Take it away when you're ready. Cool. Thanks, Brian. So yeah, my name's Jack Taranto. I'm a front-end developer at Previous Next. I've just clocked over 10 years working for Previous Next. Thanks, Owen, for the bottle of scotch. So I must be doing something right. So yeah, thanks, Heaps, for coming. This is building your design system. So I wanted to give this a bit of a personal touch at the start and give you guys a bit of background about me. These are my two kids, Sophia and Zuzanna. That's them eating strawberries. They like strawberries. They eat strawberries quite a lot. We live here. This is a tiny little town called Talong. I think there's like 800 people that live there, or less even. It's in the southern highlands in New South Wales. And this is what it looks like. It's a super beautiful picturesque little place we've got. That's my office there. We got snow a couple of months ago. It's super dry at the moment, but that's it. So yeah, first a little bit of history. At PNX, we've been using Starguides for probably the last six years or so. So Drupal theming has a long-time reputation for being tricky and frustrating. Starguide-driven development allowed us to abstract the bulk of our front-end workflow out into a completely separate stack. So that was a true revelation when we started out doing that. It allowed us to bring on front-end devs that aren't Drupal developers without throwing them in the deep end that's Drupal theming. So once a Starguide is built for a project, it then goes on to become a documentation resource for a client. It also allows back-end developers to continue building out a site with a library of components. For every major site we've launched in that past time, there's been a complete Starguide to accompany it. So at what point does a Starguide become a design system? It's important to see the Starguide as a development tool. It includes front-end code with some limited documentation on how to use that code. A design system is the next stage. It's the evolution of a Starguide. I see it as our development practices cementing to something far more tangible. It's a source of truth, and it encompasses everything digital and organization might want to produce. It's more than a development tool. Both a design system and a Starguide are, at their core, a documentation resource for a set of components. But a design system is designed from the ground up. It's not necessarily something built with standard tools. To be successful, it needs to be treated as a project in its own right. So like a Starguide, it's going to include a list of components, maybe less like a Starguide. It's going to include detailed guidelines and instructions on how to use those components from a development perspective, but additionally from a design perspective. It's going to include organization-wide preferences like color, typography, and white space with detailed instructions on how they should be used. At its core, it's just a website, though. So let's take a quick look at some examples. And if you're interested in design systems, definitely check out Rich's talk, which is next up, I think. So yeah, Brexit's proving pretty tough for the UK to crack at the moment. But they've been, this design system's been the poster child for a long time. This is the AUGov design system. It's really matured, and they're using a lot of the tools we'll be looking at in a minute. Atlassian, and yeah, Google Material Design. It's been around for a while. I think we're still waiting for Google to adopt it. So yeah, this is the core principle of a design system. The goal is to get visual designers, content designers, developers, grum masters, CEOs, and ministers all on the same page. Done successfully, it will establish this language in a long-lasting form that can be used by everyone in your organization. So what goes into one, a lot of work, firstly. It's not something that comes together in a few sprints. It's gonna take a lot of consultation. It's gonna take one or a few designers some time to create and design and test the work. Then you'll need some savvy front-end developers to put that code, put it into code in a way that's clear and makes sense for less front-end savvy developers to use. But purely from a practical perspective, what should it encompass? So colors, they're pretty important. Where a design system would differ from a style guide is the reasoning of each color's explained. Yeah, there should be context around the how and why. Typography, words, they're important too. So again, we've got context around type. Why is it being used? How do you use it? Spacing and white space, having to find rules and reasoning behind spacing makes so many common problems go away. So the intersection of components is just as important as the components themselves. Branding logo is probably important. These would apply for an organization-specific design system. Then we have the components. It's a pretty ambiguous term. We'd call a component any UI element. You should include any component that's gonna get used more than once. If you're building something that's totally unique or specific, then maybe it shouldn't end up in the design system. So layout, a grid system. This is really important, fully fleshed out. They're pretty useful. I find them particularly fun to build as well. It helps satisfy my OCD syndrome. So, yeah, what shouldn't it include? I think that comes down to the scope of what your organization does. I'd say at a common level, any one-off items that are unlikely to be reused can be spun off into their own code bases. Yeah, ask yourself the question, is this useful for someone else? Does this help communicate something that's important? If the answer is yes, then bring it in and document it. So a design system is a product, and it should be treated like one. It should have a backlog. It needs a multi-discipline team. UX designers, visual designers, developers. It's gonna need a significant investment to pull off in a polished fashion. But the value of a design system can't really be overstated. The amount of time, effort, and confusion you'll save is pretty impossible to quantify, particularly for large organizations. So, yeah, I'll say first, there's no right or wrong way. Instead, there's a few pieces of the puzzle. You wanna make sure you've got covered. So let's come back to the idea of a design system as a communication tool. What exactly are we trying to communicate? So there's three things, primarily. The design itself, visually, what things look like. And we looked at some design examples earlier. Then we have the code, the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, the React, and everything else. And yeah, probably the most important piece, the documentation. The guidelines, the instructions on how to use the contents of the design system. So, yeah, add these three up, and ideally, you get a website. That's the finished product, essentially. But basically, we want a website to contain all the info we've talked about. So, yeah, how do we build a website for a design system? We'll just take a quick look at some of the tooling. Pinex standardized on KSS node quite a while ago. Basically, every style guide or design system we've built uses KSS node. So what's so good about it? Documentation for code and components is written inside CSS using a really simple syntax. This is great for developers, both writing and reading the documentation. There's Drupal integration built right in, and using twig in KSS means you can have the, the exact same templates driving your design system and the Drupal site. It's super customizable. You can roll your own templates and customize everything that goes into it. A couple of cons, it's pretty rigid structure-wise. So there's one template file which drives the whole website. It works best for a simple document structure. I think the complex design systems we looked at before wouldn't have been built with KSS. So all the content lives in code. So that makes it very difficult to content manage. Unless you understand code, you can't really contribute to the documentation. And yeah, you probably wouldn't use the out-of-the-box themes. So you'll have to factor in additional effort to build one from scratch. So Storybook has emerged as a really solid replacement for KSS node. It's way more modern in its tooling. It's got a lot of really powerful features built in. Things like viewport sizing, color contrast, accessibility checking, grid overlays. It's got a docs plug-in, which gives you documentation written in mark-down, which makes it easier to content manage and contribute to. Yeah, the docs pages look great. They're interactive, customizable. And it's got a lot of really powerful features that create their interactive, customizable. And yeah, there are plug-ins basically for every front-end technology in use, so you can really use anything with it. And yeah, on the other hand, it's layout and design is really set in stone. You can theme it to a degree, but I think what you're looking at with Storybook is a defined tool. It's not really like a customized experience. One Storybook site's gonna look very similar to any other. And it really is a tool for developers. I think anyone can use it. It's intuitive, but it's powerful, and with that comes a pretty complex interface. It'll allow developers and designers to communicate, but not with the ease that some of the examples we looked at earlier. So, yeah, KSS and Storybook are both fantastic options to spin up a developer-friendly design system in record time, but those examples we looked at before, they're all custom builds. There isn't really a tool that's gonna pull all of that together for you. So my advice is, providing you've got the motivation, time, and budget, build something from scratch. So yeah, what would that look like? So this is like my wish list for a custom design system build. The whole thing's powered by a static site generator, so we don't wanna code 100 pages by hand. There's tons of options with static site generators, so which one you choose will kind of depend on what you're doing with your front-end stack internally, so I won't go into specific options. Documentation, I think they should be written in Markdown. It's gonna make it somewhat easy to contribute to. You could use Drupal as a content repository, and I'm sure some of the larger design systems do that, but I think there's something to be said for keeping things lean and skilling up your team, so really like anyone should be able to contribute to your docs by editing Markdown files and pushing up pull