micro-blogging system in Rails. So they got it to be born had they not, we wouldn't care about the legacy of software by Twitter. And it's harder to get software born than we might believe. I'm going backward.  So the conversation with Mike Feather was wasn't all doom and gloom. He gave me a link to this thing at the top. I put a tiny URL link, I don't know why, but it's tiny URL code alive. An article he wrote in, I think also 2006 where he says that your software is alive and he starts thinking in terms of this biological metaphor for software which is really interesting for someone who's thinking heavily about how to create systems that can live a long time and live healthier lives. And what he says here in the article is it all comes down to one thing. Code survives by providing value and being difficult to replace. So the value has to be greater than the difficulty. This is an interesting point. The biological metaphor is really what got me interested when I talked to him about this. Your code is alive. And he sent me looking at this paper by Dick Gabriel, Richard P. Gabriel. If you're not aware of Dick's work, he is I believe the first person to have written about software in terms of patterns. So taken the Christopher Alexander patterns ideas and applied them to software. He wrote the common list object system. He did a bunch of really influential important stuff. And not enough people know his work. He wrote this paper that you can find. And I have the URL there. ULS Gabriel is what that says on the tiny URL link. Designed beyond human abilities. Which is a pretty enticing title anyway. And basically what he's doing is he's looking at make-believe systems to see what would you do if some crazy parameters were present? So for example, trillions of lines of code. How would you maintain a system that looked like that? Which is not even likely to ever happen unless it were general reading. But what really got me interested is he ends up turning to this biological metaphor for systems. And he says, biological systems are very much larger than anything coherent people have built. Not just in software, but in general.  But as we talk about complexity in systems, if you look at biology, the human body, for example, you can get some really interesting examples of stuff that would work. So we're biological. And like I said, I have no business even being alive at 43 given how I've treated my body. But yet your software systems can't compete with me, general, that's pretty sad. We should both be embarrassed. How do we create systems that outlast us? Or at least me. So this sent me down this path. First, I started thinking, okay, how do the systems stay alive like me where I'm not giving a lot of input to make them be better? There is a concept in biology called homeostasis, which I honestly don't understand that well because I'm so not a scientist, it's insane. But homeostasis is a balancing process in biological systems, where different subsystems in the organism play different roles that might be at odds to each other, to balance each other out using an effect called negative feedback. So if something happens that's not bad, something else happens that's not good in a certain amount, something else happens to counteract it. So you have like the brain, which manages the whole thing, the liver metabolizes toxic substances, the kidney heals with blood, water level, et cetera. And it's a system that just balances each other and all the right components are there to make it work. In the same way that we talk about like really good agile development systems, our systems where all the components need to be present to balance each other out or management systems with executives that play different functions to balance each other out, simplified kind of dumb down version. But that's what homeostasis is. And when you are a biological organism, if you're unable to maintain homeostasis, then you reach a state called homeostatic imbalance where these checks and balances are happening and it can lead to death. Good news though in that case is you're already dying. We're all dying at an alarming rate, 50 trillion cells in your body, 3 million die per second. So just look around at the death that's happening around you.  It's like a zombie movie in here. But that's interesting. Because here I am, I'm still me. And we all grew up hearing about this and skin cells are falling off and regenerating and all that. We say we're not even the same organism we were but somehow I'm still me. And you can recognize me barely when I come at RubyCon six years later. You still know it's probably me. Or it might be this guy named Chaz that goes to RailsConf that looks exactly like me. It's weird. Have you seen him? He's there. It's me, it's me, it's me. I'm just called Chaz for that. Turns out there, it's not really true that all of the cells in your body regenerate but a lot of them do. And maybe that's a key. Glenn Vandenberg in response to one of my many tweets about this subject said, we learned that software should start small and grow, challenging to replace an existing system that way. So what he's saying is we already know that dealing with small pieces and growing them from there is a good idea but it's very hard to take a whole system and replace it by starting small and growing. And that's why we're running the problems. I also asked the question of a bunch of people many times what are the oldest surviving systems that you use regularly? So I'm trying to get a sense of like old systems that people are actually still using. Probably not because they're forced to. And you can see most of these things are from the UNIX world. Probably partially because that's the best software and partially because the people who follow me on Twitter are UNIX people. Until now because now I work in Microsoft but that's a whole other story. You can categorize these things into two categories. They are either really small components, the UNIX philosophy of tools that do one thing and do them well or they are systems and they are systems of probably made up of a bunch of small components. So stuff like the X-Windows system or Apache or probably a better version of Apache would be something with the Internet. You get the idea. So we've been using systems like this for a long time. Here's a row of them that are still driving down the street and are much older than software and even older than me. They are systems. Each one is a system that is a vehicle and it's made of all these little components that can be replaced. I'm not sure what I'm doing with my hand here. But the slides are so irrelevant they're only a distraction to me. So then I start asking myself, well what if we built software this way? What if we think in terms of the biological metaphor? The idea of regeneration. What is a cell in this context? What is a cell in the context of the software system and what is a system? What are the lines between those and how do you know what to build and when? Well, the cell thing to me is pretty easy to get. A cell is just a small thing. It's a tiny component.   It might not go well. You could watch this talk from RailsConf 2014 by Sandy and it's really right at the beginning. She says something that you pretty much could just not have done the rest of the talk. Not that it wasn't great, but this is so good. This is worth sitting through the whole conference. All of the problems we cause have the same simple solution. Make smaller classes, make smaller methods and let them know as little about each other as possible. Turns out this is a summary of my talk too, but probably we could all just get up on the mic and say that and be done with almost every talk at the conference. When I was working on Wunderlist, which was the last job I had before we were acquired by Microsoft, I made a rule, I was CTO, and I would say you can do code in any language you want, any technology you want and you don't have to ask me.  As long as the code is this big or smaller, then I would just hold up my fingers like this. And then there were a few other rules, like it had to work with our deployment system and you had to get someone else who thought it would be a good idea to use that technology. Some simple obvious ones, but you literally didn't even have to ask me about it, though I would prefer to know about it later. Because I realized that even if you wrote like a whole critical service in the Idrith programming language, which probably only 70 or 80% of us are expert in in this room. If someone came along and was on call and there was a problem and the code was this big and they couldn't figure it out or they couldn't get it to compile, they could probably just read it well enough to understand what it did and rewrite it and deploy it. That was the idea. And if they did that, I would like that. And actually as it happens, I wrote with one of my coworkers who was one of the most junior people on the team, I wrote our one and only set of Haskell services. And some of the people on the team were angry that we wrote Haskell services because they thought that was like, academic, elitist, crazy stuff they couldn't understand. And then one of the angry people came and rewrote it and go. And then another person rewrote an enclosure and another person rewrote it in JavaScript and another person rewrote it in Ruby. And as CTO, I did not think that was a waste of time because it was this much code. And they just, they didn't wanna deal with the Haskell. I was fine with that. Turned out the Haskell performed so much better than all the other things that we stayed with the Haskell. What we didn't do though is we didn't destroy the code regularly enough. So to have small things, that's good. But if you wanna really use this biological metaphor, you should be destroying those things.  