It was literally a cardinal sin to not have pasta on Sunday nights of some kind. It was always that, but not that there was Italian food the rest of the week. We had hot dogs on Sunday. I love hot dogs. But Sunday was always, I'm talking about my Italian family. Sunday night was always an Italian food night. I'm talking about my white family. It was hot dogs. Oh my, that's so good. And welcome back to our Stupid Regs, we're doing some Corbin. I'm Monica. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more juicy content. Thank you so much for coming to the camera and the bell for me. Cheers. Back! I also have a personal YouTube channel. Links right down there in the description for you. If you had to choose the rest of your life, hamburgers or hot dogs, go. Oh, hold on. Are they from a specific restaurant? Are they from in-house? All around the world, just across the board. You could have any hot dogs and any hamburgers. But you could only have one or the other hamburgers really. You really eat a hamburger? Yeah, I would choose hot dogs. Yeah, I know. I love hot dogs when I choose hamburgers. Well, anyway. Is this a food video? That'd be ironic. No, no, it's not. Oh, yeah. Trailer. No, information. I don't know. Comedy? No. Song. Song. I knew we'd get there one way or the other. I think we reacted to Kappa TV once before. What did they say these things for? Paddiatra. Job Kurian and Harish Sivaramakrishnan. Music mojo Kappa TV. And it's a Mali album. Okay. But you might recognize like the set itself like is like their band. I think. Is this like the garage thing? No, that was different. I think we've seen one of them. There was a basement thing we just did recently. Yeah, that was the net cafe. No, okay. Nest cafe. But I think it's similar to that. Mali album. But I think we've reacted to one of them before. Okay. So this is just another one. So here we go. Looks like it's going to be more classical. Freaking gorgeous. Yeah, that was awesome. It was very unique. Very unique. Man, I wish I could look at the music because it was... What were you doing? Well, rhythmically, I could hear six eight several times. It was straight six eight, which means it's six beats per measure. But then there was 11s with the dum, dum, dum. So I don't know how that was written because sometimes you can change it up. You could do like one measure of six eight and then do a second measure that's of a five eight and it would make it 11 total count. And the accentuation on it was... It was just everything that... The complexity, even in something that leans itself more toward being a contemporary sound. Eastern music is so much more... It's a different complexity because Western music is complex. Yeah. It's just a different complexity in meter and in stanza and rhythmic. It's just so freaking cool. So freaking cool. Yeah, that was... Both the singers were extremely gorgeous voices, but all the percussion behind them, I'm guessing it was playing a bell, but he was just going like... Yeah. Like every... I don't know how many... Yeah, like every... Well, he knew the rhythms. He knew the counts of the measures. It was extremely beautiful. That was an electric vina. Yeah, that was the... Yeah, the vina that she was playing was a plug-in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was absolutely gorgeous. And very cool. Very unique from the other... It was like rock and also classical. Right. Put together, which is... What can be better? Rockical. What? It was rockical. Rock and classical put together is rockical. You know who does that here in a really great way? It's a trans-Siberian orchestra. Put rock and classical together. Have you ever seen them live? I think so as a child. Okay. Yeah, they were freaking fantastic. Yeah, they were so fun. They're big Christmas... That's their big holidays to go on tour. I don't know what they're doing this year. I know. I don't know what anybody's doing live performances wise.  We'll get through it though. We will get through it. Yes, we will. If you don't say what you said a year ago right now, I mean another plague. Yeah! Dina dee dee dee dee dee dee...  Dina dee dee dee dee dee... Those were했습니다!


In today's video, we're going to be talking about how you can use TikTok to be able to start scaling your business to the next level, not only that, but I'm also going to be giving you three different ways to be able to start advertising on TikTok so you can get in front of the eyes of a bunch of new people that could potentially be new customers. TikTok has been taking the social media world by storm by giving users the ability to create short-form video clips on their platform. TikTok has gone from a platform of people just dancing to a marketing goldmine. As of late, people have been using TikTok to be able to start advertising their e-commerce business specifically in the dropshipping niche. People have been using TikTok to be able to show off their products, see how they look around the house, see how they work, and a lot more. Now, when it comes to TikTok, there is a lot of competition on there, but that doesn't mean you can't stand out. Using the right marketing strategies can really help you stand out and potentially even go viral on the platform. So, if you're ready to start making some profitable 15-second videos, then stay tuned, let's run the intro and let's get to it. What's going on, everyone? Mario here with AdoDS, and if you like videos on the dropshipping business and how to be able to start growing and scaling yours, make sure to hit that subscribe button as well as leave a like so you don't miss out on any future videos. So, why should we advertise our dropshipping business on TikTok? What makes us stand out from the other platforms such as Instagram or Facebook? Well, for one, TikTok has over 1 billion active users around the entire world. That's a lot of eyes for your products to get in front of. Now, about 78 million of those are located in the US, and roughly about 37 million are Gen Z. Now, with that being said, we really do want to focus our marketing towards them. Now, how do we do that? I'll cover that a little bit later in this video. For now, though, let's focus a little bit on why we should be marketing on TikTok. For one, TikTok can help us with brand awareness.  Now, there's a lot of different ways that we can do this, some of them being working with TikTok influencers, using the correct hashtags, using paid ads, and more. The most important thing to always remember is always make quality content. You want to make sure that the person that's viewing your videos enjoys it, so that way they have a higher likelihood of either sharing it, liking it, or leaving you a follow. With its ever-growing audience, TikTok can really help us promote and sell our products by putting it in front of the eyes of potentially millions, if not billions of people. A really good way to do this is make TikTok videos showing the product, showing how nice it is, how effective it is, without necessarily selling it. Show off the features of the product and how aesthetically pleasing it can look. That's a very subtle way to be able to market your products, which actually works very well with a lot of the Gen Zers. A lot of the times when somebody comes across a video that looks too much like an ad and they are outright trying to sell you a product, a lot of the times people are just going to scroll away and they're going to forget about it. People don't like being sold to, they like watching entertaining videos and finding something in that video that they really like. Now, as people start interacting more with your posts and you start getting a bit more attention, people are going to start commenting on those videos. It's very important that you reply back to those comments, so that way you can start connecting more with your customers. Creating a genuine connection with your audience by replying to their comments or any questions that they have is extremely important because that helps convert them into actual customers. Now, on top of that, they're also the ones that can potentially grab your video and share it with somebody else. Therefore, increasing your reach on TikTok and potentially making a few more sales. At the same time that you're answering all of these comments or questions, you're also providing customer service. Always make sure that you reply with real and well conscious answers, so that way people know that they're talking to somebody that actually cares about them and not just trying to get their money. When a user knows that we're real and responsive, they're going to feel a lot better putting their trust in our business. Now, one of the cool things about TikTok is the fact that their algorithm doesn't work the way that YouTube or Facebook does. Instead of showing people only the users that they follow, it also shows them content based on what they're already interested in. And because of that, it's a lot easier to be able to get in front of the eyes of potential new customers. Now that we know all of the reasons as to why we should start marketing on TikTok, let's actually start doing it. The first thing that we're going to need is to create a business account. Now, if you already have an account, whether it be a creator account or a personal account, it's really easy to be able to just convert it to a business. Now, on a side note, if you are just getting started, it's probably better to start off with a personal account. And then once you start getting a few sales, then convert to a business account. Now, with a personal account, it is possible to connect it to a TikTok ads manager account. But as always, it is more advisable to do it with a business account, so you have access to more in-depth analytics. But a little bit more on that later. Now let's start by converting our personal account to a business account. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to head on over to our profile page, right where it shows our username, our name and where all our posts would be. Now, if you don't have an account just yet, just go ahead and open the TikTok app and hit sign up. After we're on our profile page, we're going to go ahead and click over to the settings and privacy tab. The way you're going to do this is on the upper right hand corner of the screen, you're going to see these three little lines. That's your menu. Click on that, and then you're going to get a new window and look for the option settings and privacy. Once you're under the settings and privacy tab, you're going to get a few more options. Just go ahead and look for manage account. Now, once you're under the manage account tab, you're going to see a few more options, and then you're going to see account control right under account control. You're going to have the option to switch to a business account. Go ahead and click that. Now, the last step before changing a personal account to a business account is choosing the right category for your business. In this demonstration, we're actually just putting clothing and accessories, but make sure to choose what's relevant to yours. Now that your business account is fully set up, you can finally access your creator tools. These creator tools really help you measure the effectiveness of your content on TikTok. Now, we need to start building an effective marketing strategy for our dropshipping business. The first thing we need to do is find our target audience. Remember that the majority of TikTok users are Gen Z between the ages of 16 and 34, but that doesn't stop us from being able to target audiences beyond that bracket. At the same time, TikTok is widely used in over 150 different countries, so being able to target every single person is going to be pretty much impossible. Our posts are going to end up getting lost in all of the other thousands of posts that there are. That's why it's crucial to be able to target the correct audience and show them what they want to see. Now, the way that we're going to find our perfect TikTok audience is by continuously optimizing and testing the content that we're producing, as well as the audience that we're targeting. Now, the same way that we analyze the competition for our dropshipping store, we can do the same thing for our TikTok page. When you're checking out the competition's content, always make sure to check out their hashtags, how many views they've got in, and how many followers they have. Also check out all the other products that they're offering and see how they're interacting with their customers. After a bit of research and you get a good idea as to what's working, you can start to apply some of those same tactics to your videos. Now, regardless of how you decide to market your business on TikTok, there's one thing that's crucial and extremely important that you always need to be consistent with and that's posting.  One of the best and easiest ways that you can do this is by using a content calendar. Now, if you don't have a content calendar or don't know where to get one, just go ahead and check out the links down below in the description. I'm going to have one there that we offer over at AutoDS that's extremely handy. This calendar is completely free and it lists all the major holidays. It also gives you a lot of handy information on the holiday itself and it has links to relevant blog articles with bestselling items to be able to offer for those particular holidays. Ultimately, what you want to end up doing on your TikTok is to just create a huge community of like-minded people that share similar interests. Those people are going to be the ones that are most likely to be converted into loyal customers. Now, we want to start tracking our progress to see what's working and what isn't. Whatever is working, we can start applying a higher marketing budget to that to start converting to more sales. Now, to do this, we can start using the creator tools. In the creator tools, you're going to find your in-depth analytics, your promotions, Q&As, your TikTok shop, and a few other things. Alternatively, we can use the TikTok pixel, which is fairly similar to the Facebook pixel in the sense that we can get some really in-depth details onto what's working for our ads. Ultimately, you want to keep testing different strategies on TikTok. You want to start jumping on different trends, trying different audios, and just find out what's working best for your business. You can even try starting your own trend. Ultimately, the more techniques that we're going to be applying onto our TikTok, the better that our content is going to start performing. Now, let's talk about the three ways that you're able to start advertising your dropshipping business on TikTok. Now, the first option that we have are paid TikTok ads. While it's similar to Facebook ads, it is a bit newer, and ultimately, it's catered a bit more to the newer generation, the Gen Zs. Now, to start creating our TikTok ads, the first thing we have to do is go over to the TikTok ads manager and then click the button that says create. Now, we're going to be prompted with a few different advertising objectives. The best one for our dropshipping business though will be conversions. This selection will help us optimize our ads to be able to convert our viewers into buyers. Now, we need to choose a campaign name and set a budget. For the budget, we can choose the campaign level or group level. After we choose our campaign, we're going to be prompted with five different types of paid TikTok ads. From here, we have to choose one of them. The first one we have is the in-feed ads. This is our best selection for small to medium scaled businesses. Compared to the other ad choices, this is actually one of the more affordable options, and these ads appear on the For You page. They can include your website link or a call to action. Typically, these ads last between five to 15 seconds. Next up, we have the brand takeover ads. These typically last between three to five seconds because TikTok actually limits how many times they can be repeated. After the three to five seconds, it just becomes a regular in-feed ad. Now, if you've ever opened TikTok and the first thing you see is a promotion that's full screen and all you see is the ad, that's what this is. Another option that we have is the branded hashtag challenge. This is actually an exclusive ad type to TikTok, so you're not going to find this anywhere else. With this ad type, we can collaborate with other content creators to reach a wider audience. To do this, we would need to sponsor TikTok challenges. Afterwards, the hashtag challenge will be featured on the Discovery page for about six days. Next, we have the top view ads. The top view ads are actually very similar to the brand takeover ads, except they are more of an enhanced version. These actually last up to 60 seconds. A longer runtime on these ads can actually help our viewers by giving them more time to like, comment, and share. Now, the last option for the ad types is the branded effects ad. This is actually really cool because it allows you to be able to create your own filters on the app itself. You're able to use lenses or different stickers to create your filters so that way other users can use them and share them. The branded effects can really help maximize our ad engagements. Now, aside from paid TikTok ads, you can also choose to work with TikTok influencers. TikTok influencer marketing is fantastic because these people already have a set loyal audience. You do want to make sure that the influencers that you choose to work with that their brand values line up with yours. Also make sure that the products that you're going to be offering or giving to them are relevant to their content. Working with an influencer can be very helpful in helping grow your business because their audience already trusts what they say, and if they recommend the product, they'll be very comfortable going to that website and purchasing it. Now, our last option is to create organic content. Organic content is fantastic because it's free. We're going to be creating our own videos in this case. When you're doing this, you always want to make sure that you use the correct hashtags. A lot of the times, a good one is hashtag TikTok, make me buy it. You also want to make sure that you're keeping up with trends and you have a CTA or the call to action. Always try new things to try to drive the engagement on your posts, like creating a challenge, using trending music and filters, sharing other people's content, or even duetting and stitching it.  We want to stand out from the rest. Always aim for creating one of a kind and high quality content. Try to be unique with your videos and be creative. Another thing that's really helpful is try leveraging the publishing features on TikTok itself. What I mean by that is always try to put a good description, make it detailed, but not too long. Use the correct hashtags and relevant hashtags to what you're offering. Try to tag different brands, tag your friends, tag creators, as long as they're obviously relevant to what you're doing. And once again, always try to explore the duet and the stitch features. Those are very popular. You also want to try sharing user-generated content. Try sharing the posts that some of your friends or other creators have posted. A lot of times when you do this and you share other people's content and of course tag them, they're very appreciative of this and they like to comment on it and repost it as well. Another way to help bring in some organic traffic is to create a TikTok challenge. You can promote this challenge on TikTok or other social media platforms to redirect people to your TikTok and you can even make it into a contest to start getting more engagement.  Now the thing about challenges is that they can cost a few dollars, especially if you're going to be giving away free items or if you're going to be talking to influencers and having them promote it. Either way, if you don't want to go through that, another thing that you can do is just participate in challenges that are already trending yourself. Those are just a few of the ways that you're able to start advertising and scaling your business using TikTok. Now that you set up your TikTok account and have it as a business suite, before you start doing anything else, make sure you head on over to the AutoDS TikTok page over at auto underscore DS and leave us a follow. If you've used TikTok to market your dropshipping business in the past, make sure let me know down in the comments below. I'm very curious to know what marketing strategies used and how it went. Also, if you found the information in today's video helpful, please make sure to subscribe and leave a like. Once again, my name is Mario with AutoDS. I always wish you nothing but success in your dropshipping business and I'll catch you on the next video.