requests. So yeah, you'll need to demo your components, and the static site generator can help there too. You can build pages with templates that include component markup for examples. You can use a syntax highlighter with some JavaScript to spin your component markup out into code examples. Yeah, you could even get fancy and involve something like code pen as well to bring them both together. And yeah, taking a step back, the overall design of the website should be based on the design system itself, so you'll have like a wealth of components and styles to draw from, so you just combine them all together into a clear design and should save some design work. So yeah, now that we've built the design system website and we've included all our documentation, what about the code that goes into it and how do we help others actually use it? So most design systems will feature a CSS and a JavaScript bundle for developers to include in their project. Combine that with the markup examples in the design system and developers can build out components for themselves. Beyond that simple workflow, the type of code will depend entirely on your organization's tooling. You might be focused heavily on React, so it would certainly make sense that your design system includes React components. However, I'd argue that the most successful design systems don't dictate a technology, a specific technology choice using vanilla CSS and JavaScript means that anyone can take what you've built and use it inside any front-end. Yeah, I think that's the beauty of getting back to the basics and speaking the language of the browser instead of some arbitrary framework. So you can also provide options. So it's possible to support multiple CSS workflows by providing SAS, post-CSS, and vanilla CSS import options. So here's an exit from the Service New South Wales star guide. The accordion CSS gets installed with the MPM command at the top. We then provide the four different options for usage. So post-CSS is the preferred option. It's what we've used to build this star guide. The post-CSS ecosystem of plugins lets us use modern CSS features that haven't made their way into all browsers yet, things like CSS variables and nesting, and it transpiles them into a CSS syntax that is understood by all browsers. Then we have the SAS import through the use of eyeglass. So eyeglass is like a loader for SAS, and it gives it compatibility with MPM. And finally, we have the two options for vanilla CSS, the at import and the link tag. So all four options are valid. They provide a similar experience, and the same CSS ends up in the browser. We could probably go one step further and add a fifth option that would show you how to bring that CSS into a JavaScript app. So using MPM to distribute our packages, can you guys see that at all? Yes, it's way out, hey. Didn't run the color contrast, check on that. So yeah, using MPM is what gives us this flexibility. So here's part of the package.json file for the accordion. So yeah, if you can see that, there is a style property, and it's the original post CSS file. So there's a plugin for post CSS called post CSS import, and it allows an at import that uses the name of the MPM package to directly pull in this file. And moving down, this is the eyeglass section. So that's what provides the SAS import. The name specified here allows an at import to pull in this package. And then yeah, we've got the script section. So this is where I'm running the post CSS command. It spits out a vanilla CSS file into a disk directory, and that's the file that gets used for the SAS import and the vanilla imports. So yeah, an accordion wouldn't be much good without any JavaScript. So for that vanilla JavaScript is the obvious choice. It can be used in any browser and inside any JavaScript framework. It's just pure JavaScript after all. So this example provides two options, the ES6 import and the trusty script tag. So once the required JS has been included, there's a one line example at the bottom there on how to initialize it. So this is the relevant section of the package, Jason, for the JavaScript. That is the main property. So it's what populates the ES6 import. And for that, we're using the disked version of the JavaScript. The disked version is transpiled using rollup and Babel. So there's a CLI command there in the script section. And yeah, building JS like that is what gives you the best compatibility. So NPM really is the ideal way to distribute any front-end libraries. It's likely that your front-end will depend on other NPM packages. So why not just tap into the ecosystem when you come to distribute your code? And there's some pretty big benefits. This is the big one. So yeah, it can't really be understated how important version control is. And it's important for two main reasons. Firstly, for consumers of your design system, being able to pin to a particular version will give them confidence that nothing's gonna break on them. So the app that they've built will continue to work as is until they step in and manually upgrade something. NPM will keep all your past versions of any package as well too. So if they need to roll back, if something's not working as expected, they can. And that surety is also what allows us as developers to change and improve things as we need to. We don't have to worry about breaking anything because our users will have their own test places and test processes in place and they can update things as they need to. So it's extremely liberating to be able to roll out a new major version of something without worrying about backwards compatibility knowing that your users can upgrade in their own time. So just a little primer on semantic versioning of Semver which underpins NPM. So yeah, a developer of any publicly available package, it's super important to be across these three numbers when you release code. So that's the patch version. You can update to a patch version with confidence that nothing's going to break. This is where bug fixes will be added and you pin to the patch version by using the tilled character. This is the minor version. So again, you can update to a minor version with confidence that nothing's gonna break. You'll get new features here and you'll probably get some warnings about deprecations too. However, all your existing code will continue working and you can pin to minor versions by using the carrot character. And yeah, this is the major version. So major version changes mean breaking changes. You won't want NPM to automatically update to a major version as that's where deprecated code is removed and new breaking features are added. And to update to a major version, you'll have to scale release notes and potentially rewrite a lot of your code. So there's a couple of downsides with NPM. I guess the most notable is the main NPM registry. NPM.js.org is public when, for lots of reasons, you might want to keep your code private. I'd probably argue against that though. So firstly, your front-end code is all public anyway. When someone visits your website, it's really easy just to pull down all the front-end assets. Secondly, NPM will only publish what you tell it to. So it's possible to keep your secret source secret by only publishing compiled and minified assets. So only include the source codes when you publish if you want to. So yeah, using the public NPM.js.org registry is by far the easiest option. It's got the lowest barrier of entry for developers coming onto your design system. Yeah, there is the option of private packages as well through an NPM.js.org account or a private NPM registry hosted through GitLab. However, yeah, these options are just a little bit more complex and costly certainly and they will limit your flexibility somewhat. So yeah, how do we distribute with NPM? Your design system is likely to include quite a few different components, some of which will be integral to every user, like typography and colors, others like the accordion might be used less so. So instead of bundling everything up together and insisting that consumers of your design system include a huge asset bundle, it makes sense to split components out into their own NPM packages. And the tool to do that is called learner. So learner works with NPM to help you keep your entire code base inside a single repository and push out individual components into their own NPM packages. That's what's called a mono repository. It includes tools to manage dependencies, version control and to publish packages. So yeah, this is what a mono repository looks like. This is the root directory. It includes all the repo wide things like post CSS and roll up config, stuff that's gonna be used by each package. It's got its own package.json and you can include global dependencies for your project here. Inside the packages directory, these are all the directories that learner will publish. And yeah, inside a package, we've got the source code for each individual package. So the source code for this NPM package is going to be more than just JavaScript. There might be a common misconception with NPM. It's not just for JavaScript. You can distribute any code with NPM and eyeglass and post CSS import are the two tools we looked at to enable CSS integration with NPM. So yeah, we can have tests for each package can live here as well. So in this package, we're using Nightwatch to run functional tests on the accordion as well as acts, which runs the automated accessibility tests. They test for things like color contrast and ARIA roles and attributes. We've got the changelog markdown file. It's important to include that as well. So there's an easy way to automate the maintenance of this file, which I'll go into in a minute. And the read me should include instructions on how to install and use the package and that's file gets featured on the packages homepage on npmjs.org. And finally the package.json file, which we looked at earlier on. This configures the package on the NPM registry. It also contains package specific build steps, which learner will run before the package is published. So yeah, learner itself is configured with a JSON file, which you can't read. We specify the version at the top. So learners got its own versioning as well. So additionally, we can point it to a directory of packages and it has versioning options. So that's, I'm using the independent versioning option. That's what I'd recommend for a design system. It allows each package to have its own version and you can push out changes to one package without pushing out changes to your whole monorepository. And the last couple of options are some pro tips. So yeah, so learners got, this is the command section. So we can specify arguments here, which learner will run, they'll get passed through automatically when you run learner commands. So there's a command called bootstrap and it's what installs dependencies for each package. So I'm using the hoist option there. This will hoist dependencies from the monorepository's root. So yeah, these CLI commands are used to build each package on publish. We've got like Babel and Webpack and Post-CSS. Each one's probably got like a dependency tree of several hundred dependencies. So hoisting will just sim link the binaries up into each package.  