Hey, folks. My name is Adi Osmani, and welcome to Optimizing for Core Web Vitals. So today, we're going to talk about optimizing user experiences on the web with a case study on French luxury fashion house, Chloe. Chloe recently been taking a fresh look at web performance, and I'm really excited to share their learnings with you. Now, you may have seen Google Search announce an upcoming search ranking change recently that incorporates page experience metrics. Now, these metrics include the Core Web Vitals, which, together with a few other signals, paint a pretty holistic picture about the quality of user experiences on a page. But what are the Core Web Vitals, and how do you go about optimizing for them? Well, Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. Now, these three aspects of user experience are measured using three metrics. So first of all, we have largest contentful paint, which measures loading performance. Next up, we have first input delay, which measures interactivity. And last, we've got cumulative layout shift, which measures layout stability. Let's kick things off by talking about cumulative layout shift, or CLS. Now, CLS is a pretty important metric for measuring visual stability, because it helps quantify all those times when we see really surprising shifts in the content on a page. And it helps make sure that the page is as delightful as possible. Have you ever been reading, like, an article online, when, all of a sudden, something suddenly changes on the page? And without warning, the text moves, and you've lost your place. That's literally what happens. A giant chicken kicks your content away. And he has no regrets. Look at him. He's basically CLS. So what causes poor CLS? Well, first of all, we've got images without dimensions, ads, embeds, or iframes without dimensions, dynamically injected content, and web fonts that might cause a flash of unstyled content. Now, as I mentioned, Chloe is a French luxury fashion house, and it's become a bit of a go-to brand, not just for luxury apparel, but also handbags, and fragrances, and things like that. And they have recently been focused on improving cumulative layout shifts on all their main pages, so their homepage, their product listings page, and their product details page. Through a bunch of work, they've been able to reduce their CLS all the way down to zero, which is about as perfect as you can get. So how did they get here? This is the before view of the Chloe home page, where we can observe a number of surprising layout shifts due to elements on the page not following CLS best practices. So let's dive into a few tips that worked well here. First off, always include width and height size attributes on your images and video elements. Alternatively, you can always do things like reserve the required space with CSS aspect ratio boxes, but in general, this approach just makes sure that the browser can allocate the correct amount of space in the document while the image is loading. So here's a demo of this in action. These are some images that don't have width and height specified, and what you see happening is that they're pushing content in the page all the way down. This is something that's reflected in our tools like Lighthouse, and I've got a little bit of a clip out here. You can see the Lighthouse report where CLS is in the red and not quite where we want it to be. So how do we address this? Well, in the early days of the web, developers would add width and height attributes all over the place. They'd add them to their image tags. They'd make sure that they kept enough space allocated on the page before browsers would start fetching images. That was great because it would minimize reflow and relay out. Now, when responsive web design was introduced, developers began to omit these width and height attributes, and they started to use CSS to resize their images instead. One of the downsides to this approach is that space could only be allocated for an image once it began to download. And at that point, the browser could determine its dimensions. As images load in in that old world, the page would reflow as each image appears on the screen. And a lot of us got used to our text suddenly popping down the screen, which wasn't a very great user experience. And this is where aspect ratio comes in. So the aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. It's pretty common to see this expressed as two numbers separated by a colon. So for example, 16 colon 9 or 4 colon 3. For an x colon y aspect ratio, the image is x units wide and y units high. What that means is that if we know one of the dimensions, the other one can be determined. So for a 16 to 9 aspect ratio, if dress.jpg has got a 360 px height, the width is 360 multiplied by 16 over 9, which gives us 640 px. I'm not very good at math, so hopefully that was helpful. Now, modern browsers now set the default aspect ratio of images based on an images width and height attributes. So it's really valuable to set them if you want to avoid those layout shifts. This is a change in modern browsers. And it's all thanks to the CSS working group. They've done some work that basically allows us to just set width and height as normal. And this calculates an aspect ratio based on the width and height that attributes before the image is loaded. So what we're seeing on screen here, this is something that's added to the default style sheet of all browsers. And it calculates aspect ratio based on the elements width and height attributes. So as long as you're providing width and height, the aspect ratio can be calculated and everything will hopefully avoid layout shifts. So this is a great best practice to be following. This is also something that works well with responsive images. So with source set, you're generally defining images that you want to allow the browser to select between. You can define sizes for those images. To make sure that your image width and height attributes can be set, just make sure that each image is using the same aspect ratio. And here's that demo once again with width and height attributes added. Notice that in a modern browser, you won't see any layout shifts there and the user will get a much more pleasant experience. So another reminder, set those width and height attributes as much as you can. Here's the impact that this change has on Lighthouse. As we can see before, we went from a CLS of 0.36, so we're in the red, all the way back to something that's a little bit better. There were one or two other things in this page that could have been improved, but on the whole, we've had a relatively significant impact on reducing layout shift. You might be wondering, how can I figure out what elements on my page are contributing to CLS? We've got you covered. So in Lighthouse, we have an avoid large layout shifts audit that highlights the top DOM elements contributing most of the CLS to the page. So check out that audit. In DevTools, we also have a good story here. So if you're using the DevTools performance panel, it has an experience section that can help you detect unexpected layout shifts. Super helpful for finding and fixing visual instability issues. They get highlighted in this experience section with some kind of reddish, pinkish layout shift records. And if you click on one of those records, you'll be able to get more details about, what was the score? Where did this element move to and from? Really great diagnostics to help you nail down how to fix your CLS. So Chloe's approach to image loading is that they use a skeleton pattern with a SAS CSX mixin called bruschetta loading. Bruschetta is one of those things that are a little bit of a luxury to me during quarantine. They're right up there with toilet paper and antibacterial soap. But let's stick with bruschetta loading. So this is Chloe's approach to image loading. They have a parent container with a color similar to the final image that's being loaded. Now, lazy loading strategies like this where you have a little bit of a preview of what's finally gonna be shown are sometimes referred to as a low quality image placeholders. You can use a predominant color from the final image. You can use a low resolution image. Sometimes people will use like a one pixel by one pixel image or something like 10 pixel by 10 pixel, something very low resolution that just gives you a preview of what's finally gonna be displayed. Now, lazy loading strategies like this which either use a color or that kind of placeholder, they don't strictly improve largest contentful paint but they do improve perceived performance. So they can still be pretty good for the user experience. Now, what Chloe did here in addition to using this skeleton loading approach was that they do use responsive images and they do make sure that they're setting dimensions on their images as well to avoid CLS. Let's shift things up. Let's go on to the next tip.  Ideally, you wanna make sure that you're giving any of that content a container that is not going to just bounce out of and suddenly cause shifts in the page. A related tip to this one is avoid inserting new content above existing content. Unless it's in reaction to a user interaction you wanna make sure that any layout shifts in your page are ones that you are making a conscious decision around and like occur as expected. So let's try to visualize this. Here's an example of a promo where we're dynamically injected into the page, we haven't reserved space and it's just pushed everything all the way down. We can see this reflected in our lighthouse call out at the bottom of the screen. Now, this is something that very typically happens with ads, iframes, promos, and these types of assets can sometimes be the largest contributors to layout shifts on the web. Now, many ad networks and publishers will often support dynamic ad sizes and ad sizes that are dynamic or something that can sometimes increase revenue because you're giving people a lot of flexibility around what can go inside your ad slots but it can also be something that can potentially negatively impact the user experience by pushing things down. So that's something that you want to avoid. So how do we approach this? Well, one solution to the problem is statically reserving space for the slot. So you can make sure that you're defining a container for these ads or embed frames so that regardless of what goes inside you're not shifting the content of the page around. So here I've got a container where I've set my width and my height. I've set a background color but I've also set it to overflow hidden just in case anything dynamic is a little bit, you know, a little bit taller than the container. I still don't want it to be able to break out of it. Ideally, the content fits inside of our container like our iframes or whatever else we might inject in there. And what you can do if you're in the, you know, if you're somebody that has lots of dynamic content that gets injected into your page you can take a look at your data, look at what are the medians or the 95th percentile widths and heights for this dynamic content and size your container accordingly. That'll just mean that you have the best chance at still being able to present that content to users without negatively impacting the rest of the user experience. So here's what it looks with my pattern in place. I've reserved enough space and that content pops in but there are no layout shifts in the page. So I'm really happy about that. Slightly better is my baseline for everything in life at the moment. So yeah, this is the Lighthouse 6.0 impact. We can see that we reduced our layout shifts from 0.24 all the way down to about zero. I'm gonna give myself about zero, it's in the green. So that's great. So let's talk about a production example of something like this on Chloe. So Chloe had a promotion banner for shipping at the top of their product listings page. And you'll see this like free standard shipping promotion listed at the very top, but this wasn't always there. There was a time when this product listings page had a CLS of 0.4, which is like really not great. Because of two things. The first was the way they approached their dynamic promo banner and the way that they approached filters. Let's talk about the banner first. Now, this banner used to be positioned in line underneath the main page header. And as you can see here, it looks kind of harmless, but what's the impact of having a dynamically sized banner on the user experience? Well, we have a video here, let's take a look. As we can see here, once the content is fetched and rendered for this banner, it pushes the content for the rest of the page all the