Well, to me it was totally worth it. Marci Fernandez is just one of the more than 1600 residents of Shasta County, who relied on the state-led debris removal program to clear their property following the car fire. Can't conceive of doing it myself, and they were very understanding and helpful. Remnants of her home, as well as her husband's workshop, including all the tools, machinery and heavy equipment, littered her four-acre property. Nothing but charred rubble, but multiply that by 18,000 for the campfire. Now you get an idea what Butte County and fire survivors there are facing. The removal of hazardous household waste is well underway, but it's going to take months to remove the estimated 5.3 million tons of debris. We want our community to get cleaned up, and we want people to rebuild. And this is the first step, getting the fire debris removed. Butte County's Casey Hatcher is urging homeowners to sign up for debris removal. The campfire, now officially the state's most destructive wildfire, came on the heels of the car fire in Shasta County, so that's where they turned their attention as soon as recovery began. Paul Hellman is the director of resource management for Shasta County. He monitored the state debris removal program in his own county. All of the stories that I've heard and people I've talked to, everyone seems to have been very happy with the results, and the efficiency and the speed at which it all occurred. The debris removal program first taps the homeowner's insurance coverage, but any and all costs after that are picked up by the state program. There is zero cost to the homeowner. In order to use the state's debris removal program, homeowners must complete the right of entry form and turn it in no later than January 31st. You may do that at either the disaster recovery center in the Chico Mall, or at the ROE Center in Oroville. Again, the deadline is January 31st. There was a lot of places to clear and I had to wait my turn, but they did an excellent job.


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Okay. I think we have everybody in here. So welcome. Thank you for being here for the latest event in our 50 years of women at Fairfield Celebration. My name is Jessica Colligan, and I'm happy to welcome you on behalf of Fairfield Alumni Relations Office. Throughout this anniversary year, we have been thrilled to highlight so many accomplished women and our three panelists this evening are certainly no exception. Leading this evening's conversation is Dr. Aaron Weinstein who joined Fairfield three years ago as a member of Fairfield politics department, and he is now the director of our prelaw advising program. I know some of his students have registered for this event and I feel confident they will learn a lot from this evening's conversation. Before we get things started just two quick housekeeping notes. First, I ask that you please keep your microphones muted throughout the event just to minimize distractions for our speakers and for our other guests. And second, we encourage you to use the chat feature in zoom and submit questions for our panelists, and we will do our best to get to as many of them as possible as time allows at the end of the evening. And now I will turn things over to Dr. Weinstein to get us started. Thank you so much Jessica and thank you all very much for coming. At least for us here on campus is the first night of our spring break, spring break sorry Easter break I misspoke so I am pleased to be here I'm excited to be here really quickly a little about myself for those of you who haven't met me yet. I'm Dr. Weinstein and I teach in politics politics of course is in the College of Arts and Sciences, and I study American politics and political theory I focus on political thought specifically religious political thought and 20th century political thought and conservatism and liberalism. I also have the honor to serve as the director of the prelaw advising program. Many of my students are here as well tonight I do see them and I welcome them all as long with the alums and the parents and the other students. So, real quick, I'm going to start shutting up and I'm going to turn things over to our wonderful alumni who are here as panelists. So we have as quickly introduce all of them, all of whom by the way, former College of Arts and Science alums. Erkamporeal is graduate of Fairfield in 2012. While she was here, she was a politics major and had a communications and studio art or sorry, concentration in studio arts and Italian studies. Also captain of the D one women's cross country team. She didn't Quinnipiac law school she graduated in honors in 2015. She was a partner at Wiley Edder and doyen. And she works in transactional law and in 2017 she was nominated by her peers and recognized as New England super lawyers rising star. And she is admitted to the bar in Connecticut and in New Jersey. Our second speaker is Ellen Morgan. Ellen graduated from Fairfield in 1986 where she majored in psychology. She was born and raised in Stratford Connecticut. She attended Tulane Law School, graduating in 1989. In 1992 she became the first woman in first black assistant town attorney in Stratford. She has extensive training in mediation having attended the Center for Mediation and Law at Columbia, the dispute settlement center Inc in Norwalk and child protection session of Connecticut's juvenile court system. Family law including elderly law, juvenile law, social security and many other areas she can tell us about. And we also have with us Kelly McClure and Kelly graduated Fairfield in 1981 where she majored in political science. She attended St. Mary's University School of Law. She also attended Oxford University's law program. And over the course of 25 years she has specialized in family law representing numerous individuals and representing them very, very well. And winning sort of very sort of good outcomes for them in terms of the settlements. Kelly has numerous awards and there are too many to list but I'll just give you a few best law firms by US News and World Report top rated women leaders in the law by American Lawyer Magazine and top attorney in North America and who's who and all of that is just this last year. So, with this, I will turn things over to our speakers, first to Nicole, and then to Kelly, sorry then to Ellen and then to Kelly. And we are going to have them briefly introduce themselves tell them a little bit about their experience here at Fairfield. And specifically thinking about mentorship to begin with. So what it was like here on Fairfield on campus, the mentors that you had specifically I would hope to hear about any women in particular who were mentors to you. And then what brought you to law school and beyond so we'll start with Nicole. Thank you Dr wine scene. First off, I'm really grateful to be a part of this panel with such other great female attorneys. Well, thank you for that. A little bit about myself as Dr wine scene said I graduated from Fairfield in 2012 so I would be the youngest member of the panel today. Which is why I feel so lucky, but after I actually am originally from New Jersey, I moved to Connecticut to go to Fairfield and then to law school at Quinnipiac. I'm still living in Connecticut now. I did major in politics I actually started out as a business major, and to give business school, all the credit that it's due it was tough. And at that point I realized, you know, I do want to focus on my goal of going to law school and becoming a lawyer so I transitioned to the wonderful College of Arts and Sciences, focused on, you know, growing my, my skills in reading, writing, analytics, all that. And it really did help propel me into the career that I have now. So I utilize advisors within the school at Fairfield. I think that was probably the best part about Fairfield is that there's these open door policies you can always go and ask the questions that you need to ask transitioning from the business school to the school of arts and sciences was pretty seamless.  As Dr. Weinstein said I also ran cross country I was the captain of the team which, you know, as part of the growth of leadership skills that I had learning hard work dedication. I'm not a teacher in particular, or advisor but I think that what I want to point out is that the pre law program now is really a great tool for that and I wish I had it then and I'm so grateful that Fairfield now has such a great pre law program so that students like me can find that advisor find that mentor and get to law school.  I went to law school, I went to Quinnipiac. Just spent a lot of time there focusing on my goal of becoming a family lawyer which Kelly is a great one but I didn't wind up enjoying that as much as I thought so now I'm actually practicing law. It's not transactional work but estate planning so wills and trusts and things like that. Elder law which is actually my favorite part of my practice and probate work so you know I've been practicing law for I think five, six years now. Time is flying. And I just really enjoy what I do so I'm welcome all your questions about any aspect of Fairfield getting to law school law school itself being a lawyer. Well, and I know we have some questions lined up that I'm excited to answer. So, looking forward to it. Thank you. And actually I just realized that in our notes it was going to be Kelly going next. So, Ellen is it okay if I slot Kelly in.  Yes. Thank you for having me I feel I'm very honored to be part of this wonderful group and the connective with the Fairfield friends again. I had a wonderful experience, like Nicole a great experience I was a class 81 it's hard to imagine their 40 year anniversary was this year is coming up this year but I was really fortunate I was a policy I had a lot of great teachers. And Dr. Wein senior in Donna Ruma Hall. He was one of my professors and he was really instrumental in helping me. Like Nicole said back even back 40 years ago is very open door policy. He really was helpful with the cigar, telling me, you know, giving me advice because I didn't have any of my family that was a lawyer. And Dr. Katz was another professor that was really instrumental in helping me kind of navigate what I was going to be doing going to law school and then had a wonderful English professor already real and in fact, I saw today that I had his handbook still in my desk of how to write a proper letter and proper grammar. And I saw that I was in the Northwest dorm and I had in my book here where I was. But I, I had a great experience with the whole philosophy of Jesuit was education was really instilled in and when I was there I know it is now to but. But, in particular, Dr. Katz and question about women that have had had an influence particularly helping on the journey. I will say really the class the women in our class, Laura Incerno as I see Laura is on the in the panel. She is an amazing woman that that I was in class with. And the other women that were in our class, I think really is what helped navigate me through the journey are, even though I'm living in Dallas, Texas. We have a very close group, we see each other all the time and we connect even though it's 40 years later, which I think says a lot about the school and the values of the school, but there are a lot of very strong women in our class and Janet, who's here. They are not showing her face but is another one in the class right behind us so I really feel fortunate with that I live in Texas I have four sons that are all in their 20s and and for years my sons always