Hey everybody welcome back to magic orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a rant That's right everybody. This is gonna be a rant You know sometimes I do reviews for card tricks sometimes I do reviews for decks of cards But not always do I get to share with you my personal opinion and you know I was thinking about something the other day and it kind of just went yeah, why is that like that?  I guess I mean there's the blank card That's the double blank right and then there's the blank card that has the back design But then the face it's a blank and you're like wow this doesn't feel like a gas I mean sometimes there's trick cards. Those are cool. There's double backers And you're like, okay, I know to do with a double backer double facers I know what to do with a double facer But what do you do with a blank? Like is this a real gas card or where you just lazy and just didn't want to put anything on the face Just oh, it's a blank card I mean some people will take this and they'll make it an advertisement card or a coming soon card or a preview for something else But just to give me the back design with a blank face like Why what do I do with this? Well, some people I don't know what you do the magic trick where you have a person's card selected And then you're like watch I can take all the ink off of it now It's blank now if I hand this out to somebody they're gonna say this is just a blank card like Where's my where'd my card go? So I was thinking all right What are some ideas that you could do with a blank card and still be magical or still be fun? Well, I think you know what when you get a blank card like this This is a perfect opportunity for a writing surface like this is a blank piece of paper It's a great place to write something down You know a lot of times we're forcing cards and then we're giving them pen and say sign your name And then they're you know, they got a jack of diamonds and they're trying to find okay Where's a good place where they can see my signature? But if you have a blank card you well you can write your name wherever you want And so the first thing that jumps to my mind is the ambitious card routine the ambitious card routine doesn't need a card Per se to do the trick. That's why we allow them to take any card. They want Doesn't matter which card they take they can take any card they want and then from there on We utilize that card. Why not start your ambitious card routine with a blank card Have them sign their name and draw a picture say, you know what you get to make your own card because I want you to be dead Center perfect positive that this is your card So make your own card draw a happy face on it a gesture your favorite, you know Limerick or whatever write inspirational words of wisdom and sign your name to it only to make this card as unique as possible Then there's no way in the world there could be a duplicate of this every time they see this It's gonna be their card use a blank card for an ambitious card routine and not a regular playing card All right idea number two Sometimes we do tricks that involve jokers because we have two jokers and they're identical But we don't necessarily need them for the trick. We need them as placeholders You could say only to take this joker and insert it into the deck, right?  They sign their name. You say this is Mark's card. That's a Sally's card I'm sure those aren't names of your real friends But then once you fan the cards, then it's very easy to remember. Look, here's Mark's name So it's not a joker, right? Like I don't remember if that's Mark's joker So you say oh look Mark, there's your card and you slide it out with the card He selected you they say oh look Sally there's your card and you slide it out with the card She's selected then it becomes way more personal and at the end of the trick they get to keep their cards Usually take your jokers back, you know, and I think that's the thing with some of our cards We take them back and so the magic kind of leaves with us But it's always great to leave your spectators with some little piece of reminder of that magical experience that they have So if you can take some of these blank cards that you got lying around that you're not sure what to do with Start using these as your placeholders start using these as your jokers Start using these as your cards that you want to control allow your spectators to draw on them sign them do anything they want Use them for mentalism number of forces anything like that, you know use them up Okay, let's stop Let's get them out of our drawers and start writing and scribbling all over them and handing them out to our spectators And I guarantee you you probably use this gaff a lot more and probably appreciate it a lot more All right, so are there other ideas other ideas out there that you have for a blank card I'd love to hear them. We'd love to dialogue. Let's get into a discussion And I don't mean the standard tricks that you can do with a blank card Something that you've thought of okay something creative something that you think that would be a great idea We'd love to carry on this conversation with you a little further. So comment below Let us know what's going on you can also join the conversation on facebook You know, I got a social media on facebook. You can link me there. You can like me over on twitter I'm over there too and I'm on instagram lots of places for you to jump in and get this going And of course you can check out all of our magic reviews and card reviews at magic orthodoxy dot


All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. Last week, it was brought up that patients have always and will always ask if they can regrow their optic nerve. And we all kind of chuckled about it. As a result of that discussion and a result of my literature review that I did recently, I thought it would be timely to talk about whether or not neural regeneration is simply some crazy idea from movies like Minority Report or from movies about aliens, or if it's not really that far from reach. Featured on this slide is our star of the today, the Mueller Cell. But before I get to that, I want to talk about two patients. Yeah, two patients now. So MB, it's a 68-year-old male with reports of gradual vision loss of central vision. Exam-finding showed bilateral macular drusen, pigment and outer retina, and RPE atrophy and disruption. He is diagnosed with dry AMD. NR is a 60-year-old female who presents with sudden unilateral loss of vision. This person has a history of amauricis fujax, cardiovascular risk factors. And on exam, there's a pacification of the retina, a cherry red macula, and this person is diagnosed with central retina artery occlusion. So what do these patients have in common, aside from an over simplified case? Irreversible retinal damage, at least so we think it's irreversible. So I'm going to talk about some examples of neuronal regeneration that we have already discovered. So we've known for a long time that the peripheral nervous system has the ability to regenerate. During an injury, Schwann cells, the glial cells of the peripheral nervous system de-differentiate, proliferate, and change function. They go from being a cell that supports conduction and making myelin to a cell that supports regrowth and secretes chemotactic and growth factors. Once the axon is healed, the Schwann cell re-differentiates and becomes a Schwann cell again. Regeneration in the central nervous system is a little bit less robust. However, recent discoveries have shown that there are two areas of regeneration. The subventricular zone and the subgranular layer. The subventricular zone is located, you can see on this section it's a sagittal section, just inferior to the lateral ventricle. And the neurons go to the olfactory bulb and regenerate there. The other area is in the dentate gyrus, and the neurons there only move from one layer to another. Now it's still up for debate why these areas do regenerate, but it is thought that the olfactory bulb is sort of this vestigial function that was there for survival, for need of food, and being able to find a meat. I don't know if that's me. The subgranular layer, it's thought to be more of a current function in that it's part of memory function. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampus, which is part of memory formation. So it's thought that this is necessary to consolidate memories. So what about the retina? There's two cell populations that may serve as progenitor cells in the retina. There's the ciliary marginal zone cells, which are only found in adult fish, so we won't discuss that further. And there's a subset of Mueller glial cells. So here we have two pictures of glial cells. The above picture is the Mueller cells under normal conditions. You can see that they traverse the whole retina and their nucleus are in the INL. Under these conditions, it is responsible for homeostasis and nourishment. This lower photograph, which the Mueller cells are highlighted in green, showed that this is a rat retina under stress. So you can see that the Mueller cells are proliferating. They have an increase of GFAP. And you can see some scarring on the upper layer, on the photoreceptor layer. So normally, this Mueller cell reaction is actually not helpful for regenesis. It causes scarring, and it does not allow axons to reconnect. However, there's a subset of cells that have been found that act differently than this, that are actually Mueller cells. They were first found in fish. You can see that there are radial clusters of slow cycling cells. So these were labeled with PCNA, which is a protein that's only found when there's mitosis going on. And they were able to find these clusters of cell throughout the retina. And they were followed over time and found that they actually moved the ONL layer and then became photoreceptors. The chick retina was able to find these cells by injuring the retina. And they were able to produce. So this upper photo shows that the green areas are areas that are undergoing replication. And the red areas are areas that are producing neurofilaments, suggesting that these Mueller cells are replicating and changing into neurons. In the lower picture, bird U means again that they're replicating. And the CHX10 is a transcription factor that's only found in stem cells. So again, it looks like these Mueller cells are becoming stem cells. The only problem with the chick retina is that the regeneration is more limited. There's more bipolar cells, amicron cells, ganglion cells, and not as many photoreceptors. In mammals, it seems to be the same as far as needing injury to make these Mueller cells gain this pluripotency. A study was done, and it showed that upon injury, there's about 0.2% of the Mueller cells that kind of gained this pluripotency. However, a really neat study was done recently where these subset of cells were taken from the adult retina that were showing this pluripotency and put into rat pup retinas. And with time, you can see in this picture right here that they were incorporated into all the different cell layers of the retina, suggesting that indeed they are able to proliferate and make different layers of the retina. And again, there's even more limitations on photoreceptors compared to the fish. So what does this even matter if it doesn't improve sight? What we found is that, sorry, what another study found was that rats with retinal degeneration stimulated with wit and notch have increased Mueller cell activation and increased head and eye tracking due to stimulus compared to controls that were not given wit and notch signaling. And therefore, the increased Mueller cell activation did not occur. So in summary, neuronal regeneration may not be so far off as science fiction. There are examples of neuronal regeneration in the PNS, the CNS, and in the retina. And though we might not be able to regrow an entire optic nerve, the hope is that the current and future work will find a way to activate these Mueller cells in a way that will benefit patients, similar to the ones we discussed above, as well as many other examples where there's retinal damage, diabetic retinopathy, et cetera. Here are my references. And a little about me, I just got back from a fellowship funded by the Door Stoop Charitable Foundation. I was in Ghana for eight months and studied pediatric HIV. And these kids don't have HIV, but they were cute kids in a little town that I went through. The upper picture is Kentay cloth that is a traditional cloth that is made there. The lower picture on the right is a mosque in Larabanga. It was built in 1421 as the oldest mosque in Ghana. And just a little bit about Ghana. It was the first African colony to gain independence. That was in 1957. It's been a peaceful democracy since 1991. And Ghana has an interesting relationship with slavery. About 1 eighth of all the slaves passed through the Golden Coast, which is what the area of Ghana used to be called. And if you can see here, so from Cape Coast, which was the biggest slave castle, there's another slave castle right next to it, Almena and Accra. That's the main area where 1 eighth of the transatlantic slave trade went through. Accra was where I was right here. And then above it is Kumasi, which is where the University of Utah is really involved, as probably many of you know, in both ophthalmology and many other fields. You can see this accident and emergency department is where I actually went and met my dad. He's an ER doc here. And I went and spent some time in the ER with him. That's the new eye hospital in the middle of Konfanoche. And that's the Cape Coast slave castle. Thank you to Dr. Ombari and Judd Kahuna, MDPHC candidate in Ombari's lab who helped me prepare this. And thank you for all the physicians who let me shadow you. I was trying to decide if ophthalmology was the right thing. And thank you for convincing me that it was and is. And thank you to Victoria Smith. She's a PhD at the University of Ghana. Help me get the right stats on slavery. And thank you for all of you listening. Any questions? All right, thank you.


What started out as scribbles and more scribbles is Now the final product and I am ready to announce it Because when I started this YouTube channel hours thought that not everybody's gonna want to sit down open up YouTube and watch something It's much easier to listen to that information as you are cleaning the office or outside cleaning the garden It's a lot of cleaning or doing anything where you prefer to do something and just listen to it for me I'm stuck in commute an hour to work at an hour going back home. So I listen to a lot of podcasts I love taking in all that information in audio form. So as I'm sitting in traffic There's a lot of stuff you can listen to I have so much time So I thought why not to a podcast addition to this channel? Obviously, there are things visually that you want to watch, you know If I show animation examples and stuff like that I told you understand, but there's still a lot of that stuff that I have on my YouTube channel that I can Talk about so I thought why not let's also prepare a podcast in addition to this channel and it's gonna cover Same topics and more so every now and then maybe I might just rip the movie clip and put that on a podcast I don't think so. It's gonna be all new brand new recordings. I might talk about the same topics and expand upon I might talk about brand new things. It could be quick movie impressions and reviews It's kind of the same idea as the channel but in podcast form But also very audio-specific things like talking about an audio piece from a movie or TV show where I can play the whole thing And it's talked about why do I like this so a lot of lip-sync stuff is going to be podcast Exclusive and the way I record it is going to be all over the place depending on when I have the inspiration to talk about it What the preparation is so some stuff could be recorded in here in the office or Or I might record something when I'm walking exercise I might record stuff when I'm in the car Maybe if it's safe Got some mics everywhere some noise cancelling stuff. I think this could work, too So it's recording stuff for commuters while I commute the location is going to be all over the place But it's going to be all animation related filmmaking related and hopefully a Helpful addition to people who cannot or don't want to watch anything on YouTube and prefer to listen to something as they are in The commute or working out or working in the garden. I don't know whatever your preference is as you are listening to something I think all in all is going to be a lot of fun I'm very excited to release this and it's going to be for sure a weekly thing I might upload at the beginning a bit more frequently to kind of catch up to what I have on the YouTube channel But then for sure a weekly thing with other episodes Peppered throughout the week and if you have any specific topics you're going to talk about that might not be present On the YouTube channel as always leave a comment Let me know what your thoughts are and if I make any of the changes or updates or tweaks or anything Check out this channel I will of course talk about it And if you don't want to miss any of the uploads Subscribe and hit that bell button and as always if you watch this whole thing until the very end. Thank you very much