They did that, but then we ended up sticking with the Haskell. And I'm gonna talk about that in a sec, but if you replace the cells regularly, it enforces some things. One is it shows that the interfaces to whatever it is are clean enough that the rest of the system doesn't have to be bothered with the fact that you've replaced that component. The other is it proves to you that you can replace it, which I think is an important meta system around software development. But if you don't have a meta system for knowing that you can replace code, then you probably cannot replace code. And at WunderList, we built up this crazily, seemingly over-engineered, in fact, when they did due diligence on us for the acquisition, I got a glowing review, this 40 page report that used the words over-engineered in a positive light to describe what we had done. But this crazy over-engineered system of cells that we're regenerating, and you'll hear more about it. But because this system ran so well, especially the Haskell one, we didn't have to change it. Because when you write Haskell code, if it compiles, it works. That's how Haskell works. So there were never any bugs in the Haskell code because it compiled. But because of that, a problem occurred where the dependencies changed and the cabal system changed out from under it, which is the package management system for Haskell. And now, by the time we did the acquisition, we could no longer actually compile and deploy the code. So we had a critical problem with the system that never had an issue because the ecosystem around it changed. And we learned that we should be destroying and replacing things even when they're not broken and when they don't need to be replaced. It's a healthy meta system for development. And along with this whole thing, as I started thinking about throwing away code and being in a big organization now that has a whole lot of old code, for example, Excel, I realized that developers have a fetish for code. Like, they're obsessed with code. They think code matters. Code doesn't matter at all. The system is the thing that matters. That is the asset you create. The code is a liability. And that sounds weird, but the more code you have, the worse your system is, in a sense. And if you could take a system that does exactly the same thing exactly as well, two different systems, and one has 200% more code than the other one, the one with more code is worse, right? Because you don't want that code. So think about it this way. Think about that system. You need to be creating a system. The code is just part of it. Just plays a part. Back to Dick Gabriel's design beyond human abilities, they also sort of reached this conclusion that cells need to be destroyed sometimes. So he's talking about an external cell can command a cell to destroy itself without releasing toxins. So without destroying anything around it. And that influenced how we deployed as well. So I've been talking about code, but runtime is the same way. In the 90s at GE, we had a server that we had set up. And I remember looking at the uptime and it was like 600 days uptime on this Unix server. And we kind of high-fived and you know, great job. It didn't reboot for crash or whatever. But then we realized this is terrifying because we don't know what's on this and there's no way we could reproduce this. So we started this thing, I coined this term immutable infrastructure to describe it, where we would do the same sort of thing at runtime in our back-end systems. And whenever you want to change a piece of software on a server, you would have to throw away the server and replace it with a new one. In the 90s, that would have been hundreds of thousand dollars every time you did it. So it wouldn't have worked. And six years ago, it started to make more sense with AWS and EC2. Now this is how everyone does it. And by everyone, I mean bleeding-edge nerds that are using Docker, which doesn't seem like bleeding-edge probably to a lot of you, but it actually still is, amazingly. So never upgrade software on an existing node, always just throw it away, create a new one and replace it. And then always deploy. So we had a rule, we were still using EC2 containers at the time, or what are they called, instances. And if I had a graph of uptime on all the instances. So like I used to be proud of my 600 days of uptime. And now if I saw something that was more than a couple of hours, I would get worried. Like why is that server not being recycled and destroyed? Because the system is not healthy in that case. We don't have a meta system for proving that we can replace things. So my goal, and we got acquired so everything got ruined in terms of my nerdy plans, but everything wasn't ruined otherwise. But in terms of my nerdy desires, my goal was to have uptime be less than an hour. Just always be cycling through servers constantly in an automated fashion. But speaking of this immutability, it brings me to the idea of immutability and code. Which is also I think one of the most important things that we can learn from biological systems and like immutability and impermanence code. If we can think in terms of pure functions, think about it, a pure function actually gives you an immutable disposable scope. And you can't create huge long pure functions. It ends up being harder than just creating small ones because you don't have state, mutable state that you can deal with. So pure functions meaning functions that don't have side effects kind of force you into a mindset.  And there's this whole new wave of functions as a service. Some of you have probably played with AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. StandardLib is a company that my VC firm has invested in and we did it because they were trying to sort of reinvent how you build things based on pure functions with no side effects, which is true with no state anyway. So an area to explore, how about this for a rule? Never edit a method, always rewrite it instead.  You just have to make a new method with the same name and replace the functionality every time. This is a crazy idea, which is in fact probably not a good idea. But I like the mindset because if this were the rule, imagine how it would change what you would write when you created a method. It would be like Sandy was sitting and they're looking at you at the time, small. So kind of a summary of these ideas, the mutability of a system is enhanced by the immutability of its components. I just sat there silently so you could think about that for a second. Once you have all these little components, they need to communicate with each other.  So don't worry about binary protocols unless that's fun for you, of course, Rich. But I've just taken on you, gotta do it once. Do the stupidest thing you can. An example of that is the UNIX standard in and out kind of idea, UNIX utilities. They just read from standard in, they print the standard out and most apps or most tools in UNIX, that's what they do.  It's COBOL programs way. And it allowed us to create this extensible ecosystem around the bull with our custom TCP-IP stack. This was my first Ruby experience at work. By the way, I was generating Java classes to talk to the bull mainframe by getting the COBOL copybooks off the bull mainframe. And that's sort of like the schema of these things, of the data structures in COBOL. I would parse them with Ruby, I would generate Java code and I would commit that to CVS or whatever you're using at the time. And they did that so that no one would know I was using Ruby, but I didn't have to write in Java. In a sense, these interfaces, if you sort of zoom out, are the system. So this is just one stupid, simple concept, but if you think about the fact code doesn't matter that much because it's so small and so simple, then it's the interfaces and the way the components communicate that become the system. So that's how much attention you should spend. You pay to this. Even though I'm telling you make it dumb, I mean that in a good way. Make it as simple as possible, simple and easy as Rich, if you like to say. Maybe a rule to keep in mind in cursive that you can't make out is Ostall's law, which says to be conservative in what you accept. Oh, sorry, conservative in what you produce and what you do and liberal in what you accept. It's a good way to deal with something that can evolve over time. Now something I did that's maybe, I think it's okay at a Ruby conference. Do I have a Ruby? Yeah, I've got a Ruby logo on here. A way that we did this at the WonderList, in the WonderList organization is we said, okay, we're gonna be heterogeneous by default. When I started there, I started talking about Scala a little bit because I'd been watching the stuff that Twitter and LinkedIn had been doing. And people would really snicker in the same way that in the 90s people were snickering at me when I talked about Ruby, the GE. But what I wanted to do was get everyone into a mindset where they weren't dealing with these monolithic processes, monolithic memory spaces, monolithic sets of languages and libraries that all bleed together. All of these boundaries of creating small things that have to communicate through clean interfaces, well, it's a lot harder to produce tight coupling between your Haskell code and your Ruby code than it is to not produce tight coupling. Like you have to go out of your way. You have to be Aaron Patterson with his PHP interpreter at Ruby, for example. So we didn't use all these languages or platforms or whatever they are, but by the time we were acquired and stopped working on our backend platform, we had something like, well, we're 13 backend languages, including Haskell, as I said, Rust, Go, Ruby, Clojure, Scala, Node, et cetera. And I think that actually contributed creating the