Okay, five minutes. Okay, thank you for having me here. My name is Zion. Today, I'll be sharing my personal experience on converting dynamic sites to static pages. So supposing if I would release all the events for this meetup, let's say there are 1,000 events, so I will have 1,000 static pages, and if I want to, let's say, one day I'll change the color of the word venue to red color, so I'll change 1,000 files. The other way of doing is I have one file, one dynamic page file event of PHP, and I'll just pass in IDs. The typical PHP code will look like this, I'll connect to a database of SQL query, and I'll just output the HTML, primitive, but it works. So the story goes that in my previous company when I joined, I introduced a Zen framework for web development. The sites that were done by the many developers first before me were coded in plain PHP, HTML. So the primitive code that I mentioned just now, yes, that was all the legacy code that I inherited. So one day, one fine day, the manager who was also the CIS admin, he said, I want to delete all the past data bases. So all the websites that were not done by you, that were in plain PHP, I want to convert the static. So first of all is why we invent a real, let me try out some tools that are out there, but it couldn't really meet my requirements. So I derived my own script. Why? First reason, downwards traverser. Supposing, let's say if I were to go example.com slash event 98, the two will actually eventually go up to event 97 and your crawl 99, 2000, and eventually the whole of example.com, which I don't want. I only want those web pages under event 98. Next one is, I do not want to save the images, CSS or JavaScript. I only want to generate the static web pages. And lastly, because of all the legacy code, sometimes there were some unusual links that the developer may view some agent's links.  So I will have some code review on this code that I wrote. I'm not going to go through line by line, obviously. Just bring out some things that are of concern. This, let me see here, OK. So I have a function to actually add a link type. And I actually go by tag. So what are the links that are in the HTML document? Normally the A tag, area tag, everything tag, script tag. For A tag, normally I will get the href attribute. Fine. Let's see if I go to the script tag. Script tag, there's no attribute. I'll just get the whole contents. And after that, I'll just use a regular expression to extract out certain URLs like location.href. OK, now let me go on to the main function, which is the invoke. Basically, I use a queue. Every time I come across a link, I'll check. Is it a downward link? Is it? Example, event 98 slash test dot PHP. Yes, it's a downward link. I'll proceed if not, I'll skip. After that, I'll use Kerr to extract the web page. And this is an important part, DOM document. I actually learned that you're not supposed to use regular expression to pass the HTML document. For example, if I come up with a regular expression to actually find all the A tags in the document, it will break. Why? The A tag could be in two lines. The href attribute could be using single code, double code. In the legacy code that inherited, no codes. They didn't use code at all. So sometimes there are spacers and sometimes spelling errors. So you have no idea. Whatever you can write, you will break. So just use the PHP native DOM document. Over here, I will just go through all the register link types. I find I get all the DOM elements by tag name. Then I go through the attribute. So if there's an attribute, let's say like href for source, I will just get the whole value. And then I store it. And I put it into the queue. If not, if it's like a script tag, I will basically get the contents. I'll apply the rejects or something to find the relevant URLs. And finally, I will rename it. When I run the code, I will basically, you also return me something like this. The left hand side, the keys of the array is basically those web pages that I have saved. Those are inside the array. The values are the links that I have found. And finally, the web pages should be saved like this. So instead of one page and 1,000 IDs, I have now 1,000 static web pages that generated. And you'll be reading like this, event underscore id-1.php. Of course, yeah. And that's all. Thank you very much. Any questions? What framework are you using for your slide? Reveal.js. Reveal.js. Yes. Yeah. It's quite cool. I'll just coding HTML. You don't ask me what I use. I use it myself. OK. So basically, it is just an HTML file. And I just include the Reveal.js. And this is just it. Each slide is basically just one section. So some computers have PowerPoints. Some computers have keynotes. But every computer always has a test editor and a browser. So this will work everywhere. I'm really curious about why your assistant wanted to convert dynamic script into static HTML. Very cool question. You go one the other way around, right? Yes, correct. He was quite uptight on security. In fact, actually, he ran our web servers in the office. We have, as developers, we have no access to the command line. We cannot install any software. So talk about ComposerGit. You can forget about it. So his idea was he wanted to reduce the attack area. So the longer that you keep all those partial database and dynamic pages, someone could just enjoy the SQL injection. And many of our legacy websites, all the way from 97, they were actually kind of vulnerable to that. Because it's just primitive code. And sometimes, they don't do any escaping. Sometimes. But when I started using framework, the framework does your all for you. So that was one of his reasons for security reasons. I have a speaker in the group called Guy Henry, who gave this presentation, I think a year or two back. He actually prefers to produce everything into static pages, simply because perform, I mean, from a server standpoint perspective, hosting static stuff is so much more scalable. And especially now with S3 being able to map to a domain or whatever, you can scale it infinitely without having to do anything. So if you can convert whatever that is you're producing into static pages and product and mix it all up. Scaling problems almost disappear. Almost. Sorry? It's only zero mapping. Yeah, exactly. I mean, for certain kind of things, you can do it, not for everything. If you're hosting blogs, you're hosting content, things like that, you can do it. Thank you. Okay, thank you.


A small fraction of what their other solution costs, they're able to run it actually as fast as their physical instance for DR, and they're extraordinarily happy with their result. So Chris, what architecturally makes your cost point better than what we've been seeing on the market before? It's a very, there are a number of confluences. One of them is its origin and focus is in VMs, so that's allowed us to simplify a lot of things. Okay, just to clarify, so when you say VMs, is that VM more exclusive or? It's, we're hypervisor agnostic. Right now the focus is primarily on VMs, that's what most of the business is. Absolutely, they're the lion's share of the market, but we don't ignore that there are other competitors out there. And we'll be supporting other hypervisors in the future. So focus built for virtualization was a key simplification for us. It's this combination of inline deduplication and compression and thin provisioning. You can get the NFS with flash. So all the buzzwords you've got in there, all you were missing was cloud, and you would have a bingo. We actually, if you look at our website, you will not see the C word anywhere. Or the S word with the strategic word, neither of those have both been banned from our vocabulary. We set out to minimize. But you are innovative. You might see innovative on that, yeah, sorry, guilty. It's okay. Interesting technology, definitely something, so flash, dedupe, compression, and you work out the order of the compression and the dedupe to make sure that they all work together. And based on per VM. So the typical example is really interesting in that case. So there's a situation where they had a terabyte financial footprint. So the oracle logical size was a terabyte. I guess if they deployed it with a terabyte of SSD, it would work fine. But that was just blown through their budget, so they weren't going to do that. In our case, because of the way our system is architected, the on-flash footprints of that terabyte database is 177 gigabytes. How much flash do you have in your system? We have a terabyte. So you do, but a terabyte of flash in your system isn't going to blow out the price like it would in some of those traditional sandboxes?  But in that particular instance, great illustration, so our system is supporting this DR instance of their production database, and it's only consuming 17% of the flash and 100% of the workload is coming from flash. That's fantastic. So going back to this question of the problems in the marketplace, there must have been a sort of broader philosophy you had behind putting all of this time and effort into developing this product. What were the key problems in this virtualization area that you saw there and how are you trying to tackle those? The key issues that we saw, if you look at it from a storage into the equation, they come down to complexity, which is the rat's nest of connections between VMs and the different lungs and objects underneath. And cost is almost always in there somewhere. And the ability to have the thing combined and get stuff done quickly. So it's speed of execution, complexity, and the cost of the system. Usually we're the things that cause people lots of problems. So we set out to address all three of those issues. We were talking to one of the House of Brick recently about the problems they came across. And they said 50% of the problems that they came across were how the storage was set up. Yes, right. So they're actually a large integrator helping to virtualize Oracle, which is an interesting use case. And that's actually, I would say that's on the low side. VMworld, what's your estimate? 