What's good Joshable Ross back again with another video So I just finished checking out the Roman Reigns Adam Pierce contract signing segment for the Royal Rumble match that they were supposed to have and I Kind of saw this coming. You knew Kevin Owens was somehow going to get involved in the in this like contract signing and potentially him being involved at Royal Rumble going against Roman Reigns and I'm all for it bro on the WWE official website They announced there's gonna be a last man standing match, which I am okay with I'm interested. I'm interested to see how this is gonna play out To be honest, I don't really think they needed to go the route of the Adam Pierce Like I don't think this whole Adam Pierce being Interjecting to the storyline was needed. I think they could have really went without that and just had Kevin Owens come back into the fold get his you know, try to get his revenge and you know, potentially issue another challenge or force Roman Reigns hands to Challenge him at the Royal Rumble do something, you know, maybe take out Jay Uso in the process and now Romans is upset so he wants to get his revenge so he wants to face him at The Royal Rumble, I think they could have went that route, but they went this route just so Kevin could be the person that signed the contract I still stand with that. I do think Kevin Owens these next couple weeks before the Royal Rumble needs to take out Jay Uso Like I get it Jay is he's part of the family man He's gonna do whatever Roman asked him to do but I want this last man standing match to really just be Them two going at it That's really what I want cuz the past few matches have ultimately involved Jay Uso as some form of fashion So I think to really build up Roman Reigns like credibility Have Jay Uso get taken out if I'm Kevin Owens. That is my first mission Next week my mission is just to take out Jay Destroy him to the point where he cannot compete at the Royal Rumble put him in the hospital That's exactly what I would do make a statement. I took your cousin out Now what you're on your own Cuz every time you've had help That's the only reason why you want I took your cousin out now. You're on your own now.  That's what it's gonna turn into So hopefully he does that next week takes out Jay Uso that way he can solely focus on Roman Reigns Roman Reigns gets pissed off and it'd be interesting to see how they how they really booked these next couple weeks, man I'm I'm looking forward to bro. I think this is obviously in my opinion I'm gonna be one of the best matches on the card mainly because Kevin Owens Roman Reigns They've been killing it bro They have been killing it when it comes to just a few their intensity and just the match like the storytelling within the Matches themselves man, so it was a quick little segment nothing nothing too crazy You know Roman being a good heel, you know sitting at the head of the table You know I'm saying he's signing the contract off smug and stuff and and Adam Pierce pretty much played him So I enjoyed it for what it was like I said, I am definitely Looking forward to seeing how this plays out Honestly, I think anybody who's been following WWE for a while, you know There's a good chance that Kevin Owens will not win this match and if he doesn't win this match That's fine. They can go on to somebody else for Roman Reigns to feud with hopefully if this works out Hopefully maybe Daniel Bryan can win the Royal Rumble and that be the next few I would love that I think that would be the perfect way to segue into another feud whoever wins the Royal Rumble goes after Roman Reigns I think that would be dope So hopefully it is Daniel Bryan, but as it stands Roman Reigns is gonna win the match That's just what it is and I do believe WWE to have been booking Kevin Owens very strong I think Kevin Owens is gonna put up a hell of a fight. It's gonna be close It's not gonna be a squash match just like their TLC match was actually pretty close just like they're Helen not Helen the cell match, but they're still cage match was pretty close I think this is just gonna be like Intense cuz you're not gonna know I think he's gonna come down to like the last few seconds, bro Like I think they're going to tear it up literally and figuratively they're gonna tear up the whole arena, man So I'm looking forward to it. I wish there was crowds to see this type of match, bro It's Kevin Owens has been made into a mega baby face Roman Reigns has been the best heel the best wrestler like character wise on WWE television for since SummerSlam, bro loved his character change I love the tribal chief man Rogue Roman Reigns as we say on the main channel man, so I'm just I'm looking forward to this match So comment down below. Let me know. Are you guys? Looking forward to Kevin Owens and Roman Reigns last man standing match at Royal rumble I don't know how you could not be if you've been enjoying everything else so far This gotta be one of the matches that I am just literally gonna tune into this in the Royal rumble The Royal rumble matches up like I'm really just focusing in mostly on what's gonna happen here How they're gonna play this how how they're gonna book this so I would love to get your guys thoughts and opinion on this Man, I just appreciate all of them supporting on the channel man roll to 40k appreciate y'all kicking it with me I see y'all on the next one. Peace


What's going on guys it's your boy DPJ here today with another destiny video and in today's video we have top five sword plays of the week some amazing submissions this week thanks to everybody who does participate in these top five episodes and submit your amazing clips if you haven't seen your clip in any of my recent top five plays it's because I am overloaded with clips doesn't mean you won't see in a future one so don't fret I want to thank everybody again for the support I've received and all of my videos never mind my top fives you guys are the fucking best and I hope you guys enjoyed this video too if you guys are new to my channel subscribe for daily destiny and I'll catch you guys on the next one peace out until next time POST! your runner is advancing push forward double kill your runner moving in five minutes remaining the ammo available push forward your runner is advancing your runner runner down ten like you I could end war


all right good morning everybody I'd like to say welcome to Drupal con I'm excited to be here how about everybody is everybody excited I mean it's nice to be back in person after a few years and so I'm super excited thanks for joining us today we're going to be sharing about a project that's been over two years in the making and so get ready to walk through some approaches from inception through the launch of the first site using this new platform at Penn State so a little bit on the agenda for today these approaches are all rooted in strategy so we're gonna be talking a lot of strategy today we're gonna start with product strategy and which was kind of that guiding light through the entire project and then we're gonna dig into the technical strategy for the project which will guide us through implementation and then we'll wrap up with some insights which I think is really interesting today because that's gonna help us talk through some of the similar current and future project things that will help us in those upcoming projects that you may have all right we'll jump in a little bit about us and I'll kick off since I'm already talking here my name is Mark Shropshire I go by Shrop I've got 20 plus years of experience at the intersection of leadership and technology some of my past roles have been with universities and a nationally recognized graphic communication company some tech startups prior to coming to media current which is where I'm currently at I love helping individuals reach potential big into leadership and mentorship and and frankly empowering leaders and empowering everyone to become leaders who wants to and so I will turn it over to Jim now hello everybody thanks for coming my name is Jim Norris I'm a developer and a program manager with 20 plus years experience in large decentralized research university such as Penn State but also University of California Harvard Dartmouth Boston University my passion is helping moving big things from A to B sometimes as a developer sometimes as a leader in places where change can often happen slowly and my key role in this project was to I like to think is earned by an internal investment from the C-suite leaders who sponsor and and fund change but supporting nonprofit education research and health care enterprises is a form of public service to me that I am very passionate about so Penn State is big Penn State is really big and not only by accounting the number of students and alumni our research enterprise is enormous on the scale with John Hopkins MIT Michigan if you measure by National Science Foundation funding metrics and the like we're one of only two universities with all four land grants that's land Sun excuse me for grants land Sun space and see and the website we're here to talk about today our news website is a single large website that tells and has told for 20 years research stories that highlight the impact of our science and our research search and the impact it has on the Commonwealth and the people of Pennsylvania on the nation and on the world as long as telling a number of other public relations stories so but my perspective comes from this the central office of strategic communications and marketing at Penn State so we functionally own news storytelling it's our website but we're also stewards of the brand itself so it's notable here that Penn State has over you know best estimate over