And yeah, that last line there tells learner to use conventional commits. So these will help learner version packages for you automatically, as well as generate a change log in each package. So conventional commits is a detailed specification to help machines understand your commit messages. Here's a quick breakdown of what one looks like. So this is the type. There's a list of things you can do there. The fixed type tells learner to bump the patch version number and you can use the feet type to bump the minor version number. And you can also add an exclamation mark before the colon and that will tell learner it's a breaking change and that will bump the major version number. Then we've got the scope there. So that's really like an arbitrary description of some component inside the package. Here it concerns the print styles. And after a colon and a space, we have the summarized commit message. So you can include a bigger message as well after a line break and this is what gets added to the change log. So yeah, the, oops, sorry, the final piece of the puzzle is to add these two dependencies and this piece of config to your mono repositories package.json. Commit as in, which you can probably barely see but it's a dependency which gives you an interactive wizard. So when you're committing, you can go through a wizard and just list what everything is. You can enter all your messages in and it will write the structured message for you. And there's another dependency there called CZ conventional change log and it will write the change logs for you based on your commit messages. So all you need to do is just run this one command, learn a publish, and it will, providing your commit messages are written to spec, it will version the packages for you and only things that have changed. It will output an updated change log. It will run any build steps that you have in each individual package and it also publishes your package to the NPM registry. So yeah, let's pull it all together and see what a finished product looks like. We've got the design system website. It can be produced using KSS node storybook or if budget allows a custom static site generator. Documentation should be extensive and ideally written in markdown and committed to the code base. And the design of the website can use existing components from the design system combined with a few bespoke elements to make a unique product. And yeah, code distribution should be handled with NPM, ideally via the public registry. Components in the design system should be split out logically into their own packages using learner and conventional commits are used to easily add semantic versioning to all your packages. Thanks, guys. I think we've got a bit of time for some questions. So far away. Thanks for that. So am I understand this correctly? Using the same design system for all your client websites? We're working on one at the moment called Mixtape which is sort of, we built two sites with it now, I think. Yeah, I think we've still got quite a lot to go on it to kind of expand it. But that's kind of the dream for us, I think. We've got this shared language and Rich is gonna go into this in his talk as well. Yeah, so we've got this shared language now that we're able to use for client sites, basically. Yeah. Thanks. Have you looked at the Storybook MDX format? It's a recent addition to Storybook. Yeah, I'm not, like I'm not a huge Storybook expert, really, I haven't dealt into it too much. Yeah, I did a bit of discovery on it, really just for the talk. And yeah, we're kind of probably evaluate it fully and see if we're gonna use it in the near future, I think. But yeah. I guess the idea is to be able to put your stories within another site that you've designed. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Thank you, very good. And my question is, I see you build a component using just plain JavaScript without using the React and Vue.js. So I think then we need to just using the plain HTML template to use your component. So in this way, can you share some like a downside using vanilla.js or benefit to get in this way without using React and Vue.js? Thank you. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so like a lot of design systems will provide, yeah, basically like multiple alternatives. So you could have a design system which has like a React version of a component, a Vue version of a component, a vanilla or whatever it is, you could just keep making them basically and you could have different files inside the design system and just have instructions on how users can import each one in depending on their framework. And you could have it all stored inside the same NPM package as well. So the code could kind of leverage itself. So we're doing that with a couple of components as well, like depending basically if it makes sense, we might include a React version as well. But yeah, so the vanilla JavaScript approach is kind of awesome because yeah, you only really need yeah, the HTML markup as you said. So like as long as you've got the right markup and all you need to do is just follow the code example in the design system. And you need to initialize that JavaScript somehow. So like say you wanted to, like that accordion example, say you wanted to use that in React where you just create a React component which replicated the markup and like on one of the component initializing cycles just call that vanilla JavaScript and then it's kind of set up ready to go. That way you're using the same vanilla JavaScript to power the functionality of the accordion so you don't need to duplicate the functionality inside React with the component life cycles there. Yeah, the accordion is just a really simple open and close. So it kind of makes sense to do it like that. I guess like more complex components you would want to have React versions to get the extra functionality React gives you, yeah. Yeah, yes, that makes sense. So from a basic point you have the HTML version first and when we need we can add React or Vue.js supporting because you have already split them into small packages, right? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. But when we have very complicated component, it's just sometimes if you're just using HTML you need a lot of HTML and put all the data in the HTML before running the JavaScript. In that case, we maybe need to think about it as a support. Yeah, yeah. Including like a React component is nice because you can get the, you don't have to, at that point the people implementing the design system don't have to worry about the markup because you can just include that in your React component ready to go and they can just add a button in and they've got all the correct classes. And yeah, you could even, like with the accordion you could even have a React component that leverages the vanilla JS anyway that's got all the markup done, ready to go, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Really helpful, thank you. With your design system how do you handle the exceptions of when you have all your system already organized, show everything, but how can you handle all the exceptions or personalization of your design when it's mainly for that client and it looks similar, it behaves similar but there's always something different or unique to your design that you already built. Yeah, so yeah, there's a few, like there's a few different approaches there, like I think the go to approach is to use like a variable system where like we're using post CSS variables for that. So there's like a post CSS variables file which has got a whole bunch of things that we can tweak. We can tweak things like color and typography, spacing, grid styles, that kind of stuff just by inputting new variables and that file just gets included in that project. So that makes things slightly different. It's not mainly in terms of kind of colors and typography, it's within your structure of your design. How do you handle those exceptions or uniqueness if you want to either keep it for that client or not to handle us in your distribution package? Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I kind of see that, like you've got the design system as the underlying level there. So depending on like how it's designed and what it looks like, it's got a lot of like assumed rules and that's where like all the spacing and stuff comes in and then you've got like, then you've got that variable layer sort of in between and then there's like the layer at the top which is really just like for a Drupal site, it could just be the Drupal theme and it would have its own CSS on top of that and yeah, designing it in a way that you can have that CSS at the top, not necessarily overriding things but just kind of working on top to add like a new, like a new customized design. I think that's quite possible. It's a bit of a tricky balance. You don't want to have to be like constantly overriding styles and changing things just because the design system specified in a way. I think it's key to in this situation when it's getting reused for project sites and client sites, keep the design system as simple as possible. Don't be like overly prescriptive with the styles, just like get the base things in there that you need to allow customization as much as you can with variables and then yeah, build it so that you don't need to override stuff and you can add that extra layer of styles to personalize it and you wouldn't necessarily use like all the components. I guess like you just add in some new custom components as well. Like it's kind of like the one-off stuff I was talking about before, like if you've got some design, the design system can kind of inform a lot of the site but you might have like a completely customized hero and navigation and header and all that kind of stuff, you know, just to keep it unique for each client. Yeah. Oh, I've got a few minutes left if anyone has a burning question. No, cool. Thanks, guys.