70%, 80% of the problems that you heard about in the sessions were about I.O. And most of those were related to storage. There's an adage, you hear this, you talk to customers over and over, and if there's a performance escalation, storage is guilty until proven innocent. I mean, that's just the way it works. And it's no longer about running out of capacity so much as performance solutions that can really help with our new virtualizing. Something changed, it blew up, okay, now we're in where's Waldo. So talking about that, when something goes wrong, and there's some interesting stuff that you guys have in your product, because I always hear in a virtual environment, we shove a bunch of stuff in there and something goes wrong, and then it's like, yeah, it's the storage issue, and okay, let me sort out my virtual environment versus my physical environment and how do I fix the storage? So why is it different with your product? It's completely different as you know, multiple reasons. But the core reason is that there are no objects in our system other than virtual machines and virtual disks. There's no other hidden indirection layer. So no lones? There's no lones. Raid groups? No raid groups. There's no weird stripes. There's no volumes. There's none of that stuff exists. So if you go into even our most detailed molecular management interface. We have some files there, don't you? Yes, but the objects that are controlled are v-discs, and we take full advantage of that all the way up and down the stack. Yeah, I kind of like it because there's always that problem when you abstract an environment or put a layer of abstraction in between, and if something goes wrong, somebody has to, that generalist stuff just worked and he has to go fix it, but you guys change the way that you map to storage. There's a famous thing. I can't remember who. Some professor said, in computer science, an additional layer of indirection can solve any problem, except for the problem of having too many layers of indirection. But you're building this product, as I understand, on the NFS connection with VMware, and that's probably not the area that I'm surprised that you chose that because of all the areas in VMware, it's probably maybe the least developed. Certainly, I think as an observer, it would be fair to say that NFS functionality has lagged the block access. Right. There's no question about that. From talking to people inside VMware, that gap has been closed. If it had been caught by a network, it would have been a different story, wouldn't it? I suppose. But that has been closing, and certainly internally, my understanding is they're being treated as peers, as first-class equals. Absolutely. So you're comfortable with being in that area? But the reason we chose NFS was not, we actually can, probably will, do iSCSI connectivity. There's nothing about the protocol, per se. It just was well-supported. It was a straightforward process and allows thin provisioning. It's the simplest path to thin provisioning up front. That's the reason that we would, if there was blah, blah, blah, connectivity that offered similar, I mean, we're not wedded to NFS or dependent upon anything in particular there. It's an existing client that we could connect with. Yeah, but both NFS and iSCSI map more naturally to virtual environments than something like Fiber Channel, which took a while to kind of develop over the years. And Fiber Channel solutions are doing great today in that environment. Performance enhancements have been there, but true, NFS has been there forever. And therefore, you know, we've seen some good growth. And the NFS solution is very robust. I mean, the client actually works very well. Okay, so you've got, so your founder came from VMware, can you tell us a little bit about the rest of the team? Sure. So we have other folks that came from VMware, Citrix. I myself, I was at NetApp for 10 years. I was the vice president of product management there. We have, you guys met this morning, Ed Lee, one of our architects, who was from Data Demand. Yeah, yeah. Wrote the original RAID driver at Berkeley back in the day, so has a lot of experience with that. Prateek Wadhur, our vice president of engineering, was also Data Demand. He was the guy that made the trains run on time. And that product is so easy to use. We have other folks from Brocade, did some of the original architecture work there. So it's actually this combination of folks with deep virtualization experience and storage experience, which I think has led us to do something that is obvious in retrospect. But nobody else has done. And it was that combination that allowed us to bridge over those two gaps, I think. We've been expecting, looking for other people to do something similar and have really been surprised that there's been nobody else that's connected to the dots. But I think it's that combination of deep expertise on both ends that led us to this point. We were talking to some of the CIOs recently, one in particular. And we were asking them, what would you do differently about virtualization? And one of his answers was very interesting. He said, we should have reorganized ourselves and got away from the storage gurus, the database gurus, the server gurus, and really made them generalists and made them responsible for the whole system. Got to break the silos. Got to break the silos. Is that a constraint to your business, that these silos? Well, anytime you're trying to bring in a new way, I'm avoiding using the paradigm word, any new approach to something, is obviously it breaks glass. And organizational issues are one of the key issues you have to overcome. So it certainly is unfamiliar. And yet I would say of the people that we've talked to, the folks that understand virtualization get it immediately. And the people that are writing the checks get it immediately. They understand how this can have a profound impact. And at the end of the day, as we were discussing this morning, at the end of the day, it's applications that drive the business. And so if you can deploy an application where literally from top to bottom, you're all speaking the same lingua. And the only objects that exist all the way from the application layer all the way down to the bits that are sitting in disks in place are the same objects. You can actually talk to each other. We had a fascinating, I had a fascinating interchange. I wasn't there, but a reporter by our SE who deployed our first system at one of VMware's largest companies. We have not been able to announce this yet. But we had a fascinating interchange. Our SE asked both the storage admin and the VM admin were standing there and asked them, so how big are your VMs? And the storage admin said, well, our VMs are 500 gig because that's the size of the data store that they create. And so he's done 500 gig, you know, away you go. And the VM admin verbally slaps him.  Our VMs are like typically like 25 gig. So here you have an extraordinarily sophisticated customer and these two people work together all the time and they're not speaking the same language. I mean, one of the storage guys is working hard. I mean, there's a lot of work associated with presenting that virtual data store object and yet to the VM admin, they recognize that as necessary but not sufficient first step in this whole process. So you really see your product going in and the virtualization admin can really just take care of that whole storage environment. Not necessarily putting the storage admin out of business, but he can manage much larger environments in doing this. Yeah, I think managing multiple nodes and capacity planning and storage is not all going to be in VMs. I mean, we are probably a niche player. It happens to be a big niche and it's growing, but we're only in VMs, absolutely. Some of the challenges we see in IT in general is if they don't get things done the way, you've got the lines of business that are just grabbing a credit card and going out to Amazon. So now you've got another technology that can help that virtualization admin really do their job more efficiently. Yeah, as she mentioned, Amazon. We have another customer who's actually running us in production now and they have actually pulled a portion of their workload out of Amazon and are now created their own internal private cloud in large part because of the radical shift in economics that we present to them. So it's now cost effective for them to deploy their own private cloud, where previously the cost was just out of sight and it made more sense to pay the monthly fees to Amazon to get this hosted externally. And they have a very interesting approach to HA in their environment, which I think with a startup, why would you run a startup in a production environment? Well, the reason is that they actually have about three of our systems and have multiple copies of the VMs on each one of these nodes. And so at the application layer, they have application AJ, which is really what you want. And what applications are they running on there? They're web-facing apps. Web-facing apps, okay. Excellent. So you're obviously very new in there. You must be working on a few other things to enhance your product. Yes. What sort of things aren't there at the moment you're working hard to get? The two key future directions for us are, one is making multiple nodes even easier to manage.  You run a performance capacity or storage capacity, you add another 8.5 terabyte data store. We're working on ways to make that easy with large numbers of data stores, which actually storage providers are particularly interested in. So we've talked to folks like that. So let's just do a quick reset. So this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. I'm here with Chris Bennett of Tintry and David Floyer of Wikibon talking about some new approaches to storage specifically for virtualization environments. And Chris, one of the things we talked about earlier I want to just touch on a little bit more is, it's not so much about capacity, but it's about performance. And I think from a management standpoint, I heard something from you that I'd never heard about latency and IOPS and how I can really get visibility. Can you fill us in on that? Absolutely. So one of the things, there are a bunch of things that are really cool. So it's really fun. So on our UI. You'd like your job, I'm guessing. It's really fun. You're having a blast. I'm having a great time. It's really fun. Yeah, we don't have to. I'm guessing marketing guys don't like the stealth mode too much. Yeah, it's not so much fun. So on our UI, there are two fuel gauges. One is traditional for storage devices, which is how much of the capacity have you consumed. The other one is very innovative, which is performance fuel gauge. And as long as both of those fuel gauges are green, you can keep adding VMs to this node. So what do I get on the performance, what am I measuring from performance standpoint? It's actually a complicated algorithm internally. It's some combination of how many flash ops, how many disc ops, how much footprint you've already taken in the flash. So it's IOPS, and I believe there's latency also. Yes, so I'm sorry to answer your question. So let's say you have a performance problem. And you need to diagnose what's going on. You can drill into our UI just with a couple of clicks on that particular VDIS or that VM. And you can see what the latency is, real time, as well as what the latency has been for the last seven days. On per VDIS, you can see that information. That's awesome. I know we've gotten a lot of feedback that, right, storage is broken. And how do I go and find that? Is it better now? Is it better now? Let's throw some more hardware at it. Let's do something else now. We understand at the application level. So the storage guy can actually say, it isn't me. You've done something in the database. Here it is. It's half millisecond. Right. What more do you want? Any questions? Away you go. So we've had numerous customers. I don't want to exaggerate. Several customers in my presence, while they're seeing the demo, essentially say, I've been asking for this for years. I want to be able to see this kind of information. I haven't been able to see it before. So Chris, to lead us out, can you tell us where we can find more information on Tintry? www.tintry.com. And how can you spell that for us? T-I-N-T-R-I. And the I has a little thing over it, right? It's actually Tintry, actually it's an accent. Tintry is Gaelic for lightning. There you go. So in Gaelic, it's actually has the accent on the final I. OK, so check out Tintry.com. We look forward to following your progress. Thank you for joining us here at theCUBE. My pleasure.