a thousand sub-domains distinct to date that are bound only by the loosest digital brand standards web strategy stacks and operations and just hold on to that thought so I just want to mention a little bit about media current since that's where I'm at and we were a partner with Penn State and Jim's teams throughout the project media current we bring together talented team members and we like to build those world-class solutions such as this Penn State news site we're really happy and proud to support and focus on open source solutions being an open source product company including but not limited to you know projects that are out there like Drupal like Gatsby react things like that and we're deeply passionate about partnering partnering with clients and their teams okay so this was a complicated website build it was a visible project and while involving a lot of new technologies multiple partners and a lot of moving parts and ultimately it was successful but it was one of the most challenging projects I've ever been a part of and I'll be very honest with you there were a number of times we paused and asked ourselves why are we doing this again why would a central communications office select a decoupled architecture for one of the biggest multi-channel highly integrated on brand websites with hundreds of authors and very low fault tolerance well if you stay with me I think that question can start to answer itself we found that something this big and complex demanded that we break it down to each component segment focus on each thing as a service in isolation just to get our minds wrapped around it and thinking like that unlocked many possibilities for us to scale the work for bigger purposes purposes and services in service of the brand and ultimately the institution but there were a few tough months where I and the team were asked difficult questions from our internal stakeholders which led to some uncomfortable discussions with our partners but we all knew that we had the right strategy right we had asked the right questions we chose the right partners the right services vendors technologies many difficult but necessary conversations with our leadership about the total cost of investment and how to truly calculate long-term savings and measure and measure ultimate return when you know these conversations were successful because we had the right long-term product strategy but first we need to tell you a little bit about the business situation we faced three years ago so our legacy website so it was it is it was a big website lots of users loads of integrations up and downstream it was very custom it was it was hosted on premises it was a Drupal seven monolithic architecture supported in part by vendors and in part by in-house system administration labor with some fairly old-school web ops methods and it was becoming hard to maintain it was d7 was end-of-life or so we thought the communications business situation and is and was like functionally we're a decentralized public relations and communication business we're a large institution we have many campuses we have many departments we have many units and they all have their own distinct website or sites their own workflows sometimes their own goals authors put all authors all most authors around the university do have a connection with the new site they're putting their content in our website and they're been in the habit for a decade of fetching their content back out either by API or RSS or some combination of both and the content that's published in our system is available multiple channels so we publish the stories and our website but it's also anything that gets approved by our editorial workflow is it's queued up for email blast syndication and ours this platform integrates with an old less serve that you know we calculate it's low estimate something like 30 million individual email blasts it's a major part of our marketing strategy so big site 250 authors representing 20 plus campuses locations 50 plus you know major departments units the colleges okay it's big our big idea was three years ago what if we broke up what we already had into atomic segments and then glue it back together and manage it chunk chunk by chunk each as its own thing so convert the legacy website into a platform with reusable segments build on what we already had because what we already had was a content hub we already had a business process where users across the Commonwealth are submitting stories to use on multiple channels and getting their content back out we already had apis we had a design that was reflected our best current thinking on the brand nearly every segment in this one large website could be thought of as a reusable component so we thought so some principles started to get clear start to think beyond websites strive to avoid the constant cycle of rebuilds leverage the brand right from the position we sat where we were we stewards and owners of the brand leverage the brand in our position in the university a stewards of the brands as a call to action so I call this my the fever dream slide because you know and everything's going great this is where we're going right so enhancing and protecting the brand is an objective that helped us think but beyond a single website and towards a set of tools and standards that we could anchor a broad web strategy to so we tried to elevate this work and to have impact on the organization strategic plan and on the bottom line itself so as many of you or all of you know academia and dot edu is the ultimate horizontal business it's the opposite of top down where mandates do not work and if you're serious about change you have to make friends and partnerships and facilitate change with carrots so our creative and our development partners and I'm talking in-house and our vendors the people who execute the brand they need things like digital strategies and standards and api's and content strategy patterns rules style guides they also need access to authorized cloud providers Penn State authorized and modern webop solutions so we're not encouraging mere copying of things we're either we're we're building starter kits and we believe that taking a thoughtful point of view particularly on the design system segment of all this and in all of its related strategies enables a centralized digital center of excellence one that can perform things like digital strategy consulting SEO optimization across the domain web product and project management consultative services trying to catch like all major web fact all major web refactors sort of early in the process so we can have some influence on their outcomes central UX strategies leading to you know digital transformation and finally this is my highest concept thing so agile is more than a framework to us it's a philosophy it's a philosophy about how to brace uncertainty when building products and adopting technologies like antifragile things are things that benefit from a little controlled chaos and I think this is a useful mindset for a technical strategist at least and open source itself it's antifragile in the nature of its construction and the way the community supports it and I'll name check Gatsby here is a sort of partner that has learned from the stressors that we have put on their system and they have hardened their infrastructure as a result not just for us but for the whole community for the whole framework so okay that vision is real nice but we still needed to build this big performance news website we needed to migrate seven gigs of data need to re-slug every story we needed to host in the cloud and automate our DevOps drop we need that now please you know just noting some of the requirements you know custom authoring workflow preview security search both Google and an internal search content API RSS single sign-on data migration slug pattern recasting we need to glue it to a single domain strategy lots of integrations etc etc and plus we need preview to work the way authors expected it we needed to be able to publish our stories within five minute increments excuse me and while you're at it please build us a scalable platform so here workflow segregation means to us and power Penn State to own the segments that are closest to our business so our design system and our front ends these are good examples of that cost I choose to think this is in turn think about this is more about cost predictability is the primary driver here so accurate cost forecasting is critical right when you're doing big things especially when it changes how your organization operates so there's major changes happening in the IT business here at Penn State concurrent to this effort there's an emphasis on more cloud services and away from IT of treating IT as overhead for example so our previous setup administrative straight of Lee really was one where the cost of PSU dot edu and the new site they were largely absorbed in IT overhead we had no real good way to cost this so our vendor cost hit the chart of accounts but a less system