told me you work too hard mom I'll never go to. I don't never want to be a lawyer and now I have three of them in the lawyers are soon to be lawyers at George Washington Brooklyn law and California Western Cal and San Diego so you know it just opened up a lot of doors for me and I really appreciate it all thanks to Fairfield really got me in the right direction. Thank you very much and Ellen. Hi everybody. My name is Ellen Morgan, and I'm class of 1989. My experience was a little bit different these my sister council lived on campus. I was a commuter student. So, I lived at home. I lived at Fairfield because my father worked at Fairfield. This was back in the time when that was one of the perks of working at a university was that your kid could go to the university. So I was in class with a lot of other professors kids, which was always a lot of fun when they were in the same class with their parent. It was a little bit different now, but it was a little bit different because I didn't live on campus I worked while I went to school. So, I would go to I would go to campus, I'd go to class, and then I turn around and leave. So I didn't do a lot of the extracurricular activities, just because I had to go to work that day. I have to say I did enjoy I spent a lot of time in this list, because that's where the psychology department was located so we were down campus a little bit. And so a lot of the, you know, other places on campus where everybody would hang out was just not there. I mean, all the science students we were all down in that science building so. But it was, it was a lot of fun we we had a lot of good times and I did enjoy my time there. I forgot was the second part of the question. Just if there were any, whether peers or staff or faculty that you found to be mentors in your time on Fairfield. It was my religion professor who got me into thinking about going to law school encouraged me to apply told me where to apply.  It began with an R. He's long since past restless so but he was one of the most open genuine people I met on campus. And he's, he, I guess he saw something and he said you know what you ought to go to law school. And here's where you should go and when I got to too late, because that's where I went. There were a lot of kids from Fairfield University down there so I thought he was getting a little back or something. I kept running into people. Great wonderful so it sounds I mean everyone of course had a wonderful experience it sounds like you know campus wasn't is now still chuck full of wonderful mentors myself excluded of course. But what I want to do now is just really quickly turn things back and we were talking before we started a little bit. And I do know that I'm looking right now at a copy of the mirror week of March 31 so literally came out today. And for those of you who can read it. It mentions of course that this is the 50 years of women at Fairfield. I was wondering it will start with with Ellen and with Kelly and then move on to Nicole. Just some thoughts right regardless of the question I put to you earlier right I want you to answer it the way you like just what are your thoughts on having been either part of the earlier wave of women on campus. What it was like the way I would phrase it was sort of you know paving the way for other women at campus and then Nicole. What was it like to sort of be the inheritor of that and then pass it along to future women stags who have come after you so we'll start with Ellen and then to Kelly, and then to Nicole. I'm going to guess that my class was probably 5050. I mean there were a lot of women that were already there. And I did when I was there I did not realize that we were new. None of the professors thought it was unusual to have large classes of women. They thought it was unusual to see a large body of women in their classes. So I guess the, the earlier classes, the earlier women they really did a great job because I don't recall experiencing a lot of gender differences. I do recall they're not being enough lady before. Kelly. Well, I think it says a lot about fear field because I too felt like very welcomed. Even though, like I said I'm close to the 50 mark of anniversary. I do feel like that that I feel like they just were not judgmental or non accepting. In fact, it was a swim team at Fairfield and it was a coed team. And so it was pretty funny because we swam against all the small schools Vassar and we different places and if a woman came in ahead of the man we got more points. It was a coed team. So it was really fun. And the same thing on the sailing team I was on we women and men were both on the sailing team. So I really thought that in 77 when I went to Fairfield 1977 that it was just a given that we were going to be treated the same. So it was a great feeling of welcoming so. Also welcoming campus. Yes, very Jesuit. Yes. Yes, Nicole. Yeah, I have to say I, I'm very lucky that I never really had to even think twice about the fact that there was women on campus right. And so I give props to those who came before me, even if they didn't notice it either and that's obviously a great thing so. Yeah, I can't say that there is anything that stood out to me and that's a good thing. Okay, wonderful. Well, Kelly mentioned Jesuit values and I do think that that's an interesting place for us to move next. I will also I remind all of the folks in the room as well but especially my students, whose names I recognize today that you were of course encouraged to submit questions for us to ask, because I love hearing myself talk, but I guarantee the panelists would rather hear you hear your questions here your voices so I'll bump on to this next one but cross my fingers hope that we can move on to some student and some audience questions soon. But back to Jesuit values. And these teach us to be women and men for others. And I'm curious how Fairfield prepared you for your legal career specifically, and sort of working with and serving others, you know did, you know the Fairfield values the Jesuit values did they find their way into how you came to law which area of law you chose to practice, and so forth, and I don't think we started with Kelly yet so start with Kelly. And it had a huge impact on personally for me. I, the Jesuit values, I started off as a tax lawyer and employment lawyer. And I, you know, started off with them. And I always said I did want to do anything but family law, you know, I really like doing tax work and. I started doing start off early in my career doing pro bono work for victims of family violence. And I, I volunteer doing that and volunteer working with elderly. In addition to my tax practice of practice and then there will be people that clients would say oh she does pro bono work she can help you on your divorce and so then he would come down the hall. I worked with the oldest law firm in Dallas, and so I would get all these corporate clients coming down to talk to me about their divorce because I was doing so much pro bono work. And then I just really enjoyed the feeling of helping others in this way. And then it, then nicely it evolved to making money and then I, you know, started my own firm with two other women and, and, and it was all due to the pro bono work that I had done, and that was, you know, that was a great feeling of helping victims of family violence and just turned. You know, a change life changing for me personally. Wonderful. And Nicole and then Ellen. Sure. So, I was a resident of Loyola Hall, my sophomore year, and Loyola has like a resident program I guess you could call it where really you're living the Jesuit ideals and that was really my first experience with that I didn't. I went to public school previously so I wasn't really part of a Catholic education before. So I, I was really interested in that, you know, the ideals of who am I who's am I and whom I called to be and that was the first time we, that was introduced to me. You know, I got to attend a retreat at that time, learn about other people's stories and struggles and really recognizing how blessed I was in a lot of respects and, and that self reflection and learning to reflect on myself really set me up for success later in life I found. You know, especially going to law school practicing law and counseling clients as someone who doesn't really litigate and go to go to court often, my main practice is sitting down and listening to my client struggles, and what they're going through and really gearing myself towards, you know, counseling them in a way that works for them and makes them feel heard and, and, you know, being a calm and stable presence in their lives so you know generally speaking my time at Fairfield and the Jesuit values really just continue to push me out of my comfort zone and grow as a person I really think that did set me up for success. Wonderful. Well, like Nicole, the Fairfield was my first experience with Jesuit values. I am not Catholic. So, this was the first Catholic school that I ever gone to. And I found it interesting. It was very similar in my own faith tradition and, ironically, I went from a Catholic school to a Jewish law school is too lame. Founded as a Jewish law as Jewish school. But I would say that with all of that, it all flowed through the reinforcement of my own faith tradition, which led me into going to work for legal aid. I went to work for town government now in private practice. I represent a lot of children. I represent a lot of people who are mentally ill. So it all kind of flowed help that flow of service and what I'm doing right now. Great, thank you all three just different and wonderful applications of Jesuit values and service to others. We do have one question from the audience, which is about it's the intersection, I suppose, of women and law school, which is how are women perceived and treated in law school. And who do we start with last, I believe. Okay. So I think probably to Nicole and then to Ellen and then to Kelly. So I kind of speak about this as it also relates to practicing laws of women, because I think they, it kind of goes hand in hand. You know, as the youngest panelist, I, I would have to say that I, I hope that as the years have gone on if the other panelists have experienced gender bias or anything like that. It's gotten even better as, as we've aged, but a lot of, you know, our colleagues are still a lot older so they may not feel the same as someone like a millennial as myself would right so I do still experience some, some comments, even if they're not malicious that, you know, it just, it makes me think, wow, you know, there, there are still some thoughts that women are. I don't want to say the lesser because I don't think anyone really thinks that anymore. I hope not, but it does make me question right and in law school I would say professors are so forward thinking that that that's not as big of an issue. But in, in the legal profession you come across a lot of other people so I don't know if people have heard of the term mansplaining but it happens often to me. And that's really just, you know, typically an older gentleman speaking to me and saying, you know, explaining to me something that I know very well because I practice it every day. I, I definitely look to the older generation for guidance, I don't know everything I absolutely never think that I do, but the fact that that I need to remind them. That's great, but I knew that already thanks for explaining it to me or making a comment on how young I look, which I think really goes hand in hand with being a woman you know, male, my male colleagues at the same age. They don't get comments like that no one will comment on how they look, their age, my height, anything like that. You know, I've gotten many many comments.  