So I'm here today to talk to you about the state of the PHP community Now when I mentioned that this is probably what you were expecting a discussion of pain suffering despair agony But what I want to give you today is a talk of hope. I Want to paint a different picture of the community? That includes hope growth and future So before we do that however for everybody else in the room who didn't chuckle at that first slide We need to review the pain that the PHP community has been through To know where we're coming from and we've certainly had a fair bit of it First of all, there's internals a very special special place Internals has had its history of vitriol of being unwelcoming It's a place where definitely there have been plenty of flame wars and even personal attacks PHP 7 itself Getting PHP 7 out Had a lot of pain. There was a lot of controversy about it. There was controversy about scalar type hints Whether we wanted them or whether we didn't and once it was decided we did want them What type of scalar type hints they would be how they would be implemented when all of that was going down? A lot of controversy came up about voting techniques people campaigning for votes The timing of requests that were being put in and people may be trying to put Requests in for a vote beyond time periods and other people can looking at that differently There was just a lot of mess happening around that time There was even a lot of controversy about the name itself PHP 7 versus PHP 6 I will fully admit I was one of the instigators there I was the one who actually wrote up a very large email to the list Explaining the reasons why I really felt it should be PHP 7 which led to Zev Saraski Making the actual RFC and bringing it to a vote We've also got fig the framework interoperability group Fig has seen a lot of fireworks over its days Not that long ago. They actually had for the first time in their organization Had to have a vote and go to a vote about potentially pushing a certain member out The vote ended up failing Everything is fine however There was a lot of infighting that came with that right there were a lot of people upset that There was even a need to go to a vote people that were upset that the vote didn't happen or didn't happen the way that it did There were a lot of people who left fig at that time a lot of people who have not come back There's also been a fair bit of shutdowns happening within the community Which maybe not everyone is quite as aware of I run conferences for a living I run technical conferences specifically. I run PHP conferences the way often that People who run PHP conferences get the word out the easiest way to get the word out is to reach out to all the user groups Because you reach out to the user groups you let them know they let all their members know it's easy. It's easy to get the word out. However That puts us conference organizers in a unique place to sort of see what's happening amongst all the user groups out there and across the world There has been a lot of groups that are going inactive a number of groups that have completely shut down Being that I am from the US I have a couple specific examples from there that I can easily refer to in my mind New York PHP, which was one of the biggest or is I believe the biggest user group dedicated to a specific city Not a greater region for PHP Did not meet for 11 months straight Baltimore PHP did not meet for 18 months straight St. Louis PHP absolutely shut down and went inactive and is gone Of course, they did that six months before we moved to conference there However, a lot of that has been happening The community itself has also been fragmenting we've been fragmenting in a lot of different ways in Some parts it's people moving over to auxiliary groups people from the PHP community Moving to the Drupal community or the WordPress community or the Laravel community and separating themselves from the greater PHP community We've also been fragmenting in other ways IRC versus slack for example a lot of the older original community always hung out on IRC Now lots of people have left IRC to be in slack and that has caused some tension There's even age fragmentation happening in the community I mentioned being part of the older PHP community and I have the white hairs to show it unfortunately PHP has been around for a very long time There are people that have been in the community from the beginning and there are now new people joining the community every day And a lot of times the new folks in Have different ideas of what they want to see out of the community than people that have been doing it for 20 years Because we get stuck in our ways And then there's Reddit um To quote George Lucas you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy Um reddit is a wonderful place. However, unfortunately The PHP subreddit Tends to be the place Where all of the angst all of the anger all of everything negative about PHP comes to surface and comes to a head And unfortunately it is a very public place. So everyone sees that All right, we've talked about all of these pain points But before we go any further I want to now talk about the amazing and awesome things that does exist in the community Because it is not all pain. There are wonderful things going on Most importantly are the people in the PHP community The fact is PHP is filled with amazing people in my opinion unlike any other community In fact, I often try to compare the people of the PHP community To being very similar to how PHP itself is unlike any other open source programming language In fact, I know some people will disagree with me and in fact some people in this room may disagree with me But tough i'm up here speaking PHP is unique as an open source language in my opinion. It is the only truly Open source programming language and what I mean by that is yes There are lots of other open source programming languages ruby and python and pearl and more All of those other open source programming languages, however Have one person or maybe a small core team That actually decide the future and direction of that language If you've ever looked on the internals mailing list, you know no one is in charge of PHP PHP operates as an open democracy Anybody in this room anybody in the world can have a great idea for what they want to see happen With PHP a direction. They want to see PHP go You can come up with that idea. You can join the internals mailing list. You can throw that idea out there You will have to defend that idea But you can make a change and make that change happen in PHP Now the fact is i'm talking about all these wonderful people and because of that I don't want This talk to be just my voice I want you to listen to the words of some others as well So first of all we have Samantha Keone's She wrote an article for php architect magazine Talking about community and in it she wrote Sometimes it's hard for me to understand how warm and welcoming people can be This community opens itself up to absolutely anyone who is willing to give even a little something back It's remarkable The community has given me so much and I feel like I can't come close to giving back in kind I think back to my very first talk feeling taken aback by all the support I was getting from these new friends What did you expect one person asked me? I didn't expect this Joe Ferguson was being interviewed by cloudways who has interviewed a lot of php developers recently And in that interview they asked him about community And he said the power of the php community comes from the willingness to share We share code successes and sometimes heartbreak I have seen so many friends in the php community and we all seem to have this common goal of helping anyone better themselves There's a million other quotes. There's a million other people I did want to pull a couple quick ones from twitter if you search for php community You can find an amazing amount of things on twitter But just a few of the ones that really drive this home to my mind We have an entire twitter account php hugs Dedicated to sharing the love of the community Their pinned post is if you want to give kudos to a personal project in the community tag it with php hugs I'll retweet and share the love Michael Beckwith attended his very first php conference and he posted I have felt very welcomed by what parts of the php community Are here for php crews. It's my first php conference outside of the wordpress bubble And one of my favorite ones from zev sirasky one of the architects of php3 Was there are 13,289 times more love than hate in the community It's only that we humans tend to focus on the bad and not the good Now we talked about the negativity that happened with getting php7 out But the fact is php7 is out and it is amazing We have scalar type hints. We have return types Most importantly, we have a 70 to 300 speed increase by just installing php7 It is faster than hhvm for many use cases now There are also a lot of amazing projects being built by members of the community For example, we have phpug A great website you can go and see Every single user group in the world see when they're meeting anywhere you travel It's easy to go and look and see where you could attend a user group We have php map which builds on top of that which not only lists The user groups out there But you yourself can put a dot on that map for you showing you are a php developer and where you are And that you are willing to connect to anyone And to help and to collaborate and you can find php developers this way And then I talked earlier about irc versus slack But we now have this amazing phpug slack channel If you are not part of it, I charge you all to go join it go to php.ug and on the bottom there is a link To get an invite to this slack It is I am not sure how many thousands of people are on it at the moment But not only is everyone on it, but a number of different php user groups have all made their own sub channels on it And are having conversations and there's channels to learn about conferences and call for papers and all sorts of things And this is just a sampling of some of the projects that the php community has been putting out for the community We also do a lot of really good things For example, there has been a big push in the community recently to bring a lot of awareness To the mental health problem that exists Not just in our community, but the developer community at large A lot of this push has been from this Project non-profit that has started up open sourcing mental illness started by ed finchler up there And it has been amazing the amount of help that is created the now speakers They have been providing to various conferences to talk about this very important issue The php community is also amazing at helping each other I have lost count of the number of times I've heard of someone in the community in need And people stepping up and helping them out I want to highlight one of them just because it's the most recent one that comes to mind that was gigantic It was for this man here, Jeremy Kendall Jeremy and his wife had just had a new baby and not long after Jeremy found himself without a job Unfortunately for the job market he was in That job did not come quickly And a month went by and a couple months went by and I believe at least six months went by And again, they had just had a baby. They had all sorts of expenses. They were needing to meet Jeremy himself Would not step up and say he needed help But someone else in the community who knew him and had been talking to him was a good friend realized How bad the situation was That person started a go fund me campaign for Jeremy and his wife to make sure that they could have the money They needed to take care of their baby Thousands of people went and donated tens of thousands of dollars I was talking with Jeremy afterwards Um, and he was almost in tears saying how literally without the php community He did not know what they would have done if they would have made it that it was literally that bad And that's a very big case But it's amazing all the small things that we do to help each other out as well I can only speak for my own twitter feed But it is constantly full at least once a day I see somebody saying hey, I have a job opportunity for someone like this is anyone looking And conversely I see people going like hey, I know an