system that we wanted to create very heavily. So this is Joe Armstrong. If you were at RubyConf 2006, you probably learned about this video, but assume that things are going to fail. Failure in a system like this, where you want things destroyed is a virtue at runtime, but also in your code, which leads you to the concept of meantime between failure optimization versus meantime to resolution optimization. A lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about how can I never have a failure, which is probably impossible in most cases. Rather, if we spent all of our time thinking about how to recover from failures and forcing them, we would be in a better state. One classic example of MTBF, probably MTTR2 is testing. So this slide probably speaks for itself. Tests are a design smell. I'm surprised, didn't know I'm booed. I guess we've gotten past that point now. We're too old to worry about it anymore, but there was a time at a Ruby conference people would have been upset about this thing. Tests are coupling. Tests reach into your code in a way that actually stops it from moving forward. I had at least one conversation yesterday, and every time I go to a conference, I talk to people about their project where they end up spending, they're trying to upgrade a rail version, for example, which was the most recent one I heard about, and they spend so much time screwing around with a test suite that it is a detriment to them. It doesn't help them. So we've forgotten why we test things. What if your code, like I got to pair with Kent Beck once, and we sat down and I wrote something, I don't know what it was, it was in Java, and I said, should I write a test for this? And he said, you should write a test for anything that could possibly break. And I said, well, what about this? And he said, could it possibly break? It's like, I don't know, you know? I'll write a test for it because I thought he was trying to trick me. But I think that's a good, it's a good way to think. And of course, he didn't want to tell me because the idea is not to tell me when to write a test, it's to give me intuition about when. Well, what if your intuition, your code, triggered the intuition that the answer is always no, because your code's so simple it just can't break? That's what I mean by this. The other thing though is, don't let your test be an anchor that you have to drag around. And maybe it's more important to monitor the runtime behavior of your code than it is test it.  You can't catch the errors. How about catching the errors in production and getting to where you can fix them really, really quickly? I'm sorry, bad words, palm freaks. Experience the worst case scenario as soon as possible so you don't have to face it or you don't have to fear it. When I joined WonderList, I think it was the second day I was there, I got access to the back end systems and I started just deleting servers from the clusters until it crashed. And at that point they had moved me from the United States to Berlin to be their CTO. And I'm sure they were thinking, well, it's too late to send them back now. But I did that slowly and you would see it getting worse and worse. You would watch the graphs and then it would crash. And then the team that had previously been paralyzed by fear had to jump into action with me to save me from my own idiocy and to make it come back. And the users were really complaining. We had problems, people weren't able to log in. So it probably took them a little too far. But we were in a situation before I got there where we had finally gotten the system to where it would sort of work and no one wanted to change anything if they were afraid of it. And there you have stasis and you're screwed when you have stasis. You will not create a system that survives. So I got us in this situation where we got used to dealing with it. And I think that's a pattern for the future. Back to this homeostasis idea, I mean idea of regulation. Really, my grand experiment is paused right now and it hasn't gotten to this point. But I wrote some papers about it because I thought that's what a CTO is supposed to do. And I was imagining, like here is a, this is a generic diagram of a system. But think about the different ways that if you work on backend systems that have scalability problems, for example, where you have components that crash because they're under too much load, database can't handle load, et cetera. If you've got measurements on everything, you could say like, okay, the database can't handle it. The system is going to regulate itself and it's going to slow down the incoming traffic. It turns out that the way that you deal with a distributed system like this and you're trying to work on scaling issues is by doing these things manually. So this is the first sort of obvious step to simulating homeostatic regulation. You can imagine a lot of different things though where the system watches itself and adjusts its own components, kills things, slows things down or officially speeds things up in order to take care of itself. Even to create problems that it can then react to. So some sort of older examples there is the chaos monkey which is sort of famous from Netflix which would just go around because back in the day when they started using EC2, it was controversial, the AWS thing, because people would say like the instances would die randomly, et cetera. So they made the decision to use it and they said, well, if the instances are going to die randomly, we need to make sure they're dying a lot so that our system can deal with it. So they created this thing that would just cause problems and make sure that the system could run smoothly all the time. Pinterest did something cool a few years ago. AWS has a concept called Spot Instances on EC2. So normally, if you want to start a new server, there's a fixed price for a certain type of server.  Spot instances give you a chance to bid on a secondary market for computing product for the same types of servers and you set a minimum and maximum price and when you get it, it starts up the servers and when the price changes and you can no longer afford it, it just kills them. Which is weird if you think about running production code because it's gonna die. Pinterest switched entirely to Spot Instances and then they built their systems so they could deal with all these fluctuations which I thought was a great way to both force the concepts that I'm talking about and save a lot of money because it's much, much, much cheaper. So we started doing experiments with that too and we were saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on paper doing this. A lot of what I'm talking about with this cellular idea is encapsulation. So for this to work, the services have to encapsulate their own data. They have to own the data. And I think encapsulation is decoupling. It's sort of an obvious thing to say. It leads to stuff like lots of small databases instead of one big one. Maybe some of this stuff is obvious now. A lot of people then say, well, don't you have referential integrity? What do you do about that? They say, nope, we don't have that. I would rather have this. I would rather have decoupling and the ability to evolve things separately. The whole point of this is that I don't want any of us to be doing these rewrites anymore because it's just sad, like I said. I mean, if you want to just be a capitalist, it's a waste of money. But I think it's much worse than that. And here we are, hundreds of people in this room who are probably working on things that will not survive more than a few more years if we're lucky. And we spend so much time on it. It's just not worth it. Life is too short for that. A few years ago, I went to Nordic Ruby in Stockholm and a regional break weight at the talk. And I don't remember anything except for this line. That's how bad the old aging memory is. Ruby has beautiful coupling. That was sort of the main point, I think, of this talk. And it's true. Part of what I loved about Ruby when I got into it was I could do crazy stuff. No one would stop me. It's like, Dave Thomas used to say that Java is the blunt scissors of programming because it tries to protect the programmer from everything. And Ruby doesn't do that. And Ruby, you can redefine everything in the system at runtime and cause all sorts of crazy crashes and make it impossible for another programmer to come behind you and work. You can put something in a path somewhere that gets loaded that they can't find that redefines how strings work. That's it. They'll spend a long time trying to figure it out. And it's true. That's part of what we love about Ruby. Flexibility. But as I think about Ruby's place in the world now and the responses to my question, what does the Ruby community need to hear in 2017? Some of it was stuff like, well, why would I choose Ruby over Python at this point? Really kind of snotty answers like that. And a lot of them were about Python. Python won the data science thing and therefore is gathering steam around that. And other people said, node one. And in both of these I say, well, what did it win? And that's sort of a relevant point too. It didn't win anything. We're still here. We still love Ruby and we still use it. But what if Ruby was the language that when people talked about it, they said, if you build things in Ruby, there are tools and practices in that community. And I would say tools first. Tools and parts of the language. I don't know what they are, but they're probably not the ones that have been requested since 1999. What if Ruby was the community where when someone builds a system in Ruby, it's probably never gonna have to be rewritten. Never going to be thrown away. At least not in mass, because the system will survive. So I hope that that's an inspirational idea.