It really says that to man to man I found at least all the men I practice with. So it's something that still comes up, even if it's not malicious so something just to think about I want to say these things because if there's men in the audience, something for you to think about to write little comments like that maybe fun and nice but women experience that type of somewhat bias all the time so always something to think about. You know, and also, I had to explain recently to my newest male partners like, I can't just go into a meeting and smooth talk my way through it, I get actually questioned like, do I know what I'm talking about. And I have to prove that to people often I don't know if my, my panelists have experienced the same thing but I can't just get away with being a slick talker and going I got to actually know know what I'm talking about to impress people and I think that has to do with being a woman sometimes. Thank you, Ellen. I've had less of the gender but I do remember back when I first started. There were judges who frowned upon female war, female attorneys wearing pants into court. In law school, it was probably 30 70% male to female professors. They had more issues than the students did because the class was so was big enough that our women percentage was a much higher percentage than the actual female percentage of the faculty so I think they got over that they were just on other things, as opposed to gender. But in actual practice. Yeah, you women are not still not allowed to smooth talk your way through stuff. There are still some judges who will treat women differently. And I find actually more of that from female judges than from male judges, which is always a phenomenon that kind of like you remember being a lawyer what are you, what are you talking about. But, you know, I kind of put that down to robot is for you know, it's council already knows you've seen that a million times. So I will have to say yeah, you women attorneys still have to walk in knowing what they're doing. But after you've been around for a while, that level of respect. Boom, it's already there. Okay, great. Thank you. Kelly. I, you know, agree with both my panelists, in terms of their, you know, what he has evolved. I think professors in general, like you, Dr. Weinstein they're not, they don't come with that bias. So I didn't experience that in law school but I will say that there are a lot of great women before me that I appreciate, you know, paving the path for even though I've been practicing since 81. I mean, since 1984 1984 is that is that it was a lot of rejection, a lot of rejection finding employment. I would say, if it wasn't for the value of perseverance I learned at Fairfield, you know, despite having good grades and working hard, it was very hard to find a job. And so, and so that was a challenging part to back in the 80s. But, but I will say that I was going to a jury trial. My first child, 2027 years ago, 28 years ago, and the judge wouldn't let me go to trial because I was pregnant. And he thought it would be biased against the jury if I was representing a male and I was pregnant. It's hard to imagine that that happened but he, the other side filed a motion for continuance to prevent me from having to help because I was pregnant and the court granted it. So it's, it's kind of weird, you know, it's kind of odd to think that's true but I think there's some indirect discrimination that we'd like Nicole and Ellen pointed out that you see without really being said, you know, having to prove yourself and do more work harder. I think starting off with a female firm really helped us because we got rid of all that nonsense. All that, you know, the stereotypical stuff. That's not to say I haven't had to be really assertive with males that are, you know, they're put them in their place so we don't know a way to kind of really do it and prove themselves like you ladies both said so. You know, the legal pants policy here in Texas, they of course prefer women to wear dresses, you know, skirts, and is in some courts, but I think what's really helping evolve the practice of women is judges. You know, seeing the new judges being appointed in the federal courts and the state courts and local courts have really helped promote our practice because you know, just more well rounded. But I do think sometimes, I think that sometimes the generation of women like Ellen saw, you know, sometimes you see women being hard on women too. And I have experienced that. I think it seemed like that was women that were five years ahead of me I experienced but then I think that was just part of educating them that hey, I'm just like, you know, I'm just working hard like you and kind of having to prove yourself to them and once that happens that it goes away but it is, you know, I think like both the other panel said kind of proving yourself repeatedly is the way you have the greatest success showing them you know what you're doing and working hard, but perseverance has played a big part of the trying to try to be employed, you know, and a lot of rejection but you know, keeping not giving up so. Yes, and we're hoping of course in the next 50 years of certainly women at Fairfield just women in the practice of law that this sort of thing doesn't doesn't doesn't keep happening right that that the idea of having to prove yourself. Just is becomes a dinosaur like so many other dinosaurs. And I will say the interesting thing is is we have, we've had many pregnant partners in our law firm that are women is dealing with maternity leave and time off. Because used to be that women used to have to, you know, not talk about those things but being really transparent you can't always have everything at the same time you can't be super lawyer and you know, you know you just need to balance what works for you at any time but kind of talking more and understanding that people need to take blocks of time for leave if they need to care for their family or an elderly parent and be able to come back to the practice with the same level of compensation. And, and level of the firm without losing so called track a partnership track you know making it coming back from the practice, not a step backwards but a step forward because it makes you will better well rounded person to help your clients knowing that you've had other life experiences. That still hasn't that still has not been resolved though I think in general women practicing taking leave for. Yeah, hasn't been resolved. I haven't quite gotten there yet and it's probably my biggest concern as a female attorney is what's going to happen right so it's positive seeing other attorneys do it so let's hope. Yeah. You'll pay the way. So actually in the great days we now have lots of questions from the chat so I'm going to try to sort of summarize a few of them and try to lump them together. So there certainly are a couple that deal with law school so advice for people who are considering law school after graduation about your journey decision to go to law school. And then sort of what classes best from Fairfield best prepared you for law school. And we'll start with Ellen first.  They taught me how to read critically. They taught me how to write well. And those are two of the biggest skills every lawyer needs. It doesn't matter what area of law you are in. If you cannot write a persuasive sentence. You could be as brilliant as the sun, you will lose. So I'm going to say my English classes really did help. So for all your English professors out there. Good job. Great. And then either to Nicole or to Kelly. Political science with me. I was great at English would be right a second a close second. But that was really helpful and I guess you have another part of your question. I mean, what else. Right. Yeah, the other question was sort of your advice for people considering law school can talk about your own decision, you know why you chose to go and about more of your journey.  Oh, no, no, no, no, that's good. You reminded me because I completely forgot that part of the question. It was recommended that I go. You know, I'm a senior. They're like, you should go to law school. Okay. I really did kind of fall into it. I never planned to be a lawyer. Like a lot of lawyers that I know we all wanted to be doctors but you know the chemistry and the. And the math kind of killed us. So we all went to law school and it just kind of flowed and then once I started on the process it was, it was a real natural calling and I was like, oh yeah, this is this is what I should be doing. Okay, Kelly. Mine was by was air I didn't get a job that I wanted in a when I was looking for jobs I got a lot of rejection so I thought what am I going to do and I didn't have any other family members but also at the time, Father Kelly just become our president at Fairfield, and he was kind of off to write me a recommendation. And so in the, and the professors helped down a rumor and in the political science department really encouraged me to like to do to do something to try to apply to law school. So I was, I just really worked out good because I didn't have any lawyers in my family, but I do think also what helped is with the with even in the practice and trying to go to law school is to is get the experience in a law firm. All my sons have worked at the law firm in the summertime if they didn't have a job they were working here. So, which was great, because they're going to be joining us soon here. As is getting experience, even if you have to work for the below minimum wage or free is to tell the law firm hey I'll work for you for a couple weeks if you think I'm valuable pay me. And, and then really work hard be the first person at the office and the last person to leave. And, but you know work work for nothing to get your foot in the door to get that first experience. And I think that really helped give me a better insight the practice of law I had a professor that helped me get that first internship, you know for nothing, but I really open my eyes to the law, a little bit broader spectrum and gave me some better direction. Wonderful, Nicole. Yeah, so to be honest, I would say that one of my, the most out there classes that I think would be helpful is art history. And the reason I say that is because you're analyzing something out of the norm, right you're looking at art, you're looking at also art relating to history, and the teacher goes. Tell me what you what you see, and it's, it's so out there that it really does. It's more than politics is more than English and and it kind of put you out of your comfort zone which is a lot of what law school is you're out of your comfort zone learning totally new concepts and, and taking classes that are really difficult. So why not, you know stretch your ring wings while you're in undergrad. And I also think, you know, part of my favorite part about Fairfield was that I could do multiple things and not just politics I was an art minor, and I was an Italian studies minor. And I really enjoyed those two aspects of my education because it allowed me to do something that I wouldn't be doing in the future right I call my art minor it seemed like a waste of time but it kept me saying right it let me do something creative. And maybe happy. And I think that's a lot of something that people aren't thinking about they're like, I need to get to law school. What are the politics and these classes I need to take to get there. That's an interesting mindset to have like this is your time to enjoy yourself as well and learn new things. And even if it's creating a hobby. And I think that might sound weird and counterintuitive, but it also diversifies your resume. Let's put it that way you know it's something to talk about when you're in an interview it's something to say when you're on your writing your application. So think about things like that as well. I went to law school with a doctor, a veteran, I went to law school with these people who are so distinguished and multifaceted and I was just coming in straight from Fairfield. Like hey, I'm a politics major like everybody else right what what are you going to do to diversify yourself so that's something I want to point out.  