way down, and that's not very ideal. So how did Chloe go about fixing this? Well, they reserved space for this banner. The content for this banner was also coming from a client side request. Therefore, messages were causing a pretty visual layout shift occurring a few seconds into page load. Now, they moved this API call straight to the server and they made sure to reserve enough space for the banner with a simple height setting. As a part of this work, they moved the position of the banner up a little bit, but altogether, like moving more work to the server, always a good idea. And just making sure that they're reserving space, these things made a bit of a difference. So here's the after view. Here we can see the impact to their product listings pages after these changes have been made. It's a lot less shifty, so I'm happy about that. So we talked about their promo banner. The other big CLS issue for product listing pages was that Chloe had a filters widget for filtering products. Now, this would rehydrate to become dynamic once it booted up. And so on the client, it was pending XHR calls for data. It was waiting on session state based on filter choices in order to be able to like, finally render this thing on the screen. So this is what this basically looked like. We'd wait for kind of cons to be sent down for the filter widget, we wait for hydration and it would still push content on the screen all the way down. Now, what they ended up doing here was that they adapted this widget to contain more of the information needed to render the filter widget server side. So they'd rendered it with better defaults. This helped avoid those layout shifts. And I just wanted to give a call out here to the right of the screen, we can see the web vitals Chrome extension. This gives you a real time view of all of your vitals metrics and it can just be helpful as you're building your sites locally or you're just browsing the web and wanna get a sense for the performance of different sites that you check out on the regular. And here's what things look like after their rehydration fix for filters. As you can see, CLS reduced by a decent amount looking at the before and after. And it was just another case of like, pay attention to the little things in your pages that might be in aggregate causing lots of things to be pushed down. Every little CLS fix helps. And here's the overall impact of these changes on desktop. We can see that the above the full content is relatively stable and offers a much better user experience on the whole. And this is also reflected in Lighthouse. Work on Lighthouse, gotta give Lighthouse a shout out. As we can see here, cumulative layout shift is in the green, we've hit zero, so it's in a really solid place. So to improve CLS, Chloe acted on a number of different elements. It wasn't just one thing. They reserved space for the promo content in terms of its ratio. They made sure to set within height dimensions on their images and they adopted a skeleton pattern to improve perceived performance. They reserved space for their promo banners requests before receiving messages. And they also reserved space for the filters dynamic component as well as making a few other optimizations to just help with rendering. So on the whole, it was definitely worth it. All right, so I have a big surprise for you. We've got more metrics to talk about. Put a lot of work into this slide. Historically, it's been a bit of a challenge for web developers to measure just how quickly the main content of the webpage loads and is visible to users. Thankfully, we now have metrics like largest contentful paint that are able to report the render time of the largest content element that's visible within the viewport. Now, you might be wondering, what causes a poor LCP? Well, there are lots of things.  This could be your backend infrastructure. It could be unoptimized database queries, API responses that are just taking a while to resolve. Could be render blocking JavaScript and CSS. Slow resource times are another big one.  And then there's client-side rendering. There's a whole class of problems where those of us who love working in JavaScript and using modern libraries and frameworks and bundlers can sometimes get into a place where we have our requests for assets like images, in particular hero images, behind JavaScript fetches. So the browser, first of all, has to fetch your JavaScript. Then it has to parse and process that JavaScript to fetch your image. And that whole process can take so long that you delay showing meaningful content to your user. So it's just things like that you should keep an eye on. There are plenty of tools that can help diagnose these issues. So let's take a look at some real-world production challenges around LCP and how to work around them. Chloe started off with an LCP of about 10 or 11 seconds. In this view here, you can see that their primary hero image content wasn't getting fetched and rendered until about 11 seconds into our trace. Their homepage suffers from, in this case, it suffered from a few different things. It had heavy full-screen image downloads, poorly optimized images, some images that were requested late in the network chain. And these are very common issues. There's nothing here that's just like that they're doing crazy wrong. It's just very common issues. And it's useful to be aware of some of the things that impact LCP. So things that impact LCP are image elements, image elements that might be inside of an SVG element, video elements, block-level elements containing text nodes. And so let's talk about images first because they're pretty often a cause for poor LCP. So for many sites, images are the largest element in view when the page is finished loading, especially as UX patterns have shifted towards us using more hero images in our pages. So it's very, very important to optimize our images, especially anything that's visible within the initial viewport. Now there are a few techniques that you can use here. You can consider not having an image in the first place. If it's not that relevant, maybe remove it. Compress those images. You know, there are plenty of image optimization tools out there, compressor images. Maybe consider converting them to more efficient modern formats, use responsive images. And you can also consider using an image CDN. I'm seeing an increasing number of sites leveraging image CDNs, just to help them get control over an ability to just tweak parameters in a URL for an image and change what format gets served down or what quality you have. And it's just using an image CDN can be a really good way of staying on top of modern best practices. Because even us that are, you know, web enthusiasts sometimes have a hard time staying on top of all everything happening in the image optimization world. Now you might be wondering, how can I identify the element that is my like LCP? Thankfully, we've got some solutions here. In DevTools, in the performance panel, if you record a trace and you go to timings, you should find a record for LCP. Click on that record and you'll get the summary pane showing up that includes things like the size of the image and more importantly, the related node. So if you hover over that related node, it'll highlight what in your page was considered LCP. I personally find this really valuable as kind of a stepping stone to, where should I be spending my time optimizing? So check that out if you use the performance panel. This is also something that we try to capture in Lighthouse. So Lighthouse has got a largest contentful paint element audit and we try to highlight what element was responsible here too. So if you use Lighthouse, check that out. So back to Chloe. So Chloe discovered that they were delivering very high resolution images, even very high resolution for retina screens because there is a bit of a cutoff point where if you're serving kind of two-by, three-by images, the human eye is not gonna be able to perceive large amounts of difference there. And there are kind of, you have diminishing values that you get out of just serving very, very, very high resolution images. Now in this case, we're in DevTools, we're in the elements panel. We're looking at a specific image and what we see is that the maximum width of images being served down is 1,920 pixels. It's pretty large. So one of the things that Chloe actually decided to do was change things up here. They resized their images to not be more than two times the image viewport size. So they removed source at sizes over 828 width to keep an image maximum size that they were comfortable with. And that actually ended up being pretty fine on retina devices as well. So it was this nice trade-off of how do we deliver rich imagery without negatively impacting the user experience. Now by doing this work on an iPhone X or a Pixel 2 XL that was previously seeing anywhere up to 245 kilobytes where the image bytes being downloaded, they were able to reduce it down to 125. That's huge. That's like a 51% decrease in image bytes being served down with no noticeable difference. So optimize your images, people. The next thing we're gonna talk about is some of the other image optimizations that they performed. So on the product listings page, Chloe used image lazy loading, which is, it's a relatively popular pattern. What they discovered was that there were four primary images being loaded above the fold. However, there was one off-screen image that seemed to be tripping up their lazy loading heuristics and was still being fetched. Now this particular image happened to be 248 kilobytes in size, about 200 plus kilobytes in size. And this was negatively impacting the user experience. So they wanted to try improving this. Now on the whole, there were a number of things Chloe did. They were able to bring down their above-the-fold image download size all the way to 14 and a half kilobytes.  They adopted an image CDN, they adopted WebP by default, improved their image resizing strategy. And the results of this, outside of just having a nice like lighthouse report with lots of greens, is that each product page now weighs 57% less than it did before, which is a really nice outcome to have as a result of like optimizing your images. Taking a step back, here's what the homepage LCP looked like after these changes. We can see that again, previously those hero images were not rendering in until about 11 seconds in. Now LCP happens at about four seconds into the process and it's complete just a few seconds later. The request time for our LCP related node for kind of our hero images is about 1.3 seconds in. So on the whole, this is really great. There's still work they could do here, but on the whole, this is like fantastic to see. So let's switch things up to our next tip. Defer any non-critical JavaScript and CSS to speed up loading the main content of your page. Now, this is guidance that is, it's not new, it's been around for a few years, but for anyone that's not familiar with this guidance, I'll give you a very quick recap of it. Now, before a browser can render any content, it needs to parse HTML markup into a DOM tree. The parser needs to pause if it encounters any external style sheets, your synchronous script. And scripts and style sheets can both, you know, be render blocking resources, which can delay your first contentful paint. Consequently, your largest contentful paint as well. And so what we tell people to do is defer any of your non-critical scripts and style sheets to speed up load. So let's take a look once again at the product listings page for Chloe. As we can see, this is a trace independent of their image optimizations. And as we can see here, Lighthouse highlights that there are a few render blocking style sheets that are delaying early paints on the product listings page. Now, this is kind of manifested in terms of like just how much white we're seeing in our film strip. So one approach to addressing this problem is by inlining your critical CSS and deferring the load of non-critical styles. We often call this technique critical CSS. So critical CSS is all about extracting CSS for above the fold content, ideally across a number of different breakpoints and making sure that you can render the above the fold content as quickly as possible in the first few RTTs and deferring the load of the rest of your style sheets for the page, you know, for things below the fold, as soon as possible, otherwise. So how did Chloe do this? Well, they built some tooling. They implemented critical CSS in their SAS build process and they constructed a syntax allowing their developers to specify for each widget what part of