mambu vp Fiti Felix manye mi mambu vp Fosa Felix omondi apa nazima one guys omondi brawa nazima jee na nimoja, hewe ni jee na moja bro manu na nita kama kukuna jina moja Meme mekii na kutjua one reason why you guys are here ni gani we are here to support our brother kukud danger India But right now, cucumber 디자a is out of danger Soqui tutune kujiyakwa na potrzebwe po'kuliki se pin historians dowe kuja kufyo In terms of economy to learn ja si kama standard mesa Keli m considera nata si kama Ondo anything하는 Scale a nia. ho ki sa Iku Iku we didn't get away with her before. But I got my parents and my sponsors were there. So, we decided to meet up in Har Versa. So you completed her. Ya, it's true. So you guys have been dating for a long time. It's been 3 years. 3 years? What is that one thing you have learned from Felix for the last 3 years. He's a very self-reserved person.  Bro, muna mapenziya kuja yeka public? Ah, majiwa mafisi ni wengu. Majiwa watu watatu roga. Majiwa, kwanza mimi wuku shago kuetu wali sema si taha ewa bro. Ono ona. Ono ona ona ni kuna msena mrembo iwi. Suwata ni roga bro. Muna arego ena kufe bure na situja enjoy. Suwata ni kipiviu private inti oma wiche suwuku kuetu shago nama shosho wali sema si taha ekwana dem si taha ewa wasi jwe. Wakidu wa tani roga. Alright. So, mbibit kumalizia, one word to Akuku? Akuku, we are behind you. Ah, sorry. By the way, we are behind him, sindio? Nikizungumzuri, Akuku, we are behind you, not literally, but we are behind you. Tu me kuja support, we love you. And let's continue supporting each other, loving each other. Sita miyashida pekiyake na ata miyara apia. Sindio? Ama na mnaga ewa. Shasema bro. One word to Akuku? Um, I wish him all the best and quick recovery. Oh, wow. Yeah. Thank you so much. Akuna bati, I just say, I love you. Thank you so much. Mista, miss Feliko, to see you. Have a nice time. Thank you so much. Aya. Thank you.


Good morning guys and welcome to a new vlog. The sunglasses are working out. They're kind of weird because like everything's lighter because the tint is different. So it's not as like dark or like shaded as my other ones but I'm getting used to it. Also too, I can unlock my phone with my face. So I'm happy about that. Piper and I are on our way to grooming. And guys, this is like a side note. My hair is so dirty. I have to wash it today but I wanted to do it like just after our grooming appointment and I wanna give Piper like and myself a nice long walk today. So I might like go around the lake like the celebration lake for a bit. I would like to hit around 10,000 steps today because that's kind of what I average. Well, I average around 6,000 to 7,000 because of work and stuff. And I didn't go to cycle bar today because the timing just wouldn't have worked out with the grooming appointment. So I was like, okay, I guess I'll just, oh, look at the Pomeranian, he's so cute. Okay, anyway, the Pomeranian's crossing the road now. Since I didn't get to go to cycle bar today, I just wanted to do like, I just wanted to get movement in but I didn't really wanna go to the gym because 12, 3, 30, like I have a dog, like I could just walk her. So yeah, I might as well just go for like a longer distance and get my movement in that way today, even though it's not anything hardcore. My parents are starting this new health journey after Easter. So on Monday, they got these like, I guess the best way to describe it is like these cleansers for your gut. So I think it's mostly like a probiotic blend of something. I don't know, we got it on the cruise. So we're gonna start like our health journey. I'm not taking it because I didn't wanna like pay that to buy the probiotic stuff, but I'm just gonna watch what I eat a lot more. So I'm debating on just making chip and dip today. My regular lunch though, it does not change. That will never change. So yeah, anyway, I'm excited to do that. It was funny, cause like my aunt was like, oh Alex, have you lost weight? And I'm like, no, honestly, I think I've gained, but like I've pretty much maintained 130, surprisingly. So I don't know how that's happened. I mean, right now I'm eating like a pig cause like I feel like my period's gonna start any minute now. But I think just with my job and like somewhat being stressed out, like I just, I mean, I eat everything that I normally do. It's just I'm getting more exercise during the day, which is not exercise, but like, I mean, it's definitely more movement than like your average job. So I feel like that's kind of how I maintained. But with this new like health journey, I think my goal is to lose like five pounds because if I lost five pounds, I would be at 125. And that's like my target weight. Like that is my dream weight to weigh. And I know that's kind of weird, but like for my size and everything, like it's just, I think I'd be my most healthiest version of me. Okay, I'm just gonna add on. I feel like whenever I start vlogging in the car, when it's like after my work day or my work week, I just like wanna talk and I wanna like catch you guys up and like tell you what's up. That's why it's like always like a long clip in the car while I'm driving. So yeah, also too. I can never sleep in anymore. Like I feel like my body just got up at six AM and I'm like, why? So I went to bed at 11 too, so super weird. It's always the day after work I can't sleep in. So luckily I have like two days now to sleep in, at least a little bit more. Quick pee break before the usual Starbucks adventure. Guys, it was a venti type of day. I ended up getting the large one cause I didn't get coffee like two days last week on my weekends. I'm like, I'm making up for it with the giant one. We have like about 15 minutes before her appointment. At Piper's favorite place. She's always trying to escape here. She doesn't like it, but it's all right. We have the dog treats. There's my girl. Thank you Adriana. Oh, look at her, look at her. Oh, she's looks great. Thank you. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, is she crazy? She isn't. Okay, we're just around 5,000 steps. I don't know if we're actually gonna make it to 10,000 cause we've already walked to the high school from my house. This is celebration high school. I was like, this is kind of my plan. I don't know if it's actually gonna be 10,000 but we'll see. Yeah, it's just such a beautiful day. I swear it's like 80. Makes me wanna go to the pool. I might go to the pool today. I don't know, have to launch, we'll see. Such a good day. I think Piper's loving it, even though she looks kind of like her tails down, but it's fine. Okay, so I'm back home from the walk and I'm just putting some dishes away. But guys, we almost got to our 10,000 step goal. We have just a little bit. Well, this already was counted. Sorry, the TV's on. But look, I'm gonna hit it sometime today. But I didn't get all the way there. Piper was like so tired. She's being dramatic and panting. But anyway, that was a good workout. Got some movement in. Now I'm probably gonna snack on some chips because I deserve it. Good morning, guys. Good morning, guys. Happy Easter. Good morning, happy Easter. Oh, let me show Valerie. Happy Easter. Aw. And Valerie said give the vlog the update of why the baskets are here this year. Tell them why the baskets are here this year. They're here because we don't want Piper to get into them because it has chocolate. Right. Oh, you found, is this the hollow bunny? This is the hollow bunny. I didn't have to find it this year. Sometimes. Guys, you got three hollow bunnies. True, one, two. Oh, three. Oh, oh, Piper. Did Piper get a basket? Sorry. You're not the favorite. Look, my three eggs.  I love eggs, like I eat eggs every day. So I have a collection of like stone eggs. So one of the eggs was hidden between the egg. There's so much stuff in this house that it's actually kind of hard this year. Yeah, but it's actually hard to find. Like it's actually kind of challenging because you can never be too old to have an Easter egg. You cannot. Oh, so it's guaranteed cash. I hope this audio is like good for you guys. Piper couldn't get the chocolate. So she came out before you and ran around and got the eggs and she opened it and got him a chocolate. Disaster. Disaster. So how many eggs am I looking for? 14. One, two, three. Well, that's guaranteed 14 dollars. That's true. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. She has a bunny hidden this year. I can tell by replacements. Why? There's nothing on the floor. No, it's a hair ball. Oh, okay. Do I look all right, bundle of costume? I need to do the floors today. At least the... Hardest floors. Well, we had to go, so hurry up and get eggs. I know. How many do you have now? Five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. 