Let's be honest no one likes working. So if someone says that you don't get discouraged I know a lot of people that have gotten discouraged people said that to me. I still did it and I'm happy that I did it so if you want to go, you know go for it and that's that's what I have to say. It's wonderful and inspiring and actually gives me a very quick lightning round just sort of fun question, and then we'll get back to Jared's question from the chat about how you picked a law school how you narrow things down but I'm actually curious so Nicole it sounds like and you can correct me I'm wrong. The class that you had that maybe led to a hobby or like the the the passion class that you took. You know seems like it was art history is that would that be correct. Yeah, I think art history was a really nice combination of all of my joys art history and Italian studies. So I got it all in one. So yeah, I'd say so. Yeah, was there a favorite like particular class you remember. I don't recall the name of the class it was like an intro to art history and I took it up in Bellarmine Hall like in the, in the, in art, we were sitting around art so it was really inspiring. I really loved it. Wonderful. And then either Ellen or Kelly do you have a sort of a hobby or like passion class he took it still stands out to you. I'm going to say my favorite class the one that I still reflect, I actually still use the information non traditional religions in America, because it did just broaden my horizons to what was really out there. And learning something new something different. I still encounter I can still tell you, you know, stuff from that class I've actually used in court.   And the judge would be just thrown off and go. Okay. I don't have a sense. I'm going with it, because I, yeah, but it was one of those classes that really just broaden your horizons. Russian history was interesting. That kind of gave me a little insight into how people think, which is, given what I do, kind of important. So yeah I'm going to say those two were my passion ones. I hope I can still keep friends with my panelists because I'm really enjoying get to know everyone on it. I was gonna, I'm gonna say Ellen we've got a lot in common because my religion class was what my mind to at the time I was at Fairfield it was taught by an ex priest. He taught atheism. So I, I too, like Ellen have have used that in my trials, the things I've learned from diversified different types of religion. And so it's interesting that that and I was like, shocked that here in the 70s I was having an ex priest teach, you know, atheism agnostic religions and viewpoints. And I really was been pressed that, you know, again back in the 70s that Jesuit school was having a class about that. So it really stuck out in my mind, and it just goes to show that whole philosophy of not judgmental opened perceptive to other viewpoints was really was really in place back in the 70s. So I, but religion the same class. It was really fascinating to me.  Everyone has maybe that class and so it's kind of nice to reflect back on those classes that sort of changed who we are or give us these extra skill sets we didn't think we had or needed. So they want to jump on to something that one of our students has asked which is essentially boils down to when you're picking a law school right there are a lot of things go into your head right geography cost stuff like that but that's that he's particularly interested in defending religious liberty. So he has a clear passion right so picking a school based on program or location or like what, what helped you what led you to sort of picking the schools that you picked. And we'll start with Kelly this time. Well, well I thought I was going to go to Georgetown Law School, and my, my parents are going through a divorce at the time and so I put my whole family had gone to Georgetown. And so I thought Kelly was going to write the recommend or the recommendation I only applied to Georgetown thinking I was going to go and it's only going to go there great grades I did everything right, you know, and, and then I got wait listed. And so I had to quickly apply somewhere else that that would accept people at the last minute, and it was in Texas at never even been the state of Texas. And so I applied there last minute and it wasn't a prestigious school that I went to was St. Mary's in San Antonio. But it really was again for me, it was live changing made me force me to be humble and really appreciate the fact that I did get into school it wasn't my choice of schools I got into. And I had the path of which way I wanted to go and I was going to go to Georgetown I was going to live in DC and I've worked for Ronald Reagan. This is where I was going to go, you know I was this is also being DC in politics and and so it was really devastating the rejection. I did find out, you know, 20 30 years later that I got off the wait list but my parents had already moved me here and they didn't tell me that I'd gotten in, and I could have gone but I didn't have the resources to to go, they didn't have the money to have me again. But it made me very humble in terms of having to really have to be at the bottom of the tier of schools that wasn't a prestigious law school to have to work a little harder to, you know, to to get the job to persevere in the practice so it was. So, I do think that my people get all caught up in the right school or the right location it's really what you do with it. And working like I worked myself through school because I had to take out student loans and I, you know, so I had really helped me the experience of that helped me, I didn't graduate at the top of my class. I laughed because my husband is an attorney and he was at the top of his class so I was at the bottom of my class, but it really is it's really what you do with it when you get out and, you know, if you can't afford a school you know don't get settled with a bunch of debt thinking I've got to go to school because it's so prestigious. So, you know, I got off my student loans at my school, you know it's really better, more to start working right away for, in my experience was working getting the experience was what I had to fall back on, because I didn't have the other so don't get discouraged, if you don't get the what you think you really want to go so I'd say. We could go back and I could list those awards again if you want. All those things you earned. It speaks to the caliber of the people that we have here. So, let's I, I'm terrible with remembering who went last. So either Ellen or Nicole. Do you have any advice for people of how you picked your schools. My professor tell me which schools to apply I think back when I took the LSATs they would take your grades and they would form them out to schools. These schools would accept you with these grades and LSAT score. So I think that's where some of my applications went. I picked law schools based on geography. Oh, I only applied to law schools that had an NFL team in the city. Big NFL fan. So that was literally how I picked the school. Because you know, somebody said they want to work for this they want to work for that. You know everybody takes the first year law school is the same for every law student in the United States. It's the same stuff. And the second year, you get to diversify and pick what you like. And then that third year, you're making up all the classes because you know, they're going to be on the bar exam and you didn't take the class. So true. So true. So it really doesn't matter what school you go to. You know there's the old joke is like what do they call the guy graduated last from his medical school they call him doctor. It is the same thing. It only matters what you do with what everybody else in the same boat has been given. Great. Nicole. I'll definitely chime in on that I, I was looking for a law school where I could possibly live at my parents house save a little bit of money. I didn't get into the New Jersey schools I wanted to so I got into a few other schools and actually got some some money to go to some schools and chose a school I did not get as much money for so that's probably my biggest regret, although I loved Quinnipiac. It has a great, and I know, you know, Fairfield students are in Connecticut so you may be looking at Quinnipiac just because of your location which is why I'll comment on it. It has a great atmosphere at Quinnipiac. It really is less aggressive and competitive as a lot of other schools might be. It's a great middle middle range school. So I recommend it fully. I think my biggest issue is student loan debt so if I was going to give you any sort of like how to pick a law school tip it's do really great on your LSATs go to a school that will work and give you money. That's reasonable because it's a huge burden on my life and if you can avoid that I'd love it. So finding someplace and maybe not that you have to travel far distances to go see family or, you know, move far distances I know that my panelists have done that.  Like they said I was an honor roll student at Fairfield. You go to law school and you're with all the other honor honor roll students if not better and you're just one of many now and I was not the top of my class. They got these prestigious jobs that they thought they wanted and they hate them most of them. I went small firm, worked my way up, worked for free just like some of my panelists did. And I am just as successful as they are right you don't need to be the top of your class you don't need to be at the most prestigious school. If you're doing what makes you happy and you're going to be successful and that's so don't worry too much about where you go. It's where where you wind up. Wonderful. And how are we on time we got some time. Okay. So one of our students is asking the most challenging experience you had in law school. Right so whatever that could have been maybe what was it and then how did you overcome it what advice would you give to a student overcoming maybe their first their first challenge once they get to law school. I'd like to start on that if that's the right. Yeah please. Just jumping right in. I, it was honestly, after my first year my one year. It's when we were all looking for our first job right trying to get that law firm experience. I actually had gotten a job and I was working and I was working for free but it transitioned into paying, which was great. But I was trying to diversify and get another job during the school year so I could learn at a different firm. I went there, I interviewed and I was torn apart. I cried the whole way home, and I almost quit law school at that point I was like how am I going to do this I I'm I'm never going to get a real job.  