the CSS code goes into their critical CSS. This is highlighted using the critical keywords you see on the screen right now. Now, at build time, they're able to build both the critical CSS and the non-critical CSS so that every single build is consistent with both. There are many ways that you can approach critical CSS. I've contributed to some tooling on this topic in the past and you can automate it. You can go very custom. I see some teams that will just have a critical.css file that they manually curate. And regardless of the approach that you take, what's key is just making sure that you're delivering important content to the user as quickly as possible. So we talked about the need for loading in the other style sheets for the page. What Chloe do is their non-critical CSS style sheets are stored in an array. So they point to references to them on their servers and that's injected with a deferred script so that it's hopefully not render blocking but is still loaded with a relatively high priority that isn't going to interfere with the HTML parser. So what was the impact of optimizing their critical CSS? Well, the answer is pretty large. They were able to bring down their first contentful paint from 2.1 seconds to about 1.1 and their LCP from 2.9 seconds to about 1.5. Now, this is really great work. Optimizing your critical CSS can be a bit of a time investment but is something that can just make sure that your page is getting styled as soon as possible. So let's talk about another tip. I mentioned slow server response times when we were discussing like, what impacts LCP? Now, the longer that it takes a browser to receive content from the server, the longer that it takes to render anything on the screen, the faster a server can respond that that's gonna improve every single page load metric, including LCP. So you might be wondering, how can I tell if I have a slow server response time? Lighthouse has you covered. In Lighthouse, we have an audit called reduce initial server response time. And if you see this, it's a good hint to spend more time diagnosing the problem and causes of the problem. As I mentioned earlier, it can be plenty of things on your back end. And we're trying to optimize our server response times. There's plenty that we can do in terms of optimizing our DNS, our pre-connects, all of those types of things. But there are also things that we can do to optimize loading priority. This is where techniques like link rel preload and server push can come into play. Now, if you're new to server push, I'll give you a quick summary of it. To improve latency, HB2 introduced this idea server push, which basically allows a server to push resources to the browser before they're explicitly requested.  And so we can start pushing those as soon as things respond with the initial requests. This allows the server to fully utilize what's otherwise an idle network to improve page load times. Now, server push is not without its nuance. This is one of those optimizations where you need to be careful. It's possible to over-push. So server push is not HTTP cache aware. So I could push something for a particular page. The user could come back to another related page and the server would push those exact same resources again. The way to avoid that is by either using cookies or a service worker to avoid those refetches for those types of resources and track what's in the cache. But it does involve a little bit more work. In general, server push is an optimization that can have a big impact, but just be aware of some of that nuance. It's not quite as simple as just like turning it on sometimes. Now, Chloe use automatic server push, which is an implementation provided by Akamai. It uses data to decide when to push critical CSS, fonts, and script. And if you're manually using server push yourself, you might end up looking at syntax that looks a little bit like this. What we see here is the link HP header. This is actually the preload resource hint in action. And it's a separate but distinct optimization from server push, but in reality, most HP2 implementations will push an asset that's specified in a link header containing a preload resource hint. So you can use the syntax in order to enable server pushes for a page. So what was the impact of this optimization? Without server push, Chloe are finding in their lab tests that LCP was closer to four seconds, but with it, it was closer to 2.5 seconds, which is like a huge amount of impact. On screen at the moment, we've been verifying that using Lighthouse, but you can also tell if individual requests were server pushed using things like dev tools and using things like web page tests, network waterfall view. Both are very, very handy. Now we're on to our very last metric. Hooray! Chloe didn't optimize for forced input delay, but I did want to very quickly cover it. Now, first input delay measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page. So that moment when they start to click on a button or tap some UI, some JavaScript powered control, to the time that the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. Now, there are many things that cause a poor first input delay. There can be long tasks on the main thread, heavy JavaScript execution, large JavaScript bundles can delay how soon script can be processed by the browser and can have an impact here. And then you have things like render blocking script. Now, in general, I would strongly recommend using Lighthouse and using dev tools because they do try to point out areas where you might have long tasks or heavy script execution. Very often the solution is to just break up this work, serve what the user needs when they need it and try to look at opportunities for minimizing main thread work as much as possible. Sometimes people will contextualize this in terms of maybe shift some of that work, some of the logic work to a web worker. But regardless of the path you want to take there, the end goal is essentially just making sure that the main thread isn't busy and that user interactions are not delayed. So we're almost at the end of our journey with Chloe. Here we can take a look at Chloe's overall web vitals in the lab. Thanks to their investments in performance and user experience, they were able to reduce their cumulative layout shifts down to zero and their LCP by almost half. So this is mind-blowingly awesome. This is really, really cool. As you've seen, all of this work is kind of the culmination of a number of smaller optimizations that, when added up, actually make a pretty significant impact to your end user experience. And we don't have to just look at data in the lab, we can look at the field as well. Here is Chrome user experience report data for Chloe. And as we can see, our core web vitals metrics for LCP and CLS are trending in the right direction. CLS went from 0.85 down to zero in the latest dataset. And this is all, on the whole, it's tremendous work. It's really great to see. And I know that Chloe are happy to continue building on this work in the future as well. Now, if you're interested in building dashboards like this for your own team measuring the core web vitals, you might be interested in checking out the Chrome user experience report dashboard. This is a great solution that just allows you to drop in a URL and very quickly get access to field data and distributions for the different core web vitals. It also summarizes the metrics. So if you're trying to share around this report with other people on your team, they'll hopefully be able to also get some familiarity with the core web vitals too. We also recently shipped a new Chrome user experience report API, Crux API. This is great for programmatically being able to build out your own dashboards, very similar to what we were just taking a look at. So check that out too. And that's it. I hope that you found this talk useful. Go and optimize your web vitals. There are plenty of docs over on web.dev that cover the methodology, the tools, as well as the best practices that you can use to get fast and stay fast. My name is Adi Osmani. I hope this has been useful. Thank you.


Hello friends, the next seven star terror event has been announced for Scarlet and Violet. We're going to cover all of the details in today's video, but before we get into the video, please subscribe to the channel. Remember, you can always unsubscribe later if you'd like to. Now, we're currently still in the middle of the walking wick and iron leaves terror event that's happening now in Scarlet and Violet for the brand new Paradox Pokemon that we're introduced off the back of the Pokemon presents on Pokemon Day. Now, this event is running until the 12th of March, so this Sunday, so if you haven't got it in your games yet, you've still got a bunch of time to get in and grab these exclusive Pokemon. And after this, we now have the announcement for the next seven star terror and that will be for Decidueye. As you can see, this event will be running from the 17th of March, so the Friday after the walking wick iron leaves event finishes and we'll be running over that weekend until the Sunday evening. Normally, with our seven star terror, we get a week's break and then we get the second spell so we can do it again. But these are happening over subsequent weekends. So it'll be kicking off on the 17th of March and then ending on the Sunday. And then the next Friday will have the event running again from the 24th of March till the 27th of March. So two weekends in a row, this event will be live. This Decidueye will just be the Alolan Decidueye. So not the Hissuian one that some of us suspected, but still a really nice Pokemon for us to get. It's going to have the flying terror type with it. So it's going to be really strong. Of course, it will have strong flying type attacks, but it will also carry ghost type attacks and grass type attacks as well. We're going to have to think about when we're putting bills together for this Pokemon and it will of course have the mightiest mark as well, like the other seven star terror aides that have had in the games as we've experienced them. Of course, like other seven star raids as well, we're only going to be able to catch one of these per save file. But like with the other seven star terror aides, once you've caught it, you're still going to be able to go into these raids and beat the Decidueye over and over and over again to farm the good item drops that we normally get coinciding with the seven star raid events. So very exciting that we will be getting this Pokemon as our next star seven raid Pokemon. You've got to start to think about what Pokemon will be good going in against it. Obviously things that affect flying type super effective, ice, electric and rock. Rock probably not one of the ones that you want to bring in against this Pokemon because of the grass stabs that Decidueye will have. It'll make it a bit more difficult, but we will go through a bunch of builds that are going to be good going into this on the channel. So keep an eye out for that one. And if you've got any thoughts initially, let me know down the comment section below what you think will be good going into this terror raid. But like I say, we'll be running from the 17th until the 20th. So you've not got long to prepare for it a little over a week now, but we've got plenty time to get some builds together. So like I say, if you've got some ideas of what you would think to take into it, initially coming off the top my head as in things, something like belly bolt will be good, but there are going to be a flurry of Pokemon that are going to be really effective going into this seven star raid. And of course, we've seen with the Pikachu max rate event that the rules can be changed. The shield went up straight away for the Pikachu. I don't expect it to be the same going into this deciduous. It is a way stronger Pokemon than Pikachu has better defenses. So doesn't really need to rely on the shield too much. We can start to put ideas together going forward. So like I say, we'll be putting a best builds out going into this event. So keep an eye out for that one. And if you've enjoyed today's video, please drop a like. Let me know what your thoughts are on this brand new terror that will be happening personally for me. I'm really excited. I love deciduous. A great Pokemon. So cannot wait for it to get into Scarlet in Violet, especially because we have no idea at the minute when home compatibility is going to drop for the system. Thank you so much for tuning into today's video and I will catch you all in another video very soon. So until then friends, take care of yourselves and bye bye.