10, I'll help you. So Piper and I are on our way to Starbucks because I'm gonna use some of my Easter money to buy it. I was like, can't forget the cash because it would be something that I would do, like forget the cash. So it's kind of funny, but we're gonna go through the drive-thru Starbucks, like the one not in town because I just don't want to have to get out and like, I just want to give the money and then like get the change and whatever. So we're gonna go to the one a little bit farther away, but that's fine. I'm gonna get this little Piper over here, a pup cup because it is Easter. She didn't eat all over breakfast this morning, but it's fine. I'm sure she'll eat it a little later. I just can't forget to get my like rewards, like my stars because when I pay with like cash or like an external card, I always forget to like get my rewards. That's why most of the time, that's why I like to do the mobile orders. The funniest thing happened, so when the girl is taking my order, she's like, oh my gosh, why is your dog so small?  And she's like, I have a Palm Ski.  And I was like, oh my gosh. And then I was like, and I have your same Discover card because she had like the phone wallet thing on the back. So I saw that she had a pink Discover card, the one that looks like mine. And I was like, oh, and we had the same credit card too.  I'm like, oh, I know. See, like, you know, because I'm paying in cash, if I get like some change or whatever, I might leave it today because she was actually like super nice. And I'm like, and Starbucks has my art. She's like, yeah, I know, I love it. So it was funny. And yeah, I don't know. I just had a really good experience at the drive-thru just now, which is like so crazy. It's not like I've had bad experiences. It's just like, this one was like different, you know? It was like a nicer, you know, one. Piper, are you excited to get your popcorn? All right. Oh, snap. The lens. Okay, Piper. Happy Easter. Oh, good girl. I love it when her paw like comes up. You literally just watch Piper all day. But unfortunately that's not a job. I love the Stanley because it works perfect as a tripod, but I did the floors. I swear having a Pomsky or any dog that sheds for that matter is like every week, no matter what, I have to like clean the floors. It's really annoying, but it comes with the territory. And I just unloaded the dishwasher. I've just been watching YouTube, a little bit of TikTok and just relaxing. And as weird as it sounds, like I really don't mind doing housework because it's kind of relaxing, but I hate dusting, so I don't do that. And that's probably why it's like, it's not the cleanest like when it comes to like the dust, but like the floors, dishes, that sort of stuff, laundry. I really don't mind, so that's what I've been doing. I'm gonna finish up putting some of these dishes away and then I'm gonna just make myself a salad, I think, because yeah, that's like 12. I'm gonna do that. Okay, so the camera's at a little bit of an angle because of the straw, but I'm gonna crack open this baby. I'm not gonna obviously eat the whole thing, but I always have a little bit of the chocolate bunnies on Easter, at least just like one of them. I had some chips, a salad, and a turkey, so that's what I had for lunch. I'm thinking about filming what, I was gonna do a get ready with me. I was thinking about doing one for TikTok, but then I was like, no, I think I wanna do a separate video, so I have like two videos going up this week, because I hate just posting once a week, so I might just make a separate get ready with me for Easter. Then again, I was debating on even getting ready for Easter, because like, I don't know, half of me does and then half of me doesn't, but I might as well just to have fun with it, but here's a little bunny. And as you guys know, I like the hollow ones. I feel like the solid bunnies are just like too dense, so I just, I don't know, I like the hollow ones. Okay guys, so I am all changed and ready. I did a little get ready with me video, so if you haven't seen that, either it's going up or it's already up, but I'm just wearing this dress. It's giving Easter. I haven't worn it on Easter. And then I'm just wearing my white sneakers, cause yeah, I don't know. I didn't wanna wear heels cause it's just too uncomfortable, but I got a cute pick. I'm gonna caption it, peeps the outfit, because I saw this TikTok and it was like good captions for Easter and so I watched it and I'm like, oh, I like that one. Yeah, I'm gonna post that, probably when we're on our way to my cousin's house. We are gonna be getting on the road soon. All right, I made it to my cousin's house and I had to start the vlog because look at Remy, stop, look at me. Good boy, look at his little donut. Look at him, look at him, look at him, look at him. He's so funny, oh my goodness. I'm just kidding, there's Fraser, a good old boy. You haven't been in the vlog yet Steph, but we're not matching this time cause on Thanksgiving we were. Yeah, we should have. There's cousin Bailey, anyway we're gonna start eating so I wanna like show the spreads. Bunny ears, I'm fixing my belt. All right, go. Drifted dress from the 90s, don't know the brands. Drifted belt, don't know the brands. Coach, pillow, tabby, very stunning. Drifted boots, don't know the brand. Bunny ears, bunny ears, someone from my mom's house. I don't like it, it's my mom's. Oh, that's your mom's? Yeah, cross, I got it in Casadega. And everyone just talking about Casadega, we should go there, we should do like a family day. There's not much to do. We can see a psychic, Valerie has a psychic friend there. Yeah, I'm loving the fishtail, we didn't get the detail of the hair. No, it's not, I like, oh, okay. Anyway. Well, that's good. Let's eat. I wanna show you guys, camera eats first always. Oh, you're good, you got some action shots. There's Valerie. Anyway, I wanna show you, do a little overview and then I'm gonna start digging in. Look at how good this looks. Hey, Zika. And then, look at this cute table decor. The little carrots. Begin for the vlog, ready? In three, two, one. I'm just gonna do it with my hands. So, if anyone, if you want. Brock has already done his. Bro, back to the, someone's trying with his homemade pickled eggs. We just got done dying the Easter eggs and this is gonna be the next game. We're ready. Perry, you wanna explain it? You pull a string. We'll start, baby. Whoever we want to start. All right. Zika will start him. Wait, you pull a string and that's the number. You, yep. Four, then I have to find number four. Digging, me next. Y'all finally like it. Ooh, dig it. So great. Shots. Oh, what is it? What's number five? Number five. Nice. Whoa, that's a good one, too. Cool. The twin machine shaped the deck. Oh, I didn't know now you did a broccoli sticker. Yeah, it's still a pool. We're ready. Digging dino. Oh. Oh, I get a whole bag. Yeah, I know. Potato head tarts. Potato head tarts. All right, Naco's bubble bubbles or bubble bath? Bubble solution. Oh, sorry, Valerie. 11. 11. You do know that. No. Oh. It's two, it's two and one. Two. That's cool. No, this is a fun game. All right, who's up next? Who hasn't gone yet? Who better? You can go ahead. Oh my gosh, how cute. Are you the best? I love that. Well, hey, you could bring that to 4th of July. Oh, I love that. That is so cute.  Oh, look at that screening table. I'm gonna keep looking at what we're going to get. Oh, it's a... Oh, the mini- Mini-verse, you make miniature foods. You make miniature food. Kind of the coolest thing of all, I have a reflection, I'll show you guys that one. I make miniature food. Yeah. Thank you. I don't need it. Yeah. That's good. What is it? Eight. Ah, the best number. The best number. No, thank you. Well, one is the loneliest number, you know. You have done it? Oh, cool. Ah! So, make it mini food. I gotta figure out what this is. Oh, it's a... Chicksauce. Wait, Chicksauce? Oh, yeah. Wait, what's that today? Well, let me see double-head diner real quick. Mine are here. I'll show you. Whoa. My little one. Oh, double-head diner. Oh. Double-head diner, baby. I don't know. Bailey has to go and you have to go. Okay. One, two, three. Oh, we don't know. I got the orange one. I got the orange one. I got one. I got numbers, nine. Oh, my God, that's so cute. And Paris double-head diner. You can trade me for what's in yours. I don't know. Oh, I probably want to keep it now. Oh, yeah. It goes straight in already. Oh, I didn't look at what sticker I got. Oh, I didn't get a sticker, did I? Yeah, you did. Oh, nice. I got a sticker. What? Ooh. It's a water bottle. It's a water bottle? I think it's a water bottle. That's cute. Yeah. It's a water bottle. Tomatoes. Oh, not for me. I got the tomatoes I traded. Cute. That's cool. You always need to be talking to them. Keep that in mind. I just got it from the non-credit you gave me. Oh, my goodness.  I can't wait to look at these.