And that was a real eye opener for me because first year that's the year they weed out the students right they want to see who's really there. It's the hardest year. So I was like discouraged over discouraged over discouraged and then I, I really just put on my big girl pants and was like this is it I got to stay and like really make the best of this. So I'd say don't get discouraged when someone one person tells you you can't do it because that's it's just not true. It's not you can do it. Great. Kelly, do you have any advice for the first real hurdle that you hit. I know I think time management is important but I kind of going back to Ellen to location or where you go to school is it can be enjoyable if you there's other things you like in the city or close to family or something like that. Having never been to Texas I was having a great time in the state because a wonderful state. But you're just just managing your time and again like Nicole said not being discouraged if you do poorly because it's not indicative how you're going to do. They say the people that graduate the top of the class they all become they all get the jobs on New York City or you know big big big laws they call it now and and then they later become judges, which I think is what I've seen repeatedly in my, you know, 20 plus years of practice five years practice. The B students become the transactional lawyers, the C students, which I would be in myself as a student we become famillars I think we're the happiest so you know. So it's interesting how your life evolved so it all works out and don't give up is what I'd say. Okay, Ellen. We had a similar saying at Tulane, the eight students became law professors. The B students became judges and the C students made the money. My biggest hurdle had nothing to do with gender. My biggest hurdle in law school was a culmination of events that took place at the same time. The brand new Dean. It was the largest class of black students, the school had ever had was 44 out of a class of 300. The prior year they had four. Because we had a new Dean, they admitted more black students. So there was a lot of racial unrest, my very first year of law school. The school had never had that many black students. And the other students were not happy at having all those black students. So that was my biggest hurdle was making it through that first year. So they can get to year number two. I'm so sorry to hear that. But it was, it was an unusual year. But it was also an unusual class because we also had the largest class of non traditional students people who didn't come straight out of college. I would say about 40% of the people in my first year class had had previous occupations prior to going to law school. I went to school with a lot of retired people. I went to school with veterans like some of the other panelists have had people who were on their second or third degree a couple of doctors I went to school with. So it was an unusual class and a lot of different ways and that unusualness was the thing I had to get over. Now, the good thing about it was, I didn't know any better. I didn't have the issue of the race and the, you know, people walking around marching with signs and stuff. The composition of the class and how things work. Since it was the first time I'd ever gone to law school, I thought it was always like this. So I didn't think of it as a hurdle. It was only after I left that I was like, Wow, that was a lot to get over. That was a lot to get over. We have one essentially one minute left. So I hope I can beg people's indulgences to sort of do one quick lightning round of maybe 30 second answers of if you would if you could leave the audience with one piece of advice or one sort of thought about how Fairfields sort of the gift that Fairfield gave you that you can then give forward sort of in your law practice. What would it be. And again, you didn't prepare this question so there's no pressure for grand eloquent speeches, but just sort of initial thoughts and I promise we can pick this up at our next event. So whoever would like to go first, I would, I'll go first. Okay, so I would say Fairfield taught me to be well grounded and well educated. That was my biggest gift. Having a lot of different experiences with different types of people, different economic classes. And the Jesuit education of a well rounded individual that really was a gift. And that I will always cherish. I was going to say the same thing just being really prepared, you know, well rounded, you are forced to take a lot of different classes. And at the time I was like, what am I taking philosophy for what am I taking religion for I'm going to law school. If there's a reason for it, it makes sense and we're all, you know, talking about why it makes sense today so I agree. I agree the same thing. And also think that one thing I think resonated with fearful to is, is kindness there's a lot of kindness immediately on the campus and I think that's spread throughout with the teachers and the camaraderie of the students, a lot of that was important. Great. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. I will turn things back on over to Jessica, who I believe is still here. Thank you all so much. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you, Dr. Weinstein. Thank you to everyone who gave their time this evening to be here. The hour honestly flew by I loved hearing all of your stories. And I hope that all of our students on the call were able to take a lot from it that they can apply as they go into their own law school journeys. And I hope all who celebrate Easter have a wonderful Easter, a wonderful Passover, the remaining days of Passover for all who celebrate Passover. And thank you all for being here and we will see you again soon. Thank you for having us. Thank you everyone.


A meeting of scientific minds gathered in Bemidji last Friday to compete in the regional science fair, Josh Peterson met up with some of the young scientists and found that their projects are a possible gateway to future careers. Science can be found in just about everything. And at the regional science fair at Bemidji State University, youth from all over the region use the scientific method to experiment in various areas of interest. I mean, we have a lot of different categories that are here, but really I think the students get to apply what they've learned in the classrooms to something that they're really interested in. For 65 years Bemidji State University has held the annual regional science fair, giving professors and students the opportunity to work with young scientific minds. These middle school students are getting feedback from professionals in their field or from professors. So just seeing that and then also the students here get to see projects from other schools and interact in that way and just going through this process I think is a really beneficial thing. Whether it was sports science, food science or musical science, students who attended had a chance to showcase their ideas and interests. For two Bemidji middle school students, it was a chance to work together on looking at the effects of road salt runoff into area lakes. One of the point we did this project was if we found like really high levels, we'd encourage like someone with the right instruments, like more better instruments just to measure for chloride, like measure that spot. So like just basing off of our project, I think if somebody else were to do this project to measure like Noah said with more advanced instruments. For one student, it's all about the joy of discovery and finding answers to people's questions. I like questions, I like asking questions, so when other people ask me questions, that's really fun. Even though the science fair season is continuing, some have already thought of future science fair projects. I have some things with penicillin going on in my brain because like why are some people allergic to it and why does it help other people? After this meeting of young scientific minds, these students find their future looking bright. In Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. Out of the 85 students participating, 15 of their science fair projects will move on to the state competition in the Twin Cities next month. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


So, in this video we're going to be showing you how we're going to get the Reading Local up here that's staged on track 3 at Reading. Down along track 1, heading towards Sinking Springs. Down here to this signal, then past track 3 at Sinking Springs to Mannheim Junction. Up through here, up through the track 2, up to Hershey where the train will be stopping. As you can see, at the moment we have the track occupied by a switcher doing some switching work at Sinking Springs. Now that our switcher has finished its duties at Sinking Springs and cleared track 3, it's placed the covered hopper on the switcher back up in this sliding. We have the Reading Local staged here at the end of the branch and we're going to be bringing it back from track 3 up through track 1 through Mannheim Junction to track 2 at Hershey, where we'll be continuing our switching. So, first thing we need to do is to throw this turn out to the sliding. You'll notice that the aspect changes on track 3. Then we need to move down here, throw the turn out from track 3 to track 1 and then you'll notice the triple head master has now gone to an approach limited. Then we need to move back to our branch on junction. You'll notice the aspect change there. Throw the turn out from the Reading Branch to track 3 and you'll notice the change of aspects on the panel and also in the video above. Now all we need to do is wait for our local to move off and you'll notice that once the local moves off and occupies the next block in front of that clear signal mass now, you'll notice the change on the panel and on the signal mass as the train occupies the next block, as it's just changed there. Then what we're doing is waiting for the front of the train to occupy track 1 and the main line coming out of track 3. So now that the front of the train has moved into track 1, the Reading Branch is now cleared and also the front of the train is also now at the start of main home junction in the block at the top. So now we're waiting for the rear of the train to clear track 3 at Sinking Springs. Then once the train's cleared track 3, we can then work our way back through, close some of the turnouts. So just waiting for the front of the train up here, which is now into this block and it's cleared track 3. So just waiting for the last section to clear the turn out here and we're now at the front of the train and the track 2 at Hershey also. So we'll throw the turn out to the main line. That's now back to track 1 and also throw the turn out at the Reading Branch where it comes into track 3 at Sinking Springs. This section up the top here, you'll notice that it's got a block occupied above. This is because of the crossover here being so close. I want that to be occupied as well to avoid any strikes where trains end up passing. So now we're just waiting for the train to clear Mannheim Junction. So that's now cleared Mannheim Junction and we're just waiting for it to clear the crossover. So the caboose has now cleared the first section of the crossover between track 1 and track 2 at Mannheim Junction and it's now cleared the last section. And that's our train now stored on track 2 at Hershey.