Hello, hello writers! I'm Kristen Kiefer, author of fantasy fiction and creative writing resources, and you are listening to the Well-Sturried podcast, where I share insights, encouragement, and actionable advice designed to help you craft sensational novels and build your best writing life. Always in 30 minutes or less, so you can get back to writing, of course! Ready for the show? Let's get talking! Alrighty writers! Hello! Welcome! Come on in! Today we are talking about how to structure compelling scenes. Today's episode was specifically inspired by Kelsey, who reached out to me via email after enjoying one of the free email courses that I offer through Well-Sturried. When I asked Kelsey if she had any ideas for upcoming courses that she would like me to create, one of the topics that she mentioned was a course on structuring scenes. I thought this topic was better suited to an article, and thus today's article and podcast episode was born, so a big thank you to you, Kelsey, for inspiring this one. So in today's episode, we cover several things. Firstly, we talk about what is a scene exactly, because a scene is more than just a fun, frightening, or steamy moment between your characters. We also break down these six elements that nearly all well-structured and compelling scenes contain, and we answer the question of how you can ensure that your scene is purposeful and powerful, and I show you how to do that by summarizing your scene in a simple one-to-two sentence formula. So compelling scenes, here we come. But before we dive in, I would as always like to take you behind the scenes at Well-Sturried and share an update on what's been going on lately. The big thing this week is that I have begun work on draft two of my first full-length nonfiction project called Build Your Best Writing Life, which you guys have probably heard me talk about a little bit here and there. I started work on this second draft on Monday. I did a complete read-through of Build Your Best Writing Life and took a couple of revision notes, and I'm really, really happy. I was really happy to discover that I didn't feel that the book needed any major structural overhauls. I didn't think that there were any chapters that needed to be cut or chapters that needed to be added. I thought they were all in a great order. I thought everything was really well laid out, and I'm especially happy to discover that after how much I struggled with the initial outline of this book when I first began drafting. I put together an outline that I thought was really solid, got about 10,000 words into drafting, and then kept cutting and adding chapters like crazy to the point where I stayed between 8 and 15,000 words in this draft for like a good four weeks before I finally settled on a structure that I knew I could be proud to move forward with. So to read back the draft now and to realize that all of that pain and heartache in the beginning actually did lead somewhere and set me up for success here with revision was really, really excited. So there are 31 chapters in this book, and it is my goal to finish revising this second draft of Build Your Best Writing Life by the end of the month. It is currently May 2019. And so to do that, I need to revise two chapters every workday, Monday through Friday, and so far that's going really well. I've conquered the first four chapters and I'll be working on more later this week. One thing I think that has been helping me with this revision process is actually what I like to call the Godforsaken comic sans writing trick. Comic sans is a specific font. If you're aware of it, it's been a bit of a meme because it's such a terrible childish font to look at. And there's actually this writing trick. There was this article that went around, I believe on Lifehacker, that talked about how you need to get over yourself and start writing and revising in comic sans. The reason being, the science behind it is that every letter in the font comic sans is specifically designed to look vastly different from the others. So there's no confusing a D with a B or a G with a P. Every letter is distinct and unique. So while this creates a very childish looking font and not a very elegant or aesthetically pleasing font, it also is a lot easier on your eyes, which means that when you sit down to write or revise, you don't look at your page, look at your text, and have your eyes just start to glaze over because it all bleeds together. The thing with the comic sans trick is that it's supposed to help you retain focus and attention on your work. So I was hesitant to try this trick despite seeing that it seemed to be working for other people just because it is such an awful font, and I care a lot about fonts funnily enough. But hey, anything for the writing, right? So I went ahead and tried revising in comic sans on the past couple of days, and it's working so well. I cannot tell you how well it is working. I cannot explain. I have now been using it just these past two or three days for pretty much any piece of content that I'm writing or revising. It's kind of brilliant. You should give it a try. I'll try to remember to link that original article for you in today's episode description so you can learn a little more about it. Finally, in our behind the scenes section here, I would like to remind you that a new guest post is now live over on the Wellstory blog. This post is called Seven Tips for Submitting Your Fiction for Publication, and it was written by Lynn Lumsden Green, who has twin bachelor degrees in science and the arts, spent 15 years as the science queen for HarperCollins Voyager Online, and has published fiction in a whole variety of anthologies. She also captains the Writing Race for Australian Writers Marketplace on Facebook. So all that to say is she is well-versed in what it means to work hard to turn your writing into a career, and part of that is submitting your fiction for many writers. So Lynn has a lot of experience there, and she's sharing her best tips in this week's guest post. So if you would like to check that out, make sure to head on over to well-storyed.com slash sub tips. If you'd like to submit your own guest post for the Wellstory blog, you can head on over to www.well-storyed.com slash guest to find all of our guest post submission guidelines. Today's episode of the podcast translates the latest article from the Wellstory blog into audio, titled How to Structure Compelling Scenes. You can find the article that also serves as the episode transcript at www.well-storyed.com slash scenes. Now let's dive in. How to structure compelling scenes. Every phenomenal story unfolds in a series of scenes. If each scene in a book is a link in a chain, one weak link can threaten the overall power of a story. By learning how to craft better, more compelling scenes, scenes that are irresistible in their interest and emotional pool, we learn how to craft better, more compelling stories. But what exactly makes for a spellbinding, well-structured scene? To answer that question, we must first ask another, what is a scene exactly? I've often heard it said that a scene is a story within a story, that it should have an arc of its own. I don't disagree with this statement entirely. Compelling scenes should have strong arcs, contain or introduce conflict, and lead readers on a physical or emotional journey. But good stories have strong resolutions, and that's one factor that many scenes do not contain. What all compelling scenes do boast, however, is movement. Remember, stories unfold in a series of scenes. That means some measure of unfolding must happen in every scene you write. A figurative page turned as surely as the literal. For this to happen, each scene you write must serve a purpose. It must progress the plot or character's development, building upon what came before and leading into what's coming next. Though scenes may vary greatly in their content, there are six elements that nearly all well-structured, purposeful, and compelling scenes contain. Let's break them down today. The first element is a strong sense of place and atmosphere. Compelling scenes do not take place in a vacuum. They need backdrops or, better yet, full-blown sets with props that allow characters to interact and engage with the world around them. The more interactive and purposeful a setting, the more it will come alive in readers' minds. With setting should come a strong atmosphere. How are readers meant to feel as the scene unfolds? How can you evoke this through your scene's setting and the way in which your characters engage with it? In today's episode transcript, I've included a link to an article on how to craft immersive setting descriptions, so make sure to check out that link in today's episode description. Element number two, a grounding character. Every scene needs a grounding character, someone to whom readers can cling. Otherwise, readers are left adrift in a story in which they have no personal stake. Most modern novels make use of point of view characters to ground readers in each scene, often deepening the connection through the technique called deep point of view. But even stories that utilize narrators or alternative frameworks need an emotional lightning rod. Who will readers connect with? Who will pull them through the scene? Again, I've linked articles on deep point of view and alternative frameworks for your story in today's episode transcript at well-storied.com slash scenes. Element number three, an intriguing hook. A narrative hook is the source of intrigue that draws readers into a story or scene. Most often, hooks pose the question, what will happen next? The easiest way to introduce this question is through a classic piece of writing advice. First, get your hero up a tree, then throw rocks at him. A hook may also promise resolution, the reunion of beloved characters, a celebration following victory, the first culmination of romantic chemistry. But regardless of whether you pose a question or a promise, the art of the hook lies in a tease. How can you make the reader ask what or will it happen? In today's episode transcript, you guessed it. I've linked another article for you this time on how to weave threads of tension through your story. Threads of tension are questions. Will it happen? What will happen? And so on. So make sure to check out that article if you would like more information on this topic. Element number four, a bit of turmoil. Every scene should take place somewhere within the pacing cycle. The general movement from external conflict to external consequences, internal consequences, acceptance, and back again. These events may overlap at times or be skipped altogether. But even the happiest of scenes should contain rising or falling action based around turmoil. Your characters are reuniting, but did they last part on bad terms? Your characters are celebrating a victory, but what losses did they suffer along the way? Whether you're introducing or resolving conflict and whether that conflict is internal or external, bear in mind that turmoil must serve a purpose. Conflict for conflict's sake is not conducive to plot. It's just drama. How does the turmoil in each scene you write feed into a larger plot or character arc? Element number five, emotional weight. A fast paced sword fight or a first kiss has just as much potential to be boring as it does thrilling. All depending on whether you've given readers good reason to care what happens next. And caring comes from a place of emotional connection. Using a well-developed character to ground readers in a scene is a great way to create emotional weight, as is developing a strong hook and compelling turmoil. But emotional weight can also come from callbacks. How can you pull characters' backstories into the present? How can you highlight threads of tension from scenes gone by? How can you make use of foreshadowing and then follow up on it? The more interwoven your scenes and developed your characters, the stronger the emotional weight your scenes will bear. And finally, element number six, a strong sense of movement. Every scene should unfold a new page in your story's arcs, but it should also lead into unfolding the next, creating a sense of movement that draws readers from scene to scene. This doesn't mean leaving each scene on a cliffhanger. It simply means proposing or highlighting questions that remain in need of answering, creating turning points that pull threads of tension taught. Remember the pacing cycle. How will your characters deal with the physical and emotional consequences following an instance of conflict? A new conflict will loom on the horizon after those consequences have been addressed. Is there a threat that yet lurks in the shadows? Even the happiest of scenes should still fall within the context of a larger thread of tension, or should lead into a new, with only the final scene in your book resolving all the questions and conflicts you've proposed. Once again, I've linked an article for you on the pacing cycle in today's episode transcript, so make sure to check out that link in today's description. Ultimately, a good scene is more than an interesting concept or round of witty banter, more than shock value or titillation. Where dull scenes are self-indulgent, compelling scenes are crafted with care to fit inside a larger framework. Remember that while structured scenes contain turning points. This means they can often be summarized within a sentence or two that hinges upon a but, or though, or until. For example, Katniss hopes to avoid being chosen as a competitor in the Hunger Games, but volunteers his tribute when her sister's name is called. Though the presence of Mr. Darcy initially delights the residents of Hartfordshire in Pride and Prejudice, his proud demeanor at the Assembly soon spoils their interest. In the notebook, Allie remains at bliss in her passionate reunion with Noah, until her mother warns that her fiance has come to town. With each turning point, these scenes introduce movement in the plot. Combined with the remaining elements we discussed, this movement lends itself to a powerful and well-structured scene that compels readers to keep on turning pages. So what do you say, writer? Shall we go craft a few compelling scenes of our own? Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Podcast Writer. I hope you found it helpful to your writing journey. If so, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode, and to give the podcast a quick rating and review. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the podcast reach new writers and lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm creating. You can also give me a shout out directly on Twitter at christen-keeper. For additional guidance as you work to craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, be sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com where I share blog posts, workbooks, e-courses and other helpful resources for writers. Again, that's w-e-l-l-s-t-o-r-i-e-d dot com. Thank you again for tuning in to today's episode, my friend. Until next time, happy writing!