If you're joining us in our conversation about where it becomes flesh and issues and themes and topics that may arise or anything that these two gentlemen want to talk about. If you're not familiar with 651 Arts, I ask you to please go to our website. Please join us. We have a series coming up beginning January 26 called Live and Unspoken, where artists interview other artists. And there's also a performative aspect to it. We open a conversation with Nicholas Lecter, who's a dancer. And he will be interviewed by Issa Davis, a theater artist, playwright, writer, et cetera. We have three other ones coming up, but that's not what we are here about. But you'll have information in your program. So when you go see the play, if you're going to see it today at 4 o'clock, there's more information inside of that. We are happy to have Marco Muti-Josa, who is the writer and director, where it becomes flesh to be here in this intimate setting to talk to you. And he's going to be interviewed by Kenyon Farrell. And Kenyon is a former theater artist. He is now an activist and writer who lives in New York City. And he has a forthcoming book called The, tell me the title. Stand Up. Stand Up. The Politics of Gratial Oblivion. It's up in the press. Yeah. So he's a very prolific blogger and writer and thinker about contemporary issues around social justice, politics, and creativity. Kenyon did have a chance to see the performance. So he will be talking to Mark and sharing thoughts and ideas and comments and concerns around the play. So we have about 40 minutes. And then folks will be going up to see the show, hopefully if not, we have to end so that those who are can get there. All right. Thank you. And I turn it over to you, Kenyon. Thank you very much for inviting me to be here. I got an opportunity to see the show last night, as you just heard. And I'll try not to do too much spoiling of the events. I'll just try to be conscious of that as we discuss words become flesh. And I guess I'll just say one of my thoughts, opening up one, I just was really moved by the performance for a number of reasons that I think we'll sort of touch on. But one I just think is kind of interesting from a sort of political level is we're in election season. And what's been interesting to me in the last several weeks is ways in which I feel like the culture wars have returned from the 1980s. We're hearing GOP candidates talk about people with AIDS as deserving and their fault. And therefore should pay higher insurance. We're hearing this kind of narrative again about black people on welfare, through which it's usually targeted at black women. But absentee black fathers is often part of the secondary piece of that kind of political conversation. And so I think for that particular reason, this show is really, really important right now. And I want to say for another reason, too, that in many ways in 2008 Barack Obama's candidacy and his perhaps just relationship with Michelle and the kids sort of reemerged a sort of conversation about Black fatherhood in the last four years. So I think this piece is kind of fitting at a particular time where I feel like we're going to be hearing more of these debates in some good ways and not so good ways over the course of this election year. So I guess to that sort of point, I'll just sort of ask you sort of how do you see this particular piece fitting within kind of a larger kind of conversation? It happens in the black community certainly and certainly happens outside of it about black people. We are in a political season, but it's always winter in America. And the dismantling of the Black family structure is actually an American ideal. As much as capitalism is, as much as imperialism is, the very presence of African-descended people in the Americas is made possible by the deconstruction of the Black family structure. So yes, it's the season, but the continuum that we're talking about is a 500-year timeline. In the immediate sense, and by immediate, I mean the last 50 years, let's say, in the United States probably beginning with the civil rights era and the post-civil rights era, the introduction of drugs into black and brown communities in an intentional and genocidal way. The ways that the public school system in America fails all of our children, but beginning with Prop 13 in California, the very specific and systematic deconstruction of successful public school systems tied to tax rates, all these things, I think, form the backdrop along with the systems of patriarchy and male privilege. All these things form the backdrop of a conversation about what it means to be present in the life that you brought into the world. There are all these systemic pillars that ground us in opposition and compartmentalize and deconstruct the Black family structure in the United States. So given all those isms and given all those big ideas, I think I just really want to talk about love and how it is that we don't love our kids, how it is that issues of self-love or self-definition or self-determination occupy our practice of sharing similar love with the unborn and those that are born into our families. And so for all the systems for all the major pathologies, I think that part of what we're trying to explore in this piece is just emotional continuity, integrating a sense of self as part of the same continuum as the sense of responsibility and accountability for another. And I think that as you introduce talks of culture wars, I think what I'm struck by most is just a lack, a general lack of compassion. The polarity, the polemical discussions that we have in our politics lack compassion. And this too is an ethos that I think is present in our inability to fully love our kids. So just kind of big macro issues aside. What we try to do with the piece is create a small, intimate, sweaty, marrowed, and visceral account of why a brother might leave. And also, given those things, why we might choose to stay, how we might sever the cycles just by undergoing a process of self-evaluation and just being humble enough to then be accountable to pass on a different set of values onto someone else. Yeah, I think seeing it yesterday, you definitely see in the work this discussion I just think it's true for people generally is to be concerned about the meta or outside forces that are shaping one's ability to make certain kinds of decisions and then one's own personal kind of drive and wishes and desires and sense of future and how people are navigating becoming fathers with both of those. The personal and the political at both at play. But I also just want to give you an opportunity to talk about the process of developing the production and maybe just talk about what it was like to work with the other actors on this particular script. OK, so first, anybody else have a dad here? OK, interesting. So in the months that my partner was pregnant, I think the months of her pregnancy were the loneliest months of my life for a whole bunch of reasons, but primarily because I didn't feel like I had anybody to talk to. I didn't feel like anybody could understand. I felt like mom was pregnant and we were all focused on her and we should be, you know what I mean? I didn't know where my outlets were. There weren't other cats that I knew that were having kids. And part of all the ugliness in America that we just described has resulted in a whole bunch of black men who don't have their dads and who also kind of have a social pass to leave. So I don't really have any immediate role models. I didn't have the greatest relationship with my own dad. So the process started really because I felt at the time like the only person I could really talk to was my son, but he wasn't born yet, so I started writing these letters just about what I was going through, but addressed them to him and ended up codifying these letters and organizing these letters in a performed way in 2003. And I performed the show as a solo piece first for almost two and a half years all over the world and was done for real. Wrote other stuff, performed another stuff, was cool. And the National Performance Network approached me to reimagine the work two years ago. And the trip at the time was Tyler Perry was doing for colored girls who've considered suicide with rainbows enough, which was a wack movie. The book is a piece of genius that has inspired me and countless other writers. I thought that the movie, I think that we all do our best, but the way that Black men in particular were portrayed in the movie I thought was reprehensible, in part because the text wasn't meant to represent Black men in any other way. So did what he had to do, but in the meantime, on the large screen, what gets played out or what got played out was kind of a repetition of the pathologies of Black men in America. And so seeing that part of what I wanted to do was re-engage with that particular text, this idea of an ensemble that, in Entezaki Shange's case, could articulate common and disparate narratives of Black womanhood and create an analogous narrative with Black men. I'm really fortunate to work with the Brave New Voices Network, which is a crew of young poets in every city in the United States that comes together on an annual basis at the Brave New Voices Festival. Each poet is between 13 and 19 years old. And so in creating this piece or re-creating this piece, the young men of Brave New Voices, these five in particular, along with our DJ, Dionne Despoles, they were the first folks that I engaged and casted because they're so adept with verse. They're so exemplary on racial and political lines. And they just bust crazy hard and they're hungry. So that was the process, from loneliness to solo performance to just kind of being through and ready to move on, and then in retaliation and in conversation, and also in kind of pedagogical extension, using the process to be an extended teaching moment. And then finally, through the manifestation in its current form with young men all under 40, some under 20 really telling this story. And I think hopefully a different kind of vision of what it is to be black male in America. You know, I'm glad you brought up a couple of things. I think one, I mean, when I saw the kind of reference to Tenderzaki Shandies for Color Girls was, I have to think like, yeah, could very well kind of feel it kind of grappling with that text as response. But not as response as antagonism. It's interesting though to hear your opinion, which I happen to share about the silent Perry film. And it is a general kind of, to me, a good narrative throughout his work about, I felt like that part of my problem with that film, one of which was that it actually also withdrew all of the places within the original Shandie text where women actually have sexual agency and pleasure. As part of like, it actually just pulls all of that out. And doesn't actually portray much of that stuff that's in the original text. And I was like, that's interesting. So just my two cents on that. The other thing that I was struck by in the performance last night was just the actual physical use of the black male body in space in ways that the physicality of the show obviously has a lot of kind of dance and movement vocabulary in that way, but was so original in the sense that I didn't feel like I was watching a dance, performance per se, and saw just the sort of way of the people use their bodies in ways that we just, they just seemed really, really new and fresh in terms of ways in which that in and of itself, I think, works to kind of force people to deconstruct the way black men are sort of viewed. And that there was a real both kind of strength as a vulnerability, there was awkwardness, there was a whole kind of range of those things. So you could speak a little bit about the physicality, the movement as you see it in this particular piece. You know, I first started dancing formally when I was 10. And I was involved in musical theater and was on Broadway as a kid. And so dance has always been a really viable and very accessible point of reference for me.  