I'm going to start by saying the logo at the top of the slide there, that's the company I work for. I'm not going to mention it at all during the course of this presentation because I'm not trying to sell you anything. What I am trying to do is provide you with information so that you can make good choices about what kinds of service meshing technology you want to use to support your Kubernetes clusters. That's the important thing. The other important thing is that that's the logo of my company, that bear.  So this is going to be about service mesh and comparing the architectures between the various types of service mesh technology. And I see a few people who all of a sudden have an inquisitive look on their face like, okay, what's a service mesh? We're actually going to go through that first and then we're going to go into the architectures themselves. That's me. I'm Bruce Matthews, Bruce Basil Matthews as a matter of fact. That's why you'll see me on Google and all that kind of stuff. I've been doing this a very long time and I've worked for a very large corporate America and now I'm with this nice startup that I'm not going to talk about anymore. But that's my email address if you need to get a hold of me. All right. Here's the meat of what we're talking about today, guys. First thing we got to do is figure out what a service mesh is. So technically all of the networking architecture that goes on underneath the Kubernetes framework like Calico or Flannel or those kind of things give disparate resources to individual containers. They don't join containers. They don't actually have any inherent properties of providing resource capabilities or any of those kinds of things. And as a result, application developers have been freed to do it however they wanted. So there becomes a helter-skelter kind of approach to application development for things like load balancing or making encryption happen or those kinds of things. Well, a service mesh actually provides all of those capabilities, that infrastructure layer for the microservice application as a whole. And the beauty of it is in the proper service meshing capability, in order to take advantage of it, you don't need to change a line of code. That's the brilliant part. Okay. It makes all of the communications between services pretty transparent to the application developer. They don't have to worry about it in terms of their coding techniques. And it provides a whole bunch of additional capabilities that I'll get into and we'll go into depth on a few of them. Okay. Here's the meat of what a service mesh provides. The first thing is this idea of service discovery. Now what that means is, if there is a load balancer in your service mesh, every application will know about it automatically. If a new container is added into the mesh by having like a sidecar and a sidecar envoy proxy environment, it's immediately discovered by the service mesh without anybody having to do anything. And that really makes for a very positive experience for the application developer because they don't need to know what's out there in order to take advantage of it. The second thing is it typically involves load balancing and, you know, providing some means by which you can scale and continually add service entities of the same type and it will immediately be recognized and added to the same load balancing technology and everything else so that you can standardize how that's done. In other words, one person wouldn't be using NGINX and another person would be using HA proxy. They would be getting it from the service mesh itself. Now you may provide those options yourself as the administrator, but you're not allowing the application developer to willy-nilly pick one. So another aspect is encryption. And the sooner you can institute encryption into your environment without having to force your application service to provide it, the better it is. TLS is the basic framework for it now. There's lots of ways of integrating the encryption capability, but it happens immediately as it hits the service mesh and then is distributed internally. This prevents a lot of potential attacks on your application services. And authentication, right? I've got a certificate. I'm Bruce. The system knows me, but you, Charlie, wouldn't have that certificate and it would fail. Well, typically that's up to the application developer to decide how to handle that inside of an individual container. This provides that service externally. And it says, I'm not even going to let you get to the container. You know how they have root user container stuff in Kubernetes that you can access the entire system through? Well, this prevents that from somebody coming from the outside who doesn't have a valid certificate to get in. And they can use things like Vault and whatnot to manage those certificates, all capable of being plugged into the service mesh. And finally, and this one's more beneficial to the application lifecycle and management of it, is this idea of a circuit breaker. It actually is pulling the health of the container to provide the service that it was giving. And when it can no longer provide it, it cuts off that avenue and reroutes to the next container that's providing that service automatically. As a result, you don't get a stutter of, oh, my God, I can't find an application service. I literally now prevented that from happening and I'm going to give you a new service automatically without you having to do anything. Okay. Why did we go to all of this trouble of instituting a service mesh in your containerized Kubernetes-oriented world? Well, the first thing that you need to know is that the ability to shape traffic inside of the cluster and externally to your consumers is like pent-ultimate. And you have to be able to provide quality of service in doing that. In other words, I think this service needs more oomph than that one. You can actually establish that rule base that allows you to do that within any service mesh that you acquire. And once again, that circuit breaker feature that I described earlier, that the application developer just needs to tell it, when that one dies, what do I do? Auto scale. Man, that's the way out of this. So those are a couple of things that are key benefits. And now I want to shift from description of what a service mesh is to describing the way that they have been architected up until now, okay? We started off with libraries. They were sort of like the old C-Lib dynamic shared link libraries that you would literally have to implement inside of your container. Each container had to have a copy of that library available to it, which was fine. It was able to then segregate out service from containers X, from service from containers Y, but you were never quite sure how many people had actually taken advantage of putting the library into the container. You'd have to do something from the outside to tell you that, enforce everybody to do it. And if I needed to make a change, I needed to add something to the library. I have a bazillion copies out there in thousands of containers that I'm never sure have one or not. So node agent was the next iteration of things. And that actually took the idea that you could have all of the proxied resources going through a central point on each one of your worker nodes. So every worker node has a node agent on it. It's talking to the control plane sitting at your control service. And that's kind of a lovely world in which to be able to communicate and control things at the agent level. Finally, and this is in the last year or so, they've figured out that it was probably better to spawn a new container that's adjacent to an equivalent to the initiating container. And the only job that container has is to act as the proxy to make sure that all of the traffic that's going to the container only happens between the container and the adjacent container. And then it goes out to the services that are associated to it, the load balancers, the encrypted, you know, all of those kind of things. So those are now the three types that are out there. Oh, I was going to tell you a story. Now I don't know about any of you, but I've gotten to the point now where I worked from my home. And there are advantages and disadvantages to that. One of the advantages of it is I have a four-year-old grandson that I get a chance to help sit during the day because when his mom's at work. And he's a very inquisitive kid, and he would come to me all the time and say, Papa, what's he doing? Because I always ask him what he's doing. And I would tell him, you know, I'm doing this or that. And one day, I was working on these service mesh frameworks, putting together this presentation as a matter of fact. And I told him, I made a smash. And his eyes got about this wide, wow. You know, I'm showing you the smash on the computer. He goes running out to my wife, his grandma, me, me, me, I can hear her run down the hall.  She says, where is it? And I said, no, I'm making a service mesh, a smash. She just shook her head and walked out. This is my life at home with my wife, NUK. That's where these smash arc types of service mesh architectures comes from, OK. So let's go through the library. The library is actually the most simple implementation of it. It gets injected into each one of the containers. And all of the communications go from library to library, not from container to container anymore. And they were pretty successful in that. It was the original to be adopted. It had some pain points, most difficulty in terms of updating or upgrading that library because you had to know who all used them and everything. The version control was a little dicey. And if there was conflicting demand for performance, you'd have to hunt around using other techniques because it didn't include things that were allowing you to monitor the shaping of the traffic. And some of the guys who were involved in it were Twitter, FNECL, Netflix, and Ribbon, Eastericks, and Ribbon. OK. Then there was the node architecture type that we talked about. And here, all of the node traffic for all of the application services, even the ones that occur locally on that worker node, all happened through the agent itself. And as a result, you've got a consolidated place that gets transmitted up to a control plane service for monitoring and all of that. An advancement, definitely, from the library methodology because there were fewer of them, less resource that was involved in supporting it and all of that. But the reality is that there were some downsides, too, and that had to do with the idea that each one of the node agents was a single point of failure on the worker node. So if it goes away, all of the traffic from that node stops. And you have to fix that agent to make it happen again. And I think they've improved in some ways because they've set up virtualized IPs over the top of the node agent and tried to make it fail over and everything. But then you're actually doing two times the resource to fix it. So anyway, that's the end. Now, next generation, the sidecar technology. And this is my personal favorite. I like working with this one. And the idea is that each one of the sidecars talk to each other, both internal to the worker node and external to the other nodes in the cluster. In that way, if that sidecar fails, it only affects the one container. And typically, that gets caught in the circuit breaker. The circuit breaker says, start up a new one, create a new sidecar. I'm off and running.  But it's not perfect, and we'll go into how it's not perfect in a little bit. Because the sidecar is so closely referenced to the originating container, there is very minimal chance of it being accessed or attacked from the outside. They have to attack it through the gateway that's associated to all of the traffic that's associated to it. And that gateway is actually some kind of load balanced methodology that we'll talk about in depth in a second. And those examples of those are like Istio and Aspen Mesh for those who follow that kind of thing. Okay, so now we're going to do some comparisons of those three architectures. And I affectionately call that Schmesch Comp. There's four and four here that I picked out to give you some idea of comparison. On the left-hand side are those that are simply supplied by the open source community. In other words, there's no corporate entity that you license things and all of that. On the right-hand side are licensed versions of those products. They typically call them community and enterprise, just like everybody else with a community version of an operating system or those kind of things. And it's sort of stringent in that way. The only one that sort of steps out of that boundary, AWS App Mesh, is really intended to lock people into AWS. I'll go into that when I get there. Okay, open source types. And let's compare those or give you some idea of what each one of those do. Okay, so this is Envoy, the typical proxy. Envoy was one of the first out there. It's lightning fast. It's written in C++, was originally developed by the people from Lyft. And it has very few other aspects of it other than proxying, other than load balancing. But it's really, really lightning fast. And it's got these three parts. The main is a single thread. That's a little problematic if you have one that thread dies. But the workers themselves and the threads, it's multi-threaded in that way. And then a file flusher to say, I don't need those anymore. Close them so I have more resources. Istio, which is the one that I think is becoming one of the more prominent players in the service mesh market, actually took the Envoy methodology and put it on steroids. So for each container that's created, creates a sidecar, that's the Envoy initiator that talks to the mixer that's actually doing the governance as to flow of traffic and all of those kind of things. It also takes care of authentication for you so that no request is ever going to get to your container without going through it first. And it's really lightweight from a data plane standpoint. So, and I'll give you some performance statistics later to kind of prove that. Okay, and then we've got Linker. Linker is kind of a weird one. Linker D has had two iterations already in its life. Company called Boyant started it off and it was written in Java, which I feel really odd about. I worked for Sun for like 15 years when James Gosling was writing Oak. So, you know, and it was never good then. God knows why they'd still be writing in it now. But it was very heavyweight and it took a significant amount of resources. But it did the job in terms of being an agent. And the beauty of it was that it was both the manager and the