Good evening everyone. I'm Joe for jazby'scasebrakes.com. Happy hump day. Happy Wednesday Got some NT baseball for you. 2022 national treasures baseball four box full case pick your team at number 33 A lot of great stuff in here as you know big thanks to this group For for buying your team straight up. I appreciate that And it was Rob with the Mariners with last spot mojo before we pulled the remaining teams for a random number block We did that in a different randomizer in a different video But here are the results So featuring those teams right there Pick your team 33. Good luck. All right next to me over here and here is The fresh case of NT baseball There is another case. I loaded up another one. So if you missed out on your teams the first time Be sure to pick them up this time jazby'scasebrakes.com Let's see what we got in here. Good luck everybody starting to see all the spring training action happening I think we'll start to see some Spring training games as early as this weekend It should be nice to see Just a second here Grab some slider boxes because I think there's a book a box blank card Slow play of the hits. All right. Good luck. We're gonna start off with Connor Wong field gear That is 59 out of 99 Ed P with Boston and we've got retro materials Alec Manoa 98 out of 99 Toronto 8 So if you're not familiar with the number block format We go by that digit right there Which is Nate Before Ryan and the number 8 that Jose Ramirez 15 out of 25 Joshua with the Guardians Cleveland this for you First autograph is gonna be For the fish Jose Devers 5 out of 10 and the Marlins are a number block team. So that goes to Miami 5 Jason Kersh 5 I'm gonna go from Miami to Boston Jaren Duran Duran Hungry like the wolf 4 out of 25 Ed P and Boston got Trey Mancini 7 out of 25 Definitive ink autograph and that will be for Kevin and the Orioles Nice patch here. Louise Frias 31 out of 99 diamond backs are a number block team that goes to Miami or Arizona 1 that'll be for Jason Nice patch in there and we've got Bobby Whit jr. Field pass autograph 19 out of 99 Chad Oh with KC bought that team straight up Nice We got the book the book is 2 out of 5 Joe Cronin for the Red Sox legendary jumbo materials Wow, old piece of his lumber Game worn slash used He's playing in the 30s think about that Piece of lumber from the 30s That's for Ed P and Boston Ed All aboard the big hit express Back when when those guys probably traveled mostly By train. All right, and we got die-cut materials interest Connor wamp 2 out of 99 It's another one for Ed onwards Next box. All right. We've got Elias Diaz 13 out of 99 for Colorado Rockies are a number block team so that goes to Colorado 3 Greg with the number 3 That Corey seager 29 out of 49 Rangers edition Texas Rangers that'll be for Joshua Fernando that's East jr. 3 out of 25 Padres are a number block team so that goes to San Diego 3 That's for Greg social signatures Jake Bowers 58 out of 99 That's for Joshua Cleveland. This is for you getting the Guardian straight up. Appreciate it. Got Clark Schmidt One out of 99 Yankees Yankees also a number block team So that goes to New York one gonna be for Jason Kersh Corbin burns nice looking patch there clutch factor relic and autograph 23 out of 25 Chateau with the brew crew nice patch and auto Gavin sheets That's pretty cool five out of 25 white socks Ed P with the South Siders Got a yord on Alvarez 58 out of 99 Astros Jason K with the Strauss nice you're done the book 97 out of 99 rookie Signature jumble material Aaron Ashby. That's for the brew crew chat. Oh and the brewers Not the brewers straight up and back here is 25 out of 49 Bob Gibson Out of 45. Sorry his number cardinals Ed P the Cardinals treasure Jersey numbers All right, we are halfway through Let's get two more done here And if you're watching live, we just load up another fresh case of NT baseball if you missed out the first time Do not miss out next time Grab your teams. There's Taylor walls for the raise four out of 99 Tampa Bay for Steve H and we got a rolled his Chapman That is 96 out of 99 that'll be for the Yankees Yankees six Steve Got Tony Lazari Biography materials one out of 15 Look at the old material they use for those jerseys. It's almost like you were wearing like burlap sacks out there Yankees one Jason Kersh That cool wit Maryfield cool wit 91 out of 99 Royals Chad with the Royals and Rodolfo Castro 58 out of 99 big patch and autograph thicker card stock Pirates Kevin with the Pittsburgh Pirates Cool patch there. We got field pass one gone Gonzalez Three out of 25 Rangers Joshua with the Rangers Alejo Lopez another RPA another nice patch 67 out of 99 Reds are a number block team. So that goes to Reds seven Cincinnati seven Steve H Nice, we got a Walker Bueller four out of five Jersey and on-card autograph from my Dodgers David M With the boys in blue get well soon Walker and of course as you know out of fives and under get the train whistle All aboard the big hit express All right, and the final one of the box is the egg Dennis Eckersley 23 out of 25 Cardinals edition Jersey and autograph And that's going to be for Ed Pete and the Redbirds All right final box What would Logan picking up the 2023 Padre spring training caps. How do the spring training caps look this year? I had to take a look at those after this break although I may reserve purchasing a spring training hat until Try and make it out to a Dodger spring training game one day All right three out of ten Josh Naylor Josh Naylor for Joshua Cleveland, this is for you. Thanks Josh We got Paul Blackburn 24 out 25 three-color patch Ed P with the Oakland A's We got Carl Fisk 32 out of 49 piece of the lumber Ed P with Boston. We got Brendan Beck two out of 99 Two turntables and a microphone that goes to Chris Butler number two Yankees two We got Alec Minoa 22 out of 99 another two for Chris Ed Mundo Sosa 13 out of 25 Phillies are a random number block team Phillies three Greg the number three We have a hunter green one out of 25 nice RPA Could be a could be a breakout season for this guy. This is going to go to an LA kid too. It's from around here Reds number one Jason Kersh Reds one. I got holiday If we took a holiday It would be so nice 20 out of 99 Jackson holiday Kevin M and the O's Number one overall pig Matt holidays kid Kevin picked up the Oriole straight up. We got the book And we got some legendary material statured duals Statline out of ten It's gonna be the big unit Ranie Johnson with the triple crown the pitching triple crown in 2002 Er a wins and strikeouts to color dual relic Autograph diamond backs addition so that goes to Arizona to That's Chris Butler with two Nice Chris. All right, and the final one here is Die-cut material signatures Luke Jackson 29 out of 99 Atlanta is a number block team So Atlanta nine that will be for Ed errands last spot mojo getting the last card There you have it ladies and gentlemen What a nice break we got more NT baseball in the store check it out on jazby's case breaks calm And I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye. Bye


from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back. We are live here at AWS re-invent 2015. This is theCUBE live three days of coverage worth day three. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal noise. We talk to the leaders like Andy Jassy. We talk to the customers. We talk to the leaders of companies in the ecosystem. And of course, we have to talk about startups and their investors, VCs. And we have here a special guest, CUBE alumni, Mike Dowber. Three years in a row, Jerry Chen has got to run for his money at Greylock. Jerry and I have a bet going. I think I'm winning right now. Mike Dowber with Amplify Partis. So when you were first on your battery ventures, now you started your own venture capital firm with a partner. Talk about Amplify. Pretty young, but two years in. Three years in now. What's going on?  What are the dots that you're collecting and connecting? So first off, great to be back again. Love coming on the CUBE. So first off, I joined Amplify about a year ago. My partner, Sunil, started Amplify three years ago with really the realization that early stage enterprise tech had changed a lot. With the advent of AWS, you don't need $10, $15 million to start an enterprise infrastructure company anymore. You can do it with two or three. But the problem was a lot of these first-time founders they need a lot of help. And so we're very, very focused on cloud infrastructure, data, security, all the things you can see. Technical founders. Technical founders building technical products for technical buyers. That's what we focus on. It's the same infrastructure enterprise stuff that we've thought about for a long time. But you just don't need the money or the capital to start the companies. That comes later on when you scale up sales and marketing. You and I have talked about this a lot of times. And so that's where we spend our time. Sunil and I divvy up the world. We're a team of four people. We brought on a new guy on Monday at Alien Vault. We're really excited. Andy Minoski. And we've been having a blast. So we've been at re-invent all week. And I will tell you what, I think last year we talked about this, that last year was kind of the coming-out party for Enterprise for AWS. If you weren't paying attention last year, they've bludgeoned you this year to make sure you know it. But everybody up on the keynotes, you see enterprise, enterprise, enterprise. It's no longer- So let's rewind. The first year that we came on them, we were here, you were here also on theCUBE. Oh yeah, they won the public club, but they're not enterprise-ready next year. Oh, they got some enterprise stuff. But is it enterprise-grade? Yeah, this year. This year, it's like, whoa, geez, man. I mean, just as you walk around the show floor here, especially for people who can come here, this year you've got Dell, HP, Accenture. I think that's a teradata back there. Basically every single company that does anything in enterprise realizes that this is the place to be. Yeah, to me, Accenture deal with Amazon. I didn't ask Jazz, I should have asked them. I didn't have enough time, that's a huge validation. Accenture is an old line system integrator.  