Hello everyone, I am Dr. S. Shankaran, a faculty member in the Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering IIT Madras. I will be offering the online course on fundamentals of optical and scanning electron microscopy. It is a first course at the undergraduate level on the microstructural characterization of materials. The course will cover the principles and techniques of optical and scanning electron microscopy with demonstrations of instrumentation details and experiments through videos. This course also will cover the sample preparations for optical and scanning electron microscopy and also we will deal with practical examples. This course will be useful if you are pursuing an undergraduate program in basic science or engineering who deals with material characterization or microstructural details or topology of materials in nature. Thank you.


The truth about TEFL for non-native English-speaking teachers Sometimes non-native English speakers are discouraged in their pursuit of teaching English as a foreign language With the right TEFL certification course and training, anyone who is a fluent English speaker can also be a great teacher There is really no reason for non-native English speakers to worry as the following alumni report will clearly show This post was written by RITTT graduate Lola H. I chose this topic because I am not a native English speaker And being a non-native English speaking teacher, in my case in South Korea, has its advantages, but also some disadvantages I will develop the disadvantages first, then introduce the advantages English proficiency First of all, if you are not a native English speaking teacher, you have to prove that you have got the required language level to teach English, which is usually not required for a native English speaker For a few months, some parents would regularly question my abilities or ask how it is possible for me to be French and speak English Even though it could be very stressful, I did my best to prove to them that I had the required level to teach their children It took some time, but once they noticed their children's progress and heard the good things their children would say about me, the questioning eventually stopped Nobody knows everything Also, being a non-native English speaking teacher could lead to awkward situations when a student asks for something that I do not know Even though I am fluent, there are still some words or grammar points that I do not know or that I do not always remember, especially the ones that are not used on a daily basis When that happens, I tell them that I do not remember and that I will look for the information to be able to give them an accurate answer as soon as possible That is an awkward situation, but I do not lie as I believe lying could lead to an unhealthy relationship with the students Being able to trust each other is, in my opinion, a big factor that helps to maintain a good atmosphere in the class and that keeps the teacher-student relationship healthy You can relate to your students Besides these disadvantages, being a non-native English speaking teacher obviously has advantages as well As a non-native English speaker, I also had to learn English, which makes it easy to understand the student's struggles as I had to face the same issues at some points in my life I can, therefore, understand the student's frustrations and I believe it is easier to help them overcome these feelings for someone who had to face the same problems than for someone who did not struggle I have some students who sometimes want to give up because they feel like they are behind the group or because they do not understand some grammar points When that happens, I remind them that I also went through this that for years I have been saying poop instead of pop and would not know the difference between throw up and throw away But that today I am a certified English teacher By saying this, students realize that they can relate to me, that I understand them and that learning English is possible even though it is a long journey It makes them gain confidence and motivation, which I believe is a very important factor in learning a language You can anticipate the student's problems Also, being a non-native English speaking teacher makes it easier to anticipate the mistakes the students could make when learning a new grammar point as I probably made the same once years ago This advantage is, in my opinion, pretty important as I know what to highlight during a lesson in order to avoid these mistakes, which I believe saves a lot of time and allows the students to spend more time being creative during the activate phase of a lesson Non-native English speaking teachers rule To conclude, I would say that I believe that the advantages of being a non-native English speaking teacher really outweigh the disadvantages as being a non-native English speaker gives the teacher more empathy toward the students which creates a healthy, beautiful relationship between them Are you ready to teach English abroad? Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months To speak with an ITTT advisor today, to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 To speak with an ITTT advisor today


It's the end of the world for a drug syndicate that has been rounded up by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA. Officials say they arrested a Brazil-based kingpin and intercepted 36 blocks of cocaine, weighing 28 kilograms, with a street value of more than 8 billion naira. Acotic agents at the Mutala Mohammed International Airport first intercepted a bag two weeks and arrested a man who came to clean the luggage. A follow-up sting operation led to the arrest of the kingpin, Ejo Forph-Philix. And the prime suspect had confessed $24,000 in bribes to compromise NDLEA officials.


Another chapter in the story of Operation Atlantic Resolve closed on September 17th as military and civilian leadership in and around the town of Drosko-Pomorski, Poland, said goodbye to their summer training partners. The troops of Delta Company, second of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, Airborne, have been working small-unit tactics shoulder-to-shoulder with the Polish Army since late June. After exchanging gifts and praise with the mayor of Drosko-Pomorski and the head of Polish Land Forces Training, Company Commander Matthew McCarthy offered them his thanks. I am proud and humbled and I thank you that I'm allowed to call you friends as well as allies. Operation Atlantic Resolve is ongoing and has encompassed over 20 land, air and sea exercises so far. Sergeant Dan LaGrosso, Drosko-Pomorski, Poland.


Every time Steam sets up one of its next fests, promises to be busy and this latest one was no different. Join me as I do a quick rundown of the demos that left an impression on me one way or the other. And if you'd like more content like this, don't forget to let me know in the comments. A subscription would also mean a lot, but not getting one is okay too. Let us let me tell you all about some exciting games coming very soon indeed. Darkest Dungeon 2. Darkest Dungeon 2 is shaping up to be everything I was hoping for, a real twist and a beloved formula that keeps to the rhythm of the brutal tactical combat of the original game. narrator Wayne June is back and he's bringing so much fresh cosmic lore into the mix. The one boss I fought against shows that boss design is razor sharp but red hook studios once more. It's bound to test even the most hopeful among us as we travel towards the newer shinier, more awful and supposedly even more darkest dungeon, with so much to explore, I can hardly wait until May the 8th. If you want to find out more about my impressions, I've actually done a video on Darkest Dungeon 2. A link should be posted in the description System Shock. The world of System Shock is fully realized cyberpunk horror, with all the freedom you'd expect from the granddaddy of interactive sims, and to me this demo is a masterclass in inducing a slow moving sense of dread. I've heard of Shodan, but to get my first glimpses of her in this remake, my hair's to the ends. I can't wait to experience the gauntlet one of the best written AIs in gaming is going to put me through, and it's not going to be long at all until I have the chance. This remake should be out in March marking the end of the year, but it's not going to be long at all until I have the chance. This remake should be out in March marking whatever date it pops up on as a very exciting time for me. I played the demo for close to two hours and I didn't even manage to wrap up the first zone. It kept me up until after two in the morning. If that's anything to judge the finished remake by, this is going to be a chunky game. I hope to the gods this one is successful. The immersive sim genre has long been in decline, but if any one genre deserves a renaissance and many many titles, it's this one. I think I'll be buying System Shock on release, even if I'm not sure how long it will be before I give this game the time of day. The sad realities of being a grad student. I did put a full video out for this one. You can check it out on my channel. Oxygen. Not to be mistaken with Clay's title, Oxygen Not Included. Oxygen is a game about a planet where oxygen is very much not included. Am I proud of that joke? Perhaps. I spent little time with this survival city builder, but more than enough to take a few lessons away. This is a challenging game that does not forgive mistakes. If you're anything like me, preferring to do it alone, you'll be forced to restart. Oxygen won't go easy just because it's your first time. As far as interface goes, it reminded me of an obsession many citizen ados will have shared at one point or another, Frostbunk. Although, I don't believe it will have the roleplay and morality elements that Frostbunk did. I didn't have a whole lot of time with Oxygen and I doubt I'll pick it up, but that's not because I'm not interested. It's because I very rarely have time for survival games of any kind, whether those be survival citizens or proper survival first persons. Next up, Fabledome. One title in the genre I will definitely be picking up is Fabledome. This fantasy city builder slash kingdom manager has charm to spare, without any of the stress that something like Oxygen offers up. If System Shock had me at my tenses and most engaged, Darkest Dungeon 2 at my most cultisty and Planet of Lana at my most tender, Fabledome definitely introduced the most significant element of chill to my demo diet. As you might guess from this video, it's not something I possessed too much of. Fabledome had a whole lot to offer in this vertical slice of gameplay. And outside being able to construct fantasy buildings, houses, wells, kilns and lumber mills, farms and mines, you can also expand from one zone into those surrounding it. This means there will be a whole lot of expanding to be done. And I'm eager to test the limits of just how many hundreds of peasants you can stack up in mediocre living conditions in Scourler before they come up with the guillotine. You're not just managing your kingdom, you're actively building it up. There will be the elements of military exploration and conquest as well. So those were strictly closed off in the demo, and there is even a strategic layer which allows you to communicate with other kingdoms and Romans, other rulers, because every prince needs a princess, or another prince, or every princess needs another princess. Playing Fabledome made me happy. I can't wait until this early axis launches later this quarter. Dreadful River Here was something I had not seen before, a violent and deadly boat manager.  