administration security network infrastructure DevOps emergency response hardware config patching upgraded monitoring logging all that was unpriced and unbilled it was just unseen overhead and this led to our stakeholders to in the past to believe that once a website is done we can stop paying for it right well no being able to price each segment and forecast and plan its maintenance allowed us to change how leaders think about the total cost of investment in these technologies and our websites that are critical to us this is my last slide so when we decoupled everything we landed in a place where we can now be selective about how to best maintain each segment of the platform as a commodity with its own life cycle its own support cadences we can make choices is one segment can it be cloud source can it be outsource can it be in source can we do team augmentation manage each segment opportunity opportunistically as the need rises we're thinking that how we optimize and manage in scale of the design system segment which is the next frontier of this platform the design system in its ancillary code and instructions are how most of our adopters are going to experience the segments of the platform that are relevant to them but design systems you can hear a lot about design systems I feel this week are not enough to accomplish brand unity and great web strategy so we think of it as a library of plays and a playbook strategies that come with codes and guides and other things so one example of what I'm talking about like a single component organism that blends design tokens grid patterns multiple apis all working together is it simple for a major university federated navigation brand bar seems simple right what if you wanted to reuse that across an organization there's various methods so ours contains an alert a be a API from Firebase via Drupal it has Nive items from S3 it's via right now it's via expression and soon to be contentful maybe we have Google search apis patchy solar it's all wrapped together in a single component that can function more or less out of the box on our adopters websites so I've said enough I'm going to let shop tell you how we actually achieved some of these things well first of all Jim thanks for being such a great partner throughout the project putting in all the hard work and of course the teams we're speaking for teams a lot of teams involve lots of people involved making this happen across you know Gatsby Aquia Penn State media current and so but let's shift into technical strategy so I'm promise for everybody in here that's that may not be super technical we're not going to get really in the weeds we're trying to keep this at a higher level but I will still hopefully satisfy some of those that are technical with some technical talk and involved and we're happy to talk about this after the talk this week Drupal com but we'll kind of shift into things and and really more about the decisions of technology why we made some of these decisions for implementation which I think are foundational in this platform so we are talking about the Penn State news site but we're also talking about building platforms and so so speaking of building foundations you know one important message today if you took away anything besides everything Jim said because that's all important but but I would say stop building those websites and start building platforms and this is the this is the thing Jim you talked about over and over I mean we you know he cast the vision for us and so all the teams involved kept seeing it this way that we're building kind of a future something that could be used over and over at Penn State this this Drupal and Gatsby and Firebase and all this all these technical things we're talking about like can be packaged and reused as a platform for the future so so when you take on a task building a platform you still have to think about every decision along the way which is it's pretty overwhelming there's a lot there but you've got to step out of thinking of singularity of purpose you got to start thinking about the larger vision and provide flexibility and maintainability for everyone in every piece along the way in the platform so let's dig kind of a little bit deeper into some of this so I'm going to start here with design systems you know Jim mentioned it already but I feel like this is the this is the important piece to start with you got to start with a great design system it's an initial step it's setting the vision for the platform so we needed some then it's highly flexible component-based I'm gonna say some other buzzwords here about a customizable options and yeah we've all heard these things right but ultimately what am I really saying I'm saying that design systems are ultimately critical and then once you understand that and you start building towards that you can then figure out the technology that you need to implement and so we decided to leverage Storybook which is a React open-source product and so it's it's a well-established component-based system and that allowed us to create a what we call a living style guide but ultimately what that means to me and the team and everybody involved is that there is a there is that that playbook and you mentioned playbook there's this playbook that you can refer to and say this is how things are supposed to look but not just how they look this is how they're supposed to work and that that's critical so it's not just static so you know by building these the components that are flexible editors can arrange the components in different orders and so if you're thinking in a Drupal context you may already fast-forward mentally to where I'm headed with that but to be able to change the order of how things look and feel on a page or in a news story and yes that fast-forward if you thought about it you're right in this situation we've used Drupal paragraphs to make that happen but we've also implemented a great deal of authoring experience work along the way and I'll talk more about that but there's just a ton of work on authoring experience because if you can't satisfy you know the 250 content editors that are going to be using a platform how are you going to satisfy all of the millions of people who are going to consume the content so design systems tell that story they set the stage and everything else is in the platform from there so this is a fun slide be involved in Drupal for so many years this is always a fun slide for me because I've seen Drupal change over the years I've seen it grow and kind of change with the times as the web matures new things happen Drupal has kept up in many ways and adopted new technologies but Penn State has a history of open source I think it's great that made us a great partner we're an open source product company at media current but but we wanted to build on what Penn State already had and that was something that was set up from the very beginning of the project Penn State's got a long history with open source Drupal many other things involved but but here's some of the benefits how we see Drupal fitting this project and and really a lot of other projects but particularly this project so Drupal being a what I like to say and others have said a content management framework and what I mean by that it's not just a system it's a framework you it's it doesn't have to be opinionated you it's very flexible you can build a lot of things from it and from the ground up of course it does have some opinions but you know every system does to some extent but we see it as a framework it allowed us to build and customize that authoring experience and this this happened through fields and taxonomy content moderation user management and more and by the way is a is a big Drupal fan I know others in the room are as well you're at Drupal console there should be I have to say I love the fact that so many features are just in core and I can flip a switch turn it on at least have a baseline to start from right so but Drupal also empowers content editors to control the layout of content so this is true for traditional Drupal sites but it's also true for decoupled sites that we're talking about here so editors can trust what they edit and then preview is what's going to go live into publishing and this sort of fast forwards a little bit more into our implementation with with Gatsby making that happen because we needed Gatsby to actually do some of that but I don't want to get too far ahead it's exciting just hang with me Drupal also has an API first architecture this has been talked about for a long time Dries has gone over this and many keynotes but lots of people have worked on this that I'm highly grateful to in the community but this allowed us to make this Drupal site be the single source of truth and you know Drupal's power is in its content being a content hub so it'll not just have successful governance you know policies related to that along the way and then many consumers you know these are applications or you know it could be mobile apps could