That's pretty significant validation. I was in New York last week for strata. I'm sorry, I missed you there. But I met with one of the top three banks when I was there, and they were talking about their new AWS experiment that they're running. And the guy was talking, said, look, it's only a matter of time before this takes over infrastructure. And if the CIA and Fortune 5 banks are using AWS, where's the excuse that I can't be on Amazon anymore? It's like an island of money out there. And whoever can race out to the island first wins. I mean, this is a money making operation AWS, not just for Amazon. I mean, Amazon has beautiful integration, they fund everything, they got benefits on the other side with the shipping, all this other stuff. But outside of Amazon, there's going to be a lot of money to be made in the ecosystem. How do you look at that? Because now we're getting kind of the first look in my mind at the real ecosystem. Last year, you could see some formation. People were kind of scared, do I going to get bought out, do I going to get rolled over? Now it's kind of pretty clear. There's money making to be had. What's your view? I think you have to look at Amazon as the new OS, right? I mean, if you're starting a company, you need to look at how are you building on top of Amazon or how are you partnering with this ecosystem? Because you don't want to be running headlong into it.  Right, because Amazon's kind of gunning for them. And I'll put GCE and Azure out on the side because I think there's still a place for those guys. But Amazon is so far in the lead. So I'm a big fan of Pure Storage, as you know. Love the company, love the founders, love the investors there. But they went public and kind of like soft, okay? The revenues are good, not totally breaking out. But Dave Vellante and I always ask the same question. Have they achieved escape velocity? And is it still viable to build a storage company in this market, standalone storage? Now, they're looking good. I'm not saying they're not performing well, but Amazon is the last company to build the billion dollars in sales and storage. Besides NetApp, if you go back to NetApp, what storage company did a billion dollars in revenue? Well, so. Amazon. Yeah, Amazon for sure. But they're not a startup, but still, the storage business has changed. As one example, HP, IBM, EMC, these standalone guys, even Oracle's, but a little shaking in their boots with Amazon. We just look at traditional infrastructure, look at storage, look at networking. I don't think, I think it'd be very hard press to find people who are still investing a lot in hardware. There's a couple of hardware startups and the Pure Storage's and Nimble's and Tintries of the World to me are no longer and Pure went public yesterday. These companies are no longer startups, right? They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Just, they just have chosen to stay. Well, I saw Ravi at Lightspeed, he's on board of Nutanus, D Raj's been on theCUBE many times. Nutanus was kind of laughed at the beginning. No one really wanted to invest in this weird little startup. They're more of a server vendor, but these new models are emerging. It's a, my point is there's a new approach. There's a new approach. What is your, what do you see for that? What is the new normal now for building a products company? Infrastructure, you have to assume that infrastructure is running here, right? That infrastructure is not running in someone's data center. And we don't have a data center anymore. Our data center, our data center is the cloud, right? When we raised our new fund in Q1, one of our investors asked us for business continuity. What do you do if there's a disaster in California? We said, as long as our stuff is up and running in someone's data center, it doesn't really matter, right?  So cloud native, that's a cloud native approach. You have to, but so if you're focused on infrastructure today, if you're a new storage company today, I think it's fine to be a new storage company, but you have to assume that you're building something that's stitched within a cloud fabric, right? Maybe you're running across private and public clouds, but I don't think if you're starting a company in 2015, 2016, it can be, it could look anything like snowball, I think you're going to talk about next. It can't be these boxes. I think snowball is a smart bomb that decimates the storage business because now they just take that off.  I had no idea that Amazon would ever ship a box, ever. Is the box going on the cube? It looks like one of those water things out there. You know, it's got the casing, it doesn't really look like a box. If there's a drive by, I'll stand behind you. But no, I think to the point you're getting at, one of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how do you make the cloud more accessible and solve new types of problems? What are some of the profile persona of the entrepreneurs that you're meeting? Because, you know, I'm 50, I have provisioned boxes, I have loaded Linux. That's right. These younger guys, they, what? I load patch on Linux when I provision a server. So the younger guns have a new mindset, and Dries and I think talks about this 10X developer. So you have a new breed of entrepreneur, even if they're not technical, they got needs in business. What's the philosophy? What's the pattern that you're seeing? So for us, we're almost exclusively technical founders. And what we really like is we like the practitioner turned founder, so behind you is Datadog, right? And Olivier was solving that problem in his old company, which ultimately was bought by News Corp. He recognized the problem for cloud monitoring years ago, built Datadog into probably the preeminent monitoring tool that's used on top of AWS today. Archer Bergman at Fastly, you know, he recognized the issue that created Fastly when he was the CTO at Wikia. And this archetype of the technical founder solving a problem for him or herself, realizing that this problem generalizes not just to them and their friends, but to thousands of other people, tens of thousands of other people, that's what we're seeing consistent. So you look for that, and then the broader market match to that. That's right. Does it address a broader market opportunity? That's right. I mean, if it only addresses problems that you and your friends have, then we have an issue. But if you and your friends happen to be very good predictors for other people, that's a great sign. Okay, so your take, I've got a final question for you. So you're in the trenches, great to see you, you're investing, you're getting dirty, rolling in the mud with the entrepreneurs, which is great. We're trying to get dirty. Well, you're adding value, you're working hard. To me, that's, I know all the VCs that are doing the work, it's obvious, they're out in the streets, we see them at theCUBE. But I got to ask you, this show here, what's your take of it? You got AWS, IoT, how big will that be? How big is the BI disruption? What's your take on all this? Well, I mean, I was thinking about that before I came on. It's amazing how many industries these guys disrupt in a week, right? It'll be interesting to see what happens with the BI tool. I think QuickSight's an interesting product, but that's a different customer base for them. They have Twitch TV that can turn on IPTV tomorrow and be a leader. But you look at what they're doing in IoT. I mean, there was dozens of companies we've seen in that space for a long time. They're all in the world of hurt this morning. You know, you look at what they're doing, basically building out of mobile paths. This is a great place to do it. You really have to be careful. They're going to dominate all the Gartner magic quadrant categories. Yeah, it's going to get really boring. Mike Dauber, final thing, just final plug for the firm. What are you looking for deals? What are your current deals? Quick, end the segment with a quick soundbite on Amplify. A quick soundbite, we just recently announced our new fund, $125 million seed series, a enterprise infrastructure. So that's cloud infrastructure, security, data analytics, we're all over it. All right, Mike Dauber, Amplify partners, technical founders, solving real problems, addressing the broader market opportunity, pounding the pavement. We'll find out what deals you're working on when we come back. We'll be right back with more after this short break.