amazing senior dev or an amazing evangelist Who needs one and people helping each other out Now I also wanted to talk about growth Because php is growing We are working through those various pains So for example Internals In my opinion Internals has kind of seen the light It has been calming down a lot lately Yes, there are lots of people with very strong opinions who will argue very strongly for that We are all geeks. We like to do that However The amount of personal attacks and flame wars that come from that has really calmed down People have realized that they need to keep a professional tone I think part of that is somewhat maybe not completely but somewhat due To another project formed by the php community externals.io Which is a very public very easy to access very pretty archive Of the internals mailing list the internals mailing list has always been public But you had to know the magic url to go through and it was really ugly and a lot of people therefore didn't go look at it I have actually seen for example in externals.io help out on reddit Where in the past someone would just post something if can you believe what so and so said on internals and a flame war erupts on reddit Now when someone posts that I often see someone else going well Here's actually the link to what they said on externals.io And everyone actually goes and reads it and goes oh actually that wasn't that bad. You're taking it out of context And so it has helped out In fact throughout the php community I see a lot of new beginnings happening and blank slates As people are seeing that changes needed and growth has to happen For example right now is sort of the time for figs new day They are working on restructuring Fig 3.0 They are reformulating themselves to be much more of the standards group for php that php Always wanted them to that the community always wanted them to be and that originally they did not want to embrace that concept In fact the community is really sort of waking up We're coming out of this extended hibernation There was a law that happened And if you look back the law started sort of in that build up to php7 in about the year before it As things started to roll forward as a lot of drama started to come out About php7 and all that negativity a lot of people started to drop off People just went you know, I don't want anything to do with this right now. I'm stepping away for a bit Then php7 itself came out And a lot of the people who were pushing so hard and working hard to get it out Stepped back because they were now tired Well, that's been a while now php7 has been out for over a year Things are starting to come back all of those developers who had stepped out for a while are now starting to come back Things are starting to wake back up for example I talked earlier about how both new york php and baltimore php had not met for 11 or 18 months respectively I am very happy to announce that within the last couple months both of those user groups have started having meetings again So what does the future hold then for the php community? Where can we go from here? The problem is we have a problem of size Now what i'm saying is that we've really gotten too big But at the same time We're thinking too small And what I mean by that is that php is huge We are the elephant in the room We run 82 of the web We have enterprise adoption. We are everywhere. We won If there was a competition of what programming language would run the web It's us The problem is That means we aren't the hip new thing anymore Nobody talks about us. We're just php that other programming language that people use What happens then Is by the old school definition for those of us here with enough white hair to remember of what we considered the php community originally The php community was the internals team And their friends and followers on Which all hung out in the phpc irc channel That was a very small community and that's what Decades ago now Was considered the php community That mental image of the community Can't expand to contain 82 of the web They're estimated to be five million php developers in the world Causing that 82 of the web to happen We can't have five million developers. I'll be everyone's best buds So that concept of community Couldn't contain the growth that php was seeing and so what happened? We broke apart. We formed islands People went off into these sub communities Drupal wordpress laireville symphony In fact a number of those sub communities Grew big and grew strong and in many senses grew stronger than the php community itself We're here at one of the premier php conferences with 700 people in the room Drupal conferences get 2,000 to 4,000 people Wordpress conferences get into thousands as well and there's a word camp every single weekend somewhere that has a few hundred people These other communities broke off grew big and grew strong The thing is great work in the last couple years has happened to bridge these islands In fact, I want to tell a story about the Drupal community itself Drupal a few years ago Actually started a campaign called get Drupal off the island They realized this had happened to them. They realized that they were being very insular They were rebuilding things. They were not looking into what was happening outside in the php world They realized that Drupal was built on php and therefore it is very important to be connected and have these two communities be connected Now there was a big push. There was a lot of money put behind it. There was a lot of evangelists sent out to different conferences Did Drupal get off the island? No Because it's a great island. It's very pretty people like it But what happened was these bridges got built We now have on a regular basis php developers attending Drupal conferences. We have Drupal developers attending php conferences In fact at Drupal cons now there is a dedicated php track and a dedicated symphony track Something they had not had in the past In fact, the reason there's a dedicated symphony track is that Drupal 8 came out as part of this get Drupal off the island push And Drupal 8 is rebuilt where they've thrown away large sections of the original Drupal code And pulled in symphony and some bits of Zim framework and a few other things primarily symphony And replaced those parts of Drupal with that Because they realized why do we for example need to write our own router when symphony has a wonderful one We can build on top of we can contribute back to symphony symphonies contributions come back to us We all make each other's products stronger the problem is There is a bigger task ahead of us And that's reaching what i'm going to call the third ring of developers Now what do i mean The way i'm looking at the php community right now there are three rings So first of all you've got the core community Now my modern definition of the core community Is much bigger than what the definition was a few decades ago The modern definition involves yes the internals people and people in irc chat rooms and in slack chat rooms It involves every single member of every single php user group out there It involves every single one of you and every single person who attends any php conference in the last few years That's a fairly large core community But those are the people who are directly connected to the php community Then you have this other ring around them This is what i'm going to call the extended community This is now all of those other extended communities such as The application communities and the framework communities the people who are in the wordpress and drupal and lara vell communities Who still consider themselves? I am not a php developer. I am a lara vell developer. I am not a php developer I am a wordpress developer and that's fine There's part of the extended community because we have those bridges. We can still reach them. We can still connect with them But you this is a countable number of people It'd be hard to count, but it's countable You could go to meet up find every single meetup somewhat related to php count them find every single Conference that is in some way related to php count the number of attendees they have you can add all that up That number does not come to five million It does not come even close to that Maybe you count a million. Maybe you count 500,000. Maybe it's smaller The fact is There is a very large outer ring around us Of people who are developing on php People to whom php is just another language And who are not connected to the community at all at the moment And they are really hard for us to reach And part of the problem is that when that outer ring starts to get close To the inner rings If they see negativity If they see bickering If they forbid read reddit They are not going to see a community they want to be a part of And the thing is this outer 50 percent They're always asking this one question Why? So this photograph is from a conference I attended called that conference Makes for wonderful phone conversations when you're trying to book a hotel room You book a hotel room for that conference. What conference? That conference It's a polyglot web tech event. So there are people there From with all sorts of different programming languages as their base language It's also a huge conference thousands of people. It's also at the water park Which is why it's a huge conference with thousands of people I was at this conference one year speaking And they have an open spaces UnCon area And someone had signed up for a slot just writing php question mark At the time I was a member working with php architect and I was there representing php architect So I was there in my bright orange shirt with my logo on it And I went oh someone has something about php. I should go sit in on that and see what they're talking about So I went there and I sat down There were about six or seven guys there They were all very young in their early 20s And they were talking about php and what they're doing with it and all this and it became obvious to me listening to what they were saying That they were all people who had very recently within the last couple years graduated from college With a degree in computer science or something similar Went out to get their first job being a programmer The job they happened to find was at some company where the company said by the way we program in php And they went okay fine. That's a programming language. I can program They had never been connected to the community They didn't know a community existed. We started to talk about that They asked me what I did I'm like, oh, I'm with php architect. Can't you see on my shirt here? Um, we're the magazine that's been around for 13 years. It was 12 years at that time for 12 years Um dedicated to php and they all looked at me in almost in unison said why Why is there a magazine dedicated to php? Why would anyone do that? I'm like because it's cool and you can learn things and then we got to talking more And one of the guys there was like, yeah, I come to this conference every year Because it's the only conference. I know of that has stuff about php in it And I was like, where do you live? He's like I live in dc. I'm like I run a php conference in dc. That's dedicated to php In fact, there are hundreds of conferences dedicated to php around the world And again, his answer was why? He had never thought that someone would make a conference about just php To him would be like having a conference just about c or just about assembly There are a few of those out there, but not many not like we do right And the same thing happened we started talking I was like, hey Well, what user groups do you belong to and a couple of them were like, oh I belong to this one of that one. None of them mentioned a php user group And I'm like, why don't you belong to php user group? And again, they said, why? Why are there user groups dedicated to php? I'm like, are there assembly user groups? Are there c user groups? I'm like, well, no, not really. And yes, if you google you'll find them But hardly any compared to what we in the php community are and that's the problem is php started As this small tight-knit community of people working on a really cool thing We've now expanded to the point that we are just php To anyone that is not originally part of that community We are just another programming language and therefore they don't even think That there would be a community or why a community would exist around it It's just this programming language that in some cases has been around longer than they were born And so it's just always been there so I'm going to randomly say 50 percent of developers therefore Are outside of our reach They don't belong to a user group. They don't attend php conferences.  They go to work. They sit down in the cubicle by themselves They write php code all day. They go home. They are absolutely the people who could benefit so much By connecting with the community. They're people that we would love to help Show them the things that we can do The fact is we need to reach out to these people At the same time we need to be positive within our own community We need to not give them a reason to see anything negative We need to show them the amazing community that we are We need to give them an amazing community We need to make a welcoming environment for them Reach out Find these people pull them in And show them the love that the php community can have for them Thank you