client. So I could issue administrative commands on any node and it would get passed on to whichever node client needed it. And all things work that way. The 2.0 is the sidecar version and this is why they did it. They rewrote the whole thing in go, I think, go, yeah. And they broke apart the data plane and control plane. And it functions similar to Istio with one major exception. Where Envoy is used inside of Istio as the proxy service. This one actually has a dedicated proxy that's just written to do linker D traffic as no other purpose in life. Okay, let's take a look at some of the commercial offerings. And so we'll have a basis for comparison here in a minute. And of course it's comms smash. Consul, which is one of the originators of this, was originally developed by Hashi Corp. Around the same time that they developed Vault as the key service. And the whole idea of it was to be able to take any kind of pipe. You didn't have to build your intelligence into your physical network. So, sorry, Cisco ACI, sorry, Arista, sorry, you know, you don't have to have any of that stuff laying around. You can do most of what you need to do from shaping traffic to setting encryption policies to doing circuit breaker patterning and all of that through console. You don't need to build it into your network. Aspen Mesh was really another Istio lookalike. It's built on the same components, takes advantage of Envoy and all of that kind of stuff. But whereas Istio stops with the layer below there, the control plane API, they built one on top of it that has an additional API layer to abstract it even further so that you can manage it. And it's fairly agnostic in terms of operating system and all of those kind of things so that it fits on more places and can be propagated pretty quickly. These guys, Kong, I just sat through a presentation from them. And they've written this from the ground up. None of it is, you know, based on other open source tools, each one of them that's proprietary to them. But it's really good. It's really sharp. You may end up paying a lot for it because it's a licensed service. They do have a community version, but the enterprise version is much more robust and capable. It has its own type of Ingress Controller so that you don't need to use like a GKE Ingress Controller or something that's embedded in the Kubernetes world, Kube proxy and all that kind of stuff. And it has plug-in capabilities so you're literally able to build in an NGINX load balancer or an HA proxy load balancer as opposed to the Envoy environment that most people might want to use. And when you do that, it really is native to the product. In other words, it becomes a part of it. It's not like you've glommed something onto it. And they use Lua to really make that work as the language. So it's pretty easy to do. It's almost as easy as Go is to work in. And it has control plane, data plane mode, just like most of the others that work. And it can be deployed both in a sidecar or node agent. But the main way that they provide it is through serverless technology. This is a new thing. It's coming. Folks who don't use serverless technology start looking at it because it will be here faster than we can keep up with it. And what that allows you to do is not have to dedicate a server to host this. It shows up when it's needed and goes away when it's not required. Kind of a neat thing. OK. AWS, and the reason that I threw this in is because I've got to tell you, I don't know how these people are getting away with this. OK. We're using Envoy. That's the foundation for it. It's like every other Envoy out there, implementation. But oh, by the way, you have to use Farragut while you do it. Or you have to use ECS. We won't let you use it outside of that environment. So it locks you into working with AWS, which is their goal in life, is to make everything live there. OK. We're almost there. Let's do a comparison list of some things, a comps smesh. All right. So here's a little foundational information for all of these that we've looked at. Envoy, very low latency, very high traffic handling on GRPC, all HTTP oriented. Very few of these folks do any UDP or any of those kind of things. It's almost all TCP IP oriented traffic over HTTP. That's just the way they're built in general. It's API driven, so you can get in and out of it and add it without having to go into something special. You can integrate it into your own environments. And it gathers a ton of metrics. And I'll go into how people visualize that in a minute. Istio, on the other hand, was more focused on security and how to manage and maintain a secured traffic and to shape the traffic from one place to another, both between the containers and to the outside world. The ability to do fault injection, which is the circuit breaker technology to say something is broken and now I need to fix it and you tell me how and I'll go do it. Once again, HTTP and GRPC. But it additionally has this ability to do quotaing and all of the rating of the traffic itself, which makes it a much more robust methodology than some of the others because it has the ability to do some sophisticated plans around it. And it runs on a lot of stuff. LinkerD and LinkerD 2, in the first iteration, Java ran pretty good. It takes a lot of resource and everything else. LinkerD 2 is actually a better methodology in terms of being written in Go, thinner resource demand, all that kind of stuff. And finally, the idea that you could write another one in Rust and have it hook up into a Go-oriented thing makes it easy to deal with Rust as a similar language to Go. It's a lot faster than the old LinkerD 2. It's a lot faster than LinkerD 1. And it's all open source. But if you need service on a node-by-node basis, you can go to Boyant and get it, which is what they hope you will do because Boyant funded the whole project. If you compare those two side-by-side, you'd find out that LinkerD has a lot more features pre-built now. They just rewrote the Rust and Go versions, and so LinkerD 2 doesn't have as many of the things available, and I've listed some of them here so that you could get a handle on what's different. Okay, some of the service mesh comparisons for the commercial side console has a single binary. You can do commands for the administration of it from any node that's hosting it because it has both the administration control plane layer and data plane layer mixed in a single binary. Aspen Mesh provides an intuitive UI, lets you drill down, do all kinds of, you know, hunting and stuff like that, and I'm wondering how much time I have left. 343, okay, I'm going to get there real quick. Kong, well engineered product, has its own product development kit, plug-in development kit that allows you to plug in different types of things like load balancers and stuff like that, written in luau, pretty cool. I've actually did the Cassandra version of this, and I think it's superior to the Postgres version of it, both in terms of deployment and in terms of performance, so I would recommend that. AWS App Smash, I wouldn't recommend this in any way, shape, or form, except if you're only using AWS for things, and who does that? I hope nobody. Okay, visualization. They all use Grafana, and underneath the covers they've got Kiala and for trending and Gager for these open source projects that allow you to capture who's doing, where the ingress and egress is going within the environment, and all of that stuff is being displayed in Grafana, so you can pick out things and see how you can improve the performance by changing how it's configured and all of those kind of things. Underlying that, they take advantage of Prometheus and Trend Analysis, which is a good data management source. Okay, comparing service mesh performance. Okay, if you're going to compare these yourselves, take a look at these factors. In the control plane, the rates for both the deployment and configuration changes that you're going to make, the number of proxies that it's going to support, because that's going to indicate to you that you don't expect the control plane to perform, and then from the data plane standpoint, request size and response size is a big one, and the CPU cores, how many CPU cores are taken up just doing other things so that it might be resource constrained. And to do that, you want to use benchmarking tools that make sense. I've listed three of them down here, Fort IO, Blue Perf, and the last one, those two were done in May. This one I just added recently because I tested it and it works, and I think it's a good tool from Kinvolk. Okay, load balancing throughput and latency. Those were the five that I took a look at. Here's what I found. Envoys the winner. It's way faster than the others in terms of lower latency and request per second. And it lasts until the 99th percentile way better than some of the others. But to be fair, the gentleman from Linkerdee said, I've got one that shows that ours is faster, so I thought I would provide that to you as well. And I even followed up on that as this was published less than a week ago, and this is the latency stats for Linkerdee 2 versus Istio and both the latency and memory utilization and CPU utilization are all lower, supposedly, on the Linkerdee side. But to be fair, they said, here's the untuned Istio. Oh, well, okay, we tuned it a little bit, so we sort of massaged it. But if you notice, the stats are all the same. So it's sort of like, well, you didn't tune it that well. So I would run the test again using the same tools, because I think they had a bias. Okay, pros and cons. Using a library architecture, you get hit with these particular advantages and disadvantages. From a node agent standpoint, you've got a set of advantages and equal amount of disadvantage on it. Really, from the sidecar architecture, there are far more advantages than there are disadvantages. I won't read through this stuff for you now. I have put these slides out on the internet already. They're sitting underneath the profile for this talk. I just wanted to mention a couple of things in closing. My own concept here, Istio is becoming a member of this lovely body, CNCF, and they've almost got that wrapped up, so they'll be a full member with a technical oversight committee and all of those kind of things. If you work in that kind of environment, please contribute to it and take a look at it and send feedback to those people. Both of the LinkerD and Istio are all the open source and they have open source and commercial implementations, so you're not stuck with just the one type. This is really important. Why is the service mesh important to you as an application developer, to you as an administrator, to you as an operator, to you as an... This is something that needs to be answered, and the only way you can do that is to try it. I suggest that people do why, because a service mesh is going to be a fundamental, a mandatory in the 2020 time frame. Every Kubernetes implementation is going to have one, if not multiples, just to try and figure out which one they want to use. If you're currently using it, you already know what benefits you've got out of it, but quite frankly, continue using it and continue documenting the things that are useful and the things you find that are not useful in a service mesh, you know, performance and capability feature and all of those kind of things, because the technology is improving constantly, which means you have to keep your ear to the ground and listen for things that change in order to take advantage of this. And the final one, if you've not decided and you're working in Kubernetes at this moment, and you're hitting stumbling blocks and you're ticked off as some people get about working with just straight Kubernetes, it's too late to start using this technology to solve those problems, but I'd try it anyway and get into the game and let's see if we can make this work for everybody. Okay, once again, I'm Bruce Basil Matthews. Be Matthews at morantis.com. Last time, I'll have to say the name so that you can know where to get hold of me. Please feel free to write me if you have additional questions that I can't answer now. Does anybody have any questions that they'd like to ask? Yes, sir. I'm sorry? Yeah. Kong, and yeah, and I think it's just more complex, a more complex application service than some of the other stuff, and as a result, only a few companies have dedicated the time to develop the code to support it, but I'll bet you some of those open source guys, if you said, I'd like to put in a thousand coffees of this. Oh, okay. We'll make it for you. Anybody else? Yeah. Yeah, you can see how many implementations rely on it, right? And it's adoption, right? So, yes, it's almost over. I always hate to do that because I don't want to diss anybody. They've all got positives and negatives, and if you develop a good working relationship with a guy like the guys from Kong and the guys from Linker, that they sat down with me for, you know, afternoon so that I would give the proper information out to you folks. So, and you develop that kind of working relationship, maybe they're better than Istio, where you kind of have to figure it out for yourself. But there's Aspen Masch and there's all these others that can help you, right? So, yes, I agree with you. Anybody else? Right, Circuit Breaker. Yes. So, it really is fundamentally the types of rules that surround that. So, the load balancing idea, Cube Proxy, isn't quite as robust as people may need. And they'll typically want to use some other thing. I think NGINEX is the most popular one, but HA Proxy works great and, you know, so that's the primary reason for not wanting to use Cube Proxy. The second one in Circuit Breaker technology is what you have to do after it breaks, defining in your application code where to go, how to reroute, and all of those things, it doesn't have the rule set capability that would make it really meaningful. So, you end up having to write more code to support the version that's native inside of Kubernetes than the versions that are outside of it that say, I know already I got an autoscale, and, you know, so I'm just going to hit the trigger to autoscale and take care of it unless you tell me to do something else, which you can. So, that's those two things. Anybody else? Folks, this has been a real pleasure. I really appreciate your time and attention. I hope that, you know, I've given you enough ammunition to be able to go out there and hit the service mesh trail, and if you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. It's part of my existence in the open source community to try and help figure out what to do. Okay. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you.