be websites could be RSS feeds whatever but you know there's always these points of consumption from the Drupal site but we're excited to be here at DrupalCon talking about innovation building new and modern web on top of Drupal again I'm just always excited to see Drupal move forward and and it's the it's providing the back end for a strong decoupled system so we see the platform here as a potential model for other EDUs as well that want to build on top of this so if anyone's in the room has been involved in higher ed works at higher ed has worked in higher ed I have in the past and I can say that you know one thing I really like about higher ed is that open source feel and vibe is like alive in the academic world so and that's where a lot of that came out of so it's really fun to be involved in a project like this and help out help out other universities so kind of speaking of scale and all the things that had to be done on this project we did spend you know that time on the content authoring experience I'll get a little more detailed here so we've got 250 content editors Drupal's providing a very important service and it needs to be easy to use for those folks so Drupal's ability to you know create those custom authoring experiences and necessary workflows has been highly utilized here and here's some examples so some of those baked-in features users roles permissions content moderation was key taxonomy and I feel like for Drupal 4.5 when I got involved with Drupal which is dating me maybe but like taxonomy has just always been there and it's something everybody talks about and I remember the first time someone said taxonomy I'm like that's what I get it from a library standpoint but what is that really going to do for me but over the years I've seen taxonomy you drive so many things it's it's pretty pretty mind boggling but but beyond those built-in core features we leveraged contributing custom code to as you as you do to cover additional things like schedule publishing we limited this sounds so simple we limited field character limits and we had a UI where there's a module to actually provide a count of those you know how many letters you've typed in the field and I don't want to belittle something it seems so simple but it's so important to a content editor when they view they can see that there's a limit and they see the count that's just helpful it saves time we were able to spend time focusing on clear field labels and descriptions that is not the most exciting thing for a developer to work on I'll just say it but I will say though that like we have strategy partners media current folks like that they're willing to jump in and help with that and it is it is important I mean it has to be clear what does that description field say what how does the user even know the content editor what to put in a field so really really important so so Penn State's partner with aquia to also ensure that Drupal runs well for all the editors and the API in points so there's a lot happening on this Drupal site it's pretty big beefy infrastructure going on with aquia that's providing lots of API in points and at the same time all of those content editors editing and it yes I can talk more later on this week but there is a lot going on to keep everything coming along well with that system and we'll talk more about the API capabilities here in just a moment so so here a little bit little bit more on Drupal's the permissions roles content moderation making it easier really just the key benefit here and it's really critical for the news site specifically it might not be as important for some of the future sites on the platform it might be it just depends but on a on a think about a large-scale newsroom I mean you saw the stats I mean this is turning out lots of stories and images and videos all the time every day so so there's a lot of nuances in the mix here and you would be right content editors for instance can draft and this is a real simplified kind of a description but it makes sense and it probably sounds familiar to some of you and your projects but content editors can draft and work on content but they can't publish but beyond that like that's a real simplified version like a small group of people can actually publish the content but one thing that we spent time doing was actually hiding fields and from the the node edit view making sure that certain fields just aren't visible like so it's not enough the person doesn't have you know content editor doesn't have access to actually work on a field how about just don't even make it show up how about making the interface simpler for the content editor those are things that we worked on okay so I'm gonna jump a little bit to something a little different here and that's separation of concerns and this is this is something that plays off of what Jim mentioned earlier about segments of the system overall and don't worry we're about to get into some interesting Gatsby parts of the project too because that's the other half of what's going on here so we've talked about Drupal and all the features and you're wondering probably like what about Gatsby well let's talk about it so having Drupal and Gatsby operating independently allows content editors to work on their content while publishing only when ready that sounds simple and you might go well that sounds expected and I'm like well you can do a lot of things to kind of make that not happen in a system so on a technical side we benefit also from separating our development workflows so not only do we have that like high level content editor and publishing separation but even our developers can operate independently working in Gatsby React code base and separately in the Drupal code base and you have your teams that are best at each of those things working where they need to simultaneous and they can come together when they need to but a lot of times we find that operating in the Gatsby segment is all it's needed for a certain feature so overall the platform benefits from allowing teams to optimize improve work in any segments and not having these monolithic entities that they're having to work with so we're talking about this earlier Jim but it's like it's like we're kind of talking microservices but not like we're firing up a bunch of AWS Lambda instances not those kind of microservices but it's like breaking up a system into smaller components kind of microservices okay that's a lot of stuff I'm gonna take a breather I'm just kidding let's jump right in speaking of Gatsby stuff so this is important like and you know maybe you haven't used Gatsby before maybe you haven't used maybe you've heard all the talks about decoupled and you haven't used decoupled but but I'm gonna give a little bit of background here that I think is really important about why Gatsby is important to the project and how it works from from my standpoint and so so there are three components here that the way I see it that provide development publishing workflows that that we need for the Penn State platform there's the Gatsby framework and that's the react-based framework that allows you to build those fast secure stable accessible sites in Gatsby which is you know totally makes sense like you got to have the developer tools you got to have the things that spin up and work for developers and that allow them to to build the sites and build the Gatsby components in and then a really critical part Gatsby cloud so this helped us deliver that unified platform of building preview and deploying Gatsby and this last part is so critical it became critical I don't even think we realize how critical was but these are not just buzzwords being able to publish those to a global edge network this is not just words I'm telling you it is critical we tried deploying and when you performance test against not an edge network and on a scale like this the site if you've ever seen it the sites will not hold up so so really important and and we got to kind of be a part of a lot of a lot of the the growth of Gatsby cloud and the release of the Gatsby hosting product so there's also the Gatsby content mesh I don't want to skip over that that is really the decouple data layer that that it's it's GraphQL from a technical standpoint provides the tools for the sourcing normalization updating of content and this is you can think of this is kind of what sits in between Drupal and Gatsby it also sits in between Gatsby and any other source you're pulling from you can pull from markdown files you could pull from some other API you can do all kinds of things with Gatsby but having a common GraphQL source to actually you know query from is is really a benefit there because you're not having to like switch technologies and go oh how do I query that technology now like how do I you know how do I hit this API kind of don't have to worry about that in the same way so these are just a few of the benefits while the integration worked out really well for Penn State and for the project but there's one more which steps us