Networking is, I think, one of the pillars of any business strategy that you put, and like every business strategy, you have to go at it with a plan. And it's been working for us since we started to implement an aggressive networking plan here at Red Crow. It could help you connect with people around the world. It could help you connect with people for affiliations, for investment or sales. And like we talked about before, it helps you open up to other communities to tell them about what you do. And in this way, you can create affiliations that can minimize resources and spending and save times. To get the most out of networking, you have to always have to put together an action plan. So you do your research. You want to know who your target is and how to reach out and connect with them. And when you do that and when you identify who your targets are, prioritize them. So for instance, when we go to a networking event, you don't really have much time to meet everybody that you want to meet. And you also have very little time with them. So prioritizing the people that you want to meet based on their efficiency and what can you give them or what can you take from them? How can you both collaborate? So after you do that and you identify who they are, knowing what you want from them, it's called the ask. Everyone you talk to always understands that you have something to ask of them. So if you keep talking about your project and you don't really get to the question that you want, they stop asking, they stop, I'm sorry, they stop listening. And so when you have an ask, you kind of talk about it and you talk around it so you can tell when the person in front of you is interacting with you and how you can build affiliations and move from step of meeting them today to helping them and them helping you. There's also being available all the time in relevant networks and add to that that you have to break out of your comfort zone that we mentioned before. Meeting new people and talking to them and telling them about your organization helps shed a light and also when you network with people, keep the word of mouth, keep moving from one person to another, you get a bigger exposure and you get bigger awareness to what you do. The best part for me at least about networking is follow up. When you talk to somebody in an event and they've talked about a million people, it's going back and reminding them of yourself, remind them of your cause and then you'll get the one-on-one interaction with them. You can either ask for a meeting or ask for another email or more information and that is where you get to how do you say reap what you sowed. You get to give them the information that you have more in a personal level and get their feedback. Networking for RedCrow has been tremendous. We've got investments, we've got grants through networking, we've had affiliations with the UNICEF, the World Bank, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. Social entrepreneurs depend mostly, at least in the Middle East, on networking, on spreading your idea, spreading your solution and having people feel engaged in your product and everybody wants to help. Whether it's by financials or connections, it helps the startup or the organization break out of its small little shell and spread to the markets that you want to cover or you want to reach.


Let's go over question 4 from the Compound Data 1 workshop. So with these questions here, we're using a loop to initialize an array of values regardless of the size of the array. So that note there is just making sure that we don't hard code our loop. And it's making sure that the loop we're using is this one here, where we've got i is 0, i is less than r.length, i++. Because if you know the size of your array, say if I've got an integer array that has 10 items, it may be tempting to say, well, I only want the indexes from 0 to 9, so I'll say less than 10. But it's just good practice to have it as r.lengths. So that's one thing to note there. OK, so for each of these questions, as you can see here, I'm using the same loop, because I know that loop has i representing the array index. It will go through all of the array indexes regardless of the size. And yeah, that's just what I want to use each time. So to do these questions, what we need to do is work out the pattern between the index and the value. Because there's some relationship there, we need to work out what that is to assign a value to i. So if we have a look at 4.1, that one's not too bad. If we have a look at our pattern, we've got when our index is 0, our value is 0. When our index is 1, our value is 1. When our index is 2, our value is 2, and so on. So we can see here that whatever our index is will be whatever our value is. So what we can say is that for each array item at index i, its value is i. So for each of these questions, we are going to try and write our answer in terms of i. You could, as well, if you wanted to have a separate variable x or whatever you want it to be and allocate it x and then plus 1 to x each time. But if you already have a loop variable that there's some relationship between the value and that loop variable, there's no point creating a new one. But of course, if you create a new one, that's OK as well. OK, if we have a look at 4.2, that one's a little tricky out because we can see that it's doing the odd numbers. It's doing the odd numbers here, but it's a little bit harder to get that relationship between i and that number. So when the index is 0, the value is 1. When the index is 1, the value is 3. And then 5. And I'm assuming it's 7 and then 9. So what I need to do is, well, there's two approaches. There's the one I showed you before where I created a new variable and you would just increase it by 2 each time for this case. However, I think we can do it in terms of our i variable. So what we want to do is rewrite each of our values in terms of i. And that just requires a bit of trial and error, try out a formula, see if it works for the rest of the numbers and see what happens. So if I have a look at index 1, how do I turn 1 into 3? Well, I could do 1 times 2 plus 1, that equals 3. So let's see if that formula works for the rest of our numbers. So to turn 2 into 5, 2 times 2 plus 1 works. Turn 3 into 7, 3 times 2 plus 1 works. So it looks like we have our formula here. 4 times 2 plus 1 is 9. Awesome. And of course, this will equal 1. So I got that quite quickly because I've practised this question and I already know what the formula is. So sometimes, especially in exam conditions, it might take a little bit more trial and error to get that formula. You just want to test out, multiplying different values, adding different values and seeing what works. So I can see here I've rewritten all of my values. If we have a look at our i, I've done all of that. Well, those correspond there and everything else is the same, times 2 plus 1. So that means that what we want to do here is for each index i, the value is i times 2 plus 1. Times 2 plus 1. Great. And then of course, an alternative. It's always nice to do it using the loop variable. But I mean, if you really can't see the relationship, you've pressed for time, then you could always do something like this and then say x plus equals 2. That will also give you the same result. You can see this one is a little nicer using the loop variable. Cool. Now 4.3, actually we don't need that. 4.3, when the index is 0, the item is array dot length. When the index is 1, the item is array dot length minus 1. When the index is 2, the value is array dot length minus 2. So you can see here that each value involves array dot length and depending on what your index is will depend on what is being minused away from the array length. So when it's 1, you're taking away 1. When it's 2, you're taking away 2. And although we can't see it, when it's array dot length, when the index is 0, we're minusing 0, but we don't put a minus 0 there. So that's our relationship. Our relationship is r dot length minus i. And then that last one there, 4.4. It's a little trickier to see that one there. And I'll show you a common error that people make with this one. Sort of, I've got when the index is 0, the value is 1. The index is 1, the value is 2. And I've got 4, 8, and I know the last one's 16. So what I've seen a few students do now, and it's quite tempting to do this, but it will have some issues, a relationship they found was that each item was the previous item multiplied by 2. So for index 1, its value is the previous item 1 times 2, which is 2. If we have a look at 3, its value is 8, which is 4 times 2. For index 4, its value is 16, which is 8 times 2. And that's good that you found that relationship. Our only issue is that what happens when we have 0? When we've got i is equal to 0, we're saying array index 0 is equal to array 0 minus 1, which is minus 1, times 2. And this will give you an index out of bounds exception when I run that code, because the index negative 1 doesn't exist. So you want to be really careful with that. And I would advise not doing this question that way, even if you set your first item to be 1, and then started your loop at 1, that it does work. But there's a way to do this using just i and not having a look at the previous item, because this can cause some issues. And sometimes those issues aren't immediately obvious, especially in exam conditions where you don't have processing to use. So there's actually a different relationship here. And it's to do with powers of 2, because I know anything to the power of 0 is 1. 2 to the power of 1 is 2. 2 to the power of 2 is 4, and so on. So that pattern there, my i's are my powers. And it's 2 to the power of i. And if you do something like this, that's not going to work. Processing doesn't recognize that. So what we want to use here is the power function, which is an inbuilt method in processing, an inbuilt function that takes in two parameters. So it's an informed producer. So you pass in a base and a power. So our base is 2, our power is i, and what it outputs or what it returns is a float. And because of that, we've got, because we have an integer array and we're trying to assign a float to an integer, we need to cast this, which is saying, I know this value will output a float, but please convert it to an integer. So that will get that one to work there. There are lots of inbuilt maths functions that you can use on processing.reference, processing.org slash reference, sorry. We've got some calculation methods here that are quite helpful. However, I would not use them, I'd be careful using them in exams because if your question is asking you to design a function that given an array gives you the biggest number in that array, or actually you could use max for that. What situations would you not use it for? Ah, here we, so one of the questions when we did function was, or functions one I think, was create a function that takes the floor of a number. There's already an inbuilt function that does that for us, but if the aim of the question is to design a method yourself, then you want to actually design that yourself, not just use the inbuilt method. So you want to be careful there, but in this situation, it's okay to use pow. And I think that's the last question, awesome.