Said kingdom is about to get real, run down with rebels, brigands and opportunists. What you've got to do is protect the Eternal Crown, your sacred ride and responsibility.  There's an aspect of exploration, plenty of challenge and lots of micromanaging your guardsmen, who come in at least five varieties, bowmen, lances, swordsmen, warlocks and others. Your boat is liable to see many an upgrade, as you travel down the river in search of better fortunes and a cure for what else they land. I wish it were a breezier ride, but it's not.  Yet before I knew it, I'd gotten a scrap that saw my king's bodyguards dying despite my best efforts. Till I'd started as the hunter, I all too quickly became the prey, losing my life and the sacred duty to protect the Eternal Crown. It's a challenging pretty to look at game and a lark. What's more, it was different, and though I may not be the target audience for it, I suspect it will find its audience, one extremely happy with developer Sher AI's efforts on Red Bull River. Perseus Titan Slayer. I enjoyed playing Perseus Titan Slayer, but thought it was severely underbaked. It released just as Steam Next Fest was winding down to my honest surprise. Despite the fact that the game is currently listed as very positive in Steam, a quick read of the reviews will show a lot of the positive ones are lukewarm, rather than ebullient. It is the cheap, however. That might be helping its case. My full impressions of the demo are available in a video that did a whole lot better than I expected. Most of mine can barely make it to 100, but that's around the 400 view mark. Nothing for anyone who's anyone in this platform, but I take pride in growth, no matter how small. You should go check it out if you'd like to know more about this particular title. We're going to end up on a high note with Planet of Lana. The 25 minutes of Planet of Lana's demo passed by without notice. This is a game that knows the value of silence that can set the mood through its environmental storytelling and ambient sounds, and that, most importantly, is a labor of love. With some games you can just tell. Planet of Lana is one of them. The game is slated for release over the second quarter of 2023, and trust me when I tell you, I will be there when it releases and I will be playing it. If the rest of the game is as good as this, I suspect it might be a personal game of the year contended for me. I've spoken extensively about the demo in a video all its own. You can find it on my channel. I'm beyond proud of it, and I do believe it deserves your eyeballs. Not views. Eyeballs. That's it. Well, I also played a game called Inkbound, but I genuinely can't think of a way to talk about it without necessarily mean comparisons to better games. How do I feel the need to do so? If you enjoyed this video, please share it with your friends, like it, and, you know, do all that YouTube algorithmic stuff and things that helps me grow. I'm just kidding. I'll never grow. But that's fine. I'll see you next time. I'm Philip Magnus. Bye!


Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to the channel. My name is Laura, and this is Laura's Little Library. Today's video, I'm gonna just kind of briefly go over some of the best books, some of my favorite books every week that I've been reading for the past month and a half, as well as some of the worst books. So, if you're new to the channel, I have been doing this spooky themed reading extravaganza since the middle of September, and each week has been a different theme, and I've been vlogging at all, and so you can go back and watch all those vlogs. I am about to start my last week of witches, so those books will not be included as I have not yet read them, but all the way up until that point, I have read all of these books, and I am going to just go through some of my favorites and some of my not-so-favorites. So, the very first week that I read was Horror Slash Thriller, and this is a fairly new genre for me, and I couldn't choose specifically a favorite. I loved both of these, House of Hollow and Mexican Gothic. I loved them both. They are both very unique and interesting, and so I couldn't really choose one over the other. Maybe House of Hollow's slightly a little bit more, but I think both of them definitely earned the title of being my favorite for that week, and yeah, I mean I didn't have any least favorites. The next week was Dark Academia, and my favorite was by far A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. I loved everything about this from the unique main character as well as the amazing setting, and I just went through this so quickly, and I really want the second book now because I loved this one so much. I didn't, again, I didn't really have a least favorite for this week. I think my lowest rated of the week was Ace of Spades, but it definitely does not. It's still 4.5 stars, so Dark Academia was a good week for me, so there again, I don't really have one to say this was a least favorite. Then after that was Werewolf Week, and my favorite that I read was Red Wolf, and this is a Little Red Riding Hood retelling where Little Red Riding Hood is the werewolf, and she actually protects her village, and they don't know that she protects her village. But this one I absolutely loved both as a retelling and just as a story. It had such great spooky vibes, but also fall vibes and kind of winter vibes. All the vibes were there for this book, so this was definitely a favorite, but this week did have a least favorite. I actually DNF'd Hound of God. I could not get past 60 pages. I was really disliking everything about the book. There was nothing good that I liked, so I DNF'd it, and this is my least favorite of the Shapeshifter Week. Then after that was Ghost Week, and again, I have two favorites for this one because they're both favorites for different reasons, but I couldn't choose between one or the other, so I loved City of Ghosts. I loved this one and kind of the world building that they did, and the setting in Edinburgh was phenomenal, and it just was such greatly cold, creepy ghost vibes, whereas the Ghost and Apartment 2 are. I loved because of its cultural significance, how so many different cultures, mythologies, and ideas were presented in this book, and it was just culturally pretty diverse, and so I really appreciated that, especially in the middle grade. So these were my two favorites, and my least favorite, again, this book was not a bad book, it was just the lowest rated, and that was The Summoning, and this is the first in a trilogy, so I do plan to continue the trilogy, but yeah, it wasn't a bad book. I think it was just a little old, and I had different expectations going into it. And lastly, the last book, or the last week that I did was Vampire Week, was Bloodsuckers Week, and my favorite by far was Fangs, this adorable little comic. It is the relationship between a vampire and a werewolf, and I will not ever stop talking about this book, because I loved it so much. It was adorable, it was amazing, I wish there was more, but I also loved everything that we got of it, so just so cute, and I love the art, it's perfect. And then my least favorite for Vampire Week was the Southern Book Club's Guide to Saying Vampires.  I just had a lot of issues with pacing and information that was unnecessary or just stalling, but again, still a solid book. So yeah, those are all the tops and bottoms so far of the Reading and Striving Ants. I know this video was kind of short and sweet, but I just kind of wanted to give you an update of some of the books that I would recommend for spooky season, especially as Halloween is drawing closer. I would hope that everyone is reading a somewhat spooky book that they love or hope to love. So here were some recommendations for it, and maybe some ones to help you choose other books. But thank you all so much for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, comment down below what you plan to be reading this spooky season. I would love to know what you're going to read on and around Halloween. Subscribe if you haven't. I make new videos every Thursday, and I'm also posting bonus videos like this one on Tuesdays. And that might be something I carry through to November, so comment down below if you're interested in getting two videos a week from me. Also, I recently hit 100 subscribers, and so I'm currently gathering questions from you guys to celebrate with a little Q&A video. So if you have any questions for me, put them down below, and maybe I will include them. Thank you all so much for watching, and until I see you in the next video, I wish you happy spooky reading.