back in a Drupal content editing experience a little bit so this is a little combo of little bit combo of Drupal and Gatsby which I think is great so so a big benefit of Gatsby for the content editors involved here is the Gatsby preview and that lives inside of Drupal and what's really cool about this is I think it's it's a pixel perfect preview and I'm gonna say that again it's a pixel perfect preview inside Drupal of the content exactly the way it's gonna be published and look when it's published on the final site that almost doesn't sound like it makes sense as much until you really think about what it means to a content editor to be able to really see what it's gonna look like immediately is a huge thing it's a big deal there's no loss of fidelity at all editors can see what they're gonna go live with and also keep in mind some of these editors aren't the ones hitting the go live button right they want to be able to hand it off to somebody that can hit the go live button and make sure it's the right thing from their standpoint so so that same design system that we've been talking about today earlier on remember that first thing that's critical starting this a big platform and making all these decisions that that same design system it powers the Gatsby front end it also powers the preview system within Drupal so we're using everywhere and and Jim was telling me some stuff earlier today like all kinds of plans he's thinking about in the future but like it's it's it's making me get goosebumps going oh my gosh it's crazy I can be transparent with everybody right so it's exciting all right so let's let's talk a little bit here about the content API content hub concept with Drupal so I had had the words here epiphany I think that was Jim's words it was like an epiphany the team had Jim had but you know he mentioned as earlier Penn State was already operating as a content hub but there really wasn't a formal strategy for it right like you have Drupal and it's got a lot of API's connected to it what does that really get you well it's great it's functionally working but if there's really not a strategy you don't even know how to maybe contact and work with consumers of your API's and things like that so so really this project helped realize Penn State to have a reusable content hub as a service so thinking about the everything as a service so it's almost like within Penn State what is being done within Penn State and isn't being outsourced to like cloud services like Aqua and Gatsby and companies like that it's almost like operating another service within within the university which is huge and Jim can speak more to that himself because that's what that's what he oversees but but a universal API standard is a foundation to the platform going forward is a big key here and so JSON API is mostly what we use for for this but we're not relying on just the single core Drupal JSON API point we're using it elsewhere and we're also delivering you know from a content content agnostic scenario here to the platform like we don't really we really don't want to be opinionated about what the you know what the consumers who the consumers are what they are we just want to be able to provide a service that we hope about anybody can attach to their services to their sites their apps and all those things and it'll work so Drupal Drupal API first architecture allows this platform to provide content through a variety of methods I mentioned core JSON API that's driving Gatsby publish and preview builds we're driving campus alerts which is is really something close to my heart because that is so critical on a campus and if you've been involved in higher ed you realize you know things can happen you need to get notices out to people quickly and there's a lot of time spent at universities building alert systems and this is the start of something big for Penn State we believe so we're pushing that from Drupal so a Drupal only authorized content editor can publish an alert and that's really restricted and that Drupal pushes that to Firebase and then Gatsby picks that up from Firebase after the page loads so it's not involved in the in the Gatsby build at all which is a huge benefit and then in campus sync which is a J another JSON API endpoint which allows you know all these other partner sites all these other Penn State campuses to actually pull data and and pull that content and use it as they need on their sites across the system so it's that reuse of data so if that sounds interesting think about it we're reusing content we're reusing content we're reusing content over and over again and we're not retyping content we're not here here's a copy of this go put here's a word file go put it on your site it's being reused it's huge so so I think this project to me was and I tried to look it up I don't remember which Drupal con and it blurs in my mind but Dries at a keynote talked about the vision of the API first infrastructure you know Drupal being API first and being a content hub he spoke about that a number of years ago and that stuck with me and I think this to me was like the dream realized a bit so anyway that's that's content hub and I'm gonna jump into a little bit here about how we maintain the platform like maintaining this platform is like never done right that's true Jim mentioned that for any of our sites that we work on in projects but you know we may see a cycle of you know go through a cycle of seeking out like those are the gaps in our code and defects and what opportunities can we improve on a platform so the key here is really about taking those segments that we've talked about throughout this talk and then say you know what we can maintain and optimize and work on each segment independently we don't have to break away and and say you know hey we've got to take down the entire site to do a release no we don't we can release each segment independently this is really exciting recently so we had some search improvements to make and we're using we're using aqueous search which is you know it's aqueous version of solar search they've got some other stuff wrapped up with it and and then we have an API from Drupal and then Gatsby when you and I'm in Gatsby front end you do a search it actually talks back to that Drupal API and and and returns results but that's the overview of the system but we had to really focus on each of these separately so it was really it was really neat because all of the changes that we needed to make were in Drupal like we were able to focus on fixing some Drupal API pieces and and it took care of all the things and we did a Drupal deploy just you know to put those out there when we were ready and it didn't it you know Gatsby said they're operating has no idea anything's going on as far as that deploy it just continues to operate as normal so to an end user nothing had to be taken down all systems were still running this is important for this platform and but to help visualize a little bit of this this is this is the slide so I'm gonna pull it up this is a little this is a little Friday right because it's a lot going on I know there's a lot going on and and feel free to take pictures and all that stuff but I will post the slides afterwards this is the technical overview it's not as crazy as it seems once you get to know the platform but I did want to hit on a couple of quick things and that is that that notice notice some things we've talked about already right Drupal and Gatsby have their own get repos which help those separation of concerns and not always on optimization us to be able to manage those the flows those development workflows separately you know we've got Acquia providing hosting for Drupal Gatsby's providing Gatsby cloud hosting for the Gatsby front end but we've also got some Amazon S3 involved which is providing our image optimization and file services and there's some other pieces that Amazon's doing as well but but I want I did feel like it was important and Jim and I talked about this to show show this and and to you know be transparent about we're talking about these segments what do they look like that's gonna be the next question how do they work so we're gonna jump in now to a little bit about insights thanks Rob I'll blow through this somewhat quickly so one key insight from me is I think everyone in this room right has done are you you will do one really really hard thing in your career when we've all worked on a project where there was you know one key person who had to make or break an effort like a real MVP this project had about 10 of those Shrop being one of them and then they came from all three you know segments of the partnership so I was really really proud to be involved with this sort of matrix of people and so a key insight for me is like I said at the beginning know your business right and have a strategy and believe in your strategy maybe point to a product owner if the project's big enough right really good RFPs and try to choose some partners who have seen some stuff as Shelby foot said