one so we're gonna donate to to him again for you i am ready the peacock struct okay let's in the hunt begin it all right we're gonna take away some armor there we go we got a second strike on her what next and once more with feeling and we can collect thank you 450 i am ready all right let's do our night out night out night hold on should kill him okay that kid the show is over let's try this in see if you find money again are you kidding me wait a minute okay so okay we're doing this we got our route chat we're gonna go over here we're gonna save we're gonna run back and we're gonna enter she's gonna find buddy i should get a fight on the way let in the hunt begin it i am ready you are ready girl the peacock struct it is unfending a small blade that's some good damage and i got a lot of health back cool i'm so everybody's got sp regain abilities except for hannet except for hannet night hold bring your shade for the buffer that i forgot wait what next coming sv steel the dagger dance um let's rest i'm ready not gonna do this watch me now no this shield's are back up all right let's do it lion dance on him the lion damn a little buff have at you let in the hunt begin it good i am ready i guess i'll do another lion dance on her the lion dance to him all right so we got over a confirm rose ready to go truly joy crap and he's not broken um doesn't matter i am ready is unvending hbt a small blade oh wait i thought that would break him it's a it's a dagger not a sword waste i wasted chat at least we got primrose do some dark damage some sp back i am ready 209 yeah i guess that's right let's in the hunt begin it 177 that's still yeah thank you 450 i am ready are you are you ready uh let's do a lion dance on albert i guess the lion dance coming if thou darest let's break down his armor a little bit armor's broken uh we'll give bp back to albert that he just spent that way he can come in with sp still hopefully do a lot of damage i'll do hp still because he said 1100 flying true all right we'll just uh do a simple beast for her now we'll do in that speech still my blade is unvending the dagger 800 damn oh my gosh that is such good damage the thrill of the fight and he leveled up so it's gonna be even more next time here we go is she gonna find something chat is she gonna find money it's it's free real estate chat it's free real estate it's free real estate fight fight did they wise up just keeps finding money that time i didn't even have to get a fight and i i found money i probably don't even have to save i think it triggers after an auto save letting us begin i'm in shock man he's broken i am ready she's getting out of the law stay strong she has no self-heal or any what next are you gonna be a double uh let's just attack her i am ready the peacock struck peacock struck now do a lion dance next on obaric and then letting the hunt beginning um i'm stressed i should be able to give him some bp so with the lion dance and stuff should be awesome 24th is a week from now so next tuesday and more frame nix and rhino are primed to return so let's see what is the brain and brawl go to a prime hiku prime and cross prime what do you think single prime target's prime armor said no prime syandana ballast you've got your prime extractor prime is back definitely good now okay back to the game uh what are we doing let's do this i'm not sure what we are in the rotation so just do the damages oh i was gonna give a i was gonna give bp to obaric oh i forgot well that's my turn now saved wait what happened to his lion dance i am ready give it back the lion dance letting my arrow fly in true holding back nothing she got one more in all right still sb no still hb a small one that's a thousand damage chat i'm ready that is a thousand damage chat i should have used her stuff on that the battle is truly do that that those thief skills are redunkerous do it again actually i can use spd to get the spd i just used to use that that gave me on buff that gave me like 200 the hunt beginning redunkerous chat sure is girl uh who we're gonna collect we're gonna collect them oh we'll try thank you hey still got the 300 battle is truly joined wait his armor's up wait that was with the dagger no i would use the sword i would have took off two of its armor let's do that all right uh let's give it to back over it artwork is carrying hard right now with damage for you cannon is becoming irrelevant lesson the hunt beginning i just found thief in a cave as well as i just got it like an hour ago it was a surprise i was like oh uh let's see let's do this and that and then take off two i didn't even know you just find jobs and i just found it i'm ready all right let's lion dance over it he's about to be super strong the lion dance see if we can get another letting my arrow fly in true if we get another thousand damage on them oh wait i need to get money over it might just kill them here 450 there uh we'll do hp but what does steel do i'm curious chat i claimed that sleep weed oh his items is not money that was a very very very aggressive steel oh my gosh all right the peacock peacock strut remain give the bp to mr over here the battle is to uh hpp a small not quite a thousand but up there in 800s with 700 i mean i grow strong hand that's about to hit 20 dude this seems to be working though like i'm just going back and forth between the save point here every time i go in this cave trust us find some money she's just found another 140 i'm just going back and forth and she just keeps finding money i'm up to 18k don't stop till you get enough i'm just going back and forth between that and the save point the occasional fight let's see if she finds it again oh it's a fight okay victory shall be mine all right no i am ready letting the hunt beginning he's down to one armor oh he's working now i am ready let's heal her before she does something dumb stay strong okay give some bp to my man to my man in them oh he's stacked you know what that means i've made his own vent that is some delicious damage man counter attack coming if thou dare it holding back nothing deep 700 that was like a thousand split between both of those all right let's do a let's do a lion dance a charge lion dance on all work the lion dance the battle is truly joy let's do another steal let's do a steel hb stole 300 light let's just do a trade one let him hopefully so killing i could have stole from him i just ah i just gave away like 300 right there um man handed it's getting wrecked over there great his armor a little bit what next two more letting the hunt begin it let's do it give bp i got a rest all right let's charge rest let's see how much sp i get 75 sp from that worth scrappy jack how's the day treatment treatment good man thanks for asking uh let's do a dark damage here 317 respectable still sp each battle i grow strong hand it hit 20 chat hand it has reached level 20 find money finding money a 140 haha just keep fun i just keep going in and out finding the monies all right how much i'm up to now 19.3 yeah how's the weather uh rainy thunderstorms really really severe thunderstorms but that's summer in florida man everybody's set on skills stuff i can sell i've got 19 adult war i don't know these materials are used for yet they're piling up i know what the pomegranate stuff does let me just read it real quick uh component with poisonous effects component with sulfuric effects the fuddling effects okay i'm down to one olive blue oh that's that's to make olive life probably send it all to south texas is hot yeah it gets steamy though once the sun comes out after these storms it turns into a sauna so i don't know if you want this weather it turns it basically turns into a humidity sauna it gets it gets miserable up this course just went down like if i look at the weather right now it says what does it feel like it's probably like 80 something and it probably feels like 90 something oh it's actually 73 and it feels like 81 today's forecast to be cooler than yesterday actually it's cool today the high today yeah it is cooler today you probably do want our weather uh humidity is 93 percent so still it's still going to be a little bit sauna but not as bad and the highs are in the 80s today it seems in the 80s they always give me a fight right before i am ready what next oh my god the battle is truly both broken chat what to do old bricks become my go-to dps with these the steel hb and steel hb and sb doing so much freaking damage yeah this course down i am ready the lion down having a bad week makes me out of this let's in the hunt beginning with the subgifting stuff man i'm just afraid to even say things in some check and now you get subgifted and you're like 43 and 47 all right let's just beat this guy up a little bit let's in the hunt beginning and now he's broken let's beat him up some more don't kill him now i am ready the moonlight wooh nice damage i want to steal from monkey i am ready don't kill him why is it going up so slow don't kill the monkey battle is truly joy don't kill the monkey beginning basic stuff five percent chat it was 85 percent and she failed to do the battle is truly joy it was 85 percent use this i don't care if she was almost dead coming if thou darest yeah everybody dies now you die maybe because armor was up if thou darest could be because his armor is up we're gonna we're gonna give her a lion dance just just so this could be a really special thank you and we're gonna use all our BP that we can before we thank you that is chat oh my goodness thank you that's right that was an aggressive steal the battle is i gotta like what's it called persuade people in town so i can summon them to fight for me that's like it's really good xp find some more money she's probably found a thousand dollars just for me coming in out of this cave already yeah we're 20k that was my goal but in order to uh do that boss that was doing last night that area over here is level 22 says recommended level 22 and i tried to do it as level 17 so i got destroyed last night so i still haven't hit the recommended level for that i'm not sure where to go i went down here it was like nah man it's like danger level 54 or something so maybe i'm supposed to go back east because i can fast travel last 21 that chapter two is 27 it's like the chapter two stuff is like in the 20s so i'm like in that that weird zone between like 17 and 20 so i that's why i'm grinding levels i think they kind of make you do this because there's like nothing i don't see anything around that level so maybe i should have did more side quests i don't know i only saw one side was really that's my break there i hardly say anything in big chats anymore unless it's something original that will start a copy pasta i got that i got that stupid partner tick and it's like i feel bad when you're talking somebody else's chat with that everybody immediately sees you it's like you get noticed and sometimes you can take over somebody else's chat and i hate when somebody does that to my chat so it's like i don't want to do that to other people's chat i don't want to go in there take over their chat so i don't say anything i rarely talk it's like hi boonan what are you streaming i'm like no i don't want to talk about my stream on this guy's no i don't want to hijack his chat let's talk about the streamer not me it's almost like a uh a underhanded way to advertise your stream and i don't like that just by talking it's like hey look at me i'm a partner come to my stream i'd probably a lot more active in chats if i didn't have that stupid tick i could turn it off too i've i've turned it off a few times in other chats and it actually worked so i might continue to do that but then somebody asked one how comes you're not partnered and i'm like oh i can't escape it i just can't escape it and i talk about why i took the tick mark off and i end up ticking over the chat since square made this but nintendo published i wonder if they have limited publishing rights this will be released on pc and other systems like that rising is a good point all right i'm gonna get some food chat been kind of a slow morning but uh we're gonna be back tonight probably some more warframe or something else