literally both not surprised and outraged by the news reported death of Alexei Navalny. He bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, and all the all the bad things that the Putin government was doing. In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sent him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn't stop him from calling out Putin's lies. Even in prison, he was a powerful voice for the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it. And he could have lived safely in exile after the assassination attempt on him in 2020, which nearly killed him, I might add. But he was traveling outside the country at the time. Instead, he returned to Russia. He returned to Russia knowing he'd likely be imprisoned or even killed if he continued his work. But he did it anyway because he believed so deeply in his country in Russia. Reports of his death that they're true, and I have no reason to believe it or not, Russian authorities are going to tell their own story. But make no mistake, make no mistake. Putin is responsible for Navalny's death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin's brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. Putin does not only target his citizens of other countries, as we've seen in what's going on in Ukraine right now. He also inflicts terrible crimes on his own people. And as people across Russia and around the world are mourning Navalny today because he was so many things that Putin was not. He was brave. He was principled. He was dedicated to building a Russia where the rule of law existed and of where it applied to everybody. Navalny believed in that Russia, that Russia. He knew it was the cause worth fighting for and obviously even dying for. This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment. We had to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself. Again, Putin's vicious onslaughts and war crimes. You know, there was a bipartisan Senate vote that passed overwhelmingly in the United States Senate to fund Ukraine. Now, as I've said before, and I mean this in a literal sense, history is watching. History is watching the House of Representatives. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten. It's going to be down in the pages of history. It really is. It's consequential. And the clock is ticking. And this has to happen. We have to help now. You know, we have to realize what we're dealing with with Putin. All of us should reject


So, for a while, I've had a debate with myself about who I believe is actually more nefarious with respect to GOP leaders. Is it Donald Trump who is propagating this big lie that is harming democracy? Or is it someone like Ron DeSantis who is more politically savvy and can probably pull off all of the bad things that Trump wanted to pull off but couldn't because he was too incompetent?  I think that in many ways we dodged a bullet as a country, you know, despite the damage that Trump caused, because Trump himself just wasn't able to pull off what he wanted to. But someone like Ron DeSantis, I think he could do real damage. And today, I'm sure of it that now Ron DeSantis is absolutely unquestionably more dangerous than Donald Trump. And this story really solidified this view in my mind. So as the Washington Post's Lori Rosa and Beth Reinhardt explain, a plan by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would establish a police force to oversee state elections, the first of its kind in the nation. And while his fellow Republicans have reacted tepidly, voting rights advocates fear that it will become law and be used to intimidate voters. The proposed office of election crimes and security would be part of the Department of State, which answers to the governor. DeSantis is asking the GOP controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to investigate, detect, apprehend and arrest anyone for an alleged violation of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified field offices throughout the state and act on tips from government officials or any other person. DeSantis highlighted his plan as legislators opened their annual 60 day session last week. Voting rights experts say that no state has such an agency, one dedicated to patrolling elections and empowered to arrest suspected violators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the formation of a 2021 Texas election integrity unit in October. But that office is more limited in scope, has fewer than 10 employees and isn't under the governor's authority. So what could go wrong? I mean, I'm sure that there's no way that this could possibly be abused. Nope. Look, let me be very clear, voter fraud is not an issue. To the extent that voter fraud is found, it is statistically insignificant. It doesn't happen frequently enough to actually change elections. And when we do find actual evidence of voter fraud, more often than not, it seems like it's the Republicans who are committing it. So this is them trying to create a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. And it's a thinly veiled attempt to consolidate his power. This is encroaching fascism. Fascists are authoritarian and they find ways constantly to increase the power that they have. And this is what Ron DeSantis is doing. He's much more covert and insidious in the ways that he tries to undermine democracy, at least in his state of Florida. But while he does things like this, in true fascist fashion, he'll claim that Florida is actually the freest state in the country. But that's part of fascism.  You lie. You frame your opponents as both weak and strong at the same time. I mean, we are seeing fascism in the United States. And it's not very explicit at this point, but that is rapidly changing. We're seeing the GOP devolve from proto-fascists to outright violent fascists to wear a significant portion of the GOP's base actually believes that outright violence is necessary in order to go forward as a country in order to enact political change. So once you have a portion of the population think that democracy itself is no longer the most effective way to effect change in your country, that's when they resort to violence. And increasingly, we are seeing that. And when you have the GOP's leaders egging them on, some of them like Marjorie Green antagonizing for civil war. And when you have people like Ron DeSantis trying to consolidate his power to more effectively attack his political opponents and create these pseudo investigations into issues that don't actually exist. These are all signs of encroaching fascism. Now I want to go to an op-ed written by Abby Zemet of Common Dreams because she explains how this authoritarianism for Ron DeSantis is nothing new. She writes, Hair DeSantis, who once considered forming his own private militia, asked the GOP led legislature for six million for the new stormtroopers in a state of the state address teaming with Fridemi Bilge. Florida is the freest state in the United States, standing as freedom's vanguard for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary, and seemingly never-ending mandates due to a coercive biomedical apparatus in blind adherence to Faucian declarations. But Florida is a free state that has stood strong as the rock of freedom. Fascistic but strong. Like many of his GOP fellow travelers, DeSantis has long indulged his autocratic impulses from fighting court battles against tyrannical masks and vaccines to pushing a gonzo bill to prohibit schools from making white people feel discomfort to passing multiple laws making it harder for people, oddly, mostly brown and black, to vote in a state where over 40% of the populace vote by mail. The laws restrict absentee ballot drop boxes, toughen ID rules for mail-in ballots, and forbid giving water to voters in long lines to, y'know, keep them free. Democracy as wingnut reality show, DeSantis even made news of his signing the laws, now facing a court challenge, a Fox News exclusive. All this in a state he touted in 2020 as the gold standard of election integrity. After Trump wanted crowning, the way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence. So on one hand, he says that the way that Florida does it, it's the gold standard. The way that we do it inspires confidence of our voters. They feel as if their vote counts. But on another hand, we need to have this new police agency that I specifically will control so that way we can inspire confidence in our elections. Make it make sense. It doesn't make sense because he's using this as an excuse to consolidate his power. Trump is not as dangerous as DeSantis. And it's difficult to say that knowing that Trump delegitimized American democracy, which is a pretty significant thing to do. But DeSantis, if he were in power, he could do things that Trump only dreamed up. So when we see this feud between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis play out, I hope that they end up taking each other out somehow by battling each other and delegitimizing one another. But either way, I mean, it's not good regardless of who comes out on top as the next de facto GOP leader. But DeSantis is more dangerous. And I think that stories like this prove it.  And that may be the case. But DeSantis hides all the things that he wants to do. And it's not like he's doing that good of a job at hiding it, right? Because this is pretty explicit to want a new agency to practically intimidate voters. But still, normal Americans, they don't see it. It's not explicit to them as Trump is. So this is something that I think we have to watch out for. Ron DeSantis is a dangerous actor. Arguably one of the most dangerous individuals in the country. And we have to absolutely do everything in our power as a country to stop him from gaining power. Because if he were to ever become the president of the United States, which is possible, then I mean, we're more doomed than we are currently. Everyone else is tremendous. Many people are saying this. Join today, folks. You won't regret it.