it had four o'clock in the morning courage if that means anything to you all right so one of the things as far as challenges that they hit on here is new tech always pushes the limits this is something you know Jim you talked about a lot and you know being on the bleeding edge definitely means that a lot of times there's there's a few peers to talk about the challenges with you know there there's times where like Jim and I were on a zoom going we don't know what we do and you know we reach out to Kyle and Kyle in Gatsby helps us out with something and we're like but like that like it's a small circle of people that have worked on something this large and it's exciting at the same time it's very scary I mean I'll just be honest with you but um but so you know one of the pieces I think that helped though along the way was it led to us working through proof of concepts I think proof of concepts is important in our work and like these large projects we have to have ways to prove that an idea might work and limit that so you know we had some examples like we did proof of concepts along the way to solve the front-end hosting of Gatsby and we went through different scenarios of using AWS and Netlify and and we landed on Gatsby called Hust hosting and and I have to say in it it's not just because it's newer but I really for I believe that that Gatsby Cloud hosting is working so well because it's it's geared for the platform it's it's engineered for platforms optimized for a platform so so that was important though to go through those pieces and you know we're always pushing on these systems and so so it's anyway it's it's really exciting to work on that and the in the proof of concepts or something to always be thinking about would be kind of my advice on that we did have some also challenges with long build times as you might imagine 65,000 plus news stories over 111,000 images I think when we launched after we migrated from seven to nine and this meant Gatsby Cloud like if you just kind of threw all that at any type of system that is in a build architecture like Gatsby as there's other systems similar you know that do that but like you just throw that out there without thinking about it like it's it's a lot like it's just you can have I'll just shorten it you can have some challenges right so so it took that partnership that we've been talking about and and I know you're like he said this a bunch Jim said it a bunch about partnership but I'm telling you partnership between Penn State Gatsby Aqua Media Current I mean it takes all that to solve these big challenging problems and it's a totally real thing so I'm gonna let Jim jump in on it so one one challenge maybe this is more of an insight I would share and I'm speaking mostly I think right now to sort of marketing managers and other people that sort is we're reminded here that great technology doesn't implement itself right that there's lots of new bleeding-edge tech in here but it took a lot of time and thought to sort of build it and wrap it around a context that made sense to pay off it's not doesn't always come off the shelf another challenge was getting our major stakeholders and again these are people functional owners editors people that control funds flow and release funds for projects getting them to adjust to a new mental model of web took some doing and you know just one tiny example is the sort of value trades we're always making but one is trading TTLs for resiliency you know sometimes authors simply despite all of the last 40 minutes they want that story to be published immediately well it's not immediate it's very it's dang fast but it's resilient and it's safe and it'll hold up if it's ever under amazing stress so don't skimp on the change management set the right expectations I'm still talking you got it I'm still talking good so successes the author experiences still Drupal right so while a lot of stuff changed our authors didn't really feel it it's a little leaner and so our unit users adapted to paragraph styles without much difficulty how we're thinking about federated components and the design system has some really exciting applications for analytics now we can now build in analytic tokens to track and filter sort of by component right and so per adopter we can track and see how these various components are doing and optimize accordingly if we talked a lot about campus alerts we are kind of we are we are very excited about it's a good example but it's it's really just a Drupal content type it's one that hits Firebase it becomes an API data that's immediately available across domains and we can push out alerts potentially potentially down the road to you know hundreds of domains a key point is the legacy website was delivered on its own sub-domain news dot PSU dot EU and we migrated now to live on PSU dot edu slash news so PSU dot edu is not Drupal and it is hosted in S3 so we've glued this whole thing together to PSU dot edu via reverse proxy and that's part of a long-term strategy to move away from sub-domains you see a lot of in academia towards amp away from it some debates towards amplifying the value of PSU dot edu domain itself which will ultimately we think raise the entire university's SEO value and if there's time to talk about our open source contributions yeah I'll I'll kind of briefly mention this but there's a lot here and again all of this stuff I know it may open up lots of questions come see us this week but to talk about it happy to do that but I just have to say like this is this is open source working I mean it doesn't mean there wasn't challenges and struggles and like maybe frustrations and all kinds of things in the middle but but we we were able across you know Gatsby and and media current to partner together like there were a lot of contributions that went back to community that's built made Gatsby a better platform for many people that things that maybe they only could see problems with on this platform but now like helps every site from the smallest Gatsby site to the largest Gatsby site there's like Drupal contributions not just on the Gatsby integration that went on but throughout Drupal as you do on these large scale Drupal projects like there's things you contribute back to and I just encourage everybody to always be thinking about how can you contribute how can you give and it's not it's not always code I just have to say that and so with that I'm gonna say this is this is the slide this is this is a domain whatever you say on that this is exciting part here this is the this is the product go check it out yeah it it works it's real and so we I know we're kind of short on QA time again like there's this there's so much we could talk for a lot longer as you could tell and so please ask us questions shoot us emails talk to us at the media current booth you know Jim and I both will make ourselves available to chat happy to do that and and I have to mention I do have to mention Drupal Camp Asheville this is a really awesome Drupal Camp encourage you to come check it out they're accepting sessions now and this is one it's worth flying international for I'm telling you it's that good but anyway thanks thank you so much everybody


This competition really enhances our mission readiness. We're taking Marines from across the Corps, all of our major installations, all MOSs, and we're giving them the tools to rapidly and effectively engage targets at various distances and with various weapon systems. So we are absolutely more ready to fight because of this competition. I think being out here with Marines from across the Corps really helps unit cohesion because Marines who wouldn't cross paths with each other are doing it and they're competing together and they're saying that no matter the MOS or where we're stationed, we're all the same and we're all going to work together really well. Coming out here and getting the familiarization with the weapon systems is a huge part. The M-8 team was recently fielded and now the M-27 with the SCO is a brand new weapon system to most of the Marines out here. And I think that getting on the gun, getting familiar with it, and also just getting comfortable shooting it is going to be the most important thing. I believe it shows that every Marine is in fact a rifleman. A rifleman is able to use the weapon systems to engage and neutralize the targets and build trust with your fellow Marines while you're out here. The competition, so right now we are actually going through each one of the weapons systems learning up different things. We're not all part of infantry units. People really get time on the weapons so it's really interesting to actually go through and apply those fundamentals to go through and engage targets. The new sport of USPSA to style shooting was eye-opening. It's fun to actually engage different types of targets and go through there. I would say come out and experience it. No one out here is going to criticize you. Everyone wants you to succeed. The first step is just jump it in and get it done.