There's perhaps an exaggerated way that is so clear and so focal and especially in our neighborhoods, the way your body language will determine whether you survive or not. And so again, that's all like metaphor re-ephemera. The idea that spoken language and body language exist on the same continuum and are used to communicate the same ideas or can be used to communicate the same ideas isn't very political at all for me. It's really educational. It really comes from being an English teacher and wanting to get at, let's say, an idea. In order to get an idea, to get one idea in the classroom, you probably have to present it four different ways because there are multiple intelligences in the room and there are multiple learning styles in the room. So when I started to develop work, the things that I could immediately access were spoken language and body language as a way to communicate one idea. And hopefully as I've developed in my work, I've gotten a little bit better or a little bit more sophisticated in not compartmentalizing those things or not isolating those things, but really seeing them as one seamless form to get out a series of ideas. The body is an abstract entity. And so there are things that are communicated through the body that kind of eliminate the need to hear them spoken literally. But as poets and as students of verse, we know that especially in the spoken word idiom, there's so much kind of literal linear force that it helps to have the body as a metaphorical tool so that the literal and the figurative are operating at the same time. So that's all the form and structure of it. And then there is the political. There is the politicization of the black male body. We talk about from the cotton field to the athletic field to the digital plantation. And all those things are present in kind of the strength and the visceral nature of the piece. Also, and probably lastly, I love the integration of media design in theater and dance. But I don't go to the theater to watch TV. So I want theater that sweats. I want theater that bleeds. And I want to be able to feel it. And so all that breath, all that wanting, all that, that's intentional. Because there's a way that I think many of us are prioritizing technology over the folkloric and ritualistic nature of the body telling story. And so our emphasis is to prioritize the body over screens, which is why there are none in this piece. And I think that also works for the kind of story we're telling and the bodies that are sharing it in space. Excellent. Was there anything you were afraid in the script to put out into the world? Yeah. What's that for?  But really, man, it's my story. And so it's just hella personal. And so it's cathartic and it's healing for me. But every night that I watch it, there's still parts where I'm like, oh, I said that. Ooh, I felt that. You know? And there are moments where I really value my anonymity inside of the relationship of the work. When I was performing it as a solo piece, there was nowhere to run. You know? But the process of writing it was the healing. And then I went into this purgatory for a couple years where it was just like, here's the lesson again and again the next night. And twice on Sunday, you know? So I would say that I was like, afraid. But there's parts of the work that still hurt. I mean, I thought it was the level of honesty in it about just a range of different conflicted feelings that, you know, in this case, men have about being fathers. But anybody's parenting certainly, you know, have and, yeah, certainly wondered about that aspect of just feeling, yeah, the emotion alley of some of the fairly controversial writing in that respect. So your son is seven, eight, nine? He's like, he's going to vote. What? No, no, no, he's ten. Oh. I'm like, yeah, nothing. Has he seen it? Yep. And what have the conversations been like about the show? You know, the really cool thing is that my son is developing into his own being and his own artist. He's ten. So he's really mature and sweet, but he's also like, right. So like the things that he, you know, he knows what he needs to know. And his mom and I decided that he doesn't need to see the show again. Like he's right at the cusp where he doesn't need to see it, which is awesome. Mostly there hasn't been direct conversation about the show. The conversation that's happening is in his art. You know, there's this whole opening credo, welcome to the spoken world of living word, the dream for reverse, return back. You know, he knows it and he can do it. You know, he can do the choreography, he can do, you know, he can do the text. He's writing poems and he's referencing Mumiabu Jamal and he's referencing Frederick Douglass in his poems. He's dancing, he's making these stop anime.  And so I don't think he's like, oh, that play is about me. Let me talk to you about this play. I think he's like, oh, theater, dance. This is the world that I'm in.  You know what I mean? And I think that that's what's most present in terms of the conversation. It's not like one to one. It's more like he's a ten-year-old filmmaker. He has his own YouTube channel. You know what I mean? Like he's on that. And I think that that's more of his response than anything else. What's the future hold for you, this production and beyond? You know, I'm thrilled to be under the radar here and thankful to Shea and the staff at 651 Arts and to Mark Russell and May-Yin under the radar and the public for making a space for the piece to continue to live. I first was here at under the radar with this piece when it was a solo performance. So it's come full circle. And the great thing about it being under the radar right now is that lots of folks who have access can continue to give it life in other venues. So that's awesome. We premiered it in December of 2010 in Dallas. And I think this is the eighth city that it's been in and will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in February. So I'm really pleased with the life that it's had and the numbers of people that have seen the work. Like I said, everybody in the piece is crazy young and hungry and talented. They're all MCs, musicians, playwrights, singer-songwriters on their own and they all have viable, individual stories to tell and are playing with form in terms of how to tell them. So to me, the greatest success of the piece will be with those six dudes do individually in terms of making music and so forth. I think the piece will continue to tour a little bit longer. You know, it's been canonized or it's been anthologized by Theodore Communications Group and so it's a viable text for folks to read and I think that the best thing that happened in the piece Leaving My Body is it became practical and accessible for a company of five or six or seven to take on these different pieces and to perform them themselves and that's what I'm really hoping that happens. I think most of us that are in solo performance write for our bodies and so it's a very close fit and not enough of us I think conceive of solo performance as something to be performed by someone else. You know what I mean? I think Nalaja's Son has been one of the more successful folks that have done this in creating a piece No Child that was for her that other women have then taken on but what Danny Hawk does, that's Danny Hawk. You know what Sarah Jones does? That's Sarah Jones and I think most of us in solo performance create from that perspective so I'm really happy that it's an ensemble work. I hope young people and old people and whoever else continue to manifest the work and then in terms of my own practice, it's really two fold. I just debuted a new piece. It's called Red, Black and Green of Blues. It premiered last year and continues to tour around the country. It'll be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October and it's a piece that I'm really proud of and so a lot of my arts practice is in the continuing performance of that work and in continuing to write librettos for ballet companies and dance companies in particular and I'm also the new director of performing arts at Yerba Gwena Center for the Arts in San Francisco so I have a curatorial practice of bringing in other groups, commissioning other folks and contextualizing performance, I think in new and exciting ways for the Bay Area along with my colleagues up and down the West Coast and around the world. I think we may have a couple of moments so I want to open it up to folks that have questions. It's your opportunity to ask the artist for you to see the work. Yeah, okay. First of all, the work for employing young black men in theater, I think that's important. I know the artist on stage means so much in the integrity to be able to travel and to their own work to be able to tour and see the world, apply to the scene but the art looks like in the outside which helps so much and I know a lot of them are very hungry so I just wanted to say that and I'm sure the rest of you will be surprised. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do you do? Oh, sorry. I'll bring my quote, well an article by Al Sharpton the other day and he was talking about the lack of arts as activists or the gap between the number of artists as activists when compared to the 60s and the 70s and I'm just wondering what the ageing of hip hop artists do you think we are getting ready to see that number increase to see their volume with their voices and things that are happening in the community or even happening in the nation to see their participation increase and he particularly was talking about just the lack of participation by these artists and major events that were happening in the American community and on the political side. Yeah, you know it's deep because I think about James Brown or Bob Dylan or Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles or Harry Belafonte or you know during the civil rights era there were a number of prominent artists and I'm just referring to African American artists but you know primarily African American artists but you can go on and on and on in the United States of America and really throughout history artists have been, the bellwether have announced the change to come. I think that's still true. I think the primary difference is that the corporatizing or the over corporatizing of art structures particularly as they relate to popular music and film give us the sense that artists aren't politically engaged and it's not that artists aren't politically engaged it's that Wiz Khalifa isn't necessarily politically engaged or you know what I mean? Or like Nicki Minaj isn't politically engaged, right? So it's like there are a number of us that are fighting that use verse and music and film visual art to continue to make statements about ourselves, our bodies and the worlds that we live in. The combination of the 24 hour news cycle that looks for sensationalism the way that someone let's say like Van Jones who is an environmental artist can say something, can make a flippant comment six, seven years ago and someone rescue that flippant comment and Glenn Beck takes it, subverts it, deconstructs it and all of a sudden he's out of the White House. Like that kind of machinery is why you don't have more artists or athletes just kind of stepping up and speaking out because there's this corporate sterilized filter on banals and consequently the actions of folks that are in prominent positions to speak out. Keith Overman who was on MSNBC, a progressive channel and who every other night will just go off for 15 minutes about somebody.   John Stewart, all these folks there's a very tiny threshold in the corporate structure for activism. We want our national spokespeople to be as sterile as possible. Kelly Clarkson, you know, tweeted which I know is a less than 140 characters. Kelly Clarkson tweeted that she dug Ron Paul and you know there are darts thrown at her. So it's like she can't even express a political opinion. You know what I mean? How is that complicated? The Dixie Chicks, I mean just, yeah. Just on and on and on. So you know, when the United States went into war in Iraq you know anybody that spoke out against the war in Iraq was immediately vilified. You know what I mean? And it's just like where have we gone? You know, where you can't say war is whack. Like who are we? You know what I mean? With all due respect to Reverend Sharpton and growing up here in New York City a lot of my political vocabulary was shaped by Reverend Al just kind of going off, you know what I mean? So you know, with all due respect I think that it's less about active artists and more about a highly sensitive, you know, low threshold corporate structure that doesn't give visibility or license to artists that are speaking out. And what I just would offer too in terms of the music industry that might actually offer some, I don't know, hope or whatever a shift is, you know, nobody's selling records anymore. I mean that's the, no one is selling, you know I mean there's like a very few, like Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga are the only people selling records right now. Nobody else is selling, nobody's even going platinum. Like nobody's selling a million records anymore but there are a lot more people selling 20,000, you know, 50,000, 100,000 and I think, you know, that in and of itself may shake up some of the kind of political control over what gets out just because people don't have to be so reliant on a record label for distribution anymore like, you know, people have found other ways around it. So that I would say is one of the hopes I have that some of this other stuff can be undermined. Is there anybody in particular theater artist that inspired you to go into the field and second part is as African-American man do you feel a particular challenge because it does seem to be the same to the white industry that has established theater? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of folks that I've been inspired by and Tizaki Shange probably first among them and yeah, there's really just a long list. I'll say folks that inspire me to move into the field. I think that, you know, I saw Danny Hawk in a park somewhere in the 90s do this riff.  And I knew I couldn't do what he did, but he was speaking my language. I remember being a junior in high school and going to PS 122 and there was this piece What's Happening Now? And Crazy Legs was in it and all these B-Boys were in it and I was like, that's hip hop, I can touch that. When I was 15, there was a playwright named Bill Kane who is this incredible playwright. He wrote this piece, he was still, and I think he is still a practicing Jesuit priest, but it was this piece called Stand Up Tragedy that I was in and that was really instrumental and important to me. And then of course August Wilson. So yeah, so folks I can touch, folks I will never know. In terms of, you know, maybe intimidation or separation inside of the field, oh no, I don't really, not so much, because it's part of my life, you know what I mean? Like it's just part of my life. So yeah, exactly, so it's no different, you know what I mean? It's no different, like I could be in any field. I could be running for president, I could be running for student council. It's all kind of the same thing. The challenge I think is the normalization of narrative and how that fits into the context of your average presenting season.  There's like a certain, you know, like I'm supposed to know that this was based on Dostoevsky and I'm supposed to know that they're referencing Mahler when they, you know what I mean? And so normalizing the, a consistent reference to Du Bois or to Hughes or to Schange or to Sanchez or to Lemon Anderson, you know what I mean? Like normalizing those things is actually part of my challenge as a curator to create a context by which audiences can absorb and practice and become versed in a different kind of literacy. That's my curatorial challenge. My challenge as writer and performer is just to be as true to my personal convictions as possible. And I think the kind of person that I am, and this also speaks to just my being, is, you know, like I'm inclined towards empathy and I'm a pretty good code switcher. So I practice that in my art. Again, I'm much more, I would much rather create an environment than to create my educational practice than in my arts practice. So, yeah. Well, let's give our playwrights, Mark O'Donnell, thank you for coming to this performance talk and hopefully you enjoy the show.


I have the energy to speak to you guys but all I want to say is is Kaurama Kosodo Somalilad such a beautiful country filled with beautiful people I mean coming in here makes me feel like generosity actually exists in humans because it takes a human to be generous to another human right I've been here for eight days and people in here have shown me nothing but pure love man love actually exists in Somalilad if I should give a slogan for this country I will say it's a country of love I mean if you go to Berbera they will tell you that Berbera is the city of love right but I would say the entire country is a city filled with generous people I mean I just want to add this testimony to it because why I am right now is called White Horse Hotel and it was given to me out of generosity literally I'm not paying for anything they found out that hey what am I is in the country and they were like yo if you are here you just have to stay here whether you like it or not I'm like wow so I also want to say this and pay back I want to say thank you so much for giving me such a beautiful welcome to your beautiful country so if you ever get a chance to visit Somaliland the best place for you to stay is White Horse Hotel don't thank me now I mean thank me later you know it's a month of Ramadan the month of love demand that is more special to our Muslim brothers and sisters and when I go to Somaliland it was actually a day before Ramadan and I'm that guy who travels to embrace different culture different religion different way of doing things in every country that I go to I just don't go to a country 48 hours and I live I always want to experience the country spend my money in the country I mean get a chance to get to know the people before I'll be able to come out with one single video so I've been here for like eight days so I know what I'm saying I've been to almost every corner of Somaliland and when I go here they told me that hey Maya I think you came at the perfect time I'm like which one is a perfect time they said tomorrow is Ramadan and I'm like you know what if tomorrow is Ramadan I definitely want to practice Ramadan for the first time because I learned Ramadan in school but I never knew that a day will come I actually get the chance to practice Ramadan so all I did a day before Ramadan was to go try Lasgale is it Lasgale no if you come to um this country they go or what do you call it camel meat so I'm like you know what please can I try camel meat before Ramadan because I really want to fast and it's been seven good days and I never regret participating in this Ramadan is the most important month of the year for us for Muslims all over the world it's a month where we get to regain strengthen our consciousness with Allah unlearn all bad habits and most importantly put yourself in someone else's shoes of less fortunate feel self-discipline within your body while fasting and you could think of it like a 30-day retreat with Allah Ramadan is actually one of the five pillars of Islam you see the flag behind me that is a beautiful flag of Somalia land I mean waving higher and you see the Arabic signs in it that is actually one of the world the five pillars of Islam and what do you see right there is the Shahada I mean every Muslim knows this if you don't know this maybe you can go go let and Ramadan is the most important one and don't forget that Ramadan is actually the ninth month of the Islamic calendar I didn't know this I didn't know that Ramadan is actually a month it's actually a holy month it's actually a month that Allah review the first chapter of the Quran to Prophet Muhammad so I mean this month every Muslim in this world don't eat or drink water from dawn to sunset so during sunrise to sunset I mean I feel like it's a moment to connect with your spirit because I have experienced this myself and I feel so connected and believe me I wanted to do this for just few days but I think I'll go for 30 days and she has been so helpful I feel like without her I wouldn't have been able to complete my seven days fasting you know because we need to wake up early morning to eat so what she normally comes knocks our door around 4 445 today actually it came late she was actually dead slept in 415 came she brought some foodstuffs we ate together and then yeah I went back to sleep did you hear that first call of prayer were you awake because I've been here for like how many days now yeah six days so literally usually that actually woke me up so it was around 4 10 okay yeah yeah I woke up and I'm like why is she not coming she's still sleeping are you praying yeah so the first call of prayer that you hear it's the alarm clock for the entire country but it's literally telling everyone wake up