I have a question about Bhuta Shuddhi, we speak about cleansing of the five elements. Cleansing them of what, why do they become impure? And what is the difference between Panchabhuta, Radhana which happens on Shivaratri and the Bhuta Shuddhi process which we learn as a power of hatha yoga? The five elements, just five, if they have to play so much mischief, it's not one or two manifestations, trillions of manifestations. If all this has to happen, if it does not acquire other qualities or possibilities, there is no way with five you can create so many. They are naturally receptive in nature. The air that you breathe, the food that you eat, the water that you drink, we will leave the other two because you don't have much experience of those two. Today we know we can influence them just with thought, emotion, intention or energy. We can change the quality of the water, we can change the quality of the air and the food that we eat just with our intention or emotion or thought process. So the five elements within you which makes this body are deeply, deeply influenced. A certain layer of information which generally referred to as the karmic substance gathers without it, the elements would not behave in a particular way within you. It would be same, every human being would have been same if there was no specific information.  The banana becomes a woman. Somebody here eats, it becomes a man. If a cow eats, it becomes a cow. Same banana. Banana is not so intelligent. To make itself into a man, woman, cow, whichever animal consumes, it is a certain amount of information within you which transforms a banana into a woman or a man or a cow or an elephant or whatever for that matter. What you call as myself, individual self is essentially a certain volume of information and the fundamental way that it is stuck onto you is through the elements because there is nothing here apart from the elements. So cleansing it is also about cleansing it and making it free of the accumulated information or the karmic substance. If this is not done then you will be a strong individual but you will never know how to breach this boundary that you have set for yourself. This is not some boundary set by the existence. This is a boundary that you set for yourself. If you cannot cross the boundary that you set up, that's the foolish way to live. You set up a boundary without knowing why and you can't cross it after some time. And you start claiming, this is how I am.  No, this is how I am. This is not how you are. This is what you made yourself to be. Now cleansing becomes relevant when you want to extend yourself beyond these boundaries. And freedom and liberation becomes the goal of your life. If you want to be a concrete ball, there's no need to cleanse, there's no need to cleanse at all. So concretization of karmic process will make you rigid, rigidity will bring enormous amount of suffering, enormous. You don't need a calamity to happen.  You do not need any external assistance. This is called self-help. Most people, when it comes to their suffering, they're all in self-help, you know. Nobody need to poke them. When was it last time that somebody physically poked you? When was it last time? Maybe when you were in school, somebody did this to you. After that nobody is bothered about doing anything like that. Most of you, almost all of you have never been poked with a dagger or a sword, at the most a pin or a finger, nothing more.   How much has been caused from external agencies? How much is caused by you, if you look at it? It is a minuscule percentage which has been caused from external agencies. No, no, no, my mother-in-law said this, my boss said that. They are saying what they are saying, but they are not poking you. Physical suffering has not been caused to you from outside, unless you are from Middle East.  This is simply because the imprint is so deep that you behave in predetermined, impulsive ways. A thousand times the same situation has happened, but still the next time it happens, you almost react the same way. It takes a certain amount of awareness, certain amounts of shaking you up to respond in a different way. So what's called Buddhisuddhi is to do it in the most fundamental level. If we cleanse your mind, if we clean it in the morning by afternoon, we will have a whole new world again. It's really waste. This is why no significance or no importance is given in the yogic system towards your psychological structure.  We are only interested in the body. This is why yoga calls everything as body. Physical body, mental body, energy body like this, but no mind because the psychological activity that's happening towards which you have given enormous importance is of no consequence or significance depending upon the type of information imprinted within you.  So we are interested in handling the root. If you prune the tree, it will sprout back with vengeance, no point pruning it. If you handle the root, it will be gone. So the very root of karmic imprint is in the elements, that is the most fundamental space. It takes much more than handling other aspects. So generally, because most people are not interested in absolute transformation, they just want a little change, they don't want to lose themselves. Bhuta Shuddhi means you want to lose yourself, whether it's good, bad, ugly, beautiful, it doesn't matter, you want to lose everything that you have built so that the creators creation will stand up and shine within you. It'll take a certain amount of work. The Bhuta Shuddhi that's been taught to you is very basic. If you want to do more serious forms of Bhuta Shuddhi, it will mean it becomes your entire life, it's not something that you do on the side. So even if you do a very minor version of Bhuta Shuddhi, you will see the change that happens in you is permanent, there is no tendency to fall back and that's important. Otherwise everybody changes for three days and again they fall back into the rut after some time, that will not happen when you assist whatever else you're doing with the Bhuta Shuddhi practice. Nadaratana, I mean the Panchabhoot Aradhana is another matter, that's a ritual. For those who are not willing to do sadhana, just to give them some benefit, that's the beauty of a ritual, that's the limitation of a ritual. Anybody else can conduct a ritual for you. You don't have to do any sadhana, just sit there and benefit from that. But then only if they conduct you have it, otherwise you don't have it. Suppose we don't do Panchabhoot Aradhana, you don't have it. So the ritual is always like this, it is beautiful because people who do not know anything about it, they can still benefit from it. At the same time if those who conduct do not conduct it properly, it will not happen to you. If they do not conduct it at all, it will never be available to you. But if you do Bhuta Shuddhi practice by yourself, if you're willing you can keep it up and you will see as time progresses its impact is undeniable. Above all, whatever it does, however small the practice is, whatever it does, there is no turning back. That's a very important aspect of Bhuta Shuddhi. If you… if you… let's say six months you do asana, another one year you give it up, everything will be back as it was. Six months you did pranayana, if it's a powerful process like Shakti Chalana Kriya, if you did. Its impact will be there but if at a certain period of time, if you don't do it for a certain period of time, again it'll turn back. You meditate, you do Shunya meditation for some time, if you don't do it for a certain period of time, slowly it'll turn back. But that is not the nature of Bhuta Shuddhi. Bhuta Shuddhi if you do, nothing seems to be happening because it's very fundamental and it's slow. But whatever happens, it will not turn back. It stays with you as long as you hold this body, it stays with you, it will not go because it's on a very fundamental level. That's a significance of Bhuta Shuddhi.