Jerry of the circus Jeff said you wanted to see me.  Well, I thought maybe you'd like to get in on this job I have. What's that? Picking a school or Jerry? Oh, fine. Oh, you got the catalogs then. Yeah, here they are Nice assortment, too. It's going to be hard to pick the right school. Oh, that's so yeah Take a look at some of these books Seems like we ought to be able to pick one out of all these yeah Say here's one that looks good to me bumps this one here. I'm looking bunch of boys at that school Just look through here and see those pictures Say this is a fine school nice buildings, too So you know Sam I think you're doing a wise thing sending Jerry off to a good school The boy needs an education and he's the kind of a boy that'll make the most of you just bet he will he's quick He picks things up fast. Yeah, I have every reason to believe I'm going to be proud of him We all will that's why I want to be sure to pick the right school for him I want to feel that I'm doing the very best I can. Yeah, let's see this catalog Well, no, and that's pretty far bomb since a good school, but it's clear across the country. Oh, yes, I see it is Come in. Oh Yeah, Sam and I ever just going over some of these schools that he has books on find anything looks okay Looks like they're all okay, Dan Jim just got back in the post office. Mr. Randall found these books. Huh? Hey, this looks like a good one right here. Oh fair oaks. Hmm fair oaks military Academy Listen to this Military discipline tempered with good sense and adapted to growing boys the prime function of this school is academic and character That's the ticket here military training develops the boy physically and gives him a sound body Grace and carriage poise and self-control. It teaches them to respect authority and trains for leadership. That sounds good And it tells about the traditions of the school Background of the instructors. Yeah, this looks all right. Well, let's see Hmm say Jerry will like this. They have horses there and all the students ride Yeah, look at this picture of boating. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good size lake Another thing Look at this map here in the back. Yeah, see where it's located not too far from winter quarters We can hop down there in an automobile in a few hours. Well, that's ideal. I'd say yes, sir This looks like the school for Jerry. What do you say, Dan? Your Jerry's garden now, Mr. Randall What do you say go? Yeah, but what do you think of it? That's a fine list of instructors. They have Jerry'd certainly learned something at Fair Oaks I think it's a good school, Mr. Randall bumps. What do you say? Well, unless I miss my guest Jerry or like it They have everything their boy could wish for and did you tell Jerry on to see him Dan? Yes, I didn't Mr. Randall He was over with Olson. They're flipping off El Mundo. He'll be over. Good. Well, then it's agreed as we talked it over We'll put his money in the bank for him. I think that's wise. Yeah, so do I Jerry doesn't know yet that he's leaving the circus to go To school. Oh, he knows he's gonna have to go to school But he doesn't know he's leaving so soon won't you have to get in touch with the school first Well, yes, I'll call them long distance and see if I have an opening here He comes now across the line. Say Sam, don't you think Jerry should have a chance to pick the school? He's gonna have to go do sure. Yeah, that's an idea bumps, but you'll pick Fair Oaks. Oh, man. You just watch Yes, I did send for a Jerry you're invited to attend our meeting what mean the Jerry do good welfare society Yeah, I want to have a talk with you in man.   You better close the door Well, I'm going to start right out of my new job Jerry. That's it out You remember I told you the other day that you were going to have to go to school Yes, sir as soon as the season is over. No before that Jerry right away. Oh Mr. Randall Jerry, I've got to do my act. Well, I I think we can struggle along without the act Hello Jerry from now until the end of the season. We have nothing but one night stands You've enjoyed the best part of the season there. The rest is hard We're on the move all the time early setups and switches in the middle of the night. It's no sense really, but I don't mind Oh, I know you don't but I think you'll be better off if you go right to school You know, I want you to be happy I think you will be happy at school Why in a few days you'll forget all about the circus and take an interest in things a boy should take an interest in Football baseball swimming and things like that. You will like it Jerry Maybe oh sure you will. Mr. Randall's right Jerry if you get right at it now by the time they're promotions You'll get into a better grade now and look here I've got quite a few catalogs all sorts of different schools and pretty fine schools at that Yeah, look them over Jerry and see which one you like best Here's one I think would be nice Military schools, huh? No, that's right. Wouldn't you like to go to a military school? Oh sure I've always wanted to dad was gonna send me to one But ah gee, let me finish this season first. What's the advantage in that Jerry? I don't know, but Ah gee, I hate to leave everybody now. Oh, well, you're going to leave them at the end of the season anyway That's the way it is with circus folks on every year at the end of the season We have to say goodbye sometimes we're all together again the next season and sometimes we're not how'd you like that school Jerry? No, wait Hey, look here. Well, I'm sorry. Yes, Sam. Remember what I told you watch Say this is a keen school mr. Randall. Which one is that Jerry Farrell? He look at them horses there and polo teams and hey a big light too Well now and that isn't the one I picked out Jerry You've had enough to do with horses and being around animals You want to pick out a school where you'll learn something you you've had an easy time of it And now it's time for you to get down to business and study. Well sure, but I've got to have a little fun, too And well, you know how much I like horses and like to ride. What's the name of that school Jerry there the one you like Farroks and Jiminy look at this. It's not so far from winter quarters either He maybe I could visit winter quarters and weekends or vacation time. Well. No, that's another thing Jerry It's too close to winter quarters You you want to get the as far away from the circus as possible. Oh, no, this is a keen school Hey, and look at this well football team. Please mr. Randall. Let me go to Farroks Have you got any other objections to the school mr. Randall? No, they have a wonderful faculty and I that's the one I want to go to you said you wanted me to be happy and well, I know I'd like it there Well, no, it's an awful good school. Well, all right, but I'll do anything you say if you just let me go to Farroks Well, will you leave tonight after the show? Oh, no, not that soon We said you do anything. I wanted you to or you'll be tickled to death once you get there Jerry I'll tell you what bumps and I'll go with you. Huh?  How about that? But how could bumps get off? Oh, well Seeing as how I'm the boss. I reckon we can fix that Let me try to get a call through now and see just where we stand. I think you picked a good school Jerry So do I Jerry and you like it there. You're gonna have a lot of fun Long distance, please Yeah, what's the major's name there at the Farroks? Let's see pictures right here in the front of the book. Oh, it's a major Frank Davis. Hello operator Yes, I'm calling the Farroks military Academy at Farroks. That's right. I want to talk with major Frank Davis That's it This is mr. Randall speaking. Hey, huh? Oh the phone number. Well, well, oh, this is an extension phone to the Randall brother circus That's right. Oh, I think you're better now. They're gonna get it for you. Yeah, they'll call me right back What are you calling them for? Well, we have to see if there's a place open for a new student They might be all filled up. Oh, I see now about your money Jerry. Hey Now I see it. What Rosa was right. What are you talking about Jerry remember when Rosa told my fortune the last time She said I was gonna be in a uniform like a soldier and she saw me marching between big trees And she said I was gonna leave this way. Hey, look just look at all those big trees Say this picture here. Well, there's trees all around the school. That's another prediction of roses come true Hey, wait till slats here's about this Now about the money Jerry. Oh, yeah, excuse me Your uncle and I think you should put the whole amount in the bank for the time being all but what it takes to send me to school No, all the whole amount Jerry I have a little surprise for you. No, what Sam? What's this you remember when you started doing your act with El Mundo Jerry? I gave you a raise in salary. Yeah, but I didn't give you the whole amount That act is worth a whole lot more than you've been putting away every week and I've been giving it I've only been paying you about a fourth. Huh? That's right I've been saving the biggest part of your salary for you I've got it all right in that safe enough to pay your tuition at Pharaoh really. That's right Is that a surprise Jerry? Oh, thanks, Mr. Randall Now you can put all your money that you got from your property way in the bank I guess you're not so bad off you Well, yeah, yeah, all right operator Yeah Hello, I'm major Davis. This is Mr. Randall major Davis of Randall Brothers Circus Yeah, I'm calling to find out if you have a place for another boy there at Faroks Yeah Yes, he is that's right No, right away Yes, sir. Yes, major. Oh fine fine major. Oh Well, I'll get the information and well, we'll get in some time tomorrow Thank you, sir. You bet. All right. Goodbye, major Well, that's that is their room for me. It's all set us in yep. I mean, that's great Well, Jerry, you're almost on your way. You were certainly a fine man to talk to her I think you'll get along all right within Jerry. Hey, wait a minute. Why well, how about rags? What's gonna happen to him? Oh, I can't leave rags behind We'll know Jerry you know, I take the best to care that little fellow. No, I can't go away from him Bombs now Jerry don't worry about that. We'll take rags with us to Faroks I think after the major season. Oh, we won't have any trouble Why rags will most likely wind up being the mascot of the football team It'll work out all right now you better run along get into your uniform and get ready for the night show Jerry It'll be your last one Jerry. So that'll be good