time to eat wake up and then the second call of prayer which you're gonna hear in about 20 minutes that means okay final call get ready final call get ready and then the last one means prayer close fast no more food after that point but I don't think I will eat after this one I'm really not used to like eating at this hour I really like this but yeah yeah just drink up like hydrate regardless what you do there you hit 10 30 a.m. and hunger starts doesn't matter if you have buffet at this hour but one of the things that I do is to just like forget about the food at all okay yeah nothing just stay I mean with water you know what this time you're gonna go with that water no water this time yeah this call of prayer is what the second one that she yeah this is the last chance to eat last chance it's my last stop come back together like seven one thing that I really learned from them is that they actually practice Ramadan for you to understand that there are people out there who actually don't get food to eat during that time so put yourself in their shoes so literally Ramadan is also a month of what giving right so when she told me that I'm like you know what I cannot just fast without giving right I mean like as part of Ramadan I know that Ramadan is a time of giving and that is why I really want to do this before I get out of Somaliland I would love to buy a goat and also for the less privileged I mean your mom is around to definitely I'm gonna I want to purchase a goat and give it to you I mean you think it's okay right but where are we now we are you're the right place definitely we're at the go livestock market wow they have goat cow and camel for sale never seen anything like this before man but I think the people in here are friendly they're all calling me african african yeah I'm from Africa man hi yeah from Ghana you know Ghana yeah it's kind of like interesting how people here want to know where you from because you look different I need to come out here all right so I mean how much does it cost in here? Usually about 45 to 50 per dollar, it depends on the bigger butt or not but I don't want to give mommy a lot of stress so I think one goat should be enough because you gotta be cooking a lot of meat medium-sized and then that's okay right all right so let's go find somewhere to buy a goat goat shopping so we finally brought the goat back home and meet my Muslim family I mean she's actually my Muslim mom and she's the one who's gonna do the cooking I'm not gonna cook in here it's gonna do all the cooking I mean since I came to this country she has been taking care of me driving me around I'm even feeding me you know I've made it to life oh oh my goodness mommy I want to say thank you so much you know in Somaliland they say Mahasatni Mahasatni in Ghana we say medasi medasi yeah I speak Chinese too so I'll say shi shi ni but mommy I want to know yeah why is this so important to give during Ramadan well it's important because of this people who need and the people who have money and wealth so it's a kind of balance that the one with the well to give to the need it's yeah and I believe that whoever gives never lack so I think this should be a lesson to each and everyone even if you're not a Muslim learn to give but I think Ramadan is the time to give and since I'm here I also need to give so I'll just go somewhere else and by the time I come back I think food will be ready and together with Samia go out and share the food to the people who actually need it so how many hours in an hour in an hour food ready yeah so yeah this is the moment that I've been waiting for since morning you know it's time to break the fast and we break the fast by eating dates and drinking water I mean it's a way of regaining back your energy sorry I lost that shot because the woman she'll explain then yeah after dating water this follows and watermelon why watermelon because the Prophet Mohammed also watermelon so after the dates and water what list and then you can start the Samboos and the Mandasi it's low and to break the break the breakfast then after that you get up and pray after prayer you come back for your course you're filming okay so this is just like breakfast breakfast after breakfast then you come and eat your lunch and dinner yeah I want to say thank you so much for everything I really appreciate I mean eight days here it's amazing I would love to stay forever you know because of you now you want to have a house wow yeah I'll be coming here more often good anytime you come you welcome thank you yeah but don't forget that you both have a YouTube channel so make sure you check out the description box go click on the link and subscribe it's by force to support them yeah can I please have my main view I'm so happy you look at that sure we're happy dear


Hello, everyone. Welcome to my talk. My name is Tomasz Fronczak. I'm sure all of you knew straight away how to pronounce that just by looking at it. I'm a local here based in Berlin. By day, I am a lead SRE working as one of the local fintech companies. By night, I play with homelabs and self-hosting, mostly in order to achieve more data privacy for me and my family. Want to find out more? Here's your link. Today, we're going to talk about backups and restores and stuff like this in the context of self-hosting and running things in some more bare-metal situations. So, I'll start with a quick round of questions for you lovely people. I'd like a raise of hands for anyone who actually hosts anything or manages or hosts a service, be it at work or at home. That is less than I expected somehow. Interesting. So, did any of you ever have to actually restore from a backup? Like something broke and then you had to restore? Fantastic. Awesome. And then those that didn't raise a hand, when is the last time you tested that you can actually restore from a backup? Nice. But yeah, from the show, Fronczak can already see you're the right audience for this talk. So, let's start with a cool anecdote, GitLab. It's a small company. We probably haven't heard about it. They do code-hosting and they generally use PostgreSQL clusters to store the databases. And they are really good about their backups, free-to-won, everything. They have LVM snapshots on the disks where the database runs. They have that copied over to another series, an offset backup using PGDump, whatever the command is. And they even have, like, an auxiliary, another backup that syncs as well in S3. Or at least they thought they have, into one day, they had to restore from a backup because one of the engineers accidentally did a whoopsie and deleted one of the light database instances. Turns out he went to S3, his leg out just rolled it from S3, and then it turns out the S3 bucket was empty. Then he found out the PG backup command was silently failing for weeks, so they had, like, two weeks old data. Oh, and the LVM snapshots were enabled but not on the one set of disks that was running the database just for the other stuff. So that was a fantastic ride. I highly recommend reading a blog post, two takeaways from this. Don't be like GitLab in terms of not checking your backups, but also be like GitLab and write fantastic post mortems. There's a link to it later in this slide. So with this in mind, if we look at how some of you might be running the next cloud instance, this is more or less how I run it. I have a MariaDB for the database, just a single instance. Then you have the configuration files that have to live somewhere, and then you have the actual data for the files. And how you may backup these really depends. In a lot of scenarios, you would say, okay, so my configuration is actually somewhere in a Git repo, and then it's also on my local hard drive because I'm working on it or changing this stuff. So with MariaDB, you can also have a backup drive running to a disk somewhere or a snapshot or an FS, and then use the data.  So now imagine something breaks, and you use all of these built-in mechanisms for each part or each data type. It's a bit of a hindrance to figure out what to restore from where if it's not uniform. You don't really have a good idea of, or good control over where the snapshot of each data was taken. So I had this problem, and I completely borked my instance of Next Cloud and then couldn't recover it. You live, you learn, right? So I thought, okay, let's start over, and I'm going to try and rewind and take a closer look at how I'm going to do it. I need it to be simple. I'm doing this in my own time. This is not my job. I need it to be simple. I need ideally all of the backup and restore operations for each data type, and that's not just for Next Cloud but all the other services I'm running to be ideally the same, right? I don't want to have to learn five different types of backup recovery mechanisms and then juggle this. And because that's what I work with at work, I wanted to be all running in Kubernetes because that's what I'm familiar with. You do you. You use whatever you're familiar with, but I recommend sticking with what you know. Then I stumbled across this beauty of a system, both open source, I think both from Ranchelabs. Three years is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes, and Longhorn is basically a layer of storage. It exposes the local storage that you have on your Kubernetes nodes as Kubernetes volumes, and then uses iSCSI to mount these into your nodes in the background, so it doesn't matter where your volumes live. The coolest thing about it though is for backup reasons is it can automatically backup to NFS targets, and it does a multi-tenant backup, so you can have multiple copies of this, or multiple clusters backup to a single NFS pool, and then they can all see it, and you can basically use that as you see here as a mechanism to transmit your backup. So again, three to one. Live data lives in my Kubernetes cluster in my homelab. Then I use Trunas Scale, another open source tool that you can freely use, and then I ship all of the backup volumes via WireGuard to a friend's place who also happens to be running Trunas Scale. All of this is done basically without any code. This is all already ready of the shelf open source tooling. You can just configure it mostly for the UI. So how do you say, okay, what does that have to do with restoring a disaster recovery? Well, the cool thing is all you need to restore your service is spawn another Kubernetes cluster, and ideally, you have all your config data to do that, or you have it already done in the first place, and then you can just load all the volumes from this copy, remote copy, and then to, you know, slam dunk this baby. You just point your HA proxy to the new copy, and now you're basically restored and you're back alive. And it is super simple. I recommend playing with it. Key takeaways here. Start testing your backups and restores today. Don't be like GitLab. And also make it all simple and make your backups, or design your backups with recovery in mind in the first place, just to not have a headache when you actually need to use them. With that, thank you very much. So for me...