Hello my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here I'm an aspiring writer and if you're not new here you know the current work in progress is my fantasy hot mess titled as such because it is a hot mess. So for new people, context, this is a book that I first wrote in university, it's now been in my head for the 15 years and a couple of years ago I decided I was going to pick it up again, took a brief stab at it in I'm going to say 2017 and then fully committed to it but also writing in 2019 so in Camp Nana Raimo in July 2019 I finished a new draft completely new. There are only two things that I kept from the original which were the inciting incident or turning point and the final epic dungeon battle scene and the problem is it still doesn't work so I'm currently looking at it again trying to write another new draft and I'm worried that I might have already told this story or I'm telling it again or there are so many elements from this that I've put into other ideas and other work that there's no point in revisiting this story. So to give you context in 2019 and 2020 I've worked on and by worked on I mean either plotted or maybe drafted or started drafting a few different projects. Of these three of them do have a few similarities so they are fantasy hot mess, powerless which is my YA superheros meets the russian mafia book and vampire board games which is a book I plotted for Nana Raimo 2019 and then chose to write powerless instead. In all of these the emotional heart of the story is like a sibling or very close friend relationship so in powerless it's Hannah and her sister Maria. In fantasy hot mess it's Peri and her best friend Madeira who they've basically been together at boarding school since they were five so they're basically sisters. In vampire board games it was going to be the main characters twin cousins and similarly to fantasy hot mess they'd all been living in the same house since they were born so basically really close sibling relationships. Vampire board games I don't have as much information on because I haven't written it but powerless and fantasy hot mess bad things happen to the people that the protagonist is really attached to especially in the build up to the final battle scene then we get into the antagonists and in all of these books the antagonists are the elder parental figures so in powerless it's literally her father or father figure. In fantasy hot mess there is a group of like parental figures they're the masters and one of them is the big antagonist in book one there's also another one from the same cohort of people who's going to be the antagonist in future books and then in the vampire board games book the antagonists were like the elders ultimately and then I also noticed that in my dark night of the soul moments I tend to lock up my protagonists so in powerless Hannah and actually I should I should have said this at the beginning of the video but if you're worried about spoilers don't watch but in powerless the dark night moment is Hannah gets caught by her father and locked up in fantasy hot mess Perry gets caught by the majors who are uprising and gets locked up in the underground dungeon in the vampire board games book the protagonist gets caught by the elders and locked up and I've been a bit worried about this because is there any point in telling multiple stories if I only have one story to tell do I need to change things if the same patterns keep coming up or is it okay and this is what I'm not quite sure about because I recently decided to reread this savage song by V.E. Schwab. V.E. Schwab is one of my favourite authors besides my recent video on the invisible life of Addie LaRue which I was not a fan of but in general I am a big fan of her books and one of the things I noticed though when reading this savage song is that the characters are very similar to some of her other characters so Schwab has this tendency to have soft boys and hard girls or hufflepuff boys and slithering girls so in the shades of magic trilogy she's got Lila Bard who's a thief she wants to be a pirate she's a pickpocket she's very hard she's a very good with a knife she doesn't want to trust anyone then you've got Kel who you know wants to take care of his brother Rye wants to be accepted in the family and here's a little bit hard because he's had to be because of the nature of his job and the amount of magical power he has but there's definitely the soft girl hard boy dynamic in this savage song it's the exact same thing you've got Kate Harker who we meet after she burns down a chapel at the Catholic boarding school where she has been sent and she is determined to prove that she is hard and ruthless and that no one can beat her and this is a big part of her journey is the reputation she wants to establish for herself how tough she wants to prove herself as being in her father's eyes meanwhile the other character in that book August is a monster who wants to be a human and he is soft and sensitive and loves his music and doesn't want to hurt anyone doesn't want to eat because he eats souls and ends up starving himself to his own detriment so again same dynamic and then we get the invisible life of Addie LaRue where you've got Addie or Adeline who is not like other girls she doesn't want to get married doesn't want to have a family I don't think she is initially hard but I do think she becomes a bit harder over time and that's because if you're not familiar with the premise of that book she wants to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets so she doesn't have the luxury of feeling for other people because it's so painful when they go through a door or they go to sleep and then wake up and have no idea who she is but even aside from the necessity of her being hard her hardness is evident when you contrast her with Henry who I didn't realize until I read this savage song again but he is August grown up like they even both have black curly hair but he is um she Veeshwab describes him as a boy who's born with a broken heart and how he always seems to feel too much and give too much and anytime that he isn't enough for someone or someone breaks up with him or he disappoints his parents it's too much for him to bear and he really struggles with feeling too much and he doesn't know how to feel and be happy and I think one of the reasons why Addie seems hard is she has none of that in comparison to Henry who has so much beyond these soft boy hard girl protagonists though when I was rereading this savage song they also noticed one of the antagonists was quite similar to one of the antagonists in one of her other books so one of the antagonists in this savage song is August's brother Leo who is almost fanatical about the work they do he feels it's not described as being sent by God but there's this sense of purpose and almost they've got this divine right to cleanse the world and make it better and that was actually quite reminiscent of Eli in vicious and vengeful so Eli is someone who has superpowers and takes it upon himself to go out and kill other people with superpowers because and it's almost the same thing he has this very evangelical um attitude and believes almost sees himself as the chosen one so on one hand I was going through this loop realizing that a lot of my books have the same stuff similar antagonists similar core relationships similar dark nights of the soul and I was worried that it was a problem and I didn't know whether like I should stop trying to write the books that I naturally come up with and maybe like throw them out and try to write something that's completely different and then I reread this savage song and it got me thinking about how this author who I really admire who does work that I love seems to have tendencies and patterns and habits that come up in her own writing so it made me wonder like is it really that much of a problem and if someone who is written I think 18 books now and is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and has this huge fandom if someone like that can have similar elements in multiple stories and still have that following and still have that success and still you know have books that are not even I don't even want to comment on like the fandom so much because I think there are lots of things with fandoms that are not very good quality but even from like a publishing perspective like her publishers have published multiple books which have the same things so maybe it isn't as much of a problem as I think so I'd be really curious to hear thoughts on this one are you in a similar position to me where you do tend to tell similar stories or the stories you tell have common elements that seem to pop up again and again too do you think this is a problem and is it natural that one author is going to explore similar themes throughout the body of her work or should she be ensuring that each book is completely distinct and unique and then finally do you know any other authors who seem to have these patterns coming up in their work I do have a couple at the back of my mind but I'd be curious to see who you think of so please let me know in the comments below and I will see you next time bye