awaits but whether its spiral or syrupula some of these spiral will be may étaient fibonacci spiral or suvarnas spiral as far as its reach its a protective layer of 1.1 cm same with the강 OH话 AM VAT free beyond the space in the ninth space … cupcakes, the second, third and last joka for the first time. As you can see, there are a lot of spirals. Let's see the results of the measurements. 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13 and so on. In this samyashreni, the first two rows are 1, 1. The next two rows are the same as these two. Similarly, the fourth row is the same as the third row. That is, 1, 2, 3. Similarly, each row is the same as the first two rows. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 5, 8, 13 and so on. This samyashreni is called the Fibonacci sequence. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. Let's see the results. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. The first two rows are the same as the first two rows. ccaas ...  carga  중에 żyć ... ... ... ...  vuelta ї  complexes рен  anys ڑ  Install Each జ ��  deserved జ జ  nostalgic జ rectangles  liberals Ṣ doctor ... .. Ṣ doctor സ്ഽ്ല്്്്മ്യിഹ്കാ്ന്യ്ന്സ്മ്ന്മ് പിട്മ്മ്തികാക്ക്ക്ക്ന്മാ്യ്


Providing accurate and readable tracking information is vital to the success of our e-commerce business. And that is because we wanna offer our buyers peace of mind if they want to track their delivery progress, as well as it offers us sellers protection, if the buyers claim that they did not receive their items, we can prove it with the tracking events. However, with so many dropshipping suppliers, it's easy to find those that do not offer readable tracking information, which you will learn to convert watching this video using BlueCare Express or Aquiline International Tracking Solutions. So no matter whether you're dropshipping on eBay, Shopify, Wix, or even Facebook Marketplace, this is a video that you do not want to miss. Quick intro and let's go. Hello everyone, I'm Liron from AutoDS. Do not mind the way that I look and the way that I sound, I'm running a little cold. But besides that, as you know, this video is all about tracking number conversions and how we can actually make our tracking numbers readable, no matter what suppliers we're using and what shipping carriers they use, this will give us the seller protection that we need, as well as the peace of mind for our buyers to always be able to track their events. So let's get started. The top two solutions for converting our tracking numbers are BlueCare Express and Aquiline International. We're going to be going over the differences in this video. And once again, if you guys haven't done so yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel to always stay updated on all of the latest and all of the hottest topics that we have coming out in the world of dropshipping. That being said, let's jump straight into the action. What is BlueCare Express? BlueCare Express is a software that simply converts Amazon AMZL tracking numbers to valid BlueCare Express tracking numbers where we can easily track the progress of our events from those AMZL tracking numbers that are not trackable and not readable anywhere.  So for those of you who are looking to maintain a high seller standard, like top rated or above standard, you wanna use BlueCare tracking solutions to help you get tracking uploaded on time and validated as you can see right here. You wanna keep that as high as possible to maintain a healthy seller account. But with all of those AMZL tracking numbers coming from Amazon and there are so many dropshippers dropshipping from Amazon to eBay, this is one of the best solutions to have supported tracking numbers and have your buyers be able to track their delivery progress, as well as keeping high seller metrics on eBay, which is very important for the long-term survivability of your e-commerce business. And on a final note on BlueCare Express, you can use their tracking information on selling platforms like eBay, Shopify, and Wix to provide readable and trackable tracking information for your buyers. Now what is Aqueline Tracking? And what are the differences between Aqueline and BlueCare Express? Aqueline offers similar services to BlueCare Express by taking those AMZL tracking numbers and converting them to Aqueline's tracking numbers, which is once again, 100% supported on platforms like eBay, but not just eBay. Also, Aqueline tracking numbers can convert any tracking number to Aqueline tracking. So what makes Aqueline's tracking service solutions different from BlueCare Express? There are two things. The first, Aqueline's zip code masquerade ability, meaning if you're dropshipping on eBay and you want to avoid breaching eBay's item location policy, Aqueline's tracking service is able to use the zip code that you have specified inside your eBay listing to show that as the first place where the product was shipped from. So when eBay checks your tracking events and checks the first zip code where the package originated from, they will see that it's coming out from the same place specified in your eBay listing. Aqueline is the first service to be able to provide us with zip code masquerade. Therefore, we can avoid breaching eBay's item location policy, not get our accounts flagged or get our accounts unflagged after they got flagged and get more views and sales. The second difference between Aqueline and BlueCare Express is that Aqueline can convert all of your tracking numbers to Aqueline tracking, meaning it doesn't just have to be Amazon's AMZL tracking numbers, but it can also be any other tracking number that you provide. So for example, if you're dropshipping from suppliers like Aliexpress and you're using Aliexpress Standard Shipping or Aliexpress Premium Shipping, which doesn't always have tracking information available, you can even convert those tracking numbers to Aqueline and give the buyer the ability to track the progress of their shipments and of course, take care of your seller accounts. If the buyer's open item not received cases, you will be covered even from shipping services that do not provide readable tracking information. Those are the two main differences between BlueCare Express and Aqueline tracking number conversions. So if you're wondering which tracking solutions provider is better for your e-commerce business, here are the key takeaways. Both services, both BlueCare Express and Aqueline offer tracking conversions for AMZL tracking numbers coming from Amazon and or all other tracking numbers, although Aqueline does have the upper hand here, being able to provide tracking conversions for tracking numbers that are not readable like Aliexpress Standard Shipping and more. BlueCare Express can also convert all tracking numbers, but mostly those that are readable like UPS, USPS, and FedEx and so forth, but they can also take care once again of AMZL tracking numbers. eBay authorizes and supports both BlueCare Express and Aqueline, meaning when we add it to the order details, when we add those tracking numbers or when we get automatic tracking numbers from automation tools like AutoDS, we can simply go to our order details on eBay and track the events from there, since of course eBay supports both BlueCare Express and Aqueline. On the other hand, you can simply go to BlueCare Express' website or Aqueline's website and provide each with their tracking numbers to be able to track the events also from their websites. Last but not least, we can also use universal websites like 17track.net to be able to track both BlueCare Express and Aqueline tracking numbers and also have that integrated inside your Shopify or Wix website to be able to give the buyers the option to track the events from your online store. Another similarity between them is that we can integrate both services, both Aqueline and BlueCare Express with AutoDS' automatic tracking updates. So if you signed up with AutoDS' automatic orders or they're fulfilled by AutoDS service, which I will show you how to do in just about a minute and it's included in your automatic orders subscription. So what's the final verdict? Which tracking solutions provider is better? Aqueline or BlueCare Express? Because Aqueline has that extra feature with a zip code masquerade, for eBay dropshippers, this is a no-brainer. Aqueline is the way to go. However, if you're using different selling channels like Shopify, Wix or the Facebook Marketplace, you can use either BlueCare Express or Aqueline, although Aqueline still has a little advantage over BlueCare here since they support more tracking numbers. On the other hand, BlueCare Express has been around for a while and Aqueline is relatively new, even though they've been working really well so far. Now, how do we convert our tracking information to BlueCare Express or Aqueline? So once you've reached a decision on what you wanna use, your next step is to simply enable the automatic tracking conversions on your AutoDS settings. So once you opt it in for the fulfilled by AutoDS or the automatic order service, the BlueCare Express or Aqueline is included in your subscription. I will leave links to how to opt in for these services below this video, but let's get on with it. Here is the AutoDS platform. What you wanna do is click on settings on the left side, stay under store settings and click on the orders column. Here we can see all of the options that we have for our order settings. So what we wanna do first is on the left side, select the right store. So either your eBay store, your Shopify store, Facebook marketplace, whatever it may be and choose the right supplier that you would like to convert these tracking numbers from. So in this case, we're looking at Amazon US as the supplier and eBay USA as the selling channel. Here under orders, under tracking conversion, we have the option to either disable tracking conversion, convert all tracking numbers to BlueCare Express. So no matter what tracking number we get, we wanna convert it to BlueCare Express, convert only Amazon shipping carrier or AMZL to BlueCare Express. So only those that are not trackable from Amazon, we wanna convert only them to BlueCare Express or convert all tracking numbers to Aqueline with the zip code masquerade. Once you choose the right tracking service for your business, simply save your settings and the rest is history. All of your buyers will receive automatic tracking number conversions and updates as soon as tracking information is available. They'll be happy because they'll always be able to track the progress of their shipments, which also decreases the amount of messages that you'll get from your customers wondering where their packages are and you will keep a healthy seller account. I hope that this video helped you get a clear understanding of BlueCare Express and Aqueline, the differences and similarities between them and which one is best suitable for your e-commerce business. If there are any questions, let me know in the comments below and I will personally answer